the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 14, 2003
Unemployment jumped up once again, this time to 6.4%.
Nonetheless, government economists tell us the country is in the midst of an economic recovery–and has been for 16 months. It’s what they call a "jobless recovery."
"A jobless recovery"–that tells it all. The capitalist economy is so opposed to the needs of the population that jobs need to be cut so that the economy can "recover."
Officially, only six out of every hundred of us are without a job, but the number is much higher, as we well know when we look around our families and our neighborhoods. And for every one of us who is without a job today, two or three of us are threatened with the same fate.
The bosses hang the threat of unemployment over all our heads in order to scale back wages and benefits for large numbers of the working class. First it was the airlines and the steel companies, pleading special circumstances, cutting back wages, reducing medical care, in some cases dropping pensions altogether. Then states and cities, one after another, began to lay off workers and roll back wages and benefits. Now, almost every industry finds the bosses talking about "concessions." They are demanding that the workers give back what we once had taken for granted: what we thought was a guaranteed wage, a promised benefit, an irrevocable retirement.
No, there are no guarantees that the bosses respect. There’s not a promise they’ve made that they won’t try to tear up.
This capitalist society makes no sense. None at all. There are millions of us who want to work but have no job–young and old alike. And there are millions of things that ought to be done right now to make this country habitable for its people, but aren’t being done.
What keeps those who want a job from doing the work that needs to be done? Nothing but the capitalists’ drive for profit. Unless the capitalists can be assured of enough profit, they will not put people to work. Unless their greed is satisfied, they won’t produce the goods and services the population needs.
Instead, they speculate. Look at Wall Street. The prices of stock are once again being bid up day after day. The capitalists have no money to create jobs, but more than enough to speculate. The Wall Street casino creates no value, it produces no goods or services that we need, it puts no one to work.
But it satisfies the capitalists’ greed for wealth.
There is no recovery for the working class, and has not been. There can be none so long as we let the bosses call the tune.
We have no choice but to resist. It’s been a long time since a large section of the working class fought back all at the same time to stop unemployment and attacks on our standard of living. So, of course, it seems difficult, standing where we are, imagining how we get there once again.
There is no other way than just to start. Refuse to give up another cent in wages. Refuse to give back one dollar on our pensions or in our medical care. Refuse every demand for concessions. And when the bosses try to lay one of us off, the rest of us don’t pick up the work.
Would that be hard? Maybe. But not nearly so hard as how we have it today.
Jul 14, 2003
The Medicare drug bill in Congress is written to funnel our money to corporate accounts.
Medicare will collect about $420 each year from millions of people in the drug plan.
Then they will pay benefits to corporations as if they were persons with big drug bills. One banker quoted in the Detroit Free Press said GM would get around 150 million dollars a year and Ford about 50 million–to compensate them for paying drug benefits to retirees.
In other words, the big end of the funnel will collect premiums from Grandma and Grandpa, and the small end of the funnel will be stuck in these big companies’ back pockets.
Jul 14, 2003
The IRS reported that the country’s 400 richest taxpayers had income in the year 2000 totaling about 70 billion dollars–which is a seven followed by 10 zeroes!
To get an idea of what these 400 people got in one year, that 70 billion dollars was about equal to the revenues of the entire state of Texas that year.
On average, members of this multi-millionaire’s club earned 175 million dollars, in one year!
In other words, they were paid almost $85,000 per HOUR, more than working people make in a year.
They might have been PAID that much, but there’s no way they EARNED it!
Jul 14, 2003
Presidents–Democrat and Republican–told us that poor women with children could solve their problems by working. But mothers didn’t work because the low-paying jobs they could get didn’t provide health insurance. So the government promised that if the women found jobs and got off welfare, they and their children could keep their health care coverage through Medicaid.
Millions of poor women kept their part of the bargain. They began to work.
As for the government, it’s tearing up its agreement with working parents, cutting Medicaid coverage in state after state, saying to the lowest paid workers that they and their children can just DROP DEAD!
This government keeps no promises unless it is forced to.
