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
Jul 1, 2002
World Com, the second largest long-distance telephone company, announced that it is laying off 17,000 workers. It had already laid off 6,000 workers earlier this year. Not only is World Com destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers and their families, laying waste to countless communities that depend on these workers’ wages; it is also dumping the very people who provide and maintain long distance service for 20 million customers, who run a big part of the infrastructure for the internet, who provide local telephone service in some parts of the country, etc.
As a result, maintenance and repairs on existing networks will not get done and new networks will not be built. That spells more breakdowns, more emergencies–a big step backwards.
The heads of the company have been caught cooking their accounting books on a massive scale. For many years, they made profits look a lot bigger than they actually were.
World Com is not the exception. Some of the biggest companies in the country–Enron, General Electric, Dynergy, Xerox, Global Crossings, Adelphia–have been caught doing the same thing. In fact, the big question is whether there are any big companies that didn’t engage in massive fraud!
For years, these same bosses had trumpeted a “New Economy.” The stock market kept on going up, like a magical money-making machine for the entire capitalist class. The bosses took the wealth that the working class produced and poured much of it into financial speculation pushing land and stock market prices ever higher. Prices on Wall Street lost all connection with production and the real economy, a big bubble.
Executives began to employ a multitude of tricks to make profits look higher than they actually were because this led to even higher stock prices. And higher stock prices brought tremendous advantages. It opened up cheap and plentiful credit that allowed companies to finance expansion, to speculate on all kinds of markets, buy and sell companies, back up their own borrowing–or even turn around and loan money to others at a higher rate of interest.
Corporate executives, along with their bankers, consultants and accountants reaped vast wealth in just a few short years. Executives made sure that much of their compensation was in stock options, which they then sold. Banks and financial companies raked in enormous fees and commissions by putting together mergers and buyouts, floating stocks and bonds, etc.
This couldn’t go on forever. Two years ago, stock prices began to drop. With their stock price falling, a lot of these companies were suddenly shut out of cheap credit markets. Banks sometimes even began to call in loans. These companies began to face debt crises, and a wider panic.
The capitalist class justifies its wealth and position in society with the claim that it manages investment and production. In fact, the capitalist class is just a parasite on the working class. The capitalists’ drive for profit leads it to destroy jobs and the standard of living of the working class, that is, of the people who do all the work, produce all the wealth and make society run. At the same time, the capitalists lay waste to the productive economy.
The working class has no reason to let this situation continue. Nor does it need to. Hundreds of millions strong, the working class has the potential to impose its own interests.
Jul 1, 2002
New disclosures show that Enron made a lot more money off of last year’s fake California energy crisis than they were willing to admit at the time.
During the winter and spring of 2000-01, when California’s electricity market was “deregulated,” Enron and the rest of the electric utilities and energy companies created artificial electricity shortages, rolling blackouts and brownouts. Of course, corporate and government officials claimed that these shortages were just a product of supply and demand. In other words, they blamed the people of the state for supposedly using “too much” electricity. These companies then turned around and used these fake shortages to justify enormous rate increases, as well as a taxpayer-funded bailout.
All of those executives adamantly denied that they were profiting from the fake crisis. Enron, the biggest energy trader in California, did show that its profits in one three-month period during the crisis increased by 34%, to 350 million dollars, already a huge amount of money. But that was small potatoes compared to what the company was really taking in. Enron really made 1.5 billion dollars more out of the crisis than they admitted. Said one former Enron executive, “We were supposed to make 500 million dollars in a quarter and we were doing it in a day.”
So, what did Enron do with the extra 1.5 billion dollars? They secretly created special, off-the-books partnerships to park the money. Then, over the next year, even during Enron’s dramatic crash, the top 100 Enron executives rewarded themselves with over 300 million dollars in cash payments. Former Enron chairman and close Bush buddy, Ken Lay, paid himself $103,559,793 in 2001. That’s 103 million! Remember when Lay’s wife had the nerve to declare on national television that she and her husband were going broke! As for Jeffrey Skilling, another former Enron honcho, who claimed that he had no idea about all of the Enron wheelings and dealings that were later disclosed, he was paid close to nine million dollars in that year!
