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
Aug 12, 2002
The drumbeat of war in this country is getting louder. President Bush says that he has yet to give a final go-ahead to go to war against Iraq. But news reports tell us that the Pentagon has been planning a long time for this war. And both Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld say that war is almost inevitable.
What an outrage! The richest and most powerful military in the world is getting ready to unleash nothing less than a full-scale war against a small, impoverished country. The U.S. military already destroyed Iraq during the Persian Gulf War 11 years ago. It dropped more bombs on that country than all the bombs dropped by both sides during World War II. And–it has continued to bomb the country regularly, several times a week ever since. At the same time, for 12 years it has carried out an ugly and vindictive economic embargo that chokes off the supply of vital food, safe drinking water and medicine.
All this is supposed to be aimed at one man: Saddam Hussein. But it has been the Iraqi people who have paid the price. Over one million Iraqis have already been killed by U.S. bombs, disease and hunger. Thousands of their children are dying every month. The U.S. military has already turned Iraq into a mass extermination camp and graveyard.
Now the U.S. rulers say they have much bigger plans in store for the people of Iraq. And, Bush says, no matter what the price is, we are ready to pay it.
No, George W. Bush’s spoiled children, his nephews, and their friends will not "pay the price." They will not be called on to fight and die in this future war. Neither will the rich and spoiled relatives and friends of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. They will give the orders, but they won’t do the dying.
No, like in every war, that so-called "glorious right to pay the price" is reserved for the sons and daughters of the U.S. working class. It is the U.S. workers who will be given a gun and transported thousands of miles away in order to spill the blood of other poor people and workers. How many countless U.S. workers will also die, or have their health and minds destroyed, condemned to live what remains of their life in a living hell in some miserable hospital, or out on the street? How many will waste their youth acting as the executioners and prison guards of millions of poor Iraqis?
The working class will foot the bill for this war, certainly hundreds of billions of dollars. To pay for this, the government will look for all kinds of ways to cut social spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, education, and the little that is left in other programs. At the same time, the government will use the war as an excuse to widen legal police powers over the population.
And for what? So that George W. Bush and his cronies can impose the power of the big U.S. corporations over the workers and poor of the world. So that they can suck ever more resources and wealth out. So that Bush’s oil companies and Cheney’s construction companies can make even bigger stupendous profits off of the labor of the workers all over the world. So that the banks, the military contractors and all the other vultures can have more orders and make ever bigger profits.
Saddam Hussein may be a terrible dictator and mass murderer. But what he has done is small potatoes compared to the U.S. military machine and to the U.S. capitalists that it defends. Just as the Persian Gulf War was only a prelude to other wars, so this war will only make the Middle East more explosive and more dangerous, and increase the likelihood of more wars and more military occupations. The road they are taking us all down is a war without end, slippery with the blood of the working class and poor in this country and all over the world.
The bosses in this country are not just the enemies of the Iraqis, they are the enemies of the workers in this country. Instead of sacrificing for them, we should be fighting against them.
Aug 12, 2002
U.S. senators and representatives rushed to cobble together a bill toughening the rules on bankruptcy filings before they recessed for their long end-of-summer vacation. One of the bill’s sponsors declared that the bill that had been jointly agreed on would “restore integrity and accountability to our bankruptcy system.”
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s spokesperson, said, “The president looks forward to signing that.” (Bush, who was already on the second leg of his third summer vacation, wasn’t around to speak for himself.)
It’s true that the specter of bankruptcy hangs over the country, with one big company after another declaring bankruptcy, wiping out their employees’ pension funds and 401(k) funds, leaving big debts behind in the wake of executives who are rushing off to put billions of dollars of money into offshore banks. World Com, Enron, Qwest, KMart–and they’re only the most visible ones–have certainly been abusing the bankruptcy system.
There’s only one problem. Congress didn’t overhaul the bankruptcy laws applying to the big guys. It overhauled the bankruptcy laws applying to ordinary people, so that most people won’t be able to write off their debts when they declare bankruptcy–only defer them.
The credit card and banking industries claim that too many people write off debts they should be able to pay.
What do they mean–“able to pay”? The average American who filed for bankruptcy last year had a car that was six to nine years old and income way below the median income. Almost half of all people filing for bankruptcy are deep in debt precisely because they were recently hit with big medical bills that their insurance didn’t cover–IF they had medical insurance at all. Then there were all those people laid off, unable to find a new job that paid decent money. As we all know, between house payments, a car note, insurance payments–not to mention, utilities, phones, and food–it doesn’t take long when you’re out of work, or just working for less, to get way behind in your bills.
It’s obvious that a government which wanted to deal with the real problems behind the growing number of bankruptcies would look into providing adequate financial support to unemployed workers and a decent medical insurance plan that covers everyone–as a start.