Jul 14, 2003
President Bush announced that he will submit new regulations to Congress concerning workers’ pensions. If companies claim they are failing, he wants to allow them two years in which they need pay nothing whatever into their pension funds.
This is another way of letting companies legally raid their pension funds and enter bankruptcy court with little or no money to put toward their pension liabilities.
It’s an expanded and souped-up version of how the steel industry has been dumping its pension obligations. One company after another has been going through bankruptcy, changing ownership, leaving workers with their retirement benefits shredded to pieces. The biggest remaining companies end up more profitable than before.
The greed of the bosses has no bounds–not when they feel they have a free hand.
It’s time the workers began to tie their hands.
Jul 14, 2003
The state of Nebraska has declared it will no longer authorize Medicaid for thousands of families, the so-called "working poor." For example, a family of six will be cut off Medicaid if the total income of the whole family is more than $10,500 per year. About one million people throughout the country are expected to be thrown off the Medicaid rolls under similar rule changes in about a dozen other states.
Those left on Medicaid–about 30 million throughout the country–will now be only those on welfare, disabled, elderly or working but earning next to nothing. They cannot stay in the program if their yearly income is more than 40 hours times 50 weeks times the minimum wage.
Nebraska, like the other states, says there is not enough money to fund Medicaid.
But if Medicaid lacks funds, it’s not because the "working poor" have raided it. Nor is it because Medicaid covers people who don’t need it In fact, it doesn’t begin to cover all the people who do need it. There are 40 million more people today whose employers do not provide medical insurance and whose wages are so low they can’t afford it.
Medicaid lacks funds because the priority for all the politicians–national, state and local–is to keep the rich happy and their bank accounts super healthy. Too bad if the working poor get sick.
The federal government just gave away a multi-billion dollar tax cut going almost entirely to the wealthy. These billions cut from tax revenues this year and into the future could have paid to fund Medicaid, not only for those being kicked off, but for everyone else whose job pays no medical benefits.
Jul 14, 2003
The U.S. House of Representatives recently cleared the way for the Labor Department to change federal rules concerning overtime pay. The Labor Department says it wants to change the rules in order to "modernize" them and make them less "confusing."
It’s true, there is nothing confusing about these new rules: they are an open attack on the hard-won principle that companies should pay workers time-and-a-half for all hours worked over 40 in a week.
To begin with, an estimated 1.3 million white collar employees who earn over $65,000 a year will lose the right to overtime pay they now have. In addition, another estimated eight million workers earning between $22,100 and $65,000 a year, will lose their overtime pay rights. Among the hundreds of classifications involved are emergency medical technicians, licensed practical nurses, draftsmen, surveyors, cooks, dental hygienists, and paralegals, as well as many lower level supervisors.
By eliminating overtime pay rights for only particular categories of workers and those with the highest pay, the government hopes to drive a wedge into the working class.
This change is only the beginning of an attack on the time-and-a-half rule. To get this one by, the administration sugared it up by changing the rules that affect the lowest-paid workers, raising the cut-off below which overtime is supposed to be paid. This was hardly a new gift to the lowest-paid workers, however, since this limit had been frozen at its 1975 level for 28 years, meaning that inflation had excluded more and more low-paid workers from legally guaranteed overtime pay. The new limit, which makes up less than two thirds of what inflation costs, is still set so low that–at best–only about a million workers will gain anything.
Covered up by this small improvement is the real aim of the rule change, which threatens overtime immediately for over nine million workers and indirectly threatens overtime pay for tens of millions more.
This is only the beginning of a much wider attack on the right to overtime pay that will eventually fall on every worker–whether or not they are covered by federal labor standards, whether they are in a union or not.
The working class has a long tradition of fighting to reduce the hours of work while increasing the total weekly pay. Workers fought repeatedly to have their hours of work reduced from 12, 14 or even 16 hours a day down to 10 and then 8 hours. The workers forced the bosses to give up some of the fruits of increased productivity to those whose labor created more production.
In the 1930s, when workers were fighting to decrease hours of work at no loss in pay, the government responded by setting a premium for all hours worked beyond 40 a week or eight in a day. When the federal government wrote this principle into law in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the unions considered it a victory.
