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
Feb 4, 2002
Bush proclaimed: “My budget supports three great goals for America: We will win this war, we will protect our homeland and we will revive our economy.”
What does it mean–to “win this war” and to “protect our homeland”? According to the script from which Bush read, it means more money going into military spending. The figure floating around Washington last week was two-and-a-quarter trillion dollars to be spent over the next five years. Of course, this figure isn’t yet official. It’s only the figures put out this week by–guess who–the military goods industry. But they should know, since they are the main beneficiaries of military spending.
Bush tries to tell us that this vast increase in military spending is needed to win the war on terrorism. No, it’s designed to provide more profit to the big corporations. Period. We shouldn’t forget that almost all the top 500 corporations get an important part of their profits either directly or indirectly from the U.S. military budget.
More money going to the corporations can only mean less money for unemployment benefits, medicaid, workers compensation and other social programs; less spending on roads and other public services; less money for education. Bush doesn’t admit this. He doesn’t have to. The figures say it all.
“Reviving the economy,” in Bush’s contorted language, means to reduce “restrictions” on business–that is, all those OSHA regulations, which occasionally prevent companies from massacring their workers; all those financial regulations, which make it a tiny bit harder for big companies to hide financial frauds and dirty dealing; all those environmental restrictions, which prevent the big oil companies from polluting every last bit of wilderness left in the country.
Bush asks us to believe that his policies are defending our interests.
No, they are not.
The fiasco in Afghanistan–which Bush actually dared call the “liberation of Afghanistan”–shows exactly what his so-called war on terrorism means. It has only made the situation worse for the Afghan population, a desperately poor people who had already been devastated by decades of wars and by the Taliban regime. Those people now find themselves caught in the midst of new gang wars carried out by the warlords the U.S. helped arm and set loose, including many parts of the Taliban who came over to them.
Nor has this war on Afghanistan prevented the growth of terrorist networks–just the opposite. The spectacle of the mighty U.S. using “advanced weapons of mass destruction” on a devastated country can only create a larger reservoir of young people ready to carry out suicide attacks–eager to take revenge against a country that can only appear to others around the world as a vicious bully.
None of this is in our interest. Not this despicable war. Not the sacrifices he is trying to impose on the working population. And certainly not the flag-waving and patriotic sermons behind which Bush hides his face.
Feb 4, 2002
The Association of Flight Attendants tried to organize the 19,000 flight attendants at Delta Air Lines through a vote for union recognition. Delta carried out a big campaign against the union drive. After September 11 it even told the flight attendants that voting for the union was unpatriotic!
Yes, in the bosses’ world, it’s unpatriotic for workers to organize. It’s unpatriotic to ask for a living wage and decent working conditions. It’s unpatriotic to demand that profits go to the workers who produce them.
Which is why we don’t accept their patriotism!
Feb 4, 2002
President Bush would like to distance himself from his old buddy Ken Lay and the Enron scandal. But the media is just not cooperating: it keeps publishing the details of who in the administration had which ties to Enron.
The secretary of the army, Thomas White, was a senior Enron executive for 22 years. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Marc Racicot, made thousands lobbying for Enron. Bush’s economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, got $100,000 just in 1999 and 2000 as a paid consultant of Enron. The U.S. Trade Representative got $50,000 in 2000 as a member of the Enron advisory board. The current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvey Pitt, used to represent Arthur Andersen as a lawyer helping Enron argue that the SEC should not change the rules which allowed Enron to hide where their money was going. The Attorney General, John Ashcroft, received $57,499 from Enron in his 2000 Senate race. Spencer Abraham, the current Energy Secretary, even received Enron money for his 2000 Senate race in Michigan–which he lost.
And then there is Vice President Cheney and his meetings with Enron while the Bush administration was formulating its energy policy. There’s the Enron corporate jet that Mr. Lay lent for the 2000 campaign to George W.
Finally, there are all the Bush Administration figures, starting with senior adviser Karl Rove, who sold their stock just before Enron’s difficulties became public knowledge.
It’s nice that during the coldest part of the winter, some of the scumbags in Washington are feeling a little heat.
Feb 4, 2002
Once the Enron scandal began to draw attention, senators and U.S. representatives in Congress rushed to have their committees look into the affair.
