the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 11, 2001
With the execution of Timothy McVeigh at the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, at least 706 human beings have been put to death by the state since the Supreme Court re-instituted the death penalty in 1976.
Some of them, like McVeigh, committed particularly heinous crimes. Many more killed someone in the passion of the moment. And at least several dozen were not guilty of the crime for which they were executed, or even of any crime at all.
But all 706 of them were put to death in the name of retribution and vengeance.
Look at the hue and cry which have been whipped up for the execution of McVeigh. The media hang on every moment of the affair, giving us a complete picture of this man’s last waking hours and a minute-by-minute account of his death. He might as well have been brought down into the town square and had his head chopped off in front of the assembled population. We are asked to join in the bloodthirst for vengeance like a pack of ghouls.
In fact, the execution of Timothy McVeigh is being used to drum up support for the death penalty.
Society has to protect itself against violent crime. It is intolerable that one person would kill another person, whether as McVeigh did to make a political point, or in pursuit of a few dollars, or simply in a drunken rage. This is behavior appropriate to a barbaric past.
But it is not by coldly murdering a murderer that we can get rid of barbarism. The death penalty, far from discouraging violent crime, simply reinforces criminality and violence. An execution is simply one more crime, one more murder–and all the more horrible because it is legal and coldly premeditated.
Crime is a social problem. In this capitalist society in which we live, the relations between individuals are not free and equal. We are hemmed in by laws which defend capitalist property, which give to the wealthy the right to exploit the labor of the rest of the population and, in so doing, impoverish an important part of the population. This is what breeds crime and violence. To get rid of violent crime, we have to fight against capitalist exploitation which breeds it.
And the leaders of this capitalist society have never opposed the right of the capitalists to exploit the rest of society. It is why they have no answer to the problem of crime.
The leaders of this capitalist society themselves have more blood on their hands than McVeigh or any other criminal could begin to imagine. They use violence to impose exploitation at home. They carry out massacres of other people in wars to impose their domination–as they did in Iraq.
Where did McVeigh learn this term he used to describe the children he killed–"collateral damage"? In the Gulf War where he served, a war which has already led to the deaths of more than a million civilians. "Collateral damage"–this is what the U.S. armed forces call the Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. bombs.
The leaders of this capitalist society today impose the death penalty on people in our name, just as they killed, and continue to kill, Iraqi civilians in our name.
We have no reason to accept their bloodthirsty view of the world, whether in Iraq, Terra Haute or anywhere else in the world.
Jun 11, 2001
Illinois state legislators just passed a 53 billion dollar "austerity" budget. Cut from the budget was a program called Family Care, which had provided health insurance to the children of working parents with low incomes. This program would have cost the state seven million dollars.
So what did the legislators do with the money saved? They put in a budget authorization for refurbishing their offices. While they were at it, they treated themselves to new curtains and chairs.
Since this was an "austerity" budget to prepare for a possible recession, wouldn’t you figure they went out to the local Office Depot sale? Nope. Chairs for Assembly members cost $1,600 each, and those for Senators cost $1,800 each. Austerity or not, providing a soft cushion for their butts is their number one priority. The health of children will just have to wait.
Jun 11, 2001
The Democrats claim they opposed the Bush tax cuts, because the cuts favor the wealthy. They say that the only thing that most working families got out of this tax bill was the tax rebate, the $300 or $600 check to be sent out–and that this was put in the bill by the Democrats.
There’s just one problem with what the Democrats say. If they had really wanted to prevent this tax bill, they had the votes to do it (since they have 50 votes in the Senate).
But this time, like so many other times, they couldn’t find those votes to help the working person. Twelve of the Democrat Party members voted for the administration’s bill, allowing it to pass.
It’s an old game–played over and over by Democrats who pretend to want to defend working people but can’t come up with the votes to do so.
That’s why their party is one that workers don’t want to get invited to.