And then it would turn around and go after the big guys–the ones who, before they declared bankruptcy, stole billions of dollars from their employees’ pension funds for their own account. They might start with George W.’s good buddy, “Ken Boy” Lay, late of Enron fame. But they would quickly turn their attention to the big banks who have been helping executives drain money out of their corporations.
Here is the real irony of the push to reform bankruptcy laws: the very same big banks who paved the way for the corporate rush into bankruptcy are the very ones who today cry for “financial responsibility.”
“Financial responsibility”–words that mean nothing other than the right of the biggest corporations and banks to go on stealing from everyone else.
Aug 12, 2002
The Bush Administration uses the fact that in the past the Iraqi regime used weapons of mass destruction as one reason why the Iraqi regime is dangerous. Of course, what the U.S. doesn’t now say is that it supported Iraq at the time that it used those weapons, both against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War and against the Kurds inside Iraq.
In fact, the same person today condemning Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was Ronald Reagan’s envoy to Iraq. It was Rumsfeld, who reestablished diplomatic relations with the Saddam Hussein in December of 1983. Barely three months later, on March 23, the Iraqi army used mustard gas laced with a nerve agent against Iranian soldiers on the southern battlefront, killing 600. This didn’t seem to bother the Reagan administration. The very next day, Rumsfeld visited Baghdad and had an amiable chat with Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. The New York Times wrote: “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States.” The U.S. was obviously pleased with Hussein’s conduct of the war. That same year, the State Department pushed through the sale of 45 Bell helicopters to Iraq.
The U.S. continued its support of Hussein throughout the war. For example, in 1988 during an important battle with Iran over the Faw Peninsula, an oil port, the U.S. supplied Iraq with valuable military intelligence. This made possible a successful Iraqi attack using poison gas that killed thousands of Iranian soldiers. Many Iranian soldiers had gas masks that didn’t fit tightly over their beards, which allowed lethal gas to seep in. Hundreds of dead Iranians were found with empty syringes next to them which had a faulty antidote to the poison gas.
In 1988, Iraqi Army forces also attacked Kurds in the city of Halabja inside Iraq with poison gas, killing 5,000 civilians. U.S. intelligence figures told The Los Angeles Times that the poison gas bombs were dropped from the Bell helicopters provided by the U.S. The U.S. Senate passed a bill proposing sanctions against Iraq, but the sanctions were killed by the Reagan White House.
Meanwhile U.S. business went on with Iraq, with the U.S. importing two billion dollars of oil each year and selling Iraq one billion dollars of U.S. farm products. The U.S. government gave Iraq export credit guarantees through the Export-Import Bank. On June 6-8, 1989, a delegation of 23 U.S. banks, oil and oil-service companies, and high-tech, construction, and defense contractors visited Iraq and had “high-level” talks with officials.
Of course, all of this was done when Hussein was the U.S.’s lap dog in the Middle East, keeping order by drowning the region in blood: going to war against the U.S. enemy, Iran, keeping down an oppressed minority, the Kurds.
Only when the U.S. government decided to turn on Hussein did it suddenly accuse him of committing the atrocities that the U.S. government itself, supported and supplied in every way.
Aug 12, 2002
“If there is a future terrorist attack on America and it comes from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.”
These words didn’t come from an official of a white supremacist organization. Nor were they uttered privately by some politician or government official and leaked to the press. Believe it or not, these words came, during a public hearing, from Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission–the very government body that’s supposed to protect the civil rights of minorities!
Kirsanow also said that he could foresee that “the public would demand” concentration camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again. In other words, the Bush administration is already orchestrating the call for concentration camps. As if this much were not outrageous enough, another member of the Civil Rights Commission, Jennifer Braceras, added: “There’s no constitutional right not to be inconvenienced or even embarrassed.”
Kirsanow and Braceras made these remarks in Detroit, the city with the highest concentration of Arabs in the U.S., in a meeting whose purpose was, supposedly, to hear the concerns of Arab people about the government’s abuse of their civil rights since Sept. 11. These circumstances aggravate the meaning of their words even more and give them the character of a provocation.
These bigots representing the Big Bigot, George W. himself, have no shame! It was not an “ethnic group” that attacked the World Trade Center–it was 19 individuals who were from Arab countries. It’s not an entire ethnic or racial group that commits a terrorist act. If it were so, the whole white population, or at least the whole Anglo-Saxon Protestant population, of the U.S. should be held under suspicion after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Finally, what makes these remarks really serious is that behind Kirsanow and Braceras is the U.S. government. When government officials talk about putting “Arab Americans” in concentration camps, they certainly don’t mean Arab Americans like John Sununu, who was Father Bush’s chief of staff ten years ago. They say things like this precisely because they want to create and whip up prejudice against the Arab population and turn it into a target. For it’s a lie that a great many ordinary Americans, by themselves, “would demand” that an Arab family be put in a concentration camp just because of their ethnicity or race.