But of the 248 Congressmen and women on these eleven investigating committees, at least 212 of them had received money from Enron or Andersen, which was Enron’s accounting firm. And ALL the chairs of the eleven committees were among those who had received Enron’s political contributions. To put it more bluntly, everyone on the committees benefitted from some of the money Enron stole.
The investigations might be considered impartial. After all, both Democrats and Republicans took the money. But will they look into what Enron did with all the money it stole???
Feb 4, 2002
At the Johnson Controls auto parts plant in Plymouth Township, Michigan, 500 workers build auto and truck seats while Plymouth Township’s uniformed police patrol the aisles–and watch them.
Johnson Controls is getting ready to close the plant. They soon will lay off all but 80 of the workers. Johnson rented these cops from the township. The cops go to the plant and watch the workers instead of going to their regular cop jobs–and Johnson pays the township for their time.
What are the cops’ orders? Shoot if a worker makes a mistake?
Feb 4, 2002
On January 22, Kmart announced its bankruptcy, adding to a growing list of corporations which use the laws to re-structure the company under the rules of Chapter 11 bankruptcies.
The executives of Kmart, however, won’t be experiencing any bankruptcy whatsoever.
Salaries of the top six executives of Kmart will together total more than four million dollars. The CEO, Charles Conaway, has a minimum of 19 million dollars coming his way, including retention pay, base pay, performance bonus, stock options, an initial employment agreement, and an “executive loan.”
These “executive loans” will total 17 million dollars for six top execs. Unlike the terms of an ordinary loan, these loans don’t have to be repaid, if the “borrowers” stay with Kmart for four years. In other words, they get cash up front, just in case there is no more money four years down the road when the bankruptcy courts are finished with the Kmart case.
Bankruptcy certainly won’t help out workers about to lose their jobs or communities about to lose a store with low prices. But then this bankruptcy is not about helping a corporation to survive so much as it is about protecting those already at the top of the pay scale.
Feb 4, 2002
“It’s gone. There’s nothing left. Everything we had mostly was in Enron stock.” These were not the tearful words of an ordinary employee laid off from Enron, nor someone who saw their retirement savings go up in smoke with the crash of Enron. No, they are the words of Linda Lay, the wife of Ken Lay, the former CEO of Enron, during a recent interview on NBC’s “Today Show.”
Over two mornings, NBC basically gave Linda Lay all the time she needed to make her case on the top-rated morning show. This was then repeated throughout the day on all the news shows.
Of course, Lisa Myers, the person who conducted the interview, could have challenged at least some of Linda Lay’s assertions. Myers could have asked what happened to the 200 million dollars that Enron paid Ken Lay over the past three years. She could have asked about the hundreds of millions of dollars in Lay’s holdings, in stocks, bonds, real estate, yachts, private planes, along with the luxurious perks that go along with them. She could have asked about all the money sent to off-shore banks.
But Myers didn’t. This interview was simply a publicity stunt, engineered by Hill and Knowlton, the powerful public relations firm hired by the Lay family. Hill and Knowlton negotiated the details of the “Today Show “ interview with NBC. They precisely scripted Linda Lay’s replies.
Public relations companies, like Hill and Knowlton, often shape how news and public policy are presented. During the Persian Gulf War, a little more than a decade ago, Hill and Knowlton was hired by the Kuwaiti government to gain U.S. public support for killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.
Behind the scenes, Hill and Knowlton executives put together an unofficial U.S. Congressional committee to hold hearings about the war. The most dramatic moment in the hearings came when a young Kuwaiti woman tearfully told how she supposedly saw Iraqi troops in Kuwaiti hospitals, pulling infants out of incubators, leaving them to die. This elicited a roar of outrage over the entire world, with the testimony being repeated for weeks and months on all the news shows.
Only after the war was over, that is, when it was too late, did it come out that the tearful young Kuwaiti woman was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and she had been in Washington during the whole war. In other words, the barbaric incident was a complete fabrication, produced by the people of Hill and Knowlton.
The fact that today the Lay family is able to use Hill and Knowlton not only proves that they are far from broke–after all, the company must charge quite a lot for its services–but also, that, despite the charges of fraud on a gigantic scale, despite their fall into disgrace, the Lays must still have very powerful friends in the highest places of government and business.
Feb 4, 2002
Cuba has never officially been a colony of the United States. But at the end of the 19th century, it found itself under U.S. military administration, as a consequence of which the U.S. imposed on Cuba a certain number of its tariff and political demands, as well as the right to set up a naval base, Guantanamo Bay, near the Cuban city of the same name.
