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
Nov 11, 2002
Three days after the U.S. election, the U.N. threw its support behind Bush’s demands for war on Iraq.
In fact, despite the little games that France, Russia and a few others played for home consumption, it was always a foregone conclusion the U.S. would impose its will on this supposedly independent body.
From the day the U.N. was formed, the U.S. has almost always been able to impose its demands on the countries that gathered together in the U.N. When other countries voted something the U.S. didn’t want, the U.S. used its permanent veto power to block their decision. And, if the old Soviet Union occasionally used its veto power to block the U.S., the U.S. simply did what it wanted, and no one in the U.N. dared to try to bring the U.S. up on the kind of charges it regularly imposed on other countries–neither for military nor economic reasons.
It could not have been otherwise. The U.S. dominates the world’s economy via its banking system and through the massive investments U.S. corporations have around the world. And its military is the predominant one, holding more "weapons of mass destruction" and, what’s more critical, ten times more means to deliver them than has any other country.
So, yes, the U.S. can call the tune, and other countries dance. "Might," as the cynical saying goes, "makes right." And if the mightiest bully decides that it’s going to go to war against a smaller, but very oil-rich country, none of the other thieves want to be left out when it comes time to divide up that oil.
The Iraqi population has already suffered more than a million-and-a-half deaths, more than half of them children. For 11 years, the U.S. and Britain have never stopped bombing the country. Pretending to look for "military targets," they have regularly bombed the water purification system throughout the country. And the U.S.-imposed embargo has prevented Iraq from bringing in the supplies it needed to restart water purification. The majority of people who died succumbed to diseases caused by water-born germs–just an old-fashioned kind of germ warfare.
And today the Iraqi population is threatened with even worse devastation.
Working people in this country are also threatened–regardless of whether the war Bush orders will be a new invasion of Iraq or a massive increase of bombing.
Just look at how Bush responds to every request for funding social programs or public services: He says the money is needed to fight the supposed "war on terrorism"–by which he means war on Iraq and the widening war going on in Afghanistan.
These are NOT wars on terrorism, they are wars against other people. And we will pay a very big price for carrying them out.
The military has announced it will need a quarter of a million troops for a war on Iraq. This is enough, they say, to topple Saddam Hussein in less time than the Gulf War took. Maybe–and that’s not sure. But even if it is, they forget to mention the hundreds of thousands of troops which will be required to police the area for years after–invaders whom the Iraqi population will have every reason to hate.
We will count not only the body bags that come back directly from another war, but also the body bags that accumulate as troops return, bringing back with them new diseases, like the "Gulf War syndrome" or "Agent Orange syndrome"–diseases which the Pentagon will refuse to admit exist for years, if not decades. Not to mention the body bags which will accumulate as the troops come back, some of them so devastated by the experience that they go off and kill themselves or members of their own families–as have some soldiers at Fort Bragg returning now from Afghanistan.
Some people, of course, benefit from wars carried out to defend the U.S. empire: first of all, the capitalists of this country, who increase their profits by producing for this country’s military and increase their profits by robbing other countries of their wealth.
The capitalists are ready to trade blood for money. The working class should not be. We have every interest to oppose all these wars–the one currently going on against Afghanistan, the one currently going on against Iraq, the bigger one that Bush envisions against Iraq, and all the tiny little actions carried out in vast far-flung regions of the U.S. global empire.
Nov 11, 2002
With the elections giving control of the Senate back to the Republicans, Bush, smirking as usual, claimed a victory. And not only a victory–but a mandate for his policies.
Mandate? Ha! Less than 40% of the voting age citizens voted in this election, with each party getting only about half the votes. The remaining 60%–that is, the big majority–voted with their feet, staying away from the polls, voting, de facto, for "none of the above." And with very good reason, since neither Democrat nor Republican stood for policies that served the working people of this country.
This did not prevent Bush from claiming that the "American people had spoken,"demanding that Bush implement his policies.