No matter what they say, they are cooking the books, hiding profits when it suits them, then hiding losses when they’ve drained the wealth.
In either case, we have no reason to believe them or accept their view of society.
Jul 1, 2002
At the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court made two rulings about the death penalty. First, the court ruled that people who are judged to be mentally retarded cannot be executed. Four days later, the court ruled that a jury and not a judge must decide whether there are “aggravating factors” to supposedly justify executing someone.
According to the editorial writers of The New York Times, these rulings were “a big change” and “landmark.”Of course, if this were the case, then they would signal that the Supreme Court was at least moving away from or putting a brake on the use of the death penalty. But in both decisions, the nine justices on the court unanimously upheld the death penalty in general.
On the contrary, the limits that they placed on the use of the death penalty were very vague and open to interpretation. In both cases, they left it up to the states to write their own laws, and decide “appropriate ways” how they would be implemented.
Certainly, it might sound very “humane” that the court finally ruled that it is unjust to execute someone who is considered to be mentally retarded (reversing its own bloodthirsty 1989 ruling that it was perfectly constitutional to execute someone who was mentally retarded). But then the question becomes: Who is mentally retarded? In the case that was brought before the court, the state of Virginia maintained that Daryl R. Atkins was not mentally retarded... even though he scored a 59 on his IQ test.
According to the Supreme Court decision, this is perfectly legal–as long as the states say that they set some standard–no matter how rotten it is.
The second ruling, that a jury and not a judge must decide on whether someone convicted of a capital crime should be executed, also has no teeth. If the court meant what it said, then it would void the 800 death sentences throughout the country that have already been imposed by judges. But the court did not at all do that. They let those death penalties stand. The ruling only specifies that the state legislatures change their laws for the future. And again, the Supreme Court set no standards. They leave it up to the same, blood-thirsty state legislatures.
What one can conclude is that these decisions will have little impact on the actual use of the death penalty, that they were only for show. The fact is that most countries in the world consider that the U.S. is totally barbaric and inhumane in its use of the death penalty. A brief to the Supreme Court filed by the governments of 15 countries of the European Union, along with a group of senior U.S. diplomats stated that the U.S. practice of executing retarded people is a political embarrassment for the U.S. government.
No, the Supreme Court, which more than a decade ago made the absolutely astounding ruling that a person can be innocent and still be executed, has not suddenly discovered a shred of decency. Instead, it is merely providing the legal cover for the continued use of a barbaric death penalty in this country.
Jul 1, 2002
Workers have been on strike since June 1st at a Navistar International plant. The 650 workers in Chatham, Ontario make 39 heavy trucks a day–when they are working.
Navistar provoked the strike by demanding that workers give up large concessions, or else Navistar would close the plant.
The company demanded cuts of up to 6 dollars an hour in wages, a mandatory 56-hour work week (up from 39 hours), higher benefit co-pays and reduced yearly vacation time.
When the workers, who are organized in the Canadian Auto Workers union, struck, Navistar contracted with strikebreaking companies to bring in scabs. On June 18, when the scabs were to begin going in, the CAW brought large numbers of workers to the scab assembly area. The police arrested the local union’s president and past president, supposedly for assaulting company guards and breaking a bus window. But the company was forced to wait for another day.
On June 19, the strikers massed at the plant gate. The local police decided to stop the scab busses from getting near the strikers. The same thing happened on June 20.
On June 21, Friday, the CAW leaders sent a national alert to all its local unions. The leaders called on workers, no matter what company they worked for, to be ready to leave work at a moment’s notice and come to Chatham to help stop scabs.
On Monday the 24th, a group of workers from a DaimlerChrysler plant in Windsor, Ontario came to Chatham to help picket. At 6:30 AM, a private police vehicle drove up to the picket line and stopped. The driver waited for a group to form in front of him, and then stepped on the gas and ran into the crowd. Six workers were injured, three of them were hospitalized, one in critical condition with a shattered pelvis and internal injuries.