This enclave still exists. Situated on the southeastern part of the island, it serves as a port for the U.S. Navy patrolling the Caribbean sea and, from time to time, as a camp for prisoners: Cuban boat people, then Haitians, and today Talibans.
Guantanamo isn’t a concession with a lease for a fixed number of years, as was, for example, the case of Hong Kong with relation to China. No, the U.S. forced the Cuban regime it had installed to grant the U.S. a “perpetual lease.” The price in 1904 was 2,000 gold pieces, which amounts to $4,085 today. Fidel Castro, in power since 1959, has always refused to cash the check.
Guantanamo Bay is a colonial base. The Cubans don’t want it to be such, they have never wanted this arrangement.
But “U.S. democracy” couldn’t care less. It occupies it, which is what counts.
Feb 4, 2002
By February 1, more than 100 Israeli reservists had signed a published statement, which said, “The price of occupation is the loss of the Israeli Defense Forces’ semblance of humanity and the corruption of all of Israeli society.” Their statement continued, “We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line–the West Bank and Gaza Strip which Israel occupied after the 1967 war–with the aim of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.”
In and of itself this statement is not enough to prevent the Israeli Army from doing its dirty work in the occupied territories. But a week before, 52 reservists had signed the statement and sent it to a newspaper to be published, so their number has grown. And it is no small thing to see soldiers refuse an order.
In fact, since the Intifada resumed in 2000 some 400 Israelis, mostly reservists, have refused service in the occupied territories. But this has been kept under wraps. Most were quietly dismissed, without any discipline being taken. And of the 40 summoned to disciplinary hearings, the most jail time anyone did was 28 days. But with the publication of this letter, the reservists challenged the government openly–stating that they would refuse an order. This, as the Israeli military has hastened to point out, is “treason.” So long as it’s only 100, the military can continue to insist it is treason. The question is, will it continue to grow?
In any case, it has already proved that Israel is not the monolith that Sharon wants to pretend it is. The struggle of the Palestinians to end their oppression continues. If a section of the Israeli people can act on the realization that a people that oppresses another can never be free, it may hasten the end to the Israeli occupation.
Feb 4, 2002
At the end of January, the U.S. sent 600 soldiers to the Philippines to fight against the Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization. Abu Sayyaf means “Bearer of the Sword” in Arabic. The organization is supposedly connected to Osama bin Laden; in any case, it has a very similar history to bin Laden’s.
Abu Sayyaf was a group of Filipino Muslims who went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union in 1986. It too was financed by wealthy Saudis and is influenced by Wahabism, the ultra-conservative form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And it too was originally put together by the American CIA. In May 2001, Philippines Senate President Aquilino Pimentel Jr. described Abu Sayyaf as a “CIA monster.” He said its members were recruited by the CIA to fight in Afghanistan. The arms and funds came from the CIA, but the training was by the Armed Forces of the Philippines on various southern islands of the Philippines.
After the war in Afghanistan, Abu Sayyaf returned to the Philippines and was part of the Moro National Liberation Front, which it left in 1991. Many of its activities are on the southern island of Mindanao, which has only a fifth of the average income of the Philippines, which is quite low in itself. Abu Sayyaf recruits among the Muslim population of the southern islands.
Since 1991, Abu Sayyaf has been engaged in bombing, looting, burning, killing and kidnaping to raise money for its operations. They have kidnaped 32 foreigners, including five Americans, Europeans and Asians.
The Administration is undoubtedly trying to show that it is continuing “the war against terrorism,” to highlight Bush’s pronouncements in his State of the Union address. This is all the more so since a quick war in these southern islands of the Philippines–just like in Afghanistan–can be quickly declared a victory, regardless of what happens. Not like Iraq.
But in the most basic sense U.S. troops are in the Philippines for the same reason the U.S. has been there during the last hundred years, since the U.S. grabbed the colony from Spain. Today there are important U.S. corporations on the island. U.S. imperialism is there to defend both these corporate interests and U.S. domination of the Philippines and the surrounding areas.
Certainly their activities in no way defend the interests of the Philippine population, particularly its poorest layers, including among the Muslim population.
But the Bush Administration did not send troops to the Philippines to defend its people.