Bush, in fact, had already been busy implementing his policies–and with the ready support of the Democrats on all the things that really mattered. They gave him the votes he needed to pass the massive tax cut; over 40% of this multi-billion dollar tax cut went to the wealthiest one% of the population. The rest of the taxpayers were lucky if they got $300. The Democrats gave him the votes he needed to carry out war whenever he wanted against Iraq. The Senate, which they controlled, gave him a 77 to 23 majority for war. Almost unanimously, the Democrats voted for every piece of reactionary legislation he offered to the Congress under the guise of fighting terrorism.
No one should believe that the Democrats, had they retained control of the Senate, would have presented a barrier to what Bush is going to propose.
Of course, Bush will pretend to base the next two years on the results of these elections. Just as he used September 11 to justify a war against Afghanistan last year, he will now try to use these elections to justify a wider war on Iraq. Bush used September 11 to justify reactionary legislation and demands for sacrifice from working people; he will now claim that the elections give him the population’s stamp of approval to require greater sacrifices from working people and to give greater benefits to the wealthy.
This does not mean that the working people–the vast majority of whom did not vote for Bush–need to accept this nonsense. These elections may mean that the Democratic Party will lose some committee chairs and the right to give out positions, but they do not change anything for the population. Just as before, the issue is not what Bush proposes and what the Congress passes, it’s what the working people are ready to accept. Bush has been able to push through a reactionary program simply because the working class has made very few fights for too many years now. Republicans and Democrats alike have come to believe that they can pass whatever they like, and there will be no response.
Working people were not represented in these elections. There was no party that spoke for us–only politicians who wanted our vote. We have no reason to accept what Bush does in the name of these elections.
The working class has the capacity to throw back any new reactionary policies and to overturn those already pushed by Bush and by Clinton before him. A few big strikes, with workers really mobilizing their numbers to make a fight, would wipe that smirk off Bush’s face. More and larger demonstrations against the war would call his bluff.
Nov 11, 2002
The day after the election, John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO, issued a statement that actually included a few critical words about the Democrats: "union members said they do not think either party has a plan to strengthen the economy–and that is a particularly strong indictment of the Democrats."What conclusions did Sweeney draw from this? Did he question the unions’ support for the Democrats? No, he raised only that the unions had to do a better job of reaching their members.
As it was, according to an AFL-CIO press release, the unions handed out nearly 17 million leaflets at work places, made five million phone calls, with 250,000 union members helping to get out the vote.
The problem is not that the union leaders didn’t do enough to support the Democrats. The problem is that they gave the unions’ stamp of approval to the Democrats, a party which has steadfastly supported the interests of big business and the wealthy at the expense of working people.
Today, the working class sees no prospects for itself. And one very big reason is the lack of a party which clearly speaks for the workers and takes their side in every conflict with the bosses.
If the unions were led today by militants who represented the working class, they would set as their first priority to create such a party. Instead, the current leaders try to pump up support for a worn-out discredited party that defends the bosses.
Nov 11, 2002
In Los Angeles County, voters passed Measure B, the first hike in property taxes since 1978, with 73.2% of the vote. Local politicians had been threatening that the county could close two hospital trauma centers without the tax. Over the last 15 years, the number of trauma centers in L.A. County had already been slashed from 23 to 13, even while the population continued to increase. There are big sectors of this sprawling and densely populated county (the largest in both area and population in the country) that no longer have a trauma center.
Every trauma center closed puts people at greater risk whose injuries from accidents or sudden serious illnesses require fast response time.
The politicians say their budget is out of control because the poor and the indigent are taking advantage of the relatively cheap medical care that the public health care system provides.
Certainly the demand for public health care has increased over the years–because fewer and fewer employers are paying health benefits anymore. Currently there are over two million residents with no health insurance. And private hospitals closed 10 trauma centers since 1985 to maximize their profits.
But instead of increasing spending on public health care to meet this crisis, the county has repeatedly slashed its budget. In 1984, almost 20% of the county’s budget went to fund public health. Today health care funding is only six% of the entire budget.
