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
Mar 3, 2003
One after the other, Bush’s excuses for going to war with Iraq were demolished. Even the CIA rebuked him when he claimed Saddam Hussein was linked with al Qaeda. U.N. inspectors found no sign that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction." When the U.N, under Bush’s prodding, came up with a new demand at the last minute, Iraq complied, agreeing to destroy the short-range missiles guarding its cities because their range was 120 miles, instead of 94 miles.
Nonetheless, the Bush administration continues to push ahead to drag the world into a new and even more destructive war.
Why? The issue is not Saddam Hussein, no matter how vicious a dictator he is. For years–when Saddam Hussein was massacring Kurds, for example–he was in the stable of U.S.-sponsored dictators, given weapons and money so he could carry out his massacres. Even after the first Gulf War, Papa Bush gave Saddam Hussein his army back so he could put down the revolt of the Kurds which broke out at the end of the war.
For this new war, Junior Bush has arranged to bring in the Turkish army to control the Kurds. Following behind U.S. forces into Iraq, the Turkish army is to mop up resistance among the Kurdish population. Turkey already has a big experience putting down the Kurds inside its own borders, having slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds over the years.
This war will not be fought to protect the Kurds, any more than it will be fought to liberate the Iraqi people. They will both be its victims.
And what about us–working people in the United States? What will it mean for us?
And what happens if U.S. troops are tied up in the region for years–which could happen even if Saddam Hussein were to be quickly removed. Millions of young men learned a painful lesson in Viet Nam: when you are part of an invading army in someone else’s country, when your bombers have destroyed cities and villages, when your country’s war leads to the deaths of millions of civilians, including children, you will be hated.
A new generation of young people is about to learn this same painful lesson in the Middle East.
The American workers’ standard of living is already plummeting. Bush even now pretends that in order to pay for the war, he must cut Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment and welfare benefits, public services, education.
Bush’s budget proposals tell the whole story. While expenditures for new military research and weapons jumped up drastically, every social program, every public service and even the schools are all targeted for cuts.
Bush is using the pretext of this war to cut social and public services–so he can give even more presents to big business and to the wealthy clique which owns and controls big business. He supports every attempt made by big companies to lower wages and cut benefits. Companies rush to court to declare bankruptcy, in order to dump their pension plans–even while paying executives million dollar plus salaries and bonuses. Not a peep comes from Bush. Of course not. Bush is in the service of the wealthy class, for whom the whole country and even the whole world is their private hunting grounds.
Bush is leading two wars at once–the first one is against us here at home; the second one is against the Iraqi people. Both of these wars are being carried out to help big business increase profits. Both of these wars will cost us dearly–in material terms and in human terms.
We may not be able to stop Bush’s rush to war immediately. But we don’t have to cheer him on. We can show that American working people do not support these wars carried out to enrich American big business.
We can dig in our heels, refuse the attacks aimed at us, whether by Bush’s government or our own bosses. Our fight is here at home–not against other people like us. American workers will fight here to protect ourselves from all their wars.
Mar 3, 2003
A test on ground water this past December in Harford County, north of Baltimore, found water contaminated by perchlorate, a military rocket fuel. The county is the site of Aberdeen Proving Ground, a 72,000 acre base where chemical weapons research has been done for decades.
Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is also loaded with buried bombs and deadly nerve agents and cancer-causing solvents; it is so damaged it has earned a place on the Superfund list. If and when the clean-up is finished over the next 30 years, the cost for Aberdeen alone is expected to exceed more than a billion dollars. But the military budgeted less than two billion dollars for environmental clean-ups for the ENTIRE country. So Aberdeen is likely to be cleaned by the twelfth of never.
In fact, the state of Maryland alone has 855 waste sites needing clean-up on current and former military bases. One near Washington D.C. was turned into a wild-life refuge used for hunting, more than a dozen years ago. But it turns out the area is still full of grenades, mortar shells and rockets. A recently closed base, Fort Ritchie, in western Maryland, is the site of new housing. It was quite a shock for the families living there when grenades, mortar shells and even a bazooka rocket were found in a field nearby.