What the U.S. government is doing here is basically not different than what it did during World War II against the Japanese Americans, or what the Nazi regime in Germany did against the Jews: to turn one part of the population against a small, defenseless minority so that the government, and behind them the big corporations, can more easily take rights away from the whole population, impose sacrifices on the population, especially workers, and send them to fight wars in the interests of the big corporations.
Aug 12, 2002
For years and years, the U.S. government has claimed that Iraq has what they call “weapons of mass destruction.” Over the past few months, members of the Bush administration have gone into great detail to describe these weapons programs. According to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Iraq has “biological, chemical and nuclear capabilities.” He also says that Iraq has “mobile biological-weapons laboratories.” And George W. Bush himself says that Iraq has built bomb and missile-making facilities underground, as well as in factories that make other things, perhaps like children’s milk or medicine.
According to the U.S. government, this is one reason why Iraq is a threat not only to the entire Middle East, but to Europe and the U.S. as well.
But not everyone believes these claims. According to former U.N. chief weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, no government or agency has presented one shred of evidence to support them. In other words, they are nothing but a figment of the Bush administration’s imagination.
Of course, false charges by the U.S. to justify attacking another country and people are nothing new. As Ritter himself points out, the U.S. charges against Iraq are a “political sham used to invoke a modern-day Gulf of Tonkin resolution-equivalent for Iraq.” (The Gulf of Tonkin resolution had been submitted to Congress in 1964 by the Johnson administration to justify sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Viet Nam and the stepped up bombing of the country. The Johnson administration had claimed that two Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked a U.S. destroyer–which it turns out never happened.)
Ritter also charged that most of the members of the U.N. inspection teams that he headed back in 1998 were filled with U.S. military intelligence personnel, who used the inspection teams as a cover to gather intelligence for the U.S. And during what was called Operation Desert Fox, the U.S. military bombed the very facilities that Ritter and his team had “inspected” only a few days before.
No, the main threat to the people of the Middle East is the U.S. military, which not only has weapons of mass destruction, but is constantly bombing, murdering and destroying.
Aug 12, 2002
Over the last few weeks, the Bush administration and Congress have gone to great lengths to prove that they are cracking down on corporate corruption. On July 30, President Bush signed “a sweeping corporate fraud” bill. At the signing, Bush proclaimed, “No more easy money for corporate criminals, just hard time.”
Bush’s Justice Department also showed that it was acting in this new “spirit.” It arrested and charged several top corporate executives, including David F. Myers and Scott Sullivan from MCI-WorldCom, John Rigas and his two sons from Adelphia Communications, and Samuel Waksal from ImClone. The Justice Department made sure that they all were shown in handcuffs, doing the same “perp walk” as ordinary criminals.
But while all this was going on, Enron, the granddaddy in this outbreak of corporate scandals, kept on making headlines. Congressional investigations and news reports revealed that three of the biggest financial behemoths in the world, Citicorps, J.P. Morgan, and Merrill Lynch were instrumental in working with Enron to create private, offshore partnerships that Enron used to hide its profits and losses. These partnerships allowed Enron to avoid paying taxes and boosted its stock price. According to one revelation, in January 2000 Merrill Lynch engineered a series of phoney trade with Enron, that resulted in Enron reporting a phoney 60 million dollar profit. This 60 million dollars then allowed Enron to boost its stock price. Immediately afterwards, Enron executives exercised their stock options and cashed in. Of course, Enron richly rewarded Citicorps, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan for their services.
So, why hasn’t the Justice Department yet announced any arrests at Enron or at all those financial companies that have been instrumental in allowing Enron–and who knows how many other companies–to fabricate their profits? According to the Wall Street Journal, making a case against Enron and the financial companies is much more complicated. Undoubtedly what is meant by “complicated” are not just the crooked financial maneuvers, but all of Enron’s links to the upper reaches of the business world as well as the government. What especially counts are the Enron links to the Bush administration, the very people in charge of prosecuting Enron. Enron’s former chairman, Ken Lay, or as George W. Bush affectionately called him, “Kenny-Boy,” has been doing business with the Bush family for a long time. Among other things, Lay provided Bush with a private plane for his 2000 presidential campaign. Besides that, key members of the Bush administration either came out of Enron, such as Secretary of the Army Thomas White and Bush’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, or received big bucks from Enron, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, who received $58,499 in campaign contributions.