The critically injured worker was one of those who came from Windsor.
Police arrested the 21-year-old driver and charged him with three counts of “dangerous driving.”
The mayor of Chatham met with both union and company representatives and then told reporters, “the company must stop playing Russian roulette with this community.”
Navistar, under pressure from police, said it was suspending operations because “Safety is always our Number One concern.”
The workers in Chatham have won several victories now. They have ignored the law and a court injunction to do what they had to do to prevent scabs from taking their jobs. And they have enlisted the help of other workers.
They have forced the police to stop the scabs, instead of doing as police usually do–helping the scabs go in. They forced the mayor of the town to make a public criticism of the town bully, Navistar.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the police and the mayor can be counted on. After all, the police did not arrest company management nor even levy serious charges against the scabs’ driver. It simply means they don’t want to confront workers who exhibit this readiness to fight for their jobs and their rights.
If the strikers keep on with the same attitude that has gotten them this far, they can go on to win their strike.
Jul 1, 2002
June marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American draftsman, in Detroit, Michigan. On June 19, 1982, Chin was beaten to death on the street by Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler supervisor and Michael Nitz, Ebens’ laid-off stepson. The two had earlier yelled racist insults at Chin and his friends in a bar where Chin was celebrating his upcoming marriage. After Chin and his friends left, Ebens and Nitz tracked them down and attacked with baseball bats.
Ebens had yelled, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” The two autoworkers mistakenly thought Chin and his friends were Japanese. For them Chinese, Japanese–it made no difference. They were simply repeating the mindless propaganda then being spewed out by the auto bosses and repeated by the UAW (United Auto Workers). Supposedly imports of Japanese autos were the cause of layoffs in the U.S. auto industry. Demanding big concessions in wages and benefits from workers in the early 1980s, the auto companies claimed it was necessary to help them meet the competition from Japanese auto companies.
Not only did the UAW accept the auto bosses’ arguments–and their demands for concessions–it also stepped up a vile anti-Japanese demagogy. The union banned Japanese cars from parking lots at union offices and halls. Some union officials threatened workers who parked Japanese cars at work. Other union officials organized workers to smash Japanese cars with sledge hammers in PR events for the media. And the UAW distributed racist bumper stickers with slant-eyed smiley faces on them.
The murder of Vincent Chin was a kind of lynching, for which the UAW had laid the groundwork.
Twenty years after the murder of Vincent Chin, many more domestic autos are produced in the U.S.–but by many fewer workers. Jobs were not lost to Japanese producers–but to the speed-up drive of U.S. bosses–a drive which the UAW abetted with its racist anti-Japanese sloganeering and the partnership it openly joined with the auto companies. The U.S. auto bosses are the ones who have benefitted from the vastly increased productivity of autoworkers, not the workers.
What the UAW did prepared a tragedy for Detroit workers in many ways. Not only could they not defend themselves from their real enemy, they were dehumanized with at least some of them turned into brutes who carried out a racist lynching–or who applauded it.
Jul 1, 2002
Vouchers are put forward as an answer to the “crisis in the schools.”
And it’s true there is a “crisis” in the public schools. But this “crisis,” of course, strikes some students more harshly than others, while some students escape it completely. By all available measures, the public schools which serve the children of the wealthy are doing a very good job.
On the other hand, most public schools which serve the poor and working class communities fail to turn out students with skills adequate to function in modern society.
According to a report printed by the journal, Education Week, more than half of all fourth graders who live in a city cannot read and understand a simple children’s book; more than half of all urban eighth graders cannot use math to solve a simple problem. In “high poverty” urban schools, the results were much worse: only 23% of fourth graders met the “basic” standard for reading; 33% met it in math; and 31% in science. This lack of formation in the lower grades obviously determines what a student can do in high school and beyond.