It was far from that. It was a way to divert workers from fighting to reduce their hours further. The vast increases of productivity since mean that a 20-hour work week could be standard with weekly wages higher than those based on heavy overtime.
Instead we have heavy overtime as the way to get a decent income. And now the bosses feel so bold they think they can even take back the overtime premium.
No! It’s long past the time when the workers should begin to refuse the bosses’ demands.
Jul 14, 2003
For over a year and half now, the United States has held prisoners taken during the war in Afghanistan in abominable conditions on the military base the U.S. controls in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Despite the official end of this war, the number of prisoners has continued to increase. In January of 2002 when the first planeload of blindfolded and chained prisoners arrived, there were approximately 150 on the base. Today, there are 680 held in a concentration camp baptized X-Ray. They are held in cages, deprived of all rights, considered neither as political prisoners nor as prisoners of war, nor even as common criminals with their rights. They are held without any contact with the exterior, without knowing whether they will be tried, what accusations have been made against them or whether their completely arbitrary detention will ever end. The youngest is 13 years old.
Despite protests by a number of humanitarian organizations that defend human rights, these conditions of imprisonment remain as harsh as ever. In the style of the most barbarous dictatorship, the prisoners are held in a veritable state of permanent torture. A number of attempts at suicide have been reported recently. Last year, there was a hunger strike of at least 100 prisoners to protest against acts of humiliation.
Today, the American army says it plans to replace the metal cages in which it holds the prisoners with real prison walls, complete with an execution chamber. And the American government now speaks about a trial process, but this trial will have a colonel as the general prosecutor and another colonel as the defense lawyer … to argue their case in front of a jury made up of hand-picked representatives of the American administration. In other words, judge, jury and executioner are all part of this set-up.
These kangaroo court procedures have caused U.S. lawyers and law associations to speak against them. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers will propose at its next annual meeting that lawyers not agree to take part in defending the Guantanamo prisoners, since that would, as one lawyer put it, be "lending legitimacy to what would otherwise be a sham proceeding."
For most of those being held in these inhumane conditions, not one bit of evidence has been presented to establish even a hint of a link between them and the Al-Qaeda organization of bin Laden or, for that matter, any terrorist organization. But even if proof had been given, the manner in which the leaders of the U.S. have acted toward these men finds no justification in a civilized society.
What U.S. leaders have set up in Guantanamo demonstrates that the barbarism comes from their side.
Jul 14, 2003
Hoping to blur the growing scandal over the lies he told about Iraq’s weapons, George W. Bush went to Africa last week. He made some extravagant promises about AIDS. Pledging to spend 15 billion dollars over five years to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, Bush said this was ten times as much as previous U.S. spending to fight the disease in Africa.
Certainly, Africa is suffering a veritable plague. Over 29 million people on the continent have AIDS or are HIV-positive. In some countries, over one-third of the population is infected with the deadly virus. With only 12% of the world’s population, the continent has 90% (11 million) of the world’s AIDS orphans. But what Bush is proposing doesn’t begin to address the problem–and in fact was not intended to.
These funds–and this is what is most disgusting–are not going for actual health care in Africa. Part of the money will go to fund Bush’s own political priorities. For example, out of the small AIDS budget, 130 million dollars will go to finance the "abstinence-before marriage" programs of the right-wing religious fundamentalists who make up much of Bush’s voting base here in the U.S. Leading HIV/AIDS medical groups working in Africa, such as Physicians for Human Rights, have already condemned these kinds of restrictions, saying that such a program can only impede the overall prevention and treatment programs.
The biggest chunk of money, over half a billion dollars in the first year, will be spent in Washington, D.C. to create a new U.S. government bureaucracy, an Anti-AIDS administration. What will be the purpose of this new bureaucracy? Bush doesn’t say it out loud, but his appointment of the man to head it says a lot. The first coordinator will be Randall Tobias–whose last job was CEO of the U.S. pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly. Under the guise of fighting AIDS, this new administration will really be fighting to protect and expand the profits of the U.S. pharmaceutical companies, to protect their ability to charge outrageous amounts of money for AIDS treatments in Africa, while keeping out the much, much, much cheaper and just as effective generic drugs manufactured in India and Brazil. In other words, Bush’s AIDS program will deny drug treatments to the vast majority of African people infected with the AIDS virus.
