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
Jan 21, 2002
Is there any doubt that Enron, until recently the country’s seventh largest company, is a giant fraud? Executives created over 3,000 shell companies to funnel literally billions of dollars into their own pockets. They set up over 900 offshore accounts with the sole purpose of defrauding the U.S. government of its taxes. They emptied their employees’ savings and pensions. When the whole house of cards began to collapse, they and their accountants began to shred thousands of documents, erase thousands of e-mails. In a confidential memo to the Enron CEO Ken Lay in August, Enron Vice President Sherron S. Watkins summed it all up: “...we’re such a crooked company.”
And yet, there are no arrests?
The people at the very top of this government claim to have zero tolerance for crime. Bush ran for office based on his record as governor of Texas, bragging he had okayed the execution of more prisoners than anyone else. The attorney general is a religious zealot who claims not only to fight crime, but sin itself.
But what do they have to say about Enron? Bush’s secretary of the treasury, Paul O’Neill, declared that what happened at Enron was no big thing: “Companies come and go. It’s part of the genius of capitalism.” Bush’s top economist, Lawrence Lindsey (a former Enron adviser), went on to characterize the Enron affair as a “tribute to American capitalism.”
In other words, what happened at Enron is business as usual. Truer words were never spoken.
If anyone needs proof, just look at who was involved with Enron, a veritable “Who’s Who” of the business and political world. First, the Board of Directors, considered one of the most distinguished in the world, includes a member of the British House of Lords, the wife of a senior U.S. Senator, the dean of a major law school. Enron executives–tied closely to the Bush Administration–needed and got the go-ahead from the Board of Directors to do many of the things they did. Second, they needed and got the help of some of the top banks, accounting companies and law firms in the country, literally the cream of the crop. Finally, they needed an entire political structure that allowed them to do what they pleased.
There was never any indication that any of these parties tried to stop Enron’s corruption or fraud.
Why should they be concerned? Enron may have been stealing right and left, but so do other big companies. The main difference between Enron and the others is simply that Enron got caught. Corruption, fraud and theft are at the very basis of the functioning of the capitalist system.
We have no reason to believe a word from any of these liars and cheats who run both business and government. Not on anything. They are the same people who want us to hand over Social Security to them so they can create a giant 401(k) plan, like the one that Enron just plundered. They are the same ones who try to convince us that wars–fought to defend the interests of the big multinational corporations–are in our interest. They aren’t.
We have no reason to sacrifice for or to die for any of these liars. They promote the corporations and the capitalists at our expense and at the expense of working people all over the world, including here.
Jan 21, 2002
Commerce Secretary Don Evans was contacted by Ken Lay, head of Enron, in October. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was contacted by Ken Lay in November. And, as we all know, Lay was George Bush’s great good buddy–giving him big bucks in every election campaign since the early l990s.
Since Enron declared bankruptcy in December, the Bush administration has been a bit embarrassed by its ties to Enron. So they rush to point out that the administration did nothing when contacted by Lay.
And that is the point!
Enron just ruined the pensions of 20,000 people in its work force, and thousands more who had their pension money in 401(k) plans with Enron stock, plus laying off at least 4,000 so far.
If the administration in Washington were the defenders of the American people they claim to be, they would be outraged on behalf of all the ordinary people. They would have taken action against Enron and its management, starting with the big boss, Ken Lay.
They would have begun the process of getting all that money back that Lay socked away in offshore banks.
No. They did nothing!!!
Jan 21, 2002
The Big 3 claim over and over that they cannot compete with Toyota or Honda in the U.S. because the foreign car manufacturers have an unfair advantage. The U.S. auto companies claim that the newer corporations don’t have all the retirees that Ford, GM and Chrysler have, so their costs are lower.
We know that corporate America practices lying like humans practice breathing, but here they’ve really outdone themselves.