At Fort Detrick in Maryland, the military has been developing biological weapons, including anthrax of the type used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. The cost for cleaning up there has more than doubled since at least 100 vials of dangerous bacteria were found in its dump last year.
The military claims it has been following the rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency since the early 1980s.
That’s strange, since the military regularly asks for exemptions from the EPA rules.
The cost we pay for the military is not only the terrible possibility of the deaths and destruction of the young people serving, nor the financial burden.
The world’s most powerful military not only destroys people in other countries, it slowly poisons people here.Super military mess in Maryland
A test on ground water this past December in Harford County, north of Baltimore, found water contaminated by perchlorate, a military rocket fuel. The county is the site of Aberdeen Proving Ground, a 72,000 acre base where chemical weapons research has been done for decades.
Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is also loaded with buried bombs and deadly nerve agents and cancer-causing solvents; it is so damaged it has earned a place on the Superfund list. If and when the clean-up is finished over the next 30 years, the cost for Aberdeen alone is expected to exceed more than a billion dollars. But the military budgeted less than two billions dollars for environmental clean ups for the ENTIRE country. So Aberdeen is likely to be cleaned by the twelfth of never.
In fact, the state of Maryland alone has 855 waste sites needing clean up on current and former military bases. One near Washington D.C. was turned into a wild-life refuge used for hunting more than a dozen years ago. But it turns out the area is still full of grenades, mortar shells and rockets. A recently closed base, Fort Ritchie, in western Maryland, is the site of new housing. It was quite a shock for the families living there when grenades, mortar shells and even a bazooka rocket were found in a field nearby.
At Fort Detrick in Maryland, the military has been developing biological weapons, including anthrax of the type used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. The cost for cleaning up there has more than doubled since at least 100 vials of dangerous bacteria were found in its dump last year.
The military claims it has been following the rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency since the early 1980s.
That’s strange, since the military regularly asks for exemptions from the EPA rules.
The cost we pay for the military is not only the terrible possibility of the deaths and destruction of the young people serving, nor the financial burden.
The world’s most powerful military not only destroys people in other countries, it slowly poisons people here.
Mar 3, 2003
Jésica Santillán, who went into Duke University Hospital for an operation to save her life, was instead killed by that operation. Doctors gave her the heart and lungs from someone with an incompatible blood type. Hospital spokespersons called it a "clerical error."
A "clerical error"? Clerical error means that someone doesn’t get billed right away, or gets billed too much. Who could think of calling the death of someone a "clerical error"?
We may have paid more attention to the death of Jésica, but what happened to her is all too common in American hospitals today. A blood type is a simple thing to verify–if time is taken. But, less and less is time taken.
"Errors"–clerical or otherwise–are common today and growing more common. Infections are commonplace also.
How could it be otherwise, as hospitals across the country transform themselves into profit-making enterprises? In order to maximize profits, they cut back on staff. Nurses, whose job it is to monitor the overall situation of the patients, are given extra patients to care for. The staff whose job it is to keep a hospital sanitary is reduced. There are fewer dietary workers, whose job it is to make sure that patients get the right food; fewer clinical workers, whose job it is to take the tests and read their results; fewer pharmacy workers, whose job it is to make sure that patients get the right drugs.
With such cutbacks, there can only be more "errors," more infections.
If there is a "nursing shortage," as some hospitals claim, it’s because of such worsening conditions.
Workers in factories know what it means on an assembly line when the boss "cuts costs." Quality goes down.
Well, hospital bosses are cutting costs too. And "quality" in the hospitals is going down. But there’s a difference. When a car gets messed up badly, the company just recalls it. But no one can recall Jésica nor all the thousands of others who die as the result of similar mistakes.