The government is not spending more money, as advertised. In the first year of this five-year pledge of 15 billion dollars, only a little more than one billion dollars was spent. And next year, they plan to spend only two billion, instead of the three billion dollars a year that the pledge implies. And the small increase in spending to fight AIDS in Africa will be paid for by cuts in the U.S. budget to fight the other deadly diseases in Africa, including malaria and tuberculosis.
Bush went to Africa not to alleviate this crisis. He went to serve the interests of one set of very powerful U.S. corporations in increasing their deadly grip over this impoverished continent.
Jul 14, 2003
In late June and early July the U.S. news media began to broadcast pictures of Israeli soldiers leaving certain parts of the Gaza Strip, handing over the policing of these areas to Palestinian forces. This is meant to create the impression that, after a half century of struggle, Palestinians are finally on their way to set up their own state and determine their own future as a people.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however.
The much-publicized pullout concerns only a small part of the Gaza Strip. And these areas will continue to be cut up by Jewish settlements, which are heavily guarded by the Israeli army. In the Gaza Strip, 1.2 million Palestinians will still be crammed into an area of merely 500 square-miles, surrounded by barbed wire and the Israeli army. Without any substantial resources, industry or infrastructure, the vast majority of the Palestinian people in Gaza will still be forced to go to Israel as day laborers to make a living, going past military checkpoints every day on their way to work.
As with previous peace plans, the "roadmap" doesn’t put any real obligation on Israel. There is a vague promise that Israel at some unspecified time will have to dismantle the 60 Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas that have been built since March 2001. But nothing is concrete.
And how about the dozens of other settlements built since 1993 despite the Oslo agreement? And why not all the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which cut up the territory of the Palestinian Authority? The "roadmap" contains not a single word about those!
On the other hand, the "roadmap" obliges the Palestinian Authority to crack down on "all those engaged in terror" and to dismantle "terrorist capabilities and infrastructure." These are exactly the same words that Israel uses, but the extent of Israeli repression betrays the real target of this repression.
The Israeli army has besieged and raided Palestinian cities and refugee camps, carried out mass arrests and confiscated or demolished homes and property on a daily basis–in short, it has rained down acts of collective terrorism on the entire Palestinian population, not just on individuals who plan and carry out terrorist attacks.
Clearly, Israel has been trying to stop something much broader and deeper in the population than terrorist attacks, that is, the Intifada, the vast movement of the Palestinians, especially the younger ones. But the Israeli army has not succeeded in this, despite the brutality of its methods. So once again, as in 1993, the U.S. wants a Palestinian police force to take over this task.
It is no surprise that the Palestinian people have no illusions about this "roadmap."
Jul 14, 2003
If Bush’s "roadmap" were to be followed, the vast majority of the Palestinian people would continue to live without any hope for a decent future. It was this very situation that, in 1987, led to the widespread popular uprising in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which became known as the Intifada.
The rock-throwing teenagers who were on the forefront of the uprising then are in their thirties now, but many of them are not less defiant in their outlook since the conditions under which Palestinian people are forced to live have not become any better. At the same time, since September 2000, when a new upsurge of the Intifada began, a new generation of young people has emerged, confronting Israeli guns, tanks, missiles and F-16s with the same kind of defiance and determination that the previous generation of Intifada fighters had.
After each suicide bombing, the funeral of the bomber turns into a mass demonstration, with hundreds of young Palestinians dressing like suicide bombers and swearing that they are ready to be the next bomber. This may show the determination of the young–but it also shows how their militancy is being led into a dead end. Not only do the suicide bombings kill young people who want to fight, they also suggest to the Palestinian population that the actions of individual "martyrs" can accomplish what, in reality, can only be accomplished by collective actions of the population. They also widen the rift between working-class Jews and Palestinians, who will have to be indispensable partners in building a different future for all working people in the region.