The benefit of all the corporate scandals is that it brings out in the open what usually goes on behind closed doors. The passage of a few laws and the arrests of a few executives will not change that. On the contrary, this supposed crackdown is a mere show, meant to protect the bigger and better connected players and institutions. The entire capitalist system is rotten and corrupt. It always has been. And it always will be.
Aug 12, 2002
On July 1, U.S. military aircraft attacked four villages in Afghanistan killing at least 48 people and wounding 117. Recently, United Nations investigators supported the claims of Afghan village residents that the U.S. government repeatedly distorted and covered up what its military forces did.
First, the U.S. tried to downplay the extent of the attacks and the loss of life. Immediately following the attacks, the Pentagon claimed that only 5 people had been killed. Obviously, that was quickly shown to be a complete lie. So, the Pentagon tried to excuse the attacks. It claimed that Afghani villagers had fired on a U.S. gun ship patrolling over the area. But U.N. investigators found no evidence of ground fire at the scene. So, the U.S. military tried a different story: it claimed that the U.S. gunships had fired on the compound of what they thought was a Taliban leader. The only problem with that story was that the U.N. found that there was no evidence of Taliban fighters anywhere, and the compound that suffered the most destruction belonged to an anti-Taliban fighter. Most of the people killed or wounded by the U.S. military had been at a wedding celebration.
But that was not the end of the extent of the U.S. military’s cover-up. U.N. investigators also discovered that U.S. and allied Afghan military ground forces had entered three of the four villages immediately after the attack and carried out “a thorough ‘cleaning’ of the strike areas” that included removal of evidence of shrapnel, bullets and traces of blood from the victims of the air attacks. When U.S. military officials were confronted with that they came up with another story: They said they were only collecting all this as evidence. Yes, but evidence that obviously they didn’t want anyone else to see!
No, the U.S. massacre of July 1 and its efforts to cover it up only prove that like every occupying power throughout history, rather than supposedly bringing order to Afghanistan and rebuilding the country, as it claims, the U.S. is really just imposing its power, and the power of its Afghan warlord allies, on the population–through violence and terror.
Aug 12, 2002
The increasingly brutal policy of repression by the Israeli army vastly worsened the situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories in the last year. Incomes have dropped by a third, while unemployment now affects more than half the population of the territories. At the current time two thirds of the Palestinian population have to survive on less than $2.50 a day. The consumption of food products has dropped by 20%.
As always, the most vulnerable suffer the most. According to a new study sponsored by UNICEF, nearly half of Palestinian children are suffering from chronic malnutrition and about a quarter of them from stunted growth and other physical problems due to a lack of food.
At the time of the Oslo Accords in March 1993 between the PLO and the Israeli government under the auspices of the United States, there were many promises of massive aid from the international community. But the newly autonomous territories under the Palestinian Authority didn’t have any possibility for economic development. How could anyone really believe that the territories were economically viable? These territories have no natural resources. They are cut into two distant parts (the Gaza strip and the West Bank of the Jordan valley) and are each broken themselves into small parts by Israeli settlements that monopolize the best farm land and water, and with roads reserved for them alone.
The occupied territory, which in many places is overpopulated, hasn’t benefitted from even a minimum of investment since its annexation by Israel in 1967. The territory was considered a reservoir of cheap manpower and mercilessly draftable labor with Palestinians having to go daily into Israel with a work permit. Finally, while the Accords temporarily satisfied each of the protagonists on the political level (Arafat’s PLO became the head of the embryo of a state and Israel got rid of the major headache of maintaining order in the territories), the Israeli government kept control of the Palestinian economy.
In the following years, little of the hoped-for investment flowed into the territories. And with the number of Israeli settlers rapidly increasing, work permits for Palestinians were reduced.
The new Intifada broke out in September 2001 and the massive policy of repression by the Sharon government made the situation increasingly impossible. The multiple blockade of the territories by the army led to the repeated closing of check points. Even when they were open, Palestinians workers could no longer go to their jobs, or only with a delay of many hours. The lines at the Erez check point, for example, begin at 3:00 AM. Some small shops set up in the territories were reduced to juggling with whatever provisions they received, and it became impossible to move business inventories.
The multiplication of roadblocks on the roads, indeed the pure and simple blocking of roads, transformed all trips into an ordeal. In fact it is necessary to change taxis several times to cross the mounds of earth behind concrete blocks that the Israeli army put at the entrance of towns.