Mar 3, 2003
The catastrophic break-up and crash of the Columbia space shuttle on February 1 that cost the lives of seven astronauts might have been officially labeled an accident. But it certainly was not a surprise. The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, NASA’s own independent monitor, had been warning about unsafe conditions in the shuttle program for years. As recently as last April, the chairman of the NASA’s safety monitoring panel, Richard Blomberg, had told Congress, "I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am right now." And these concerns were echoed by a whole host of government auditors, former technicians and other experts connected to the shuttle program.
After recent near-misses, NASA’s safety panel put its finger on the cause of the problems: "In spite of the clear mandate that neither schedule nor cost should ever be allowed to compromise safety... NASA is driven by achieving cost and staff reductions, and the pressures placed on increasing flights."
Not only did these earlier warnings fall on deaf ears. Five of NASA’s most vocal critics on the independent safety monitoring board, including Chairman Blomberg, were forced out by the government in the months before the fatal Columbia disaster.
To say that cost cuts have taken their toll on NASA is an understatement. Since 1990, funding for the shuttle program had been cut by 40%. Last year, NASA had its budget cut by one billion dollars, even while the government increased funding for military space flights by 600 million dollars.
At the same time, NASA has farmed out 95% of the work of building and repairing the shuttle fleet to private industry. In 1996, the Clinton administration put most of the responsibility for the day to day running and maintaining of the shuttle program in the hands of United Space Alliance (USA), a consortium owned jointly by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the two biggest military contractors in the world.
The Clinton administration justified this privatization by saying that private corporations would find more cost savings. And it’s true they found "cost-savings" by cutting back their workforces. This certainly pushed up their profits–but at the expense of both safety and scientific research.
At the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, operated by Lockheed, for example, the company cut the number of employees in half, even while the facility turned out more work. After the shuttle disaster, employees told reporters that managers encourage them to cut corners and that they are often not trained for their jobs. Workers also said that defects were often papered over, and not reported to NASA. Some unauthorized repairs concerned the application of the fuel tanks’ foam insulation–the same insulation now suspected of causing the damage to the shuttle’s wing.
Up and down the line, the shuttle program has been plagued by the same "cost-cutting." As another example–NASA gave Raytheon and Johnson Controls a fat contract to operate the special cameras that photograph the shuttle launch. But the telescopic lens of one of the cameras has been broken for months and it hasn’t been repaired and its images are fuzzy. At the same time, these companies laid off most of their experienced camera operators. So, the fuzzy images taken by inexperienced technicians are what NASA depends on to analyze what happened during the shuttle launch.
The corporations have it enshrined in their contracts that for every dollar they cut from the cost of the space shuttle, they get to keep 35 cents. So, the more money they save for NASA, the greater the profit they make for themselves. These companies are very open about what their first priority is in doing space work. After winning its latest big contract for space work from the government, Lockheed wrote in promotional material that its space work was "designed for the journey from NASA to NYSE (New York Stock Exchange)."
Mar 3, 2003
Joseph Amrine, a death row inmate accused of killing another prisoner while serving time for burglary, has called for a new trial based on new evidence, as his conviction was based only on the testimony of three convicts, all of whom have since recanted their testimony.
During Amrine’s hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court, two judges questioned the assistant states’ attorney, Frank Jung, who was asking the court to deny Amrine the right to a new trial.
One judge asked, "Are you suggesting that even if we find Mr. Amrine innocent, he should be executed?" Jung replied, "That’s correct, your honor."
The other judge asked, "If we find DNA evidence absolutely excludes somebody as the murderer, then must we execute them anyway if we can’t find an underlying constitutional violation at their trial?"
Jung again replied, "That’s correct, your honor."
Reporters questioned Jung’s boss about his incredible statements. Attorney General Nixon backed Jung up, saying his response was a "legally correct answer."
Indeed it was! The legal system in this country is not a system of justice, which would put the highest priority on exonerating the innocent; it’s a system of getting guilty verdicts, no matter what. Always has been. But hardly ever do we hear it admitted in court!