Jun 11, 2001
Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on Death Row after having been found guilty of shooting policeman Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Mumia had been a former Black Panther who was an outspoken news commentator before the shooting. During his trial Mumia was represented by an incompetent court-appointed lawyer, who has since been disbarred. Mumia did not testify, nor was he even allowed in the courtroom for half the trial.
For the first time Mumia gave a sworn statement to a U.S. court on May 3, 2001. He said that on December 9,1981 he was driving his cab and saw a police light flashing. He saw his brother standing in the street staggering and dizzy. He left the cab and ran toward him. As he crossed the street he saw a uniformed cop turn toward him with a gun, saw a flash and went down to his knees. He sat still trying to breathe. When he opened his eyes, he saw cops all around him. He was pulled to his feet, rammed into a telephone pole, beaten and thrown in a paddy wagon. "I never said I shot the policeman. I did not shoot the policeman. I never said I hoped he died."
Mumia’s brother William Cook also made a statement to the court. He said that his partner Kenneth Freeman was with him that night. He said that Freeman later told him there had been a plan to kill Faulkner and that Freeman had been armed that night and took part in the shooting.
Another sworn statement was presented to the court, written two years before by Arnold Beverly. He said, "I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area." He also said, "I shot Faulkner in the face at close range." And said that after the shooting, he "by pre-arrangement met a police officer who assisted me when I exited the speedline underground about three blocks away." Beverly continues to be in hiding–obviously, if he came forward, he would be arrested for murder.
Another statement was made by Donald Hersing, who was an informant for the FBI in 1981 to 1982 (when the shooting occurred). He described the corruption among the Philadelphia police, identifying the cops who were at the scene of the shooting as among the most corrupt. All of this has the ring of credibility.
Since the shooting of Faulkner in 1981, the Philadelphia police department was investigated for corruption and ultimately put under court-ordered monitoring by the Department of Justice. One result of this investigation was the release of hundreds of people who had been convicted on doctored evidence.
The possible involvement of police corruption in the shooting provides an explanation why the police and Philadelphia prosecutors have fought so hard to deny Mumia another trial where all of this would come out.
Mumia’s supporters are asking workers to raise awareness of Mumia’s case in the work place–discussing his case, distributing ribbons and buttons in defense of Mumia.
Their demand continues to be: justice for Mumia.
Jun 11, 2001
New York Governor Pataki and New York City Mayor Giuliani have just made a deal to give the New York Stock Exchange a billion dollars. The city and state will buy land and build a new trading floor for the heart of the stock market, supposedly to keep 6,000 jobs from leaving New York City for New Jersey.
The Stock Exchange just had to threaten to cross the river to New Jersey, and the state and city leaders fell all over themselves to pave their corporate way with gold.
Was anyone heard to object? Not in the capitalists’ media, the most important of which is the New York Times. But then the newspaper had just made its own little deal with the city: 30 million dollars in tax breaks and subsidies.
There’s no welfare like corporate welfare–which Wall Street certainly knows.
Jun 11, 2001
Starting May 13 fourteen people started a hunger strike at 31st and Kostner Streets in Chicago to demand a new high school. Four other people soon joined the hunger strike which was taking place in a tent camp in the Little Village Mexican area. The hunger strike attracted considerable attention in the Mexican community. Hundreds of people regularly came to visit the fasters.
In 1998 the Chicago Board of Education had announced that it was going to build a new high school at the location and allocated 25 million dollars for construction. In 2000, the Board’s budget listed the project, but removed its funding. Meanwhile the city built two high schools elsewhere in the city designed for students directed toward college.
The hunger strikers complained about conditions at Farragut High School, located a bit north of Little Village. There are constant problems with gangs, drugs and violence, with the police outside almost every day. A number of the mothers on the hunger strike said they didn’t want their children to be bused to other schools, but to go to high school in the neighborhood.
School Board Chief Executive Paul Vallas said of the hunger strike, "It’s not going to force me to make a decision." But within days Vallas was forced by Mayor Daley to resign as the head of the School Board, following Gery Chico, who resigned as president of the Board.
But the removal of two officials does not mean that the parents have won their school. It’s simply an old trick the politicians play–remove an official to play for time, hoping that people’s anger dissipates.
