The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Sen has agreed to Australia’s request to resettle refugees.

“Up until today, Cambodia has decided to accept refugees who really need resettlement in Cambodia,” Mr Hun Sen posted on Facebook.

The problem is, Hun Sen doesn’t use Facebook. As the Cambodian Daily reports:

Tith Sothea, spokesman for the Press and Quick Reaction Unit, also confirmed that Mr. Hun Sen has not taken ownership of the page in his name.

“Up to this hour, Samdech has no personal Facebook page,” he said.

Oops!

Of all the people talking about the proposed Abbott budget, Clive Palmer makes some of the most sense. Steve Keen makes this observation in his weekly column:

Speaking in the face of quite hostile questioning on ABC AM, he observed that Australia’s government debt level of 12 per cent of GDP was far below the OECD average of 73 per cent, rejected the hysteria that Australia’s anticipated deficits would lead to a debt ratio of 70 per cent, defended running deficits if they were needed to stimulate the economy or provide infrastructure or social benefits, and noted that our current government debt level is far below the personal debt level that most Australians currently carry.

“Our debt at the moment is probably around about $300 billion so that’s… about two months of our activity. Is your personal debt less than two months of your activity? That’s what we are as a nation. You know, we’ve got debts which are less than one year of our total activity. I mean that’s not difficult.” (“Budget based on a con: Clive Palmer”)

Spot on, Clive. Most of his points were made equally well by Penny Wong for the ALP in the Guardian, but this observation — that Australia’s private debts are far greater than our public –was unique to Palmer.

I recommend listening to the full radio interview of Clive Palmer linked in the quoted text. For a guy as outrageous as he is large, Palmer makes some good points. Not only should Liberal’s listen to him, but Labour should as well.

Cambodia is on the verge of signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Saudi Arabia to formally create a legal pathway for Cambodians to work in Saudi Arabia. Why is this happening? Simple: the rate of exploitation (the ratio of profits to wage labour) increases when poor Cambodians (mainly domestic helpers but also construction workers) agree to earn a low salary in a wealthy country. This already happens to a large extent in Thailand. Saudi Arabia, however, is a country of far greater wealth. With this new MOU, Saudi Arabian employers will get cheap labor and Cambodians will get a higher wage than they would have back in their home country (or even Thailand). From the perspective of capital, this looks good for everyone because labor costs go down and profits up. But from labour’s perspective, this exploitation is brutal: 15 hour work days, little vacation time, few rights, far away from home and family, and the possibility of psychological and physical abuse. This isn’t a new phenomena, sadly. This has happened in Hong Kong for years, resulting in a system of second-class citizens who come from other countries (mostly from the Philippines today) to work as domestic helpers. This system in Hong Kong is institutionalised to such a degree that domestic helpers have their own visa entry points at the international airport, separate from tourists or residents. Yet, domestic helpers are not full citizens, earning under the Hong Kong minimum wage.

Saudi Arabia dosen’t have the best human rights track record for low-wage, foreign workers. The Phnom Penh Post quotes Joel Preston stating as much:

“Saudi Arabia has a long history of inflicting severe psychological, physical, and sexual abuse upon its migrant domestic workers,” he said. “We saw the same thing in Malaysia. Indonesian maids were consistently subjected to torture, rape and death. The Indonesian government instituted a ban on sending workers there. But the Cambodian government was more than willing to pick up the slack, sending its citizens to work in places where too many Indonesians had already died and suffered.

“It was essentially a death sentence for many young Cambodian women – and it’s happening all over again.”

When Cambodia’s last comparative advantage within the system of global capitalism is cheap labor (its other advantage was abundant land, but that has mostly been privitzated at this point), human suffering becomes the norm. It’s a sad day when governments create legal norms that allow for increases in exploitation. I hope Cambodians can resist the temptation of a higher wage abroad relative to wages in Cambodia. But that is wishful thinking given the difficult living conditions most face.