Instead of funding medical care and other social services, the county has engaged in a gigantic giveaway to the corporations. Every construction project–like the stunted mass transit system, for example–is mired in stupendous cost overruns, corruption and outright graft: huge amounts of money that enrich the capitalist class.
Measure B does not specify how much the politicians have to pay for health care. It only gives them new tax money. Thus the increased tax revenues paid by the working class and poor will allow the politicians to shift funding currently slated for public health care to the corporations. It won’t improve public health care–only the health of corporate bank accounts.
Measure B was strongly supported by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Local 660, which represents the county hospital workers. The SEIU provided three-fourths of the two million dollars spent to promote the Measure B tax increase. It also provided the people to walk door to door and work in a phone bank, talking the measure up.
In other words, the union officials did the dirty work for the bosses and the politicians, channeling the health care workers’ energy and resources to support a tax increase that will cost all workers more money with no guarantee that this will keep any trauma centers or save any jobs at all
Working people need to do exactly the opposite. Instead of collaborating with the politicians and bosses who are cutting jobs and closing down vital health care services, workers have to organize together to carry out a real fight and confront them.
The workers should not aim to give the politicians more money: our goal should be to make them use the money they today control to pay for services the population needs.
Nov 11, 2002
The Chairman of the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission), Harvey Pitt, resigned last week. His chief accountant, Robert Herdman, resigned three days later. And William Webster, former head of the CIA and the FBI, who was just appointed to the oversight board of the SEC which would clean up Corporate America, said, "If I conclude that my ability to serve impedes on the ability of the board to function, I will step aside."Why is there such turmoil at the SEC? This is the agency which was designed to make sure corporations follow the rules. It is the place where corporate misdeeds are supposed to be handled and prosecuted. Following the recent Enron and WorldCom scandals, on July 30, Bush signed a new bill to further clean up those corporations which sure seemed dirty to the public. Bush claimed, "Corporate misdeeds will be found and will be punished. ... No more easy money for corporate criminals. Just hard time."But the White House couldn’t clean up the corporations. After all, these were the friends of the Bushes, those who had donated thousands of dollars in political contributions and even given corporate officers to the administration. And Congress couldn’t clean up the corporations, since that’s where most of their contributions come from. So the job would fall to the SEC.
The chairman appointed to the SEC by Bush was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who had spent the last 25 years defending those accused of financial fraud. He and his firm had at one time or another represented all of the Big Five accounting firms, including Arthur Andersen, the former accountants for Enron. No wonder his critics charged that as head of the SEC, his committee lacked any teeth. In fact, the SEC’s Public Oversight Board had no power to subpoena records from firms it accused of wrong-doing; in February the board members resigned in protest.
Webster was brought in by Pitt to head a new oversight committee set up after the July 30 bill was passed. But Pitt neglected to mention to anyone that Webster had headed an auditing committee overseeing United Technologies, a corporation currently under investigation for fraud.
To accomplish their job of making sure the books of the corporations are clean and law-abiding, the SEC proposed to hire 200 new auditors. Less than three months later, the administration cut the SEC’s budget request by 200 million dollars. The White House thinks SEC auditors can find corporate misdeeds in their spare time.
All these maneuvers suit the corporations very well. After Webster and Pitt are gone, will the fox find somebody new to guard the henhouse?
Nov 11, 2002
Elections held on November 3 in Turkey produced a massive political shake-up. None of the three political parties which made up the government for the past four years managed to pass the 10% barrier required to enter the parliament. The party of the prime minister Bulent Ecevit received only 1.2% of the vote. His former foreign minister, who had abandoned the unpopular Ecevit to form his own party, got even less.
This protest vote was widely expected. While practically all leading politicians have been involved in various corruption scandals, the country has been submerged in a deep economic crisis. The state is currently running a 210 billion dollar debt to foreign and domestic creditors. To protect their profits in the face of a stagnant economy, the bosses have resorted to factory closures and layoffs. The official unemployment rate is 20%, in reality even higher. Seventy-two% of the unemployed are young people who have never had a steady job. For those who still work, the minimum wage is about $110 a month, or about 60 cents an hour.