The majority of parents with children in the public schools today are angry at the terrible conditions they are in. If the parents are to really have their demands met, they’ll have to continue and broaden this fight.
Jun 11, 2001
We hear about those tax rebate checks we are supposedly going to get this summer. Washington is supposedly looking out for all of us. The only problem is that the politicians are looking out much more for the few who are wealthy, at the expense of the rest of us.
The White House announced we will all get an across-the-board tax rebate and a tax rate cut. It sounds very nice and equal, but not everyone will get either. For the taxpaying majority, earning up to $60,000 per year, the maximum tax rebate would be $600, if you are married or $300 if you are single. But over 60 million taxpayers will get LESS than the full amount. And there are millions of lower paid workers who will get nothing at all. On the other hand, a couple earning $500,000 will see their taxes cut by $23,000!
They say we are no longer going to pay estate taxes, which sounds like a good deal. But if you died right now and left your family less than $675,000 in all your goods and property, your family would pay no inheritance taxes as the law currently stands. Under the old law, only the very wealthiest families had to pay any inheritance tax. The new tax law now does away with all inheritance taxes. The average tax savings will be six million dollars per family. Of course, not many families own enough that they would have paid six million dollars in estate taxes!
Washington says that parents will gain more child tax credits. Over the next 10 years, the amount a parent can deduct for children under 17 rises from the current $500 to $1000 per child. But the way the new law is written, there will be very little change for the majority. And the lowest paid workers with children will see no benefit at all. On the other hand, taxpayers earning between $110,000 and $250,000 will get most of the benefits, since this tax credit is now to be extended to them.
In other words, the politicians give more money to the wealthiest people, while they ignore the real needs of the majority–all the while bragging about what they are doing for us.
Jun 11, 2001
In midMay, there was a one-day general strike in Greece to protest a new government program to "reform" the retirement system. Currently in Greece, there is one retirement system for everyone, whether they work in private or public jobs. Women can retire on average at 50 years of age and men at 60. The average number of years on the job during which people pay into the retirement plan is 30 years for women including those who have raised children; and 34 years for men. The amount of money received during retirement is currently based on the last five years of work, which are usually the highest.
The new government "reform" plan announced in April, pushed back the retirement age for everyone to 65, beginning in the year 2007. The amount of the pension was to be calculated on 10 years instead of five. The result of this reform would lower the amount received by almost 40% on average!
Finally, this reform of the pension system would have transferred retirement money from publicly held funds into private insurance companies that would take over managing the system.
This new government "reform" is nothing but a scandalous attack on the working class, put forward by a government which calls itself socialist and which claims it is only doing what other governments in Europe are doing. In so far as all the governments of Europe, and we could add North America, are pushing new attacks on the working class, this is true. All the governments are using the same pretexts to launch new attacks on the working class!
Reactions to the new government plan began in April, shortly after the retirement "reform" was announced. A number of union leaders held meetings in different towns around the country in protest, though the turn out was on the small side since this came during the Easter period. Of course, this is precisely why the government made its announcement at that time, hoping to avoid a reaction by the working class.
The following week, however, the unions called for a general strike that was held on Thursday, April 26. There were a number of larger demonstrations, with several thousand workers stopped work and demonstrated. Farmers also demonstrated in the central part of the country. Many people say these were the largest demonstrations they had seen in Greece in the last 10 years.
Over the past decade, the working class has been under attack in various ways, paying the price of government decisions to turn over national industries to private ownership, and suffering layoffs in both the government and the private sectors. The socialist led governments carried out the same attacks on the working class as did the rightwing, New Democracy government that preceded it.
By the end of April, because of the widespread discontent and the number of protests, the government announced it was temporarily suspending its retirement "reform" project, while planning to hold discussions with the leaders of various unions. Obviously, the government has not given up its attempt to cut back workers’ retirement plans. But this time, it hopes to first have the agreement of the union leaders when it does this. Perhaps these union leaders will accept to go along with these cuts, but the level of discontent displayed by workers in their strike of May 17 indicates that the workers themselves are not at all ready to accept.