Even those students who do manage to graduate from high school do so with inadequate preparation for most jobs or for further education. Less than one-quarter of all students in urban schools who graduate have the academic preparation needed to go on to college. Here, again, the averages mask the much harsher reality of the biggest cities. Jonathan Kozol, in his book Savage Inequalities, provided figures for the whole city of Detroit in 1991: of the 20,000 students who had entered the ninth grade, only 7,000 were graduated from high school and only 500 had the minimal preparation needed to go on to any kind of college, including two-year community colleges. Over the last decade, the Detroit School Board itself admits that things have not improved.
The majority of high school graduates in big cities who do go on to higher education qualify only for community colleges, and most of those students quit before they finish a two-year course. In the early 1990s, the Chicago community college system issued a report showing that 97% of students who entered one of its colleges quit before receiving a two-year degree or entrance into a four-year college.
At the other end of the scale are those who don’t make it through school. It is estimated that nearly 10% of all students in urban school systems never enter high school. Of those who do enter an urban high school, slightly over half fail to graduate in four years. In many schools, the drop-out rate is much worse. Kozol cited figures for some of the most impoverished Chicago schools indicating that only about 15 to 20% who started first grade in the early 1990s could expect to graduate from high school. And long before students officially drop out, they just stop coming to school.
Vouchers won’t change this. They’ll only allow children in the poor schools to shift to another poor school.
Jul 1, 2002
The development of the public school system–that is, freed from religious influence, paid for by the state, open to all, and obligatory for all–was the work of the popular classes in American society, starting in its earliest years.
There were schools in the North American colonies before the revolution, almost all run by religious orders. But shortly after the first bourgeois revolution, that of 1775-78, a movement began to establish secular schools.
People like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, the more far-sighted political representatives of the American bourgeoisie, were among those who led the drive for non-religious schools. These schools, secular though they were, were not yet a system of public education, even though Jefferson popularized the demands for schools open to everyone, paid for by the state. But for such schools to come into being required a movement of the laboring classes, in fact, several different movements.
The first quarter of the 19th century saw the gradual establishment of “common schools” for young children, but in many cases, the children of laboring people could attend only if the family took a “pauper’s oath.”
The first publicly funded high school was started in Boston in 1821. In 1827, the state of Massachusetts ordered every town with a certain minimum number of families to provide basic education, the number and variety of courses depending on the size of the town. By 1825, the first high schools outside of New England opened in New York City, and in Cincinnati Ohio. But these high schools were not yet open to all, nor certainly not obligatory for all children, which is the only way to ensure that education is free for all.
What changed that was the development of workingmen’s parties in a number of towns where the working class was developing. The first such party was established in Philadelphia in 1828. Other parties quickly sprang up, first in other Pennsylvania towns, then westward to Ohio, as well as southward to Delaware and northward to New York City, Boston and other New England towns. Within six years, such parties were organized in more than 60 cities, and “mechanics societies” in many more. Every one of these parties raised the demand for publicly funded education open to all, and most parties called for mandatory school attendance up to a certain age and, along with it, an end to child labor, as well as other demands such as the abolition of debtor’s prison, of unequal taxation and of convict labor. While the parties which raised these demands did not have a long life, their activity was what brought public schools as we understand them today into being.
By 1837, a state board of education had been established in Massachusetts; and a state-funded and state-administered system of education, directed by the state university, established in Michigan. As the frontier moved westward, many schools were established in small localities, before the states had even been organized.
The South, obviously, had a different development. For all practical purposes, there was no system of education, other than for the very privileged sons of the slave holders until after the Civil War. Teaching slaves to read was legally prohibited, and while there was no law against teaching the poor whites, there were also no schools where they could have been taught. But the Civil War, that second bourgeois revolution, and the social changes wrought by Reconstruction coming on its heels, brought a system of public education into being in the South. One of the first actions taken by almost all the Reconstruction governments set up by the ex-slaves and, in some states, the poor whites, was to establish public schools open to all, funded directly by the state governments, with aid from the federal government.
For the development of capitalism, public education of broad layers of the population was a necessity. For modern industry and the technology required for it to develop, there must be workers with at least the rudiments of an education: the ability to read, to write, to carry out basic mathematical functions, etc.