Mar 3, 2003
A new report to the Senate Finance Committee details the tax avoidance schemes of Enron.
As one Congressman said, "...instead of drilling for oil and gas, Enron was drilling the tax code, looking for ways to find more and more tax shelters."
The report shows how the same tax avoidance schemes used by Enron are also used by most other big companies. It estimates that just the top 10,000 companies avoid taxes of over 50 billion dollars a year.
Fifty billion dollars a year would go a long way toward dealing with the problems we face. If each of the 50 states got an extra billion dollars or so a year, education , public services, health and social services could be improved.
The Senate report shows that the schemes used by Enron are now standard practice in the whole corporate world. And for good reason. As their economy sinks, each individual corporation uses every trick and dodge to stay afloat longer than the others.
This means the CEOs have to cook their books. In the process, of course, they manage to skim off many millions of dollars for themselves! Their standard practice is to steal from the shareholders as well as from the taxpayers.
But why shouldn’t they lie, cheat and steal? Out of all the Enrons and Arthur Andersens–out of all those executives who have been found out–how many have had to pay any real penalty?
Ask George W. Bush. He’s one of them.
Mar 3, 2003
In mid-February, the Bush administration announced that it was considering sanctions against North Korea. These sanctions involve cutting off the money sent to North Korea by Koreans living in Japan and reducing food aid–measures to squeeze this severely impoverished country, already plagued by widespread famine and malnutrition. According to Bush, the reason for such actions is that North Korea builds nuclear warheads and long-range missiles with the intent of delivering them all the way to the U.S.
In reality, it’s not the U.S. which is threatened by this small, underdeveloped, severely impoverished country. North Korea would not survive a nuclear confrontation with the world’s only superpower which owns the world’s largest and deadliest arsenal, both conventional and nuclear. The threats all go in the other direction, and have for over half a century.
Starting with the U.S. decision to divide Korea, followed by the U.S. war on Korea, the country was decimated. The U.S. heavily bombed North Korea, destroying much of its infrastructure. The U.S. also used chemical weapons in the war, causing widespread contamination and severe damage and disease in the local population, as well as among U.S. troops.
Since the Korean War in the 1950s, the U.S. has never really eased the pressure on North Korea. To this day, almost 50 years after the end of the fighting, the U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty to officially end the war. The U.S. maintains 37,000 combat troops in South Korea in addition to the South Korean army, which is under U.S. joint command. These forces are supported by nuclear-armed submarines in the Pacific. While the U.S. is now accusing North Korea of planning to build nuclear weapons, for the past half century the U.S. itself has always kept the threat of a nuclear attack against North Korea alive.
In addition, the U.S. has isolated North Korea from the world by imposing a trade embargo on the country. The heavy U.S. bombing during the war had already thoroughly destroyed North Korea’s industry and infrastructure, effectively sending the country back 100 years. The embargo ever since has made sure that North Korea stays like that.
The end of the Cold War not only didn’t end North Korea’s isolation, it actually made things even worse for that country. The two major countries that had traded with North Korea and provided some aid during the Cold War years, the Soviet Union and China, cut off their subsidies to North Korea as they established closer ties with South Korea. Severe shortages, especially in food and energy, started to plague North Korea. In the mid-1990s, famine killed an estimated two million people, that is, 10% of the country’s population.
In 1994, after a standoff with the U.S. similar to the current one, North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactor. In return, the Clinton administration promised North Korea two smaller nuclear reactors, to be delivered by 2003. The U.S. has not yet fulfilled this promise and says that the reactors will not be ready for use at least until 2005. Under the agreement, the U.S. had also begun to send North Korea an annual supply of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil to help out with the energy shortage, but the Bush administration stopped deliveries of fuel oil last year. On top of all this, Bush made his famous speech last year in which he mentioned North Korea among the three "terrorist" countries forming an "axis of evil." And when Bush made that speech, the U.S. was already waging war against another poor country, Afghanistan, and was getting ready to start a full-scale war on another member of Bush’s "axis of evil," Iraq.