It’s not an accident that suicide bombings have become so common. This is a conscious choice made by the leaders of organizations like Hamas, but also others, that have positioned themselves as the opposition, and possible successor, to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Just like Arafat, the longtime leader of Palestinian fighters who turned into an advocate of the futile and deceptive "peace process," these leaders are distrustful and hostile to the idea of the population taking matters in its hands. Just like Arafat’s PLO, these organizations, while organizing young fighters from poor, working-class backgrounds, represent the interests and aspirations of the Palestinian elite–businessmen, military and civilian functionaries, professionals–who want to benefit from running a country of their own. Just like Arafat’s PLO, these organizations compete for the favors and support of repressive Arab regimes, instead of relying on the mobilization and organization of the Palestinian population itself–which they see as a threat to their own rule.
For more than half a century, the political framework built in Palestine by the big powers, above all the U.S., and reinforced militarily by Israel, has only bred endless war and suffering for the people of the region. There is only one way out of this quagmire, for both Palestinians and Jews: to destroy that framework in a common struggle against the warmongers and build a new society which will make its priority to provide for the needs of the entire population regardless of ethnicity or religion.
On that path, Palestinian workers and poor are ahead of their Jewish counterparts: they already have an uprising going on. The Intifada offers the possibility for them to go further, but only if the Palestinian workers and poor can go beyond the narrow goals and tactics set for their struggle by their present leaders.
As for Jewish workers, they have to break with their leaders also–leaders who, for the narrow goal of a tiny national state and in alliance with imperialist powers, have turned the region into a prison for Palestinian people. But Jewish workers, who have to serve as prison guards over an entire population which hates them for that, are also trapped in the same prison. Their only way out is finally to refuse to do the dirty work of the oppressor and find a way to bridge the gap that decades of bloodshed has created between them and the Palestinian people.
Jul 14, 2003
On June 20, officials of the Union Pacific railroad deliberately derailed a runaway freight train in the middle of a working class neighborhood in Commerce, California, just east of Los Angeles. Union Pacific derailed the train without any warning, no word to police or local authorities, not to speak of the residents of the neighborhood hit by the train itself. People were not evacuated before the freight cars, filled with thousands of tons of lumber and sheet rock, flipped over and sent their cargo flying into a teeming neighborhood.
Authorities admit that it was sheer luck that no one was killed. But there was certainly a toll from the disaster. More than a dozen people were injured. Two homes were completely destroyed, while others were seriously damaged, their residents forced to move their families into hotel rooms for the indefinite future.
Faced with public outcry, Union Pacific’s management admitted that it "made a mistake." But at the same time, it tried to blame the train crew that had released the brakes of freight cars waiting in a rail yard to be hooked up to a locomotive because of a miscommunication. Of course, what the company won’t admit is that mistakes and mis-communications are bound to happen, especially as it pushes more work on fewer workers.
And it was exactly this reality that management had not planned for. There were no back-up or emergency procedures. There was no one else around to stop the rail cars once they began to roll out of the yard and pick up speed. There was no way to trip the brakes automatically to stop the train from rolling. When the railway crew attempted to notify the one dispatcher in the yard, they couldn’t get through because she was on another call. When they did get through, the matter was handled by Union Pacific’s only emergency response team in the whole country, located in St. Louis, Missouri, half a continent away!
This was not an "accident"–not by any stretch of the term. This was the result of conscious decisions taken to improve profit and let safety be damned!
Jul 14, 2003
The first July thunderstorm brought rains and high wind gusts to southeast Michigan. In downtown Detroit, the Comerica Tastefest closed for about 3 hours. The festival director said, "We had a few tents that were blown over, but it was nothing serious."
And indeed it was the sort of summer storm that frequently comes through. It should have been nothing serious. But over a quarter-million households lost electric power, most for at least half a day, some for as long as three days. Ask anyone who had meat in their freezer: that’s serious. Ask anyone who depends on any electrical medical device: that’s way beyond serious.