Feb 4, 2002
Starting at the end of January, a battle raged between the forces of two warlords over the city of Gardez, 75 miles south of Kabul. This battle shows what the future of Afghanistan is likely to be. Saifullah, one of the warlords with ties to the Northern Alliance, had been in control of the city, since the Northern Alliance swept past Kabul. But Hamid Karzai, the new head of Afghanistan who was hand-picked by the United States, appointed Padsha Khan Zadran to replace him.
Zadran was not appointed because of his devotion to the Afghan people, but because of his willingness to make a deal with Karzai, who needs reinforcements against the Northern Alliance. Zadran. has a reputation for corruption and brutality covering 20 years. Just last month he told the U.S. Special Forces that a convoy of Taliban and Al Qaeda were in the region. In fact, it was a convoy of tribal elders on their way to Karzai’s inauguration. The U.S. bombed the convoy, killing dozens of the tribal leaders. Their families say that Zadran wanted them bombed because they had refused his demand to support him as governor of the province of Paktia, of which Gardez is the capital.
Gardez, the city which Zadran attacked, has no paved roads, no proper hospitals or schools and no electricity except for the few rich who have a home generator. The troops of the two warlords shelled each other with mortars and artillery in and around the city, killing as many civilians as troops. A dozen children were killed and dozens more wounded. After his forces failed to take the city, Zadran issued a threat to devastate it: “I’ll kill them all, humans and animals.”
Both sides denounced the Taliban, and both sides included Taliban troops as they fought over control of the city. This is not surprising. After all, the forces of many warlords had rallied to the Taliban when they were taking over control of the country in 1996. Now, the Taliban troops are returning to the armed gangs supporting local warlords.
The recent battle at the hospital in Kandahar gives, indirectly, a picture of what happened–or, more exactly, didn’t happen in the U.S. war on Afghanistan. For almost two months, a handful of Al Qaeda gunmen held an unoccupied wing of a hospital. Neither the U.S. forces, nor local forces nor the central forces of Karzai’s government were ready to carry out the kind of fight needed to dislodge them. And yet, this empty building was held by only a handful of men–obviously if all the Al Qaeda and Taliban forces had made as determined a stand, there would have been no apparent, easy victory for the Northern Alliance.
But that wasn’t what happened.
With the invasion of the country by the U.S., many of the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces just melted away. They weren’t defeated. They weren’t killed. Most couldn’t be found. Some, of course, went into Pakistan. But for the others, many just merged with the armed gangs supporting local warlords. And now these local warlords are going into battle against each other with the population caught in the middle.
Karzai’s government in fact rests on these warlords who have their own armies and control their local territory. These local warlords in the government were the same men in charge of the government from 1992 to 1996, when they tore the country apart in a continuous civil war as they fought in shifting alliances to see who could grab more territory. Today, the same thing is resuming, with the population continuing to pay the price.
Hamid Karzai was being honored and feted in Washington, D.C. as the salvation for Afghanistan when his warlord lost out in the battle for Gardez. So he had to cut short his trip to scurry home to try to cobble together a new “alliance.”
This is not the picture the Bush administration gives of Afghanistan. This is not a country freed of terror. It’s an Afghanistan being plunged into a more deadly terror.
Feb 4, 2002
Christmas, 1914. The troops of two empires, British and German, faced each other, stalemated in trenches divided by only a few yards: No Man’s Land.
Nearly a million had already died in this first year of World War I, a war that would stretch out for four years and claim eight and a half million soldiers dead and 13 million civilians. On that Christmas Eve, while capitalists, generals and politicians feasted in safety and boasted about their war, in many trenches, soldiers called a truce. Violating orders, they agreed not to shoot during Christmas.
Usually the German soldiers made the first truce offers to the British, French, Scotch or Irish units facing them. Soldiers who afterwards wrote letters home about this extraordinary moment, described the Germans putting up Christmas trees, calling greetings, and singing Christmas carols like “Silent Night” and addressing their supposed enemy as "Comrades."
Soldiers from the British side might respond with carols of their own. A soldier might have a harmonica, concertina or flute to play. Both sides would applaud each other. Signs were made: "You no shoot, we no shoot." Cautiously the first truces were made. Groups of soldiers left their trenches and met in No Man’s Land. They gathered and buried the dead of both sides. They exchanged their cigarettes, their liquor, their Christmas rations and gifts. They exchanged souvenirs, often trading pieces of each other’s uniforms. They wore each other’s hats and helmets and posed all together for the rare camera (usually an officer’s). They shared pictures of their families, and stories of their lives in peacetime. Soccer games were the highlight of the truce. A "ball" would be a stuffed sandbag, the goals marked with piles of soldiers’ coats. For up to two weeks in some places, the truce held.