Aside from showing disillusionment with the country’s ruling elite, the outcome of the election can hardly be called a reflection of what the population wants. The big winner was the Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, which was formed last year by some members of a banned Islamist party. The AKP received only 34% of the vote, but since only one other party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, passed the 10% barrier with 19%, the AKP was awarded almost two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly.
The AKP’s success was aided by the fact that its leader, R. Tayyip Erdogan, had been prevented from running for office because the military had banned him from politics in 1998. Thus Erdogan has been able to present himself as a political outsider, under attack by the country’s corrupt ruling elite.
But workers certainly have nothing to expect from the AKP. Both during his election campaign and in his speeches after the election, Erdogan reassured the bosses and Turkey’s creditors that the country will stay on the same course as before–which means that an AKP government, as did the governments before it, will help the Turkish bosses and foreign banks to secure their profits and loan payments. And that, of course, means that the burden of the economic crisis will stay on the shoulders of the Turkish working class.
That’s why, while Erdogan may be unpopular with the generals, the outcome of this election is certainly acceptable for the bosses. There will be a one-party government which, thanks to its religious rhetoric, has a certain base in the population. So the bosses can count on the possibility that they will have a stable government which could impose the bosses’ agenda on the population.
But that all depends on how the population, especially the working class, will react to the austerity measures continually imposed on them. Turkish workers can certainly look back to a tradition of building trade unions and organizing strikes. Today, such struggles continue in the face of low wages, layoffs and factory closures, but they remain isolated. If the workers can unify these isolated fights and turn them into a massive social movement, they can effectively counter the attacks of the bosses and their politicians.
Nov 11, 2002
A series of nine explosions in the huge black township of Soweto in South Africa left one person dead and at least one wounded. Guards on duty at a parking lot for minibuses in that township reported seeing white men place a package beneath a bus. It turned out to be another bomb.
The South African government arrested and brought to trial 18 whites it accuses of attempting to overthrow the government.
Thomas Vorster, the first man to go on trial, is an Afrikaner suspected of running a racist group known as Boer Force. He has said nothing so far. Other Afrikaners have not been so quiet. An Afrikaner, Fred Rundle, speaking as a white favoring "separation" of the races, said,"They’re freedom fighters....We want a territory for ourselves where we can rule ourselves. We don’t want to be ruled by people with a culture that is alien to us. Yet here we are, forced to live amongst them and work under them."How ironic to hear this racist speech of "freedom" and democratic liberties.
The Boers were white South Africans of Dutch ancestry who ran the country for many decades. As a tiny minority, they were unwilling to allow the slightest right, the smallest benefit to go to the black majority which had lived in the area for many centuries before the whites arrived. In their days of power, these "apartheid" rulers forced not only separation between whites and blacks but degradation and humiliation upon the black population of the area. Black South Africans lived almost as slaves, inhabiting enormous slums on the outskirts of towns because they were not allowed to live in towns except as servants of white families. Huge numbers of blacks were pushed out to remote rural "bantustans" where women could barely survive on barren farms while their husbands found work in the fields, factories or mines owned by whites.
This was the "culture" the Boer minority imposed on the black majority when the Boers held power. This was the Boers’ idea of "freedom." As for democracy–look what the Boers did when the black South Africans finally forced the old regime to grand the first elections since white people had arrived! They set off bombs throughout the country to prevent the elections. This is the past the Boers who today use terrorism against the population want to go back to.
Afrikaners like Rundle can call themselves "freedom fighters" all they want, but they were–and are–nothing but terrorists.
Nov 11, 2002
One hundred and seventeen dead hostages, for sure; and perhaps more considering those near death in hospitals. That is the result of the intervention of the Russian forces of law and order that put an end to the hostage situation at a Moscow theater. As for those who took the hostages, nearly all of them are dead, many executed in cold blood.