Nonetheless, it was not the capitalists who established the system of public schools that we know–secular, publicly funded, open to everyone and mandatory for everyone. It was the working people of this country who forced the issue.
Jul 1, 2002
It’s no secret what is required for a good education: first of all, good teachers; second of all, enough teachers, so each student gets the attention he or she needs; third, enough up-to-date books and other supplies, so science projects may be pursued, and the student exposed to culture. That’s what the best schools provide, and it is what is absent from the worst schools.
The biggest single item in short supply in the schools is the teacher. For the last 40 years there has been a chronic shortage of teachers trained in the field they are teaching. Many teachers are today teaching a subject in which they had no formal preparation whatsoever. Almost 20% of math teachers and 15% of English language teachers did not have even a college minor in the field they are now teaching. One-third of all American high schools offer no physics class because they have no one able to teach physics.
In a significant number of cases, teachers aren’t certified at all. Today, according to a study done by the National Center for Education Statistics, 12% of teachers with less than 4 years of teaching experience have no certificate, or only a so-called “emergency” certificate. These are overall figures for the country as a whole: they are much worse in the school districts or schools which serve the poorest children. Coming into September of the 1997-98 school year, the Los Angeles Unified School District hired 2966 teachers to fill vacancies. Roughly 60% of these new teachers had only “emergency certificates,” meaning they didn’t even meet standards to be certified.
Even when teachers are certified and have preparation in the fields they teach, they are burdened down with classes so large, they can’t begin to give attention to the children they are teaching. Starting in 1985, the state of Tennessee decided to study the effect of class size on student achievement. This is so obvious it shouldn’t require a study, yet state legislatures continue to debate the point. The Tennessee study involved class size in the early elementary years, kindergarten through grade three. Each participating school divided into three types of classes: “small” (from 13 to 17 students) or “regular” (22 to 26 students) or “regular with a full-time teacher aide.” At every grade level students in the smaller classes did significantly better on standardized tests than those in the larger classes, whether or not the larger class had an aide. Small classes in inner city schools made the biggest jump in achievement. Not only did students do better during the years they were in the smaller classes, but they also did better during the rest of their school years up through graduation.
The bourgeoisie and better off layers of the petty-bourgeoisie know that smaller classes and better prepared teachers make a difference. The classes in their schools, whether public or private, have many fewer students than the “normal” class in working class areas. Their teachers have much more academic preparation, including in the field they are teaching. And the teachers have access to modern equipment and all the textbooks they need.
What would it take for every school to have the same thing? In a word, money.
But proposals like those for vouchers or charter schools simply drain money out of the system–but they don’t put children in better schools.
In the first place, a voucher is worth only what the original public school of a student would pay. In Ohio, for example, vouchers are worth only $1,618 a year, while the average cost per student is $5,251 in the public schools. Private schools cost much more.
And in the schools whose tuition is low enough so the vouchers can pay it, the education is generally inferior to that in the ordinary public schools. Many of the schools where vouchers are used are run by religious orders, which at the very least interfere with a real scientific education. Others have been set up as charter schools by someone to make a profit. In neither case are the interests of students from ordinary families served.
We live in a society today wherein exist not only the technical means but also sufficient wealth so that every child could be truly educated: that is, not only gaining a basic foundation in math, reading, writing and a scientific approach, but absorbing the collective knowledge that humanity has developed up until now. The knowledge that humanity in its different cultures has collectively gathered is there, available to be passed down to all the members of society.
What stands in the way of this is a reactionary system which not only refuses to provide the money needed, but also proposes to take us backwards all the way to the time before the first American revolution, when schools were run by churches and religious orders. Those people who so regularly call on the “founding fathers” to buttress their reactionary arguments, in fact would set Jefferson and the others to spinning in their graves–as the saying goes.