The soldiers sent letters home to their families, even a few pictures, describing this extraordinary thing they had done. The families forwarded the letters to the newspapers. But the newspapers would not print them. It was wartime. The soldiers were not supposed to be peaceful! The higher authorities tried to pretend it had all been made up by traitors. Not until a soldier’s letter was sent overseas and printed by The New York Times did the barricade break, and papers in both England and Germany began to print the soldiers’ stories.
Even with letters and pictures, the Christmas truce has been questioned from the start as something that could not possibly have happened, at least, not the way the soldiers said it did. But of course, the soldiers were the ones who were there!
It was partly to gather all of the evidence that Stanley Weintraub, a military historian and author, researched and wrote this book, Silent Night. He gathered original letters and photos, oral histories, newspaper reports, and official field diaries of many army units. He shows that the truce movement was widespread and profound.
The book’s main shortcoming is that it ignores the background to this truce: the socialist tradition in which the working classes of most of the belligerent countries had grown up. A very large fraction of the working class was conscious that the workers’ only real enemy was the capitalist class, and that workers of all countries had common cause against that enemy.
Lenin, the leader of the working class revolution in Russia, heard about the Christmas truce. He pointed out that if there were organizations prepared to fight for such a policy among the soldiers of all the belligerent nations, there might have been a quick end to the world war in favor of the working masses. Lenin wrote, “Try to imagine Hyndman, Guesde, Vandervelde, Plekhanov, Kautsky and the rest [leaders of so-called socialist parties that supported the world war]–instead of aiding the bourgeoisie (something they are now engaged in–forming an international committee to agitate for fraternization and attempts to establish friendly relations between the socialists of the belligerent countries, both in the trenches and among the troops in general. What would the results be several months from now?”
This aspect of the truce is ignored by Weintraub. Nevertheless, the book gives an immensely fascinating look at this little known episode of World War I.
Feb 4, 2002
After spending half his life in
prison for a murder he did not commit, Michael Austin’s conviction was overturned at the end of December. A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge found that his trial was "seriously plagued" by multiple problems. The judge added that no reasonable juror armed with the facts known today would have convicted Austin. Nonetheless, it took the states attorney another week before she finally decided not to retry the case.
In 1974, Austin was convicted of killing a security guard at the Crown Food Market in East Baltimore. The arrest was based on faulty identification by a store clerk. The store clerk originally described the shooter as a light-skinned black man, about 5’8" and 150 pounds. Austin was 6’5", dark skinned and 200 pounds. Nonetheless, the clerk pointed Austin out in court. In fact, he was the main witness in the case. The prosecutor introduced him as an “upstanding college student,” when, in fact, he was a drug dealer who had a lengthy criminal record.
Before dying of an overdose, the clerk confessed to his family that he had lied when he picked out Austin.
Austin’s lawyer, who was not given the case until the actual day of trial, never submitted crucial evidence–a
time-card and statement from Austin’s employer, which would have supported his testimony that he was at work the day of the killing. The judge, who issued faulty instructions to the jury, sentenced Austin to life in prison.
It took tremendous persistence for Austin to win his freedom, coming first from Michael Austin himself, who got his high-school degree in prison while attempting to expose the facts of his case. Finally Centurion Ministries, a private group that provides legal help to the wrongfully convicted, took up his case in 1994 and then pursued it for five years. Eventually, the victim’s widow spoke out in his defense and the clerk’s family came forward with his confession.
Currently Austin plans to get a job as a construction worker and wants to work with incarcerated youth. But Austin does not accept that full justice has been done, raising that there are still unresolved issues. To this day, neither the judge nor the states attorney has admitted him innocent. Nor has he received a penny in compensation.
Feb 4, 2002
On the morning of January 19, the Top Value Food Market in Long Beach, California called police about a lady who had walked out of the store without paying for her groceries. The woman, 57-year-old Marcella Byrd, had been living in an assisted living center for senior citizens, being treated for schizophrenia.