If an ordinary storm can take out electricity for so many people, it only points out how deeply the power companies have silently cut into service and maintenance.
It’s not hard to see which tree limb is likely to fall on a power line in a storm, nor to spot sagging power lines. It’s not hard to check records to see when transformers are due for replacement. But it is hard when there are no workers to do it–when power companies are more interested in increasing profit than in spending on upkeep of power lines and equipment.
When a storm hits, electric company execs rush to blame their problems on Mother Nature.
But the problem isn’t Mother Nature. It’s the nature of business.
Jul 14, 2003
On July 10, the City of Detroit, pleading poverty, closed three fire stations and said it would rotate daily closings in as many as five stations.
Fire protection in Detroit is already stretched so thin that fire engines sometimes arrive a half hour or more after being called. This action can only mean that more houses burn to the ground before the firefighters get there.
The city says it has to make up a 192- million-dollar budget deficit. They say costs of firefighters’ overtime, sick leaves, and vacations are too high.
To say that costs of sick leaves and vacations are too high is about like saying that having fires is too costly. If firefighters didn’t fight fires, they would not have injuries, they would not have overtime, they would not need vacations! The city is complaining about normal things that happen to normal people doing their normal work. What did it expect?
The city also guarantees it will need overtime since it currently is training only 50 new firefighters instead of the 80 new firefighters it needs.
No money for overtime? Not quite true. The police department, for example, pays overtime to provide security for events like concerts and ball games. This is a subsidy given away to the promoters and owners of stadiums, auditoriums and theaters who don’t provide their own.
The mayor’s own security detail ran up a $260,000 overtime bill last year–more than triple the bill from the year before. In fact these payments were part of a scandal that forced the mayor’s two high-school buddies off that job. But the mayor wants to cut fire protection instead!
The city also argues that its costs were unexpected because an arbitration ruling forced them to go back to four-man crews on fire engines. In other words they were cutting corners on safety and fire-fighting ability by sending out understaffed trucks and counting that as "normal" in the budget!
But these costs are like pennies compared to the tax breaks and services given to the largest and richest individuals and corporations in town. The city paid millions to help GM sell its old headquarters, and paid again to build new roads and infrastructure serving GM’s new downtown RenCen headquarters. The city subsidized and gave tax breaks to the Fords for their new football stadium; to Mike Ilitch for his new baseball park; and to Compuware for its new headquarters building.
A small fraction of these giveaways would more than take care of the budget shortfall and keep firefighters on the job where they belong.
If there is a budget crisis, it was made and continues to be made by the city’s taking from ordinary citizens in order to feed the already overstuffed wealthy.
Jul 14, 2003
The British Foreign Office has now admitted it–Britain no longer believes it will find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Of course, Tony Blair’s government, just like Bush’s, now says that’s because all the weapons have been destroyed.
Destroyed? What did they do with the 35,000 liters of anthrax Bush claimed existed? Did Iraq send a few grains of it in millions of envelopes around the world? What did Iraq do with the 100,000 pounds of nerve gas Bush said existed? Throw it up in the air? What about the 25,000 liters of botulinum toxin–did it just get dumped on the ground?
If Iraq had destroyed this massive amount of toxic material, not only would there be massive traces of it–there would have been a disaster of epic proportions throughout the whole Middle East–with millions of people poisoned.
But the fact is, nothing has been found. Nothing will be–despite all the headlines the media wrote over the last three months pretending that anthrax or something else "might" have been found, headlines that turned out to be filled with as many lies as Bush’s State of the Union speech.
But then these mythical weapons were never the issue–they were only the pretext for carrying out a war whose main aim was control over the Middle East’s oil.
Jul 14, 2003
This week, Bush’s press secretary said that the CIA had OK’d the president’s State of the Union speech, including the lie about Iraq’s uranium that had somehow "crept" into it. George Tenet, director of the CIA, said he accepted responsibility for the speech–only to point his finger at members of his staff who, he said, were the ones who read the speech and didn’t tell him what was in it.