Jun 11, 2001
On May 18, for the first time since 1967, Israel sent F16 bombers against Palestinian targets. The jet fighters fired missiles on major population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the cities of Nablus, Ramallah and Gaza, killing 11, wounding dozens and turning many buildings into rubble.
The Israeli government said these air strikes were in retaliation for a suicide bombing which happened earlier that day in the Israeli town of Netanya: a 21yearold Palestinian detonated explosives strapped to his body in front of a shopping mall, killing five people besides himself, and wounding dozens of others.
Since the suicide bomber was from the West Bank town of Tulkarm, the Israeli army made sure to send some helicopter gunships to that town, too, to punish the townspeople. And then came the usual collective punishment measures against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, such as the customary closure of borders, keeping tens of thousands of people from going to work. This time, the Israeli army even closed the only highway in the Gaza Strip or rather, that half of it which is used by Palestinians. After the latest wave of the Palestinian uprising began last September, the Israeli army built a concrete divider down the center of this highway to keep the Palestinian population of Gaza, numbering over one million, apart from the Jewish settlers there, the full 5,000 of them!
It is such extremely unbearable, humiliating conditions that unify the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza against Israel. The rage of a population deprived of land, livelihood and a future keeps this newest wave of the Palestinian uprising, the "Second Intifada," alive and on the rise. (The first Intifada, the uprising in the Israelioccupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1987 to 1993, forced Israel to negotiate an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat, establishing the Palestinian Authority.)
Since the beginning of the Second Intifada last September, Israel has resorted to all of the repressive measures in its repertoire: military occupation, firing on unarmed protesters, the arrest and assassination of Palestinian militants, the shelling and bombing of neighborhoods, the flattening of entire neighborhoods with bulldozers, and now the F16s.
So far, however, these repressive measures seem only to have strengthened the uprising, which is carried on mainly by a very young population. For example, practically the entire city of Nablus turned out for the funerals of 11 policemen killed in the F16 raid which hit their police station. Young men shouted slogans, volunteering themselves for new suicide bombings. Other slogans were directed not only against Israel but also against the U.S. for supplying Israel with its stateoftheart weapons of mass destruction.
The continuing revolt of the Palestinian population has led the U.S. to seek a new round of cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And this time, the U.S. has adopted a language which is unusually critical of Israel. The recent "Mitchell Report" on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict put the responsibility for the escalation of the violence primarily on the Israeli government. It not only called on Israel to immediately stop military confrontations but also to freeze the construction of settlements in the Palestinian territories something the U.S. had never suggested before.
The question of the settlements is certainly a key issue, to say the least. Since its inception, the state of Israel has used Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories as a means of grabbing land. No matter what political party was in power, all Israeli governments expanded these settlements and, through incentives and subsidies, actively encouraged Israelis to move into them. This policy didn’t change in the least after the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO. Israel continued to build settlements in areas it had officially agreed to eventually cede to Palestinian control.
Since the Oslo Accord, the number of settler houses and apartments grew by 52%, swelling the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza from 115,000 in 1993 to 200,000 in 2000. This doesn’t include the 180,000 settlers in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want to establish the capital of their future state. There, new settlements and roads to these settlements are being designed in such a way that they would separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank. In general, these settlements, with the heavily armed Israeli army outposts protecting them, would turn a future Palestinian state into one where the population is confined in separate pockets of land, unable to freely move between different parts of what is supposed to be one and the same country.
This is not a new problem. If the U.S. now suddenly recognizes it, however, it’s because of the Second Intifada. This massive popular revolt certainly threatens other areas of the Middle East, destabilizing the whole region which is so important to the U.S. government and corporations, not only because of oil but also strategically. So the U.S. wants Israel to make some concessions not only symbolic ones but ones that really matter to Palestinian people, such as freezing the settlements, even if only temporarily.