The reoccupation of the principal cities of the West Bank since June, the curfew installed and the massive destruction caused by the Israeli army during its successive operations, ruined the Palestinian cities. Besides the destruction of the infrastructure (the port of Gaza, the Jericho airport), roads and water pipes were systematically broken up, the telephone and electric networks destroyed. Each neighborhood, each village, was reduced to almost individual survival. In the West Bank, families embarked on the cultivation of small farms for food when still possible, for the Israeli army destroys houses and cultivations near the roads, under the pretext of protecting the Israeli army and the Israeli settlers. In certain villages the population doesn’t even have access to drinkable water which it used to pay for and which arrived by tank truck. The digging of a well has to be approved by the Israeli administration and the nearest Israeli settlement. The inhabitants often have to be content with their reserves of rain water.
The level of life has been pushed back 35 years, to the time of the beginning of the Israeli occupation. The Sharon government declared some days ago that it wishes to improve the lives of Palestinians who don’t fight Israel. To prove it, it accepted to free up 14 million dollars and envisages later freeing up two other payments of 14 million dollars each, out of the 430 million dollars that Israel owes the Palestinian Authority on taxes levied at the border. This is a pathetic measure aiming as a response to protests, even including protests from the Israeli population, after Israel’s bombing of a working class neighborhood of Gaza on the night of June 22-23. This bombing led to the death of 17 people, including 11 children.
It was a tiny drop of water in that ocean of misery which is today’s occupied territories. This is what nourishes the current of young Palestinian desperados ready to transform themselves into suicide bombers and which renders life impossible for the Israelis themselves.
Aug 12, 2002
In Pakistan this June, a young woman was gang-raped by four men who were ordered to rape her by a tribal council. Hundreds of men stood around laughing as she pleaded.
The gang-rape was carried out to punish her whole family because her 11-year-old brother was seen walking down a village street with a girl from another tribe. The tribe was considered a higher class than the boy’s, or caste, as it is called there.
This barbaric example of what tribal councils mean is not limited to this one village, this one family, nor to Pakistan. In many parts of the poorest countries in the world, women are kept in conditions like slavery. As the weakest members of the society, they face harsh punishments dealt out in these reactionary societies.
One reason the U.S. government gave for going to war in Afghanistan was the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women, which certainly included rape, torture and murder. But for years before, the U.S. government turned a blind eye to these barbaric practices, especially when U.S. oil companies looked to the Taliban to control the country, while the U.S. oil companies planned to build an oil pipeline.
Today, the U.S. government may give some lip service to protests against the brutal treatment of women in Pakistan. But that doesn’t stop the Bush administration from increasing military aid to the very dictatorship under which these practices were carried out.
Aug 12, 2002
A new agreement opening the way to the settlement of the bloody civil war in the Sudan was signed on July 20. The two parties attempting to regulate this half-a-century old battle were the dictator of the Sudan and the rebel forces of the Liberation Army of the People of the Sudan that operates in the south of the country.
But behind these parties stands the United States, which far from being concerned about the right of self-determination granted to the southern region, or the separation of church and state proposed in the document, is more concerned about all the oil that lies below ground in this country.
The Sudan, located in East Africa, is an artificial state created at the end of the 19th century by British imperialism. It was created to act as a buffer against French colonial expansion into Africa. The civil war first began in 1955, just one year before independence was established for the Sudan. This civil war erupted when British colonialism tried to impose a Muslim fundamentalist regime on a population in the South of the country that was predominantly Christian, or animist.
If this civil war has continued for so long, it is because the rival forces fighting for power inside the country were supported, on one side or the other, by various imperialist powers. The seizure of power in Khartoum by the current dictator at the end of the 1980s was not only supported by the Muslim fundamentalists, but also by France; while the United States and Great Britain passed both military and financial support through Uganda to the guerillas in the south of the Sudan. Later, the U.S. declared the Sudan a terrorist state because it had at one point harbored Bin Laden. In 1998, the U.S. bombed a pharmaceutical factory there under the pretext that it was producing chemical weapons.
But more recently, American imperialism reestablished its diplomatic relationship to the Sudan: The U.S. no longer considers it to be a terrorist state. And after the Sudan cracked down on its Muslim supporters, the U.S. has even listed it as a country for tourists to visit.
Of course, the fact that the Sudan regime continues to rule by terror against its own population is of no concern to American imperialism. What is important to the U.S. is that the regime has offered to serve as a stabilizing political force in the Horn of Africa.
So, if the United States has changed its politics in relationship to the Sudan, it is not for humanitarian reasons, but for political and economic ones, and above all, for the potential profits to be made off the oil in this region.
In fact, since 1999, the Sudan has become an exporter of crude oil with a production capacity that in the next three years could reach 500,000 barrels a day. Its reserves are estimated to be more than three billion barrels! That is what makes this country very attractive to the big American oil companies.
If there can be a political settlement to the conflict in the Sudan (having nothing directly 9to do with the interests of the population) the exploitation of oil in the Sudan can quickly become very profitable, and the benefits can be split between the American oil companies, the military regime in Khartoum and the leaders of the rebellion in the south. These are the reasons, finally, why American imperialism has now decided to intervene in the civil war in the Sudan to calm it, rather than to inflame it as before.