Meanwhile, several army generals let it be known that their plans for "post-war" Iraq were overridden by civilians in the Defense Department. In turn, the chief civilian, Donald Rumsfeld, let it be known that three members of his staff were the ONLY ones responsible for the current situation. Apparently, he, too, knew nothing about anything.
As for the Democrats, a number of them are now calling for a "congressional inquiry" into Bush’s big lie–as if they hadn’t voted for this war, applauding every single one of Bush’s lies, lies that many other people exposed at the time.
Then, there’s Bush himself, who took off for Africa, telling a few more lies about money he pretended he had spent on AIDS, but had really given to the big pharmaceutical companies.
As they say, once a liar, always a liar.
Jul 14, 2003
A U.S. Army colonel recently addressed a meeting of 800 military spouses at Fort Stewart, Georgia. According to news reports, he had to be escorted out of the meeting by military police–because the angry wives and husbands, tired of the government’s lies, were yelling at him and cussing him out so badly he feared for his life.
This was not an isolated incident. There are similar reports filtering out of U.S. military bases all over the world. In those areas where the families of soldiers are collected together and can share what information they have, anger is growing. They have been lied to. They are fed up. They want their family members back home. They are right to feel this way.
This war is being fought NOT because there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which there weren’t; and NOT because Iraq threatened peace in the world, which it didn’t; and NOT because Saddam Hussein was a real S-O-B, despite the fact that he was. This war was fought for one main reason: so U.S. imperialism could control oil throughout the Middle East.
This is a filthy war–killing men, women and children for the sake of oil profits, leaving a whole people desperate. And the bitter fruits of this dirty war are now coming to rest on the shoulders of the U.S. troops that Bush & Company sent off to Iraq.
In the first two and a half months after Bush declared that "major combat operations" in Iraq were over, more than 70 U.S. soldiers have been killed in ambushes, grenade attacks, sniper attacks, land-mines and "accidents," with hundreds more wounded. The former commanding general in Iraq, Tommy Franks, admitted to Congress early in July that attacks on U.S. troops are coming at a pace of 10 to 25 a day.
This is not a war that is over. It is the beginning of a new deadly swamp.
Franks admitted that this war will go on at this level for the "foreseeable future," what he acknowledged could be four years.
As for the nonsense that Iraqis were welcoming the U.S. troops–not even Bush or Rumsfeld dare pretend that any longer.
Bush–who pretends to be a rough-and-tough guy–is the same man who once used his family’s influence to avoid combat in Viet Nam. The same holds true for Vice-president Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and for the trio which supposedly planned this war: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Not a one of them got their feet dirty in battle. They all had the way out of combat that wealth and privilege provide, and they all used it.
But for the troops now in Iraq–who are overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of the working class–there was no way out. The sons and daughters of the working class did not choose military service so they could be an occupying army in a country where they are not welcome. They did not choose to do the dirty work that Bush and Company want done in the Middle East. Most of them chose military service because they had no other choice. There were no jobs–not that paid a decent wage or provided training.
Bring them out of Iraq. And take the money being spent to destroy Iraq and put it to work creating jobs here.
Jul 14, 2003
"Iraqi, Possibly Tied to 9/11, Is Captured"–so said a headline in the New York Times of July 9. The Times story repeated a rumor the Bush administration had floated months before–that a Ba’ath Party official recently picked up in Iraq "might" have met with one of the 9/11 hijackers in Prague, five months before the attack on the World Trade Center.
Yes, and the cow might have jumped over the moon too. In fact, this wild story–fabricated by the Bush administration as justification for its war on Iraq–had been discredited even before the war started by both the FBI and the CIA.
The Bush administration is particularly adept at floating such stories: troops "might" have found anthrax–but didn’t; investigators "might" have located botulinum–but didn’t; mobile labs "might" have been located–but weren’t. And the famous uranium "might" have been purchased by Iraq–but wasn’t.
The Times had to have known that the story was fabricated, that it was part of a lying propaganda campaign aimed at justifying a war fought over oil. No problem for the serious old New York Times, which brags that it publishes "all the news that’s fit to print."
Apparently for the New York Times, lies told to justify a filthy war qualify as "news fit to print."