Legally, corporations which have employees entitled to retirement and health benefits are required to set aside a sum of money sufficient to cover their future retirement and health obligations. And these three companies certainly had the money to do it–look at all the wealth that their retirees produced for them, year in, year out for the 30 and more years they worked before they retired. Not to mention the fact that their taxes were lowered when they claimed these pension contributions as an expense on their balance sheets.
So if GM, Ford and Chrysler want to tell us today they have to dip into today’s profits to fund pension liabilities they should have funded yesterday, then they are thieves stealing from the workers and the IRS.
If you’re thinking about waiting to see if the government will slap these guys in jail, don’t hold your breath!
Jan 21, 2002
The Detroit auto show took place in early January with all its usual glitz and glamor and champagne. Limos arrived one after the other, as the same time Ford was announcing its expected to cut the jobs of 35,000 workers. Where did all the money for the auto show come from if they are so broke?
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Jan 21, 2002
It wasn’t very long ago that William Clay Ford, Jr. fired CEO Jacques (Jac the Knife) Nasser and took over the reins of Ford Motor Company himself. Now he has stepped forward to make the doomsday announcements. Five plants have to close. Eighteen plants have to downsize and restructure. Suppliers have to be cut. Thirty-five thousand workers’ jobs have to be eliminated. Ford’s prospects are bleak. He says.
Ford’s public relations department must be working overtime, because it’s a hard job to convince anyone that a multibillion-dollar empire like Ford is going broke.
It was only last year that the same public relations department was boasting about Ford’s huge 28 billion dollar cash reserve. Did they lose all that money that fast? Or did they just bring in the Enron accountants?
In any case, the news accounts leave many more questions up in the air than they answer.
First of all, how many cuts are they talking about, where and when? The headlines say “CRISIS” and “BIG CUTS!” But the smaller print says “later” and “after production is shifted.” The headlines say “35,000 LAYOFFS!” But the smaller print seems to be talking about a totally different project.
For example, the headline of a Detroit newspaper said “SHIFT REDUCTION” at Atlanta Assembly. Atlanta has 2,189 hourly workers. To say “shift reduction” makes us think of half the workers gone. But in the details, the article reads: “Workers affected: 150 hourly.”
When you read through the rest of the proposals, with the exception of several old plants or very small ones, this is what they are proposing.
So what’s up? We know that Ford can count, and this doesn’t begin to add up to 35,000.
What’s up is that Ford intends to impose the same old speed-up it always tries to force on us: trying to cut 150 jobs out of work force of 2,189, spread that work onto the 2,039 workers left. And they will try that in each of their plants. If they can cut and paste enough, they can go ahead and close those few old plants they want to close.
Seen from this viewpoint, it looks like the ordinary speed-up that workers face every day.
Of course, with the usual speed-up comes resistance. Sometimes the companies succeed in cutting jobs and dumping the work on those who are left. But often, workers, individually or collectively, find the ways not to work faster.
This is Ford’s problem: how to impose, across the board a speed-up, without sparking any reaction from the workers.
And so we are confronted by these big glaring headlines: 35,000 jobs to be cut. Enough to make someone think there is nothing that can be done; enough to make someone think it’s better to lie low and just hold on to their own job.
Or so Ford hopes!
That would be the worst possible reaction. If the workers accept these scare headlines, if they think they can’t respond, then, yes, Ford can eventually cut 35,000 jobs. In other words, Ford will be able to do what William Clay Ford says he wants to do: “revitalize,” in other words, get rid of workers.
But that can’t happen if the workers resist.
This is not a new ploy. It’s exactly the same kind of game that Chrysler played just about a year ago: big headlines, big scare stories.
We can bet that GM will be next.
If Chrysler, now Ford and eventually GM get away with this, of course it will make them stronger: in other words, richer. And yes, their shares will attract more money on the stock market.
But it won’t rescue these companies from bankruptcy. Because these companies ain’t broke.
It definitely won’t do anything for the workers except to make them lose more jobs faster, and fall into earlier graves.