Aug 12, 2002
In 1996, an international summit was held on world hunger. All participating heads of state, or their representatives, promised to wage a relentless war on this scourge–which really belongs in another age, not this one. These leaders further pledged to “reduce the number of undernourished people to half by 2015.” As far as one can rely on the available statistics, it would be necessary to reduce the number of people suffering from hunger by 22 million a year to reach this goal. So far, however, that number has remained under six million a year, according to the U.N.
Six years after the summit, in countries called “underdeveloped” alone, over 800 million people permanently suffer from hunger and malnutrition; every day, 22,000 of these people die of these causes; at least two billion people in the world are affected by a lack of food. These are all statistics revealed during the last U.N. World Food Summit, which was held in Rome in June, 2002. (Notice how the word “food” is used instead of “hunger”!)
The situation could easily get worse. Several years of drought in southern Africa have caused a severe crop shortage which, in turn, has brought about a serious food crisis. According to a U.N. report, in certain parts of the region, such as in Zambia, “people resort to desperate measures, including eating potentially poisonous wild plants and tree barks” to ease their hunger. There is no hope for the situation to get any better before 2003. In fact, even the most optimistic experts predict that it will get worse.
Yet today, it is easily possible for the entire population of the world to be adequately fed. In the rich countries, the freezers are full of meat, the silos are full of grain, and there is no shortage of dairy products either. And who knows how many tons of fruit and vegetables are being destroyed every year by farmers who can’t find buyers for their produce!
In agriculture as well as in manufacturing, the capitalist economy is capable of producing all the consumer goods needed by the population. The same capitalist economy, however, doesn’t allow the whole population to benefit from its productive capacity. The hypocritical and powerless rituals held under the guise of international summits don’t change this reality. The worldwide management of production and distribution of the wealth produced by humanity is too serious a question to be left in the hands of the possessing classes, who have proved themselves to be too narrow-minded and too selfish for this task.
Aug 12, 2002
Mitchell Crooks, the man who filmed the beating of a black teenager by Inglewood cops, was arrested a few days after the incident. The district attorney’s office said that this was a “routine” arrest, due to outstanding warrants Crooks had for drunk driving, petty theft and a hit-and-run accident in Northern California five years ago. The officials claimed that Crooks’ arrest had nothing to do with the police beating he taped.
Yeah, right. Warrants that the D.A. long ago decided not to pursue all of a sudden become important–so important that a whole squad of agents was sent to arrest Crooks. And they handcuffed him right in front of TV cameras.
Jeremy Morse, the cop seen on tape smashing a handcuffed teenaged face-down on a car and then punching him, was sent home on paid “suspension,” while the person who filmed the incident was quickly and demonstratively sent to jail for years-old petty offenses.
No, this is not a routine arrest, it’s obviously something else. This is exactly what a D.A. would do if he wanted to show that it’s okay for cops to brutalize people at will, and that whoever tries to draw attention to police brutality should expect consequences.
Is it any wonder that not a single day goes by in this country without people being terrorized by a cop?
Aug 12, 2002
Four women were killed within six weeks–all by their husbands, who were members of the army’s Special Forces unit, all at Fort Bragg, where the elite Special Forces units are prepared to go to Afghanistan, or to which they return from Afghanistan. Three of the four men had recently come back from fighting there.
Just a coincidence? Maybe, but it’s an awfully strong coincidence. And–as the police often say–in a murder investigation, there are no “coincidences.” Even the head of the Defense Department’s Task Force on Domestic Violence admitted, “This does feel really unusual to have so many partners killed in such a short time in one place.”
Other army officers rushed to downplay any suggestion of a link. The garrison commander at Fort Bragg said he doubted that the deployment to Afghanistan had played a role. He said that military service in many of the more than 30 countries where U.S. troops are deployed is equally stressful–implying that service elsewhere also led to incidents of domestic violence. And it’s true that overall the armed forces has a very high level of domestic violence, with the Special Forces having an especially high level. Moreover, the recorded level of such violence has been on the increase in the armed forces, jumping up almost 60% over the last decade.
So maybe it wasn’t service in Afghanistan, per se, that caused this rush of domestic violence at Fort Bragg–domestic violence made worse by the fact that one of the soldiers had stabbed his wife, only to then set fire to the house, with their children still in it. But certainly the training these soldiers went through in order to go into someone else’s country as an invading force, treating everyone and everything as an enemy could only have played a very big role.
The mother of one of the soldiers who killed his wife was quoted as saying, “I truly in my heart believe that his training was such that if you can’t control it, you kill it.”