Of course, the action of the Chechen commandos who took hostages in a public theater is humanly unacceptable and politically unjustifiable. The commandos consciously took the risk that their act might end in tragedy, not only for themselves but also for all the hostages. Terrorist methods, even when they are taken in the name of an oppressed people, can only do a disservice to the latter. At the same time, one can only be horrified by the methods used by the Russian forces of law and order, who chose deliberately to sacrifice the lives of the hostages when they used chemical "weapons of mass destruction," as Bush calls them. No one knows whether the hostages would have been executed anyway by the hostage-takers, but it is the Russian forces who killed the ones who are dead today.
By deciding to put an end to the hostage taking in this horrible way, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin reinforced his image as a strong man. He certainly showed the barbarism of his state that transformed a theater room into a gas chamber.
But what is even more barbarous is the war that the Russian government carries out in Chechnya. It is a dirty war that resembles a colonial war carried out against an entire people in order to preserve the interests of the Russian state in a strategic region. It is a war where the Russian generals have been given free rein to terrorize the population as they sacrifice the lives of their own Russian soldiers. The few images that come out of this war and make it onto television show Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, turned into ruin, with women, men and children attempting to survive in the middle of the bombings and the repression. While every major head of state gave Putin their support during his action against the terrorists in Moscow, not a single one of them has condemned him for the terrorism he carries out in Chechnya.
For the big powers in the world, the "fight against terrorism" has always been a pretext for them to use, on a big scale, terrorist methods to preserve their own interests. It is in the name of the "fight against terrorism" that Bush bombarded Afghanistan during many weeks, massacring thousands of Afghans who were not responsible for, but the victims of, the Taliban dictatorship. French president Chirac recently gave homage to general Massu as a "very great soldier." But how many Algerians were tortured and summarily executed under his authority, in the name of the "fight against terrorism," as France tried to maintain its colonial domination of Algeria?
It is again in the name of the "fight against terrorism" that the United States government is preparing a war against Iraq, with the support of all the world’s powers, despite a few mutterings of protest at the U.N. Yet how many innocent civilians will die in this war that the United States pretends to carry out against a sole individual, Saddam Hussein?
All of these people, from Putin to Bush to Chirac, denounce the terrorism of small groups in order better to justify their state terrorism. But this state terrorism has no more justification than that of the people who took hostages in Moscow: neither in its methods, nor in its objectives. Because the methods used from Chechnya to Iraq to Algeria or Afghanistan, are always to kill innocent people in order to terrorize a whole people. And the objective of the big powers is to use this terrorism to maintain a world order of the powerful over the oppressed, the rich over the poor, and the big imperialist nations over the peoples of the world.
Nov 11, 2002
Europe’s top intelligence officials and investigators are disputing the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq has ties with terrorists. "We found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," said the French judge who has led investigators fighting Al Qaeda’s activities in Europe for several years. "And we are working on 50 cases involving Al Qaeda or radical Islamic cells. I think if there were such links, we would have found them."Nonetheless, Bush continues to assert that Saddam Hussein "has got ties with Al Qaeda." Rumsfeld claimed the administration has "bullet-proof evidence" of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks. Of course, he offers nothing but assertions.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, a German intelligence source called this talk of a connection "nonsense." Britain’s Foreign Secretary said that U.S. allegations of a meeting between one of the September 11 hijackers and an Iraqi intelligence agent have been disproved. Even George Tenet, head of the CIA, issued a statement refuting Bush’s claims.
The issue is not simply whether Bush lies. We already have plenty of evidence attesting to that–his recent claim, for example, that the SEC had fully exonerated him in the Harken Energy scandal, when the SEC did no such thing. It strongly criticized him for filing insider stock sale papers months late.
In any case, the real issue concerning his current pack of lies is that not only won’t a war on Iraq prevent more terrorism–it will provoke more terrorist attacks. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge involved in the investigations, said, "A war on Iraq will not diminish the terrorist threat. It will probably increase it. It could radicalize the situation in the Middle East ."Bush pretends he is taking the U.S. into war against Iraq in order to prevent terrorism.