Jul 1, 2002
At the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school vouchers could be used in church-run or religious schools. The proposal for vouchers has been around for almost half a century. In 1955, in the middle of the McCarthy period, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman proposed a system of “vouchers,” that is, statements of credit given to parents, allowing them to pay for tuition (or part of it) at whichever school the parent might choose, public or private, including church run schools. But even in the middle of that reactionary time-period, the proposal did not go very far, since quite obviously it would mean the destruction of the public schools, if it were really to be implemented.
More recently, legislators in over 30 states have introduced proposals authorizing such vouchers, in an attempt to play to the religious right. Only three states–Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida–actually passed such laws however. And every time a voucher proposal was put on the ballot in a popular referendum, it was voted down.
In general, the courts have long ruled against spending public money in religious schools, on the grounds that this violated the constitutional mandate separating church and state. In 1973, the Supreme Court itself issued a decision which prohibited New York state from reimbursing parents for religious school tuition.
Now, however, the Supreme Court has reversed the earlier rulings, declaring that state tax moneys can be used to further religious education. This reversal does not depend on some fine legal distinctions. Nor is it simply the product of the change in Supreme Court justices. It is an acknowledgment that we are living in an exceedingly reactionary time period.
It’s obvious that the proposals which are floating around today–whether for vouchers or for charter schools–are completely crazy, even in what they would concretely set up: people running from one school system to another, from the public school to a private school, with vouchers in hand plus their other hand in their own pocket to come up with the difference; new schools being set up, reserving admission for only those students the new schools want to admit. The old schools today founder, deprived of money. If more of their money is drained, they will collapse, and yet there will not be enough money to provide vouchers which would allow working class parents to send their kids to the best schools.
This is a proposal which would take education backward several centuries, back to the time when schools were not available to everyone, to the time when churches decided what would be taught and what would not be taught.
Jul 1, 2002
The Los Angeles Unified School District is moving its headquarters to a 29-story office building in downtown Los Angeles–but not before the district’s seven board members and superintendent each get their own private bathrooms next to their offices on the 24th floor.
This is particularly outrageous in a district whose schools often have one bathroom for several hundred students–in some cases, for 500 students. L.A. Unified school bathrooms are too often out of order, dirty, or even lacking toilet paper or soap.
The cost of the private bathrooms, district officials say, is not more than $100,000.
Maybe. But this school board has voted to spend at least 180 million dollars on its new headquarters, private bathrooms and all–even while declaring it is running a 440-million-dollar deficit and has to cut basic services, teachers and classes.
If this what they learned about being public servants, they need to go back to school!
Jul 1, 2002
Eighteen times in the last eleven months, a wheel has fallen off a city transit bus as it took passengers around the city of Baltimore. Eighteen times the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) has failed to solve the problem.
It is sheer chance that no rider or bus driver was badly hurt, although plenty were frightened as 200-pound wheels rolled off down the street. Nonetheless, the acting administrator refused to even look at the problem until the tenth time a wheel came off. Even though she then interfered with an attempted investigation, she was not relieved of her job and placed on a leave of absence until the 17th incident. Higher management suggested she was trying to protect a maintenance supervisor, who is her husband.
Whether or not this was her motive, the fact remains that bus maintenance is low on the list of state priorities. There are not enough mechanics to check all the bus wheels. Even when they started a crash program to check the wheels, it was expected to take a month.
In other words, most of the buses did not have changes yet on their wheels, even while other maintenance was ignored. In addition, mechanics didn’t have manuals for their equipment and were told NOT to follow the manufacturer’s recommendations on lubrication.
The MTA finally hired a new chief, Robert Smith, from the Chicago Transit Authority, in June. But chiefs come and go. The real problem is whether the state will fund public transportation and, in particular, hire enough mechanics and equipment to do the job needed.
The head of the Department of Transportation, John Porcari, told legislators in Annapolis, "We have not done the job we should within the MTA to spot the issues early and give them upper-level management attention. I need to apologize for the less-than-satisfactory service we provided. As far as I’m concerned, the buck stops here."
So he says, but if the buck really stopped at his desk, there would have been no problem. Or, at least, today, he would be ready to hire hundreds of mechanics. The bucks obviously don’t stop at his desk–and they certainly don’t get to public transportation.
