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
Sep 13, 2004
While the election campaign grinds on, the unemployment situation continues to worsen. Even though the unemployment rate has stayed relatively steady, the proportion of people without work continues to grow.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped President Bush on the campaign trail from insisting that "our growing economy is spreading prosperity and opportunity and nothing will hold us back."
Prosperity and opportunity are spreading???
Sure they are–for the ruling class. Corporate profits continue to jump from one record high to the next. Top corporate executives have rewarded themselves with ever more money, salaries almost twice as high as they were 10 years ago.
This money is coming directly out of the hides of working people. These companies may call it something else, like "cutting labor costs." But what they are really doing is cutting our jobs through downsizing and plant closings. Then they are using the threat of job cuts to increase the work load of those workers who remain, through speed-up and lengthening hours of work, thus leading to even more job cuts.
That’s where our jobs are going. The bosses are robbing them from us.
"Nothing will hold us back," Bush declares. Sure. Nothing is holding the government back from handing over hundreds of billions of dollars of the government budget to these companies in order to boost their profits still further. Fat contracts are produced by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three big tax cuts enacted in the last three years, said to be worth trillions of dollars, are further enriching the very wealthiest.
And how does the government pay for all this? How else but by slashing government jobs, especially for services that are provided to working people. When the government slashes social programs, such as public medical care, unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing aid, aid to children, the elderly, the handicapped, it is cutting government jobs. When the government cuts spending that goes to building and repairing bridges, roads, street lighting and of course, the public schools, they are cutting government jobs.
On the campaign trail, John Kerry denounces Bush for the loss of jobs and the crumbling economy. But Kerry stops there. He doesn’t mention the cause of the job losses, the corporations cutting jobs, the government cutting social services and the infrastructure. He doesn’t even say that many of the jobs being shipped out of one workplace are going to lower-wage workers in this country.
Why won’t Kerry dare condemn these corporations for destroying our jobs? Because he serves those very same corporations. Just like Bush. This is why Kerry’s proposal supposedly to save jobs is just a warmed-over version of what Bush proposes. Kerry, too, wants to grant more tax breaks to these same companies that are attacking us!
Just as in the past, in these elections, the working class is confronted by two big parties, the Republicans and Democrats, both of which serve the bosses’ interests, the interests of the very ones attacking us. The working class has a crying need for our own party. We have long had that need. But that need is becoming greater, as the situation gets more dire.
So, what is our best choice? If we can’t vote for what we want, we should not vote for what we don’t want. When we do that, we are giving our seal of approval to the very policies which will be used against us. Our votes for either of these candidates will come back to haunt us.
Sep 13, 2004
When he was running for Governor of California last year, Arnold Schwarzenegger promised that he would "clean house" in Sacramento and end the politics of catering to "special interest groups."
Apparently, that doesn’t include corporations and their lobbyists. The oil giant Chevron, for example, was one of the corporations that participated in writing Schwarzenegger’s 2700-page reform plan, called the California Performance Review.
Not surprisingly, the plan includes recommendations to ease environmental requirements for new oil refineries and the expansion of old ones. The governor is also planning to visit with Mexican officials later this month, to lobby, among other things, for Chevron’s proposed liquefied natural gas plant off the shore of Tijuana.
It all comes for a price, of course. Since Schwarzenegger’s election, Chevron gave $800,000 to his political funds and the California Republican Party. Chevron was also one of the 20 companies that paid to send Arnold and his staff to the Republican National Convention in New York.
A Chevron executive said that Chevron’s donations were not because of Schwarzenegger’s favors to Chevron but because of his "pro-business agenda."
Did anyone ask him to explain the difference?
Sep 13, 2004
During his speech at the Republican convention, Arnold Schwarzenegger said that the Democratic convention deserved the title of one of his movies: "True Lies." No objection there: Democratic politicians lie. And so do Republican politicians, including ... Schwarzenegger himself!
Arnold lied right there in that speech he gave. Two of those lies were so blatant his Austrian countrymen exposed them right away.
Lie #1: Arnold said that he "saw communism with my own eyes" when he saw Soviet tanks as a child. He couldn’t have–the Soviet army left Styria, the province Arnold grew up in, in 1945, two years before he was born.