In fact, the situation will develop in exactly the opposite way. U.S. threats against Iraq can only reinforce the already deep well of hatred toward the U.S. which exists in countries around the world. It is this hatred which has already spawned terrorist attacks–and which could spawn more.
Bush’We need to oppose the horrible state terrorism the U.S. carries out against people in other countries because of what this humanly means–but also because he puts us at great risk.
Nov 11, 2002
On October 13, Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation made food poisoning history. It recalled 27.4 million pounds of chicken products, the largest recall ever, because of contamination in one of its Pennsylvania plants. On November 2, the Jack Lambersky Poultry Co. of New Jersey recalled 200,000 pounds of chicken and turkey because of the same bacteria.
The Pilgrim’s Pride plant had been cited by Agriculture Department inspectors 40 times this year. Their reports said "corrective actions were not implemented, not accomplished in a timely fashion, or ineffective." Nonetheless, this plant was never shut down by the Agriculture Department. It continued to work until an outbreak of food poisoning killed seven people and poisoned at least 50 in the U.S. northeast. Only then did the Centers for Disease Control step in and force a recall.
After this scandal, many USDA meat inspectors told reporters about new, weaker rules that prevent inspectors from doing their jobs. An instruction memo issued last May to meat inspectors in Kansas said that inspectors were responsible for any lost production they caused. They were also told to overlook small amounts of animal feces unless the feces had a "fibrous" nature.
Since l998, a new USDA program called HACCP–instituted under the Clinton administration–replaced the old mandatory, hands-on federal inspections. The new program allows meat processing companies to make their own inspections and file their own reports. USDA "inspectors" now inspect more plant paperwork much more often than meat. Some inspectors call HACCP the "Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray" program.
Something is rotten in these packing plants and in Washington, D.C., and it’s not only the meat. Capitalism is taking us back to the early 20th Century–the period Upton Sinclair described in The Jungle.
Nov 11, 2002
At the end of October, General Motors broke new ground in its endless fleecing of taxpayers. GM said it would ask the Michigan government to declare one of its skyscrapers and 10 blocks of its prime downtown Detroit riverfront property as a "renaissance zone".A "renaissance zone" designation lets companies located there operate for up to 15 years without paying state or local taxes. This no-tax plan supposedly was set up as a way to improve devastated, impoverished areas.
GM’s prime downtown properties hardly qualify, but this didn’t seem to embarrass GM or government officials pushing this deal. GM wants a tax break to remodel its skyscraper, the 500 Tower, to suit EDS Corporation, which is planning to move in. EDS is Ross Perot’s former company that does most of GM’s computer development.
GM also asked for tax breaks on the 10-block riverfront project of premium condos, shopping, entertainment and offices it had announced last June.It’s laughable that GM pretends its downtown Detroit real estate is an impoverished zone. But reality has never stood in the way of GM’s getting subsidies from the State of Michigan. For example, GM soaked Michigan taxpayers for 107 million dollars in l998 for its Flint engine plant, 93 million in l999 for its Warren Tech Center, and 169 million in 200l for its new auto plant in Lansing.
City Democratic and Republican state officials have always been ready and willing to give taxpayers’ money to GM. A case in point: GM wanted to move its world headquarters from its ancient building in Detroit’s New Center–a building so old it had no central air conditioning–to a modern headquarters in the downtown Renaissance Center (the RenCen), originally built by Ford. For GM to upgrade its old building to make it salable would have run hundreds of millions of dollars.
No problem for the State of Michigan. The Governor made a deal to help a real estate company finance the purchase of the unimproved building–for which the State will then lease back for 20 years. The State will also spend 116 million-plus to remodel it. (The GM executive suite is reserved for the Governor whenever he or she visits Detroit.) The State also provided a tax break of 8.3 million dollars for GM’s new RenCen parking garage. And it spent over 140 million to rework the roads around GM’s new address at the RenCen.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the tax burden for Michigan taxpayers is at least a billion dollars higher because of gifts like these to GM in recent years. A billion dollars of public money gone to subsidize the bosses’ private profit.