Whatever Ford says, the workers should have the same response: No job cuts, we don’t accept a single one!
Jan 21, 2002
Originally, Zionism, the political current which led to the setting up of Israel, was not a product of the Jewish religious hierarchy, but a nationalist reaction to the situation in which Europe’s Jews found themselves. While the Zionist movement always had a religious wing, its main body of activists was made of secular nationalists among whom many even called themselves “socialists”. In particular all the Israeli prime ministers from 1948 to 1974–Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levy Eskhol, Golda Meir and Yitzakh Rabin–were part of this latter group.
And yet religion permeates everything in the Israeli state which eventually came out of the Zionist movement. State institutions are not subjected to the authority of the rabbis. But the Jewish religion is the official state religion and many aspects of social life are entrusted to their hands–for instance birth and death registrations, marriages, areas of welfare and education. There is no such thing as a civil marriage, and marriages between Jews and non-Jews are not possible. All sorts of material advantages, particularly in terms of housing and jobs, are available to religious Jews and not to others–be they atheists, Christians, or Palestinians.
The role of religion in today’s Israel did not come out of nowhere. It was the result of a conscious choice on the part of the Zionist movement which presided over the creation of the new state in 1947, and more specifically on the part of its left-wing which played a vital role in this process.
The Jewish immigrants who fled to Palestine in the years before and after World War II came from many different parts of the world. Many had a long tradition of collective struggle–through the trade-union movement or the socialist and communist movements. Most had never subscribed to Zionism or any kind of Jewish nationalism. Collectively they were determined to build a new society, free of the injustices, discrimination and poverty that they had experienced in their native countries, a society that would never again allow any form of dictatorship.
For the left-wing Zionist leaders, the problem was not to make the best of the unprecedented human potential that they had at hand. It was, on the contrary, to constrain the outlook of the settlers so as to reduce their expectations and ambitions to a narrow nationalist perspective. And because the settlers’ sense of identity was far too open-minded to fit into the ionist perspective, this sense of identity had to be built from scratch, using biblical mumbo-jumbo to please the Zionist right.
The left Zionists went out of their way to find justifications in the ancient biblical texts for their nationalist claim that the Jewish population “owned” Palestine–the gift of the “promised land” made by Jehovah to Moses.
Needless to say, the arguments borrowed from the Bible to justify the setting up of Israel were not exactly progressive. After all, for anyone who reads the Bible without the blinkers of religious faith, it is a crude testimony to the barbaric society based on slavery at the time when it was written. Its many heroes are, just as the god it portrays, as ruthless and contemptuous of the poor as the society which produced them. And yet it is from this Bible that Zionism dug up justifications for everything–whether for the “historical” roots of the Israel-Arab conflict or the rights of the Jewish people over Palestine.
In 1948, when the British mandate over Palestine came to an end, the Israeli state was declared as a Jewish state which would be open to all Jews, provided they could prove they were Jews. But how could one prove Jewishness, if not by reference to the Jewish religion? And yet all Zionist parties signed the declaration of independence, with its religious slant–and not just Ben Gurion’s Labor party, but also the social-democratic party Mapam, which had been advocating a bi-national state including both Arabs and Jews on equal terms.
If religion bears so heavily on today’s Israel, it is due to this initial choice to base the legitimacy of the state on religion. Since then the grip of religion has been further reinforced by using religious pretexts to justify Israel’s position in its on-going conflict with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 war, for example, or its policy of developing settler colonies in the Gaza strip and the West Bank, have been justified on biblical grounds. But each time the Israeli government resorts to such pretexts to justify its policies, it only reinforces the religious far right.
Today there is a long list of far-right religious parties in Israel. There is no difference between the hysterical rabbis who form the core of some parties and the so-called “radical” Iranian mullahs or the Taliban for that matter. These rabbis, who enjoy life as parasites of society under the pretext that they have a spiritual role to play, are in the habit of inviting their followers to stone women who dress or behave “indecently.”