North Korea does not threaten the U.S. The U.S. has threatened and continues to threaten North Korea. And not only North Korea. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has played the role of imperialist cop in eastern Asia. It fought two major wars in Korea and Viet Nam, to impose its rule.
Today, a total of 100,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in South Korea and Japan, backed by the most massive and modern weaponry in the world. The never-ending accusations against the supposedly "rogue" North Korean regime are a smokescreen and an excuse for the U.S. to maintain this large military presence in the region. It’s the American military presence which is the real threat to peace and security in eastern Asia as well as other parts of the world.
Mar 3, 2003
The following report of the big demonstration in Britain first appeared in Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of our comrades in France.
If the day of February 15 showed something in England, it was above all the depth of the opposition to the war policy of Tony Blair’s Labour government.
Never have there been so many demonstrators in London. For over nine hours, two columns of demonstrators leaving from different points converged on Hyde Park, the largest park in London. Over a million people demonstrated; many more than in November 2002, which already was a strong slap in the face for Blair.
The demonstration was called by the "Coalition Against the War in Iraq," a coalition that ran the gamut from the extreme left to the Muslim fundamentalists, passing through various ecologists, third worldists and a number of pacifist groups. And three of the five British political parties represented in Parliament joined in the call for the demonstration: the Liberal Democrats, the Irish Nationals of the NSP and the Gaelic nationalists of Plaid Cymru. There were also a number of unions and local groups tied to the labor movement.
In any case, the organizers were overwhelmed by the large number of demonstrators. The large majority of the participants appeared to have come spontaneously. Among them, there was an important proportion of very young people, among whom many came as an entire class organized in their high schools from all four corners of the country. And there was also a high percen percent of people coming from the middle classes, that is from the voters who "float" between parties.
Finally, a good half of the demonstrators were modest people, working people, unemployed or retired, coming to express their indignation not only against the threat of war but also against the arrogance of a government which looks down on the majority of public opinion which has opposed its policy. It is this indignation in the population that was seen on the tens of thousands of hand-written signs carried by the demonstrators.
Blair moved up his speech before the Scottish Labor Party by four hours–in order to avoid the protest that was planned in front of the conference center at the official time of his speech. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators noted the supposed courage of this politician who wouldn’t face those who contest his bellicose words–but who is ready to let the blood of the Iraqi people flow under the pretext that "ridding the world of Saddam Hussein would be a humanitarian act."
After the February 15 march, no one can doubt the public opposition in Britain to the threat of war against Iraq. Blair himself saw it well. But will this change his policy? No question of that. He is satisfied to send contradictory messages, which is nothing new. He indicates the necessity to find a "solution within the framework of the United Nations," which is a formulation fluid enough to hold all interpretations, while at the same time he goes along with all of Bush’s war talk.
Blair knows that the pacifist opposition he faces is not homogenous. Part of this current is more inspired by anti-Americanism, isolationism and above all a profound illusion in the neutrality of the United Nations, than it is by a real rejection of the predatory nature of British imperialism against the poor countries. And it is this that marks the limits of this movement as it is today, no matter how large the mobilization it was able to organize.
That being said, and no matter what Blair will say, this mobilization reflected deep opposition in the population to this war. The day after in the workplaces, there was an enthusiastic reaction which went well beyond those who actually participated. And this may reinforce the morale of a part of the population, particularly among the youth and the workers. If so, February 15 will have contributed to making people aware of their collective strength and convincing them that even if they don’t have the power to prevent this dirty war, they can perhaps force Blair to pull back his missiles and many other things as well.
Mar 3, 2003
The following article first appeared in Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle); the newspaper of our comrades in France.