Ten police responded to the call–only to gun down this black woman accused of the “dangerous” crime of shoplifting.
The Long Beach Police Department rushed to justify this senseless murder as “self-defense.” A spokesperson for the LBPD said that the police had first chased Byrd “for an entire city block,” and that when Byrd finally did turn around, she was holding a knife. The police said that they tried to stop Byrd by using “non-lethal” force, firing miniature bean bags at close range, but that this didn’t stop her. Byrd then supposedly raised the knife up in a throwing position–at which point, several of the cops fired their guns–in “self defense.”
Marcella Byrd, who stood all of 4 feet, 5½ inches, and weighed 260 pounds, could hardly constitute any kind of a threat to 10 cops–even assuming that she actually had a knife and the cops didn’t plant it on her afterwards. Only in stories told by police do seriously disabled grandmothers suddenly become superhuman threats.
As a spokesman for the Byrd family said, “One woman with a knife couldn’t be tackled by 10 officers? Why couldn’t someone sit there and talk to her, for 50 hours if necessary? It’s a life.”
Exactly.
But in this society, life is considered cheap–especially when the life belongs to someone who doesn’t rub elbows with the big thieves of this society.
Feb 4, 2002
A chemical flame retardant used in foam furniture is today showing up in mothers’ milk. The chemical is polybrominated diphenyl ether, known as PBDE. It is known to have effects on the development of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the body’s thyroid system. The danger has recently been pointed out in this country in an article written by Robert Hale, a professor of marine science, and five other scientists, in the magazine Nature.
PBDE doesn’t easily breakdown naturally. Entering the environment through, among other ways, discarded furniture, it is ingested by insects, which are in turn eaten by animals, which are in turn eaten by bigger animals. PBDE is like DDT and PCBs, which also accumulated along the food chain and posed serious health problems.
This chemical has been found in a range of species, including fish and sperm whales–which shows that it has spread into the depths of the ocean. And traces of it have been found in frozen land as far away as extreme northern Canada and eastern Siberia.
In recent years, DDT and PCBs–now banned–have been decreasing, while PBDE has been on the increase. The level of PBDE in mothers’ milk is today 40 times as high as it was in 1972.
In Europe there is a move to ban use of the chemical. The German chemical industry voluntarily banned the chemical as long ago as 1986. The European Union has issued a Human Health Risk Assessment recommendation calling for the end of use of the chemical.
The United States seems to be lagging way behind. Not only hasn’t PBDE been banned, no authorities have started a process leading in that direction.
The U.S. chemical industry has rallied around Great Lakes Chemical, the only U.S. company to make PBDE, saying more studies are needed. This was what the chemical industry argued for years about DDT and PCBs, until long after there could be no doubt of the damage they were doing to animal and human life.
Unfortunately, the attitude of government has always been to require near absolute proof of danger before a chemical can be banned–as opposed to the reasonable approach, requiring proof that a chemical is safe before it’s authorized for sale.
Feb 4, 2002
The Bush administration announced that it was moving to make more low income women eligible for pre-natal and child health care.
The government proposes to expand coverage by defining a fetus as having legal status, so that it could “qualify” for health coverage.
Concerned about the health and well being of pregnant women and their unborn or newly born children–do they actually dare to say this? Then all the Administration has to do is provide the money for their medical care. It could start by rescinding the cuts in Medicaid made by this Administration and earlier ones. It could begin to call employers to account for cutting back on health care coverage.
This administration, like the previous ones, presides over a country with more than 40 million uninsured people, a hugepercentage of which are the working poor, the vast majority of which are women and children. So of course, poor women lack pre-natal care and good health coverage for the birth or the lives of their children.
No this hypocrite Bush is not making a serious effort to cover health care for poor women, children and unborn children. He is simply trying to please the religious fundamentalists who are part of his political base of support. Giving a fetus legal rights is a backdoor attack on the right to a legal abortion, one of their causes.
Bush is not the first wealthy old man pretending to care about women and their babies. Lechers, willing to ignore each other’s own sexual attitudes and attacks on women, have long pretended to care about the “rights” of “unborn” children.
We see today what such “caring” has meant: a rate of infant mortality higher than that in any other industrialized country, comparable, in fact, to the rate of infant deaths in many “Third World” countries.
Hypocrites!