It’s a cash-and-carry government. They take our cash and carry it to the corporations.
Nov 11, 2002
"Bowling for Columbine" is a documentary by Michael Moore, whose previous movie, "Roger and Me" looked at what General Motors did to Flint, Michigan. This new film starts from the massacre at Columbine High School to look at the broader issue of violence in the society.
Worth the price of admission is an animated clip about U.S. history, showing the violence against the Indians and the history of racism in this country, where violence was used to subjugate black people.
The cartoon–quite hilarious–and the movie do a good job of pointing out how racist this society is. But it doesn’t examine why it is. The movie shows, for example, how racist and hysterical fears have been whipped up time and again in the population. But it doesn’t examine how deliberately the capitalists have done this–to divert attention from working people’s fundamental problem–them.
Another thing the film does well is show the many different ways U.S. society is violent and how tax dollars fund violence.
Starting from Columbine High School located in Littleton, Colorado, the film then jumps to missile manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which is also located in Littleton. A corporate spokesperson in the film says their missiles exist for "self-defense" only.
That this is a lie is exposed by film clips spanning decades, showing U.S. troops invading other countries to impose "regime changes." Footage of innocent civilian casualties piles up on the screen. These U.S. invasions are shown to be awful massacres, just as Columbine was. The movie makes a strong point that the very day of Columbine the U.S. carried out its biggest bombing in Kosovo.
The movie shows that Canada has more guns in relation to the population than the U.S. does, but the murder rate is much, much lower than in the U.S. It shows it’s the extreme poverty of the U.S., the historic use of violence to hold black people down and the state’s use of violence around the world that explains all the gun killings in the U.S., not the guns themselves.
It looks at Michigan’s welfare to work program which put a single mother from the Flint area on 90 minute daily bus rides to work two jobs at a mall in wealthy Oakland County. Still she could not make enough to prevent her family’s eviction. When the woman’s 6-year-old went to stay with her brother after the eviction, the boy found his uncle’s loaded gun, brought it to school and accidentally killed a 6-year-old classmate.
The film interviews the white prosecutor who received angry mail for refusing to try the 6-year-old black child as an adult. The white sheriff, on camera, puts blame squarely on the welfare-to- work-program that took a decent parent out of the home.
The film holds up a mirror to our daily lives here in the U.S. and dares us to look long and hard and ask: "Why?"Seeing the film may also spur some to seek out solutions to the problems raised, and a solution does exist. Because the working class, when it is organized and fighting, has the possibility to take power away from the capitalist class–the parasites who profit from the violence and racism that the movie exposes.
Nov 11, 2002
The family of Frederick Finley has now received 7.5 million dollars in a settlement from the May Department Stores Co., the parent company of Lord & Taylor.
Over two years ago, Frederick Finley was murdered outside a Lord and Taylor department store in Dearborn, Michigan by several of the store’s security guards. After his 11-year-old stepdaughter was accused of shoplifting a $4 bracelet from the store, the family was confronted by security guards who choked Finley to death.
Day after day, the incident made front page news. You would think there would have been outrage that a man could be killed for a $4 bracelet. Not at all–not when the victim was black, without political connections or wealth.
The media–provided with information by the authorities, condemned the family–maligning their character, their personal habits, the marital status of Finley and his common-law wife, their step-children. Some articles even blamed Finley for his own death, despite the coroner’s report that he was choked to death. When nearly 5,000 people demonstrated at the shopping center, the media portrayed this demonstration as if it were a public nuisance, rather than a legitimate outcry at a disgusting murder. And although prosecutors, facing new protests, finally charged one guard in the death–but only on an involuntary charge–a local Dearborn judge refused to order a trial.