In Spain the demonstrations on Saturday, February 15 were the most important that have taking place in this country for 25 years. They occurred in all the big cities, but also in very small ones. There were several million people who marched or who remained stationary for hours when it was impossible to march, as in Madrid, where it was impossible to take the planned route. The government didn’t even try to debate the figures, given how much the demonstrations exceeded predictions. Five% of the entire population was involved in these demonstrations.
These demonstrations were called by the left parties among others and were supported by numerous artists. They certainly expressed the opposition of the population to the Spanish government, as it falls in behind U.S. leaders in a warlike adventure against Iraq.
But the size of the demonstrations also reflects the discontent that the Spanish government’s policy has provoked in working class layers. This had already been expressed in giant demonstrations, as for example, against the reform of labor legislation which caused millions of workers to descend into the street, or the demonstrations in Galicia, which showed the extent of the population’s anger at the indifference and inertia of national and regional leaders in the wake of the catastrophic breakup of the oil tanker Prestige.
With only a few months before the next elections, the parties standing in opposition to Aznar’s Popular Party, which is currently in power, are certainly going to ride this discontent. But the extent of the mobilization is also an encouragement for all those who feel it’s necessary to continue the struggle.
Mar 3, 2003
On March 1, Turkey’s parliament rejected a law which would have allowed the U.S. to station troops in that country in order to invade Iraq from the north. This vote comes somewhat as a surprise since the leaders of Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, which has a commanding majority in the parliament, had urged their deputies to pass this measure. Only a few days before, the AKP leaders had made an agreement with the Bush administration about the deployment of 62,000 U.S. troops in Turkey.
The AKP deputies, however, were caught between a rock and a hard place. According to polls, as many as 95%, that is, the entire Turkish population almost without exception, opposes a war on Iraq. Even as the vote was being taken, over 50,000 protesters staged a spirited anti-war rally in front of the parliament. Allowing the U.S. to attack Iraq from Turkey would have totally discredited the AKP, which came to power only last November. So about 100 of the party’s deputies joined opposition deputies in a "no" vote, defeating the measure.
Does this vote mean that Turkey will not be involved in a U.S.-led war against Iraq? Of course not. U.S. warplanes have already been using bases in Turkey to launch bombing raids in Iraq for the past 12 years. And Turkey itself has had hundreds of troops inside northern Iraq for some time. In fact, the Turkish government was getting ready to use a U.S. war on Iraq as a cover to send 60,000 to 80,000 troops up to 140 or 170 miles into Iraq. Turkey’s excuse for such an action is to prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees from entering into Turkey, but its real goal is to control the Kurds in northern Iraq, preventing an outbreak which could encourage the Kurds inside of Turkey to do the same thing. Once the war starts, the Turkish government is likely to put such plans in action.
There are nearly 15 million Kurds who live in Turkey, and another 15 million Kurds who live in Iraq, Iran and Syria, making up the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own nation state. The Turkish government has long carried out repression against Kurds. After a Kurdish rebellion in the 1920s, the Turkish government abolished the word Kurd from school books, and the use of the Kurdish language was made illegal. The Kurdish provinces of Turkey’s southeast were put under military occupation. When a Kurdish group began guerrilla warfare there in the 1980s, the Turkish military bombed villages and expelled the population. Some 30,000 people were killed and millions were uprooted. All this time Turkey was a member of NATO, the alliance of supposedly democratic countries. And the U.S. fully backed Turkey in this oppression.
In fact the U.S. has a long history of sanctioning the oppression of Kurds by both Turkey and Iraq. When Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Kurds of Halabja in 1988 and killed 5,000 Kurds, the first Bush government maintained friendly relations with the Iraqi government. After the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. stood by when Saddam Hussein repressed a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq. It was not until after Hussein had done this that the U.S. put limits on Hussein.
So, of course, the U.S. is ready to accept Turkey putting down these very same Kurds in northern Iraq again–in the name of maintaining "order" in the area.