Jul 1, 2002
Experts say the forest fires raging on federal lands in several western states have come much earlier and are more widespread than usual for several reasons. First, the whole area is suffering from a years-long drought.
The other cause is a conscious policy carried out by the U.S. government for almost a century–a policy which has created a large amount of combustible material causing fires to spread rapidly and be difficult to put out when they do catch.
Without human interference, wildfires started primarily by lightning would normally burn through these forests from time to time, reducing both tree and underbrush density. But because of more commercial development in these forests, in 1910 the government adopted a policy of suppressing all fires.
By the 1950s, the Forest Service recognized that this total fire suppression policy was creating a potentially disastrous situation. It recommended controlled burning of selected areas of forest to get rid of the underbrush. But lumber and logging companies and land developers didn’t like even the temporary disruption of their operations that controlled fires caused. And the wealthy people who had put summer homes out in the forests didn’t like the smoke.
Finally, several of the fires started deliberately by the Forest Service got out of control, because of insufficient staffing of the Forest Service. So the total fire suppression policy has remained largely in effect.
The results are the huge fires we see raging today. Capital–which looks often only at the short term maximization of profit–often creates bigger disasters for itself–and us–down the road.
Jul 1, 2002
On June 24th Bush demanded that Yasser Arafat step down and the Palestinians choose a new leadership. A minister in Ariel Sharon’s Israeli government said the speech “could have been written by the Likud,” that is, Sharon’s party.
When Sharon’s brutal policy provoked an outbreak of suicide attacks, Sharon had cynically declared–despite all the evidence to the contrary–that Arafat was responsible for them. Sharon had also pretended that he himself wants to make peace but Arafat isn’t willing.
Around the world–including in Europe and Japan–Sharon has been criticized for his intransigent policy: repression of all Palestinians in the occupied territories, more Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, and attempts to destroy the Palestinian Authority. But Bush, the leader of the world’s superpower, the only nation which truly could force the Israeli government to carry out a different policy, instead pretends that Arafat is to blame for the lack of a peace agreement.
Many times in the course of dirty wars like the one Israel is waging against the Palestinians, leaders of the occupying army declare that they’re ready for peace, but they can’t deal with the leaders of the forces fighting against the occupation. That’s what French leaders said during their war against Algeria, what the United States did in Viet Nam, vainly seeking to set up a “third force.” It’s obvious that an occupying army prefers to deal with people who will surrender rather than those who fight back.
Today, the Israeli leaders, with Bush standing behind them, repeat this same ridiculous lie. The current Palestinian leaders doubtless represent a small layer of bourgeois Palestinians, often corrupted, little concerned in fact for the interests of their people. But this certainly doesn’t give the Israeli leaders or the Americans the right to change them. Whatever leaders they might set up would only be worse.
For the time being, requiring that Arafat be replaced before peace talks can begin amounts to putting off indefinitely any attempt at settlement. This is what Sharon has in mind and what Bush has just ratified.
Nevertheless, they can’t continue indefinitely to deny the most elementary rights to an entire people. This policy is doomed to the same failure as all preceding attempts to fabricate “third forces.” In the meantime, the policy of Israel and Bush can only increase the credit of Arafat with the Palestinians.
Jul 1, 2002
In June, a loya jirga, or, grand council, assembled in the capital city of Kabul, supposedly to select a new Afghan government. The U.S. government and media played up the event, calling it the first step towards a democratic Afghanistan.
Extensive news coverage was given to some of the speeches made at the loya jirga–as proof that democracy was at work. Delegates criticized the warlords who are responsible for the violence and destruction that has plagued Afghanistan for decades. But these speeches, just like those grandiose speeches we hear now and then in Congress, remained just that–speeches. The elected representatives who gave these speeches had no power whatsoever. The real power was wielded in deals made behind closed doors, by those same warlords who were the targets of these speeches.