But at the same time, the U.S. wants to make sure the uprising is suppressed effectively something Israel alone has proved incapable of again and again, no matter how much it increases the use of brute force. So, once again, the U.S. is trying to get the Palestinian police forces to actively cooperate with Israel. This is not such an easy task since the Palestinian police chiefs in the West Bank and Gaza were both targets of Israeli assassination attempts within the last two months, and one of them was wounded!
That’s why none other that the very head of the CIA, George Tenet, was dispatched last week to Israel to bring together Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs. The CIA has been involved for several years in this threeway cooperation to police the Palestinian population and control the intifada that is, of course, until Israeli troops attacked the Palestinian police chiefs. The U.S. is obviously sending in a highprofile official like Tenet in an effort to convince the Palestinians that it’s safe for them to be around the Israelis again!
In the end, however, no combination of concessions proposed by the U.S. and Israel can answer the demands of the Palestinian population simply because the goal of these governments is to maintain the very conditions which have deprived the Palestinian people of a future.
So for the Palestinian people, the solution lies only in their ability to maintain and take further their revolt. The suicide bombings (to which the mass media always chooses to devote much publicity) and the Palestinian population’s support for them may show the resolve and defiance of a people against far superior military forces. But they offer no way out for the Palestinians–all the more so because they are directed against the poorest layers of the Israeli population. Such individual acts of terrorism cannot break the stalemate of revolt, military repression and temporary concessions.
What has trapped the Palestinian people in poverty, unemployment and a lack of prospects is not only the Israeli state but a whole political and economic setup. The purpose of this setup is for big corporations, based above all in the U.S., to extract as much profit as possible from that part of the world. That’s why the Palestinian workers and poor can break this vicious cycle only if they can lead their uprising towards destroying that whole setup and replacing it with one that will allow them to pursue their own aspirations: a decent, humane existence for all working people, including Israeli workers.
Jun 11, 2001
James Culp, a Detroit man arrested in 2000 on drug charges, has just filed a federal lawsuit against the Detroit police under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Specifically Culp said the police first planted drugs on him as a pretext to arrest him, then after indicting him, offered to sell him the drugs that were to be used as evidence against him.
Two months after his 2000 arrest, Culp said the police came to his home and offered to sell him the evidence to be used against him for $5,000. When he paid them, they gave him the drugs, telling him to get rid of them.
The officers returned a second time to tell him there was more evidence to be gotten rid of in his case. But this time they demanded $10,000. Culp said he couldn’t borrow any more to pay them.
Unfortunately, he also told these crooked cops that he had not yet burned the evidence. The cops–all out of uniform–came back to his house when he wasn’t there. With guns drawn, they terrorized his wife, niece and children. The two women were pistol-whipped and his wife Rosetta was beaten unconscious. Both ended up in the hospital. The "off-duty" cops made it clear they were searching for the "evidence."
Is it just a coincidence that 30 KILOGRAMS of cocaine worth 12 million dollars showed up missing three months ago when the department inventoried its property room? If so, it’s an awfully big coincidence!
Remarked Culp’s lawyer about the missing evidence, "If [the police] really want to keep track of their drugs, they could rise to the level of 7-Eleven [and use surveillance cameras.]" Culp has turned the evidence over to the FBI, after Police Internal Affairs refused to talk to him.
The police–now what are they called? Guardians of the law?
Yes–but whose law?
Jun 11, 2001
In May, "legionnaires disease" was confirmed at Ford’s Dynamometer Research and Engineering Facility in Dearborn Michigan. Legionnaires disease is a particularly virulent form of pneumonia which can be contracted when someone breathes in vapor from contaminated water. Water which sits, or which is circulated through pipes, or held in any tanks which are not regularly cleaned, can become contaminated with the bacteria which produce the disease.
The first two men diagnosed with the disease at Dynamometer became ill early in April after repairing a ruptured pipe which carried pond water into the facility. Ford was notified in early May that they were sick.