But where the religious far-right is most active, of course, is in the armed struggle against the Palestinian population. One of its organizations, Gush Enim (the Bloc of Faithful) was founded in the 1960s by Rabbi Moshe Levinger. It pioneered the setting up of Jewish settler colonies in Hebron in 1968. Since then, Gush Enim has been running an anti-Palestinian hate campaign, going so far as to claim, in the name of the Bible, that killing Arabs is a way of honoring God. At the same time it recruited youth in the poorest Jewish areas, giving them guns to help “defend” settler colonies. Another demagogue, Rabbi Kahane, who had immigrated from the USA in the 1970s, became famous for similar reasons. His overtly racist grouping Kakh, which can be translated as “so be it,” aimed at terrorizing the Palestinian population out of the West Bank. Eventually the chickens came home to roost when Kahane was shot dead by a Palestinian during a visit to the USA in 1990.
Of course such crazies can be found in any country. But the policy of setting up Jewish colonies in the Palestinian territories has given these far-right groups a disproportionate political role and influence. Since the setting up of the National Palestinian Administration following the Oslo accord, the far-right has effectively acted as an unofficial auxiliary militia for the Israeli army inside the so-called “autonomous” Palestinian territories.
For the particular brand of fundamentalism represented by the Jewish religious far-right, as it has developed over the past thirty years, the enforcement of religious principles in day-to-day life appears, therefore, as a secondary issue. Its main concern is to champion Israel’s expansionist policy. It is a kind of fundamentalism which holds enormous dangers for the future, both for the Israeli population and for the Palestinians.
While the Palestinians have been direct victims of the choice to turn what had once been Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state, the Jewish people themselves have and will continue to suffer horrible consequences from this besieged fortress in which Zionism trapped them.
The decision to found Israel as a religious state restricted to Jews resulted in a catastrophe of historical dimensions in the Middle-East.
Jan 21, 2002
Three men were decapitated on the first of January in Saudi Arabia. They were condemned to death because they were homosexuals. If such an act had taken place in Afghanistan after September 11, U.S. commentators would have run out of harsh words to say against such executions. And we would undoubtedly have seen images of this event over and over again on television. But there was no such reaction because Saudi Arabia, which is run by a religious regime just as barbaric as that of the Taliban, is a long time ally of the United States.
As far as cruelty and religious obscurantism is concerned, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia is just as bad as the Taliban, to whom they previously gave substantial financial support. These Saudi brutes publicly execute a hundred people a year, killing the men by sword and the women by pistol. These cases almost always begin with arrests carried out by the religious police, an institution which the Taliban copied from the Saudis down to using the same name: “Committees for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice.” Whippings, beatings and amputations of body parts are a common form of punishment. Confessions under torture are used as proofs. Accusations of sorcery or of "corruption on earth" are used to justify charges of violating Islamic law. Immigrant workers–Filipinos, Middle Easterners and African–are among the first to face such punishment.
Since the end of World War II, American leaders have maintained an agreement reached by Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi dynasty. Saudi Arabia guaranteed oil at reasonable prices to the United Sates, passing it through the intermediary of American oil companies, who were guaranteed a very hefty profit. In exchange, the U.S. government pledged to use its power to keep the Saudi regime in place.
This agreement has been scrupulously respected by both sides ever since 1945 and let the peoples who live under this regime by damned!
Jan 21, 2002
The Bush administration may have declared a unilateral victory over the Taliban on December 16, designed to coincide with the festival marking the end of Ramadan. But it is over a month later and the U.S. continues to bomb the country, even if it is on a more limited scale.
Under the pretext of hunting down bin Laden, the remaining al-Qaeda fighters and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the U.S. continues to bomb whole villages into the ground in eastern Afghanistan. For example, the English-language Pakistani newspaper, Dawn News, reported that 65 villagers were killed on the 20th of December, 40 on the 27th, over 100 on the 31st, and 32 on the 4th of January. On January 10th and 11th the U.S. bombed the town of Zhawar and its surrounding area intensively, forcing people to flee into Pakistan. All these raids took place in predominantly Pashtun areas close to the Pakistani border.