But at the same time that the U.S. agrees with the Turkish government’s plans to send its own troops into the Kurdish area of Iraq, it also places certain limits. The U.S. has drawn a line beyond which the Turkish army can’t go: it can’t touch the two important oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. They are reserved for U.S. control–and for U.S. oil companies.
The U.S. government prattles on about using the war to introduce democracy to Iraq. But in northern Iraq the U.S. is already planning on maintaining order, and that means above all the continued oppression of the Kurdish people, depriving them of the most elemental right to run their own affairs.
Mar 3, 2003
Companies like McDonald’s and the Greektown Casino have put up billboards around Detroit, commemorating black history month. Of course, it’s their very distorted version of black history.
One of them features a cartoon-like Ella Fitzgerald declaring, "It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts." Another depicts Coleman Young saying, "You can’t look forward and backward at the same time."
McDonald’s message to black people seems to be: "Stop whining and dwelling on the past, forget slavery and Jim Crow and move on." As if the problems of a racist society were all in the past, and all we have to do now is change our attitude.
In fact the black masses have always tried to move forward in the only way that matters. They fought against everyone–slaveholders, KKK, segregationists, outright and "secret" racists–who wanted to take them and the whole society backward. And they did it by always remembering where they came from–so they wouldn’t let any reactionary take them back there again.
Mar 3, 2003
Two feet of snow paralyzed the Baltimore-Washington region. As the snow continued to fall, Maryland’s Governor Ehrlich announced a state of emergency. The next day, he ordered a ban on travel except for hospitals and emergencies. And the following morning, with the snow not yet finished, he was on TV admonishing people to stay home if possible. "Use common sense," he said.
Common sense! Was that what it was when his administration told all state employees that their buildings were open, even before the snow had stopped falling? Oh, sure, he said that workers could stay home by using "liberal leave"–a misnamed provision, if there ever was one. So-called "liberal leave" means that if you stay home you either don’t get paid or you use up some of your sick or vacation leave time.
Ehrlich thought he pulled a slick one, forcing workers to come in and work, despite the outrageous situation, or else use up some of the money that was coming to them.
But the workers did him one better. The vast majority used their "common sense" and stayed at home–as any reasonable person would do in such a clearly unsafe situation. And now these workers are demanding to be paid for the day–as they would have been if Ehrlich had shut down the offices. It’s only "common sense."
Mar 3, 2003
On February 22, in Dearborn, Michigan, a Labor Against War rally was held at the UAW Local 600 hall.
About 250 people heard speakers from different unions oppose the coming war in Iraq. It was agreed that working people have a lot to lose, and nothing to gain, by the corporate drive toward war amid the oil fields.
The rally was important as a first public event in Michigan organized by union officials.
The rally also showed how little we can depend on nice statements by high union officials. In particular, in the UAW, three out of five of the national vice-presidents have issued statements against an Iraq war. Yet for the rally on the UAW’s own turf–they made no attempt to bring people out, or even publicize it.
It’s a shame, because a union hall packed to overflowing with workers against the war would have had its own special weight in the anti-war movement. It could have set an inspiring example for other unionists across the country.
But it’s no surprise to any union member any more, when high officials don’t put their money where their mouth is. It’s why we have to take the responsibility.
Mar 3, 2003
As the drumbeats for war speed up, Bush will try to use the soldiers he’s sent to the Middle East against people in this country who oppose the war–and against the soldiers’ own self-interest. "Now that they are in harm’s way, we must support the troops" –that will be his refrain.
This refrain–support the troops–is heard in every war. What scoundrels like Bush cannot gain by wrapping themselves in the flag of patriotism, they try to gain by playing on the workers’ concern for all their sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, and neighbors who are in the middle of the battlefield. In Viet Nam, Johnson and after him Nixon tried to make it seem that the demonstrators were attacking the troops (and, unfortunately, some demonstrators were stupid enough to get lured into this trick, believing that the troops were as much of a problem as Johnson and Nixon, et al). But the fact is that some of the biggest opposition to the war came from within the ranks of the armed forces–even though such opposition can subject a soldier on the battlefield to all sorts of discipline, up to and including execution.