Rumors spread through the plant about the possibility of legionnaires disease, but Ford did nothing to confirm it until almost the end of May. And even then, it did not shut down the whole plant. It only chlorinated the ponds from which the water came and cleaned up the basement of the plant with a disinfecting agent.
At the very same time as the outbreak at Dynamometer, Ford was pushing workers at its Rouge facility to work under equally dangerous conditions. The main pipe supplying water to the facility ruptured, thus contaminating not only the pipe, but the whole water system. Ford pushed workers to come back into work the very next day, covering over the problem with bottled water, portajohns and portable tanks providing water. What does bottled water mean in plants where water sprays are used to cool hot parts and where water vapor is everywhere to be breathed in?
Nothing to worry about–so said Ford; and so echoed the big cheeses at UAW Solidarity House who certainly weren’t rushing out to the Rouge to expose themselves to the threat of a potentially deadly disease.
Workers at both facilities certainly should have worried–and refused to submit themselves to the risks. Some of them did refuse.
After all, it was only two months earlier that an outbreak of legionnaires disease at Ford’s Cleveland Casting Plant had claimed the lives of three workers, and led to the illness of many more. On March 7, two workers from the Casting Plant were diagnosed with the disease. The next day, lab tests confirmed the diagnosis. It was not until March 12 that Ford notified the union of the problem, and not until March 13 when it took a tiny action against the disease: it closed down the workers’ showers and distributed bottled water.
The only sane precaution against such a disease is to get everyone out of the buildings where the water supply is suspect. But Ford delayed doing that in Cleveland until the night of the 14th, six days after the lab tests confirmed the existence of the disease.
As soon as a disinfecting company cleaned out the water system, Ford called people back to work, even while cleaners, wearing protection gear, continued to work on the system and to take water samples. Test results didn’t come back for ten days, during which time Ford pushed for production.
No sane person would send people into a possibly deadly situation until it was definitely cleared. But corporations are not sane people; they are crazy for profits. And Ford, which has long demonstrated that it will cut every corner, delay implementing every needed safety measure, is among the craziest: a true leader of American capitalism.
Jun 11, 2001
In May, a Baltimore jury awarded over seven million dollars to the family of Eli McCoy, a 17-year-old high school student. McCoy had been shot dead by a Housing Authority cop on Thanksgiving Day, 1999. The jury concluded that Officer Kenneth Dean III had used excessive force, battered the young black man and acted with malice in killing the unarmed McCoy.
On the day McCoy was shot, his father sent him on an errand to a nearby store in Walbrook, the poor neighborhood where the family lives. He ended up cornered in the backyard of a house after trying to run away from Baltimore City cops and off-duty Housing Authority Officer Dean. These cops chased him after a woman reported that McCoy and another young man had snatched $20 from her. Several witnesses who lived in the neighborhood testified McCoy obeyed the cops’ orders to put his hands up. One witness heard him say, "I don’t have a weapon. I haven’t done anything. What, you gonna shoot me?"
Officer Dean, standing only about 8 feet in front of McCoy, then did exactly that; a few seconds later he fired two more shots into him. McCoy died on the spot. Three neighborhood witnesses reported that one of the city police officers then cried out to another officer, "I can’t believe he (Officer Dean) just did this."
The family was forced to take its own case into civil court because city prosecutors refused to bring criminal charges against Officer Dean. The Housing Authority even continued to employ him.
A jury has now decided that Dean committed murder. But others are equally responsible–and first of all, the police department officialdom, the city prosecutor and the mayor.
In refusing to indict Dean, they indicted themselves as accomplices after the fact in McCoy’s murder.
Jun 11, 2001
Hollywood released the movie Pearl Harbor just in time for the Memorial Day holiday. The film portrays the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian naval base which occurred 60 years ago. The movie, which stars Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Jon Voight, presents a picture of the attack through the lives of a group of young pilots and their friends.
The film realistically depicts the violent horrors of war. It shows the death and destruction during the defeat suffered by the U.S. navy in the attack and the impossible conditions the sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor faced. It gives a glimpse of the manner in which the ordinary troops are kept in the dark about their missions by the officers, although this is portrayed as necessary for the sake of secrecy. The film also touches on the racism in the military, through Gooding’s character, who has enlisted in the Navy only to be assigned the position of cook along with the other black sailors.