As in so many other military ventures, the number of casualties and the real extent of the damage caused by the U.S. bombings will probably never be known–and certainly not from the big-business-owned U.S. media, which has no interest in reporting the number of ordinary people being killed. Nor are we told the indirect effects of the war, particularly among the refugee population.
The civilians killed were not accidents in the “hunt for terrorists.” They were the target. U.S. bombing around Kabul is aimed at subduing the population around the capital, so that this new government can pretend to govern–or at least remain in place in Kabul.
Even now, the various warlords on whom the new power rests show signs of being ready to resume the bloody feuds in which they turned Afghanistan into a killing field between l992 and l996. This is the new “democratic” government the U.S. has installed. This is the “peace” that U.S. bombs brought to Afghanistan.
Jan 21, 2002
On December 14, an investment company called the Carlyle Group made 237 million dollars in a single day by selling stocks for a military contractor it owns, United Defense Industries. This was not so surprising since only a day before Congress had passed a defense authorization bill which included 487 million dollars for 480 Crusaders, a massive high-tech cannon produced by the same United Defense Industries.
What was behind such good luck? A Carlyle spokesman said that the company hadn’t “lobbied” for the Crusader. Who needs to hire lobbyists to influence Congress when Carlyle’s chairman is Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defense and a close personal friend of the man currently holding the post, Donald Rumsfeld? Or when George Bush, former President and father of the current President, is on the company’s payroll?
In fact, Carlyle’s management looks just like a club of former top politicians and military men, including former British prime minister John Major; former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili; former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Arthur Levitt; and elder Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, among others. In fact, the current Bush president was a director of a Carlyle subsidiary from 1990 to 1994.
Carlyle specializes in buying military contractors that are not doing well, then re-selling them after getting big government contracts for them. It has returned a 34% rate of profit over the last 10 years and currently has 12.5 billion dollars in investments.
And who are the investors who have reaped these profits? Whoever has the kind of money for such big investments, of course, including a certain, very wealthy family from Saudi Arabia–the bin Ladens. Until last October, that is. That’s when Carlyle bought out the shares of the bin Laden family. “This wasn’t done because anyone thought they did anything wrong,” a Carlyle executive said. “We didn’t do it with relish or great glee. We felt and they felt that it was something that was causing more attention than it deserved.”
After all, Carlyle was jumping on the bandwagon to profit from the “war on terrorism” after September 11. And it’s hard to look “patriotic” when consorting with the family of the man Bush designated as the main enemy.
Thus “America’s war on terrorism” continues–and business looks as good as ever for the great patriotic leaders of the Carlyle Group.
Jan 21, 2002
At least 11 workers became ill on January 10 at the U.S. Commerce Department Building in Washington, D.C. Apparently the illnesses resulted from inhaling toxic fumes from irradiated mail.
Since the anthrax attacks, the U.S. Post Office has started to irradiate all federal mail in order to kill any potential biological agents. As usual, the public was told that irradiating mail poses no health concerns, nor would it damage the mail. And, as usual with official claims, there was a slight discrepancy between reality and what the officials said.
It turns out that the irradiation process causes the release of hydrocarbons from plastic, and plastic is, for example, widely found in envelopes with address windows or shrink-wrapped mail. In the case of shrink-wrapped mail, the gases are trapped inside until someone cuts open the bag to release the toxic fumes–making people sick.
The irradiation was also said to have messed up computer disks, computer chips, medicine, food, and photographic items.
When they wrote up the job description for bureaucrat, they must have put at the top of the list: “able to create new problems.”
Jan 21, 2002
The Army announced in early January that it was going to get rid of a stockpile of mustard gas that it has been storing at the Aberdeen Proving Ground just north of Baltimore. This stockpile has more than three million pounds of this chemical weapon, a known cancer-causing agent.