Feb 4, 2002
According to Sports Illustrated, the Winter Olympics, to be held at Salt Lake City in February, has already used up 1.5 billion dollars in federal funds. That’s one-and-a-half times the amount spent by the federal government to support all seven Olympic Games held in the U.S. since 1904 combined–in inflation-adjusted dollars. Compared to the last Olympics held in the U.S., in Atlanta in 1996, this is two-and-a-half times more–again after inflation is taken into account.
Where is all this money going? The largest chunk of it, half a billion dollars, was allocated for repaving highways, building new roads and other projects related to roads and highways around Salt Lake City. It just so happens that many of these roads lead to sites of new real-estate developments, vastly increasing their values.
Just good luck on the part of real-estate developers? Hardly. To the contrary: these capitalists, with the complicity of politicians tied to them, used the Olympics as a cover to funnel millions of dollars in taxpayer money into their pockets. One of these businessmen, C.C. Myers, for example, got federal funds to build a road to his development of 700 houses. He also got the state agency overseeing construction of Olympic facilities to bear all the costs of installing utilities, telephone and sewer lines to his development. As a result, the value of the land alone, without the houses, went from three million dollars in 1990 to 48 million dollars ten years later–a 16-fold increase, all pocketed by Myers and his partners.
Another big beneficiary of federal Olympics money is Earl Holding, oilman and one of the country’s largest landholders. After Salt Lake City was chosen for the Olympics, Holding managed to give some remote, mostly unusable land he owned over to the federal government in exchange for 1,320 acres of prime national forest land. Supposedly, this land was being given to Holding to build venues for some of the Olympic events–except that those events needed only 100 acres, not 1,320 acres. And they didn’t have to be transferred to Holding. Not surprisingly, Holding is now busy building a luxurious ski resort on this land, with the federal government contributing another 15 million dollars to build a road to the resort. The Olympic events on Holding’s land will take six days. After that, the land will be Holding’s to keep.
How was Holding able to get everything he wanted from the government? He got a little help from Utah Congressmen, such as Senator Orrin Hatch, and government officials, such as Gray Reynolds of the U.S. Forest Service–who went on to work for Holding after retirement!
The Olympics are about to begin, and we’ll hear those grandiose speeches again about the “purity” and amateur spirit of the games, about how they bring people from all over the world together, etc.–coming from the very same crooks who use the Olympics to fill their own pockets and those of their friends.
Feb 4, 2002
Last week, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) gave permission for a Michigan company, BioPort, to begin shipping anthrax vaccine to the Department of Defense (DoD).
The factory was shut down in 1998 for failing to pass FDA inspections. The company had failed sterility tests and its bookkeeping was considered inadequate, among other problems found by the FDA inspection.
Whatever the FDA may have found out, this vaccine certainly had already developed a lot of problems. It was first used on army personnel during the early 1990s at the time of the Gulf War. After that war, veterans began reporting a number of problems that began to be called the Gulf War Syndrome. The DoD denied for the first few years that there was a Gulf War Syndrome. When it finally admitted that there was such a problem, it disagreed with the causes being discussed, namely, that their own vaccination programs and their own weapons could have caused the symptoms which the vets were experiencing.
In 1997, the DoD ordered vaccination for anthrax for all current service personnel and national guards. That is more than two million people, but as of last year, only half a million had begun the vaccination program. The vaccination program was effectively but quietly suspended after a number of service personnel refused to be vaccinated.
The DoD has never carried out any longterm serious study on the problem. By contrast, the Canadian Department of National Defense did study Canadian Gulf War vets and reported a significant relationship between immunizations and the development of chronic fatigue symptom, one of the problems often reported by U. S. Gulf War vets. A 1999 British study examined British Gulf War vets and other vets and found that receiving anthrax vaccine was related to developing illness consistent with Gulf War Syndrome. A recent French Ministry of Defense study suggested that "multiple vaccinations given during the war, particularly those for anthrax, botulism and plague, seem associated with an excess of Gulf War Syndrome symptoms”
Even a study of Kansas vets of the Gulf War, published in 2000, showed that one third of Gulf War vets had those symptoms, while vets who had not been vaccinated rarely had any such symptoms.
Now, however, the vaccine is being produced again–without any changes in the vaccine, with none of the problems resolved. It’s enough to make a suspicious person question last autumn’s anthrax letters–sent by a yet undiscovered terrorist of U.S. origin.
In any case, BioPort certainly couldn’t be happier.