All of this is the window dressing in a movie which is nothing but a vehicle for covering over the significance of the attack at Pearl Harbor.
The film sticks with the standard propaganda version about the U.S. and Japanese governments’ roles. The film shows the Japanese military leaders deciding to make a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, sending out false reports of the movements of its naval fleet to confuse any U.S. spy efforts.
The film does nothing, however, to explain the reasons for the Japanese decision to attack. Nor does it say anything about the struggle the U.S. government was then waging against Japan to control Southeast Asia for the benefit of its own national ruling class. It ignores the fact that the U.S. government froze Japanese assets. It also does not mention the economic embargo that the U.S. government placed against the sale of oil and scrap iron to Japan, which provoked Japan to declare war.
Above all it ignores what has since been shown in the U.S. government’s own cables and documents: that the U.S. government at its highest levels not only was aware of the impending Japanese attack–but that it had provoked it and welcomed it as a way to overcome the staunch opposition to the war which existed in the whole American population. (A recent book by Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit, clearly demonstrates that the U.S. government was bending every effort to bring the Japanese to attack first.)
The picture shows President Roosevelt as being completely surprised by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In fact, to the contrary, there is considerable evidence that the U.S. government and the president had information about and were following the movements of the Japanese fleet toward Hawaii in the days before the attack. There is evidence that they not only withheld this information from the admiral at Pearl Harbor, but they prevented him from carrying out exercises which would have allowed him to discover the approach of the Japanese fleet.
The U.S. government wanted to enter World War II. The war would decide how the world’s economy would be divided up. The politicians probably didn’t anticipate the enormous blow the Japanese would issue to the Pacific naval fleet in Pearl Harbor, but they had wanted the Japanese to carry out the first blow to overcome the population’s strong opposition to entering the war.
The film mentions none of this, nor anything about the internment of 120,000 JapaneseAmericans from the West Coast in American concentration camps that was carried out just a few months later.
Instead it plays on the suffering of U.S. sailors to reinforce the myth of a U.S. victimized by Japan.
Jun 11, 2001
The top UAW official in western Ohio announced the union would institute a boycott of The Toledo Hospital (TTH). The UAW also plans to boycott Paramount Health Care, the HMO owned by ProMedica, TTH’s parent company.
The UAW alone counts for almost one fifth of members registered with Paramount HMO. Other unions, which are also being asked to join the boycott, account for a good number more. A boycott, if the threat were carried out, could seriously cut into the income of ProMedica. Clearly this threat is designed to make ProMedica management take a more "reasonable" stance toward the UAW, after the union campaign which just failed there.
The problem is, what do the workers at TTH think about the boycott, especially those workers who were active in the union campaign that just ended? Certainly the hospital management will tell them that the UAW is threatening their jobs by this boycott; and echoes of this could already be heard in the hospital.
The workers at TTH might nonetheless favor a boycott if they had discussed the issues and made the decision to call for one. They might have found it a useful tactic as one action in a broader campaign which they carried out to win their union.
But the problem is that this decision was made with no "input" from the workers at TTH–don’t even speak about any real collective discussion or decision-making. They found out from the press.
The organizing campaign, itself, foundered at TTH because the workers who took responsibility for the campaign did not make the decisions as to how the campaign would be carried out. This was very useful for the hospital which made a point of playing on the idea that the union is not democratic.
From the 300 workers who stepped forward publicly to announce themselves as an organizing committee, despite the risk this entailed, to the many, many workers who talked non-stop to their fellow workers to collect the necessary signatures to even get an election–these workers were the basis not only of the union organizing effort, they were the union itself.
They are the ones who today still have the capacity to make a union function at TTH. To do it, they will have to bring themselves together to decide what they want to do and who will do it.
Whatever may come of this boycott, what they do will decide whether they have a union and, above all, what kind of union it will be.