On May 8, 2014, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) held a “promotion” in Siem Reap. This was the latest stop in a campaign trail that started in the south and will conclude later this week in the north. It’s been part of various events held throughout the country since CNRP leader, Sam Rainsy, proclaimed the July 2013 elections as invalid because of voter fraud. Indeed, a rallying cry heard at many of these events has been “Where is my vote?”

Interestingly, the terminology has changed to describe these events. When I asked a friend yesterday where the “protest” was being held, I was quickly corrected: this isn’t a “protest,” as it was called in December when I last attended a CNRP event. It is instead a “promotion.” When I inquired about the reason for the semantic change, I was told that using the word “protest” would be met with violence by the Hun Sen’s ruling part, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), and his “third hand” (that is, his secret police). Using the word “promotion,” by contrast, indicates the CNRP is rallying around its own ideas and not condemning the CPP.

At the “promotion” yesterday, Sam Rainsy told supporters that CNRP would help the poor and find jobs for Cambodians who have illegally migrated to Thailand. Although there was much talk about what CNRP would do if they ever came to power, there was also much said about the problems of Hun Sen and his ruling party. People were chanting that they wanted change and that “Hun Sen, step down”  

These “promotions” have been likened to the “middle class revolt” found in other countries such as Thailand and Ukraine. Although there are certainly many middle class citizens attending these events, my observations suggest there is a broad base of supporters, including rural and urban, poor and middle class, and young and old citizens. Moreover, the other “middle class revolts” have turned violent, while In Cambodia, the people I speak with tell me violence is not needed and indeed not wanted. Most CNRP supports I speak with remember the 30 years of civil war that only ended in 1998. They do not want to return to violence, so instead place their faith in change to come through democracy and human rights.

The other difference between the Cambodian “promotions” of late compared with the “middle class revolt” in other countries is in the belief in democracy. In Thailand, for instance, the “revolt” has been to oust an elected Prime Minister and attempt to install an unelected council. The Thailand “revolt” wants to eliminate corruption in the country by moving away from democracy. In Cambodia, by contrast, people want change to come through the ballot box. CNRP supports truly believe that Hun Sen will loose—and step down from— power through elections.

It is precisely this belief in democracy that may be the Achilles’ heal of the CNRP “promotions.” For democracy to work, institutions must be independent from the executive. Change must be possible through the ballot box (or in Thailand’s case, the judiciary), culminating in a peaceful transfer of power between leaders regardless of political party. Cambodia under Hun Sen, however, has seen the police, the military, the school, the civil service, and local commune councils politicised. The ruling party distributes largess to these social institutions based on political affiliation. Moreover, Hun Sen has a large personal army and what he has recently called his “third hand”—the invisible force that will do his dirty work. Politicalisation of social institutions and clear threats to opposition movements suggests Cambodia is not a democracy despite the CNRP’s belief in the ballot box.

For CNRP to come to power in this environment means most institutions in society would have to change. The military and civil service would have to be de-politised. This is a daunting task which I’m not convinced is possible through voting alone. To put this another way: Hun Sen has ruled Cambodia in an authoritarian manner but has called the Kingdom a “democracy” because there are elections. This has convinced international donors to continue funding the government despite repeated human rights abuses. He is playing a game of semantics whereby he does one thing and calls it something else. One way Hun Sen continues his tight grip on Cambodia is through the control of words. His main opposition have wilfully changed from protests to promotions and continue to believe the chimera that Cambodia is a “democracy.” Unless the opposition embraces tactics other than “promotions,” I don’t foresee change any time soon.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court just ousted it’s Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, for transferring the national security chief, Thawil Pliensri, on September 7, 2011. The court saw this political move as “an abuse of power.” The back story is here. This quote sums up the actual political move:

Thawil was replaced by Pol General Wichean Potephosree, who was subsequently replaced by Lt-General Paradorn Pattanathabutr last October.

Thawil was removed apparently as the Yingluck government wanted to promote Pol General Priewphan Damapong as National Police chief. At that time, Wichean was the police chief and he vowed not to let go of that position unless he was made the NSC chief.