Lie #2: Arnold also said in his speech: "As a kid, I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left." Again, he couldn’t have–Austria had conservative governments from 1945 until 1970, two years after Arnold immigrated to the United States.
But then, we already knew that Arnold knows from first-hand experience what it takes to be a bourgeois politician–lots of lies and a big smile.
Sep 13, 2004
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) says that Thomas A. Scully, former head of the Medicare division of the Department of Health and Human Services, owes the government seven months back wages, or $84,933.
The GAO found that Scully broke the law by ordering a department actuary, Richard Foster, not to release to Congress the estimated cost of the administration’s Medicare reform bill. It was narrowly passed in a dramatic 3 A.M. Senate vote after the Bush administration said it would cost 400 billion dollars. The actual estimate, the one Scully ordered withheld, was 534 billion dollars.
The bill provided a bonanza for drug companies.
What’s the significance of this little trick? Obviously, Medicare beneficiaries will be charged more for coverage when the program finally starts.
In any case, Scully won’t have any trouble paying his health care bill–even if he ever does cough up the $84,933. He is now a registered lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Caremark Rx, and other health-care interests. They pay off very, very well.
Sep 13, 2004
News organizations and politicians friendly to the Bush administration have been making a big deal about the authenticity of the 30-year-old memos shown on CBS’s "60 Minutes." In fact, these memos weren’t needed to prove that George W. Bush got special treatment when he skated through the Air National Guard, not even bothering to show up for months at a time–but not being found AWOL and sent directly to Viet Nam, which was what the military was supposed to do to those who went AWOL from the National Guard.
Of course, by focusing on those memos, the Bush administration is trying to avoid the main issue that was brought out by the "60 Minutes" program–and not just for Bush himself, but for all the sons of the wealthy and privileged classes.
During the "60 Minutes" interview, Ben Barnes, Texas Speaker of the House, described in 1968 how he was asked to get Bush, the son of a U.S. congressman from Texas and the grandson of a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, a spot in the National Guard. Said Barnes, he gladly reciprocated, because it was a way to make powerful friends who could help him in his own career. Barnes says he did the same thing for hundreds of others, as did officials all over the country.
Fighting in Viet Nam was not for the sons of the wealthy and the well-connected. Since the members of the National Guard were not sent into combat, the National Guard was the perfect spot for the children of the privileged, of the ruling class, like Bush.
Of course, once the draft was ended in the mid-1970s, the ruling class no longer needed to send their children into the National Guard as a way to avoid war. And the National Guard instead became the place where more and more working people went for a second job, one with small retirement, health and educational benefits to supplement what their civilian jobs didn’t give them.
With these changes, as well as the sharp reduction in the number of regular army troops, the military began increasingly to rely on the members of National Guard for combat missions. This started during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, and increased greatly during the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The mission of the National Guard may have changed. But the way war is conducted certainly hasn’t. The ruling class still sends the sons and daughters of the working class and poor to fight and do the dying for the ruling class’s wars, while the ruling class finds all kinds of ways to protect its own.
Sep 13, 2004
Using the anniversary of September 11th as a campaign tool, Vice President Dick Cheney declared, "It’s absolutely essential that on Nov. 2 [election day] we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." In other words, if the Democrats win, Cheney says the U.S. can expect more terrorist attacks.
That is certainly possible. Of course, if the Republicans win, the U.S. population can also expect more terror attacks.
The problem is not which party wins but rather the wars which the U.S. government under both parties has been pursuing, and the impoverishment which U.S. corporations impose around the world.
President Bush himself admits that "the conditions that give rise to terror" [are] "poverty and hopelessness and resentment." What Bush should have added is that, if poverty is the ground from which terrorism springs, the U.S. ensures the seeds are well-watered by its military actions against people all over the world.
Much of the world’s population lives in misery. And their very level of existence, their homes, their jobs, their way of life are all bound up with wars–wars which the U.S. has directly or indirectly carried out. The falling bombs and gun-toting men victimize millions of women and children and old people.
In the decades before September 11th, the U.S. was using its military forces in conflicts around the world, worsening the situation for hundreds of millions of people.