Mustard gas was one of the first chemical weapons, used extensively in World War I. It was manufactured by the U.S. Army during World War II.
Mustard gas has long been known to burn the skin, cause respiratory problems and cancer. The U.S. Army certainly had no doubts on this matter. It tested it during World War II on at least 4,000 of its own troops. Although, since it wouldn’t admit the testing for decades, the veterans who developed breathing problems or cancers couldn’t get help from the Veterans Administration.
It had other guinea pigs also. When one of its ships carrying mustard gas was sunk, U.S. troops on the ship who were recovered from the water developed blistering skin, stinging eyes, skin lesions and other problems. Within a month 83 U.S. soldiers contaminated in the explosions had died.
Despite knowing the effects of mustard gas, and despite agreeing not to use chemical weapons, the U.S. military still stockpiled tons and tons of mustard gas. Now, of course, it has developed much more deadly weapons and doesn’t need it any more. So, using September 11th as an excuse, it’s decided to dispose of this poisonous stuff they kept around for 50 years.
That certainly shouldn’t make anyone feel any safer!
Jan 21, 2002
On January 8, the Supreme Court ruled against a woman whose job left her permanently disabled. Ella Williams lost her job at a Toyota plant in Kentucky because a painful repetitive-stress injury to her arms and hands prevented her from doing her job.
Williams had filed suit against Toyota under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, asking that Toyota give her a job suited to her injury so she could go on working.
Toyota claimed that Williams’ impairment, diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome, was “a specialized and idiosyncratic limitation.” They went on to say: “Repetitively wiping cars with arms at shoulder level is not a major life activity” and therefore she can’t sue under the act. Toyota argued that major life activities means working in general, and does not include a job of one’s choice.
Williams told the court that without accommodation her injuries would bar her from most jobs available to a Kentucky resident of modest education. There was no dispute that the job she had done at Toyota had caused her injuries.
Speaking for the majority on the court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed with Toyota, saying repetitive physical activity was not “of central importance to most people’s daily lives.” Apparently Justice O’Connor doesn’t think work is central to daily life!
Maybe for Supreme Court Justices, work is not central, but for the rest of us, paying our bills IS the major life activity.
The Supreme Court set a new precedent with Ella Williams’ case–one which will affect millions of workers. Some estimates are that almost 60 million Americans will suffer from chronic musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, by the year 2020.
Jan 21, 2002
On January 6, Aaron Thomas Jr., a 63-year-old man, was found dead from the cold. In October 1998, Peoples Gas Company had shut off the gas at his previous residence because he was behind on his bills. When he moved into his new place in December 2000, the company wouldn’t hook up the gas since he hadn’t paid his old bills. He has been without heat ever since.
Thomas is not the first person known to have died from lack of heat this winter. He is the tenth in a year that has been mild so far. There are three more months to go in the winter.
It’s outrageous in this day and age with all the modern conveniences that people freeze to death in the middle of a big city.
Chicago is a city which gets cold every winter. No surprise in that. No reason that there aren’t measures already taken to prevent people from going without heat.
The gas company, of course, will say that there are programs set up to prevent this–well if so, when they shut Aaron Thomas’s heat off, why didn’t the gas company implement them? When he applied for heat in a winter month, why didn’t they call on one of these programs to pay off his bill, so he could start fresh?
No, they stood on their right to make as much profit as possible–and let an old man die.
Jan 21, 2002
Ali, the movie biography of Muhammad Ali now out in theaters, provides a very good portrayal of the athlete who took militant stances against racism and the U.S. war in Vietnam. The movie stars Will Smith as Ali, Jon Voight as Howard Cosell, and Jamie Foxx as Ali’s trainer Drew “Bundini” Brown who all contribute good acting performances. The music of Motown and Sam Cooke provide a good backdrop and a sense of the excitement of the times.