This is only the first installment of a story that was told over and over during and after the Viet Nam war. As this dirty war against the Afghan people drags on, there will be more.
Aug 12, 2002
Some police “experts” now say that the widely televised videotape of the police beating of a teenager in Inglewood, California doesn’t tell the whole story. They claim that surveillance tapes of the gas station where the incident took place may show that Donovan Jackson, the teenager, struggled with the cops before the filming began–which according to them, justifies the brutal treatment he received from the cops.
This is obviously nothing but the same kind of cover-up we see again and again in similar incidents of police brutality. Of course, there are two sides to every such story, and it is true that not all details of the incident were captured on videotape. But what’s seen in the tape and the basic facts about the incident certainly give us a good idea about the nature of the confrontation between Jackson and the cops.
The cops say that Jackson violently resisted their orders and, fearing for their safety, they used force to subdue and handcuff him. Jackson is a 16-year-old who weighs 136 pounds and looks young for his age. Who in their right mind can believe that it would take four grown men punching and choking a slight-built teenager, to the point of making him unconscious, to calm him down? Jackson’s family says that he suffers from a hearing disorder, which often delays his reaction when he is spoken to. Whether this was a factor in the confrontation or not, one thing is clear: the cops’ approach was not to try to communicate with Jackson. Their attitude was to hit first and ask questions later.
But there is more to this incident than a few brutal cops getting violent. The attitude of the cops’ superiors in the police department and the district attorney’s office, both before and after the incident, explains why acts of police brutality are so common–not just in Inglewood or in L.A., but in all cities across the country.
In Inglewood alone, there have been more than a dozen complaints of police brutality in the past two years. Not a single one of these cases has been prosecuted. Jeremy Morse, the cop who’s seen in the tape slamming a limp, perhaps even unconscious and handcuffed Jackson face-down on the trunk of a car and then punching him, was mentioned in at least six such complaints. Just two weeks before the Jackson beating, for example, Morse took part in another beating which almost killed Neilson Williams, a 32-year-old black man. According to witnesses, Williams fully complied with the orders of Morse and other Inglewood cops who said they wanted to search him. But the cops still beat and choked Williams, to the degree that medical workers who treated Williams first thought he would die. Williams’ family filed a complaint and organized a protest, but the incident was ignored by the police department as well as the media. Neither Morse nor any of the other cops were charged with crimes; they were not even reprimanded.
The response of the authorities to the Jackson beating would have been the same without the nationally broadcast videotape. Just look at how they have tried to avoid the issue. Morse was suspended but with pay, and the D.A.’s office gave four of the six cops involved immunity from prosecution for their grand jury testimony. All four, two sheriff’s deputies and two Inglewood policemen, then testified that they hadn’t seen anything. The sixth cop at the scene, Morse’s partner Bijan Darvish, wrote in his report that Morse “assisted Jackson to his feet.” In other words, all of the other cops denied seeing Morse slamming Jackson while the videotape clearly shows at least three of them standing around Morse when he did that. So why did the D.A. give these cops immunity? They didn’t provide evidence against Morse. The D.A. was simply trying to protect them. Almost two weeks after the incident Morse and Darvish were finally indicted, but only after the black community, accompanied by well-known activists such as Al Sharpton and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, organized demonstrations and press conferences to express their outrage.
We hear it said that not all police officers are brutal, racist psychopaths. That may be true. But many cops are. And they, on a daily basis, attack people in the working-class neighborhoods of every American city. What the media reports about is the tip of the iceberg–those extreme cases when someone is killed, for example, or when the incident is filmed. The real question is, why are these cops allowed to get away with this kind of brutality? Why are they so easily given immunity? Even if a few of these cops end up being prosecuted, why do all they get is usually only a slap on the wrist? Effectively the authorities–police brass, D.A.s, judges–encourage police terror in the streets.
Those who take the wealth produced by the working class for their own account, maintain this society of exploitation and impoverishment with a state apparatus that keeps order through intimidation and brutality–that is, through terrorism carried out by the state apparatus.
The police act like an army of occupation in many working class neighborhoods because that’s what they are.
Aug 12, 2002
On July 30, a painter fell 150 feet to his death in the Detroit Lions new football stadium. 42-year-old Gjon Gojcaj, the father of five children, was spray painting from a basket hoisted up by a hydraulic crane when a stabilizing outrigger collapsed, causing the rig to tip over.
This was hardly an “accident.” One of Gojcaj’s co-workers, Marcia Anderson said that both the crane that failed and another one used by painters at the site were old and rickety. On the day before the accident, the rig that failed wasn’t working because of a faulty hydraulic pump. The other rig wasn’t working the day the accident occurred. “They were junk,” Anderson said. Anderson herself had refused to go up on the rig on the day it failed, fearing it was unsafe.