Whether this was “an abuse of power” or not will be debated for some time. What is clear, nevertheless, is that the recent unrest in Thailand—where a group of mainly urban middle class citizens have now successfully ousted an elected Prime Minister whose political base was comprised primarily of rural poor citizens—is pushing the international community’s conception of democracy. Joshua Kurlantzick connects the unrest in Thailand to that found in Turkey, Ukraine, Thailand, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cambodia. He says that this global unrest is a “middle class revolt“:

While relatively free and fair polls put these leaders into office, in office these leaders have gerrymandered political systems, used money to buy votes, crushed media outlets and civil society, and generally acted like elected autocrats.

But leaders such as Thailand’s Yingluck Shinawatra or Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukoych have also built broad enough bases among the poor, using populist rhetoric and policies to cut poverty to win elections. The willingness of demonstrators in some of these nations (though not all) to bypass democratic politics for street justice has further undermined democracy and added fuel to violent crises.

Indeed, the People’s Democratic Reform Committee, the group leading the protests in Thailand, are calling on the government to install a “reform council overseen by a leader of their choice“—in effect, an unelected council.

The lesson so far from Thailand is the rise of the middle class does not necessarily mean a move towards democracy. Other issues remain to be seen. For instance, will Yingluck’s transition out of power be peaceful? Kurlantzick’s believes we’ll see more violence, and indeed protests by the rural poor are already being organised. Moreover, what do these events mean for the typical understanding of middle class political power as being historically peaceful? And beyond Thailand, what lessons can Cambodia draw from the recent events, especially considering its growing number of protests?

In his new book, David Harvey lambasts the “theory” of human capital, which underpins much of the contemporary thinking on the “value” of education in society:

To be sure, skilled and highly trained labour might reasonably expect a higher rate of remuneration than unskilled labour, but that is a far cry from accepting the idea that the higher wage is a form of profit on the workers’ investment in their own education and skills. The problem, as Marx pointed out in his acerbic criticism of Adam Smith, is that the worker can only realise the higher value of those skills by working for capital under conditions of exploitation such that it is, in the end, capital and not the worker that reaps the benefit from the higher productivity of labour. In recent times, for example, worker productivity has surged but the share of output going to labour has declined, not increased. In any case, if what the worker truly possessed in bodily form was capital, Marx pointed out, then he or she would be entitled to sit back and just live off the interest of his or her capital without doing a single day’s work (capital as a property relation always has that option at hand). As far as I can tell, the main point of the revival of human capital theory, at the hands of Gary Becker in the 1960s, for example, was to bury the significance of the class relation between capital and labour and make it seem as if we are all just capitalists earning different rates of return on capital (human or otherwise). If labour was getting very low wages, it could then be argued that this was simply a reflection of the fact that workers had not invested enough effort in building up their human capital! It was, in short, their fault if they were low-paid. Hardly surprisingly, all the major institutions of capital, from economics departments to the World Bank and the IMF, wholeheartedly embraced this theoretical fiction for ideological and certainly not for sound intellectual reasons. (p. 180)

The World Bank is building new roads in the commune where I’m collecting data. Interestingly, most of the participants believe it is the government that is building the roads. Unfortunately, the roads are being constructed during the beginning of the rainy season, which means when it rains the roads turn to mud. After a night of heavy rain last week, my research assistant and I had to walk down the new roads because driving was unsafe. Potential long-term development sometimes means short-term life interruptions.

On my way to collect data outside of Siem Reap, I noticed the construction of 12 mostly identical houses. As the economy grows in Cambodia and the middle class increases, people are demanding larger houses but at somewhat affordable prices. Buying land and building one’s own home is likely more expensive then buying in a development like the one captured in the image below. In economic terms, this is speculative building: some developer thinks that building a group of suburban homes will have a high return on investment. Lets hope this isn’t the beginning of a housing bubble.