Yes, we must support the troops. But the ONLY way to support them is to do everything possible to bring them back OUT of "harm’s way."
The best way to support the soldiers is to oppose this war.
Mar 3, 2003
Over the last months, the Bush administration’s point man in trying to prepare public opinion for the imminent U.S. war against Iraq has been Colin Powell. This role was marked by Powell’s February 5 performance before the U.N. Security Council, where all Powell’s charges against Iraq turned out to be filled with obvious lies, distortions and half-truths. And this has led some commentators to ask how Powell–the supposed one voice of moderation and sanity in a cowboy administration hell-bent on its drive to war against Iraq–could allow himself to be used in this way.
In fact, Powell has never acted any differently.
This was demonstrated in Powell’s second tour of duty in Viet Nam in 1968-69. At that time, he was the deputy assistant chief of staff for operations at Americal Division headquarters. He was given the job of responding to a young soldier, Tom Glen, who called for an investigation into the rumors about a massacre by Americal Division soldiers in the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam.
Now known as the My Lai massacre, this was the infamous action carried out in May 1968. In a period of four hours, a U.S. infantry unit rounded up old men, women and children, herding them into the village’s irrigation ditches. Some U.S. soldiers raped the girls. Under orders from junior officers on the ground and most likely senior officers in the air, the soldiers emptied their M-16’s into the terrified peasants. As some parents desperately used their bodies to try to shield their children, the soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, were killed.
Powell refused to carry out an investigation. Instead, in a memo to the adjutant general, Powell branded Glen’s charges false, asserting that "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese are excellent."
Of course, it was Powell’s findings that were false. And it took the efforts of an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour to piece together the truth about what happened at My Lai from interviews with infantrymen who had been there. Only after government officials decided that news of U.S. army massacres at My Lai, as well as other places, was spreading so fast that they could no longer control it, did the army inspector general finally step in to carry out an official inquiry. Despite all of Powell’s efforts, news of the My Lai massacre finally came out, becoming one of the most damning symbols of the barbaric U.S. war against the people of Viet Nam.
It should be noted that Powell did not bother to mention his role in the attempted cover-up of the My Lai massacre in his best selling autobiography, My American Journey. For Powell to have made his "journey," that is, his way up through the ranks of the military and the government to its highest reaches, he always had to be the "good soldier" and "team player."
This is the role Powell is playing today–trying to prepare world opinion for new massacres by the U.S. military in Iraq.
Mar 3, 2003
As the U.S. gears up to go to war against Iraq, the U.S. news media and public officials push their idea that the U.S. casualty rate will be relatively low–just like the supposed low rate during the Persian Gulf War 12 years ago.
The reality is quite different. U.S. casualties during the Persian Gulf War were not low, as advertised. Over the years, the number of veterans coming down with Gulf War Syndrome has skyrocketed. According to the Veterans Administration (VA), almost one-third of the 690,000 soldiers are suffering from one or more of the many symptoms associated with the Gulf War syndrome, including crippling symptoms, severe mental problems, sterility and for some, even death.
For years, neither the Department of Defense, nor the VA even recognized Gulf War syndrome as something real–just like they denied that Agent Orange was a real and serious malady caused by U.S. weapons used in the Viet Nam War. If they finally have acknowledged that there are problems, it’s only after repeated attempts by vets to demand treatment.
Going into the Persian Gulf War, the politicians made all kinds of promises to the soldiers. President George Bush Senior personally promised them that they would not be forgotten. But, when they came home and demanded treatment or disability benefits, the government treated these same veterans as pariahs.
Going into any war, the brass bands play and the flags wave. And there are even a few ticker tape parades for the soldiers when they return. But that is just a show to cover up reality: the government sends soldiers to war as just so much cannon fodder in the service of the politicians, officials and big corporations. When they come home, they’re tossed out just like garbage.