The film gives some hints about experiences that contributed to Ali’s political awareness. It shows how as a youngster he and his father had to move to the back of the bus, while white passengers rode up front and some seats were left empty. It also depicts his reaction to newspaper stories about Emmett Till, the black youth who was lynched in horrific fashion for talking to a white woman during a visit he made to Mississippi.
The movie also tells of Ali’s attraction to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. It gives a hint of the media’s opposition to him when he began to take political stands, through an exchange with Howard Cosell. Cosell admits he is wrong when he continues to refer to Ali as Cassius Clay, the name that Ali was born with but rejected as the name given to his family by slave owners. It portrays both his personal friendship with Malcolm X and his break with him, when Elijah Muhammad censured Malcolm. And it gives a glimpse of Malcolm X’s assassination and Ali’s reaction to that.
The film is particularly strong in its depiction of Ali’s refusal to join the fight of the U.S. against the Vietnamese people. It quotes Ali when he says, “I got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” In his trial for refusing the draft, Ali states that he doesn’t understand why he should go thousands of miles to fight for “American freedom” when others won’t fight for his freedom here at home.
We also see in the film the price that Ali paid for his stance; his bout with poverty when he is not allowed to fight. Ali lost three years during the prime of his boxing career as a result of the government’s attack on him. And it also gives a sense of the excitement generated in the black population by his return to boxing and his heavyweight championship fight with Joe Frazier, who won the championship while Ali was out of boxing. It also does a good job of showing other fights, like his early bouts with Sonny Liston and his recapturing of the heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire.
This is not just a movie about Ali the boxer, although the fight scenes are very realistic and intense. It does not show Ali in a vacuum. Rather, the film attempts to show the controversies and complexities that existed in Ali’s relationship to the Nation of Islam, to Malcolm, to several women in his life and to the black movement.
At the same time, the movie dances over the reactionary side of the Nation of Islam in that period as it discouraged open opposition to the U.S. war, although the movie does hint at it.
The Nation was opposed to Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the Armed Forces. They demonstrated their opposition by expelling him from the Nation. As the movie shows, this was not the reason they gave. They claimed the reason was because Ali was too concerned with boxing and winning. If that had been true, he would not have stood up to the U.S. government, a stand which cost Ali so much. And when his conviction was overturned, and he could fight and make money again, one of the sons of Elijah Muhammad approached Ali, offering to accept him back–and be his manager.
The strengths of this film are its portrayal of Ali’s convictions and courage in refusing to fight and “kill poor people in another country.”
Jan 21, 2002
Muhammad Ali has agreed to be a pitchman for what the U.S. government claims is its war against terror, that is, the war that the U.S. is carrying out not only against the people in Afghanistan, but many other countries as well. Ali’s propaganda advertisement will be designed for broadcast in several translations throughout the Middle East, that is, among the very peoples that the U.S. has targeted for its war. It is being produced by Hollywood 9/11, a committee of Hollywood studio executives pulled together by Bush’s chief of staff, Karl Rove.
These supposedly “independent” and “patriotic” studio executives say that Ali will tell the world how well Muslims are treated in the United States–in other words, the U.S., which has carried out and supported wars all over the world, is a supposedly free, democratic and just society–and other hogwash.
Obviously, for the government and the studio executives, Ali is the perfect front man for the U.S. war. As opposed to most performers who slavishly do whatever the government and the companies tell them to, Ali earned respect for stands he took in the 1960s, when he denounced this racist society and the U.S. war in Viet Nam
Certainly there are black people, including Muslims, who today are completely accepted into the highest levels of this racist society. That is, a small privileged minority of black people benefitted from the gains won by the mass black movement of the 1950s and 60s.
But that changes nothing about the basic injustice of this society, nor the necessity for the masses of the working class and oppressed to change it.
Today, Ali seems ready to turn his back on what he once stood for–letting himself be used to support everything that, as a young man, he opposed. This contradiction couldn’t be more glaring, at the very moment that the movie Ali opens, showing that what he once spoke up for, he now renounces.
It’s sad.