Of course, none of this came as a surprise in Dearborn, with its long-standing–and well-deserved–reputation for racism. Orville Hubbard, the Dearborn mayor who at one time declared that black people should leave Dearborn before nightfall, is today honored with a statue on the lawn of city hall.
Now, more than two years later, Lord and Taylor has offered to pay seven and a half million dollars.
This is no small settlement, agreed to by a company to avoid a long drawn-out legal battle. Seven and a half million is a defacto admission that Frederick Finley was murdered.
As they say, money speaks louder than words–in this case, money admitted to murder.
Nov 11, 2002
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Virginia would be the first state to try the two sniper suspects, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo. "It is imperative," thundered Ashcroft, "that the ultimate sanction be available for those who have committed these crimes."Other officials of the Bush administration explained that not only is Virginia "more efficient" at executing people, having put more people to death than any other state–except George Bush’s Texas, of course. Virginia also allows the death penalty for juveniles, while Maryland, where most of the killings took place, doesn’t.
Of course, what Muhammad and Malvo did was horrible. Assuming that they were the snipers–and the case does seem strong–they carried out a cold-blooded murder spree. They prepared a vehicle from which they could shoot, then they picked off their targets with a military sniper’s weapon. Their targets were chosen, not as a function of who they were killing, but in order to create as much confusion as possible.
It’s obvious that no society can accept such horrible actions.
But what Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration are doing is much worse. For over two weeks now, the Bush administration has been orchestrating this case as a way to push for reinforcing the death penalty at a time when there is increasing opposition to it. In fact, several states, including Maryland, have recently declared moratoriums on carrying out executions, after people sitting on death row have been shown to be innocent by new DNA methods. In Illinois, for example, 13 men sitting on death row awaiting execution have been proved not to have committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.
The arbitrary imposition of the death penalty has long created opposition to its use. A murderer who is white and rich has hardly ever been put to death, while one who is black or Hispanic or both white and poor has a very great chance of being condemned, even when the crime committed is similar. Moreover, the murderer of a white person, whether white or black, is four times more likely to be put to death than the murderer of a black person. The justice system clearly puts a higher price on the life of a white person than on the life of a black person. It values the life of a wealthy person more than that of someone poor.
But the issue is not simply whether execution is unfairly imposed or whether an innocent person is put to death–as horrible as these things are. The issue is the outright barbarity of the death penalty. Not a single country in Europe executes people, nor do a number of other countries. In using the death penalty, the U.S. joins itself to some of the most reactionary countries in the world, and some of the most violent, dictatorial regimes in the world, starting with Saudi Arabia. The death penalty is an open declaration of contempt for human life.
The never-ending state of war in which the U.S. is engaged, using its "weapons of mass destruction" against civilians in one far-flung part of the globe after another, is simply another expression of that same contempt for human life.
Is it simply a coincidence that John Muhammad came back from the Gulf War "a changed man," one given to rages, according to his first wife, who hid from him out of fear at what he had become? Maybe.
Is it simply a coincidence that Robert S. Flores, Jr.–the man who two weeks ago killed three teachers at the University of Arizona–also served in the Gulf War, after receiving sniper training?
Is it just another coincidence that there has been a rash of murders by the elite special forces troops returning from the Afghanistan war?
All just coincidences? Maybe. But the fact is that a society which puts forward military solutions, that is, violent solutions, trains its population to be violent.
Today John Ashcroft openly stands in front of the TV cameras, practically rubbing his hands together in glee, considering the possibility of putting John Muhammad and Lee Malvo to death. He might as well propose to take them out to the public square and turn their execution into a public spectacle.
That’s what is done in countries like Saudi Arabia whose wealthy class seems to thrive on the death penalty–and which does quite a good job at producing terrorists, by the way.
The ruling class of this country is violent to the core. This is their "morality." Execution is their answer to the violence they themselves have spawned.
It’s not ours. We can refuse to be sucked in by their disgusting answers. We can set as our goal the creation of a society in which injustice, exploitation and the contempt for human life which capitalism produces are done away with. The morality of the working class demands respect for life.