In the end, the “new” government was mostly the same as the old government led by Hamid Karzai before the loya jirga. If there was any change, it was for the worse, for it meant the strengthening of the power of the warlords and religious fundamentalists. The elected delegates of the loya jirga simply rubber-stamped the power-sharing agreements made by the warlords.
These agreements are the same kind of deals that were continuously done and undone by these same warlords throughout the 1990s. Just look, for example, at Karzai’s three vice presidents.
Mohammad Fahim also kept his post as Defense Minister in the government. An ethnic Tajik, he is the military commander of the Northern Alliance and the successor of Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated last September. During the civil war between 1992 and 1996, when different warlords were fighting over Kabul, Massoud’s troops shelled the city and committed atrocities against civilians belonging to other ethnic groups.
Haji Abdul Qadir is an ethnic Pashtun, currently in control of the eastern city of Jalalabad. In 1996, Qadir gave shelter to Osama bin Laden when bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan.
Karim Khalili, the third vice-president, belongs to the Hazara ethnic group. After the Taliban came to power in 1996, Khalili aligned himself with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, until the Taliban turned against him and drove him out in 1998.
Karzai offered vice-presidencies to two other warlords, Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum and Tajik Ismail Khan, but they both declined. They apparently preferred to use their influence from their local bases of power–Dostum from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and Khan from the western city of Herat.
The important post of the Interior Minister went to the 80-year-old Taj Mohammad Wardak, who returned to Afghanistan this year from his 15-year exile in Los Angeles. Since his arrival, Wardak has been leading a battle against another warlord, Padshah Khan Zadran, over the city of Gardez–which both warlords are in the process of destroying in order to control it.
Karzai appointed Sheikh Hadi Shinwari, a fundamentalist, as chief justice. Shinwari’s first act in office was to accuse Karzai’s Minister for Women’s Affairs, Sima Samar, of blasphemy. When Samar had been brought into the “interim” government–the only woman so “honored”–Bush pointed to her as the mark Afghanistan is changing. But under pressure from Shinwari, Samar has now resigned from her post. Karzai also accepted the demand of the fundamentalists to call the government “Islamic.”
In short, it’s back to business as usual in Afghanistan. That means more war between warlords and more destruction, more repression against women and anyone who dares to oppose the warlords or religious fundamentalists, more extortion and violence against the population. Reportedly, extortion on the road is rampant again as it was before the Taliban. Looting and rape are also widespread, for example against Pashtuns in the areas controlled by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, the backbone of the U.S.-led Afghan coalition.
And Afghanistan is once more on its way to becoming the main supplier of opium in the world, as the warlords have now been freed to engage in the lucrative drug business again.
These are the warlords that the Bush administration calls “the good guys,” and this whole mess is what the Bush administration calls “bringing peace and democracy” to Afghanistan.
It would be laughable–if it weren’t for the price being paid by the population of Afghanistan.
Jul 1, 2002
On June 30 postage rates went up. It now costs 37¢ to mail a letter instead of 34¢. The Post Office cites its 1.2 billion dollar loss last year, subsidized by the taxpayers, as the reason for the rate increase. It’s true that there is a postal subsidy, but it goes to the business mailers, not those of us who have to pay our bills with first class stamps. And we pay it–both through our taxes and when we pay for stamps.
Under the new postal rates, for example, a company pays only 18¢ to mail a business letter weighing almost three and a half ounces. If we mail a letter weighing the same amount, we pay $1.06!
So-called standard mail, which businesses use when they make bulk mailings and sort the letters by zip codes, last year averaged 9¢ an ounce, while the first ounce of the mail we sent cost 34¢. If companies had to pay an additional 25¢ an ounce it would bring in 43 billion dollars more–35 times the 1.2 billion dollar deficit.
Business, of course, says that it pre-sorts its mail. OK, even if it paid a reduced rate, there would be enough additional income to the Post Office to not only eliminate the 1.2 billion dollar deficit, but to greatly improve service. More workers could be hired, thus shortening lines in local post offices.
The Post Office is part of the United States government, which says it is running it like a business. To be more exact, the government runs the Post Office FOR business.