Jimmy Carter began the funding of the terrorist gangs in Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines into Lebanon in 1983 and into Libya in 1986. U.S. bombs on Libya’s capital killed the baby of Libya’s leader, Moammar Kadhafi, among other children. The Reagan administration carried out a murderous counter-insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, after the Sandinistas had helped rid Nicaragua of its U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza.
Under the first President Bush, the U.S. invaded Panama, bombing its capital and getting rid of the former buddy of the U.S.–Manuel Noriega. In the first Iraq war of 1991, the U.S. carried out a massive bombing campaign of Iraqi cities–only to leave Saddam Hussein in power, giving him his army back so he could stop insurrections carried out by Shiites and Kurds. For 13 more years the U.S. bombs continued to fall. The total deaths from all the bombing plus the effects of the U.S. embargo reached at least a million deaths in Iraq.
Under Bill Clinton, the U.S. and the European powers set in motion the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, arming all sides in the vicious fighting which followed. The bodies piled up in mass graves until U.S.-led NATO bombing pulverized Serbia for 72 straight days. The big powers pretend that blame belongs to Slobodan Milosevic, the loser among the thugs in power, but they set the civil war in motion.
Also under Clinton the Marines went into Somalia in 1993 and into Haiti in 1994 and 1996. The results certainly didn’t benefit those populations, which remain in miserable conditions to this day.
Today there is the U.S. war in Iraq–which to other people around the world marks the U.S. as bestial.
Terrorism cannot be justified–but we need to know what has produced the terrorism. When bombs fall on family and home, when the innocents are raped, tortured, and brutalized, it’s no surprise that there is a growing pool of very desperate and angry people. It’s from this pool the terrorists find new recruits every day.
Terrorism is one of the by-products of U.S. imperialism which regularly unleashes deadly military actions to allow the corporations to extract riches, raw materials and labor from the peoples of the world.
Sep 13, 2004
What would you do if you were told that your son had been killed in a pointless war?
When Carlos Arredondo of Hollywood, Florida faced three Marines who came to his house to tell him that his 20-year-old son Alexander had been killed in Iraq, he told the Marines to leave him alone.
Filled with grief and desperation, he walked into his garage and picked up a propane tank, a gas can and a lighting device. He took them to the Marines’ van, smashed its window, climbed inside, and set it ablaze.
Arredondo was released from the hospital last week after being treated for second and third degree burns over much of his body.
Arredondo’s wife Melida stated, "This is his scream that his child is dead. The war needs to stop."
Arredondo later added, "I was crying, screaming inside the van.... I feel betrayed. I was angry with the war. I didn’t see the point of my son dying... or these people dying every day."
Arredondo’s anguished reaction speaks for all military parents who feel the same way, parents whose views ordinarily aren’t reported amidst all the propaganda pushing support for this dirty war.
Sep 13, 2004
By the second week of September, U.S. forces were carrying out new military offensives in several cities in Iraq.
In Tal Afar, in the far north near the Syrian border, U.S. forces invaded the city with overwhelming firepower, including jets, helicopters and tanks. A U.S. military spokesman said that U.S. forces killed 57 enemy fighters with "great precision and without a single American casualty." But in fact, the main victims of this attack were civilians. A local hospital reported that it had received scores of civilian dead and wounded, including women and children.
Further south, 35 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military bombed Falluja for four straight nights (as of this writing). A spokesman for the U.S. military explained that the reason for one of the raids was that "the target was a building frequently used by terrorists at the time of the strike." Iraqi doctors reported that the U.S. air strikes killed twelve Iraqis, including five children and two women. In the rubble of another house demolished by another U.S. air strike, workers found only one survivor, a 10-month-old infant. In another 24-hour period of U.S. bombing, Iraq’s Health Ministry reported that at least 16 civilians had been killed. In the face of those reports, the U.S. military spokesman had to change his tune slightly: "In spite of the great care taken to spare the lives of non-combatants, an unknown number of Iraqi civilians were unfortunately among those killed and wounded in the strike."
One can only imagine with what kind of "great care" the U.S. F-16’s and Apache helicopters bombed and rocketed Falluja’s apartment buildings and homes!
Finally, in Sadr City, the massive and teeming Baghdad slum that had gone from being a hotbed of opposition to Saddam Hussein to a center of opposition to the U.S. occupation, a week-long period