Following Gojcaj’s death, the vice president for stadium development for Ford Field said, “We are very confident that this is a safe work environment.” But construction contractors at Ford Field have been repeatedly cited and fined by state inspectors for violations of health and safety regulations. Just the week before this “accident” happened, Thomarios Painting, the company Gojcaj worked for, had been fined $1,750 and issued two citations for failing to maintain safety procedures for painters. State inspectors charged the company with not providing proper safety lines and harnesses designed to prevent injury in case of a fall, and failure to keep work scaffolds up to code standards.
The contractors at the new stadium said they simply had no choice because they have been under pressure from stadium authorities to complete work there in time for the planned August 24 opening.
The new football stadium is clearly living up to it’s name–Ford Field. Officials claim everything is safe, just like they did at Ford’s giant Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan before the power house exploded, killing six workers. Yet even before it is completed, a worker has died because of speedup and lack of concern for safety.
Aug 12, 2002
There was a huge sigh of relief throughout the country as the nine miners trapped in a flooded mine for three days were rescued in Somerset, Pennsylvania. Through television, we were all able to witness the tremendous human dramas both deep below and above the earth.
There were the nine trapped miners, who tied themselves together and shared their little bit of food, while they struggled to breathe and stay warm and affirmed their solidarity in sharing their uncertain fate, to either live together or die together. At the surface of the mine, there were their comrades, using all their ingenuity, skill and acumen, rushing to save them. They first drilled a small hole to provide warm air and air pressure to keep the water from completely flooding the small air pocket. Then they drilled a bigger hole to the spot at which they could only guess where the miners were trapped.
But what has been little discussed has been the circumstances behind the accident and the rescue operation.
Certainly, this accident never should have happened. The entire region is honeycombed with old, abandoned and flooded mines. Accurate maps, and modern seismic and geological techniques that oil companies use to find oil deep underground, are essential so the miners know where they are digging. But none of this was provided by the company–obviously so that they could save a lot of money. This left the miners operating blind. As a result, they accidentally broke through to a neighboring mine, abandoned for 50 years, that was flooded with ground water. The maps said that this mine should have been 300 feet away. But once the miners broke through, some 50 million gallons of water poured into their mine, sending the men running for an air pocket 240 feet below the surface.
Once the rescue operation began, it was obvious that there was no emergency digging equipment anywhere near the mine, obviously to save more money for the mine owners. A drill bit had to be trucked hundreds of miles from West Virginia. Of course, the mine owners or their managers tried to save a bit more money by not shipping two drill bits at the same time. So, after the first drill bit broke, there was another potentially critical 18 hour delay until a new drill was brought in.
Eight days after the rescue operation, President Bush had the miners sent over to the White House so that he could draw a little political capital for his own purposes. With the miners present, he gave a patriotic spin to the entire ordeal by claiming that the miners represent “the spirit of America”–as if the accident illustrated that everyone in this country is one big happy family and has the same interests.
In fact, the accident and rescue operation prove the exact opposite. It shows that the mine owners, who tried to save money at every turn at the expense of mine safety, have the exact opposite interests of the miners. The nine miners are alive today due to the actions they took underground and the actions of other miners in the rescue efforts, not because of state officials and the mining companies.
Aug 12, 2002
According to a report of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, one in four cases of unanticipated deaths or injuries among hospital patients is being caused by a shortage of nurses.
This is the result of a study which examined patient deaths and injuries since 1996. In other words, it took these “experts” six years and an expensive study to figure out that there is a severe nurse shortage which compromises healthcare and endangers lives on a daily basis. They could have spared themselves the time and money if they just had asked healthcare workers and patients about it!
Today, about one in eight nursing positions in the U.S. is vacant. A recent report in Pennsylvania stated that 50% less nursing care was available to patients today than in 1980.
But what has caused nursing care in particular, and healthcare in general, to go backwards in the last two decades?
In a word, capitalism.
In the last 20 years, more and more hospitals came under the control of for-profit corporations. In an effort to cut costs and increase profits, these companies merged hospitals and reduced the number of healthcare workers. The government reduced the amount of money it put into educating new nurses and healthcare workers. In nursing, they changed classifications in order to reduce staffing and pay. As a result the workload and stress level of nurses increased, which in turn caused many nurses to leave the profession. Conscious decisions were made which created the nursing “shortage.”
In the last few decades, medical science and technology made great advances. If we lived in a rational, humane society, this would translate into better healthcare for the population and less workload and less stress for healthcare workers.
But we live in capitalist society, in which healthcare is just another commodity for bosses to try to sell and make a profit out of. Working people pay the price–both as patients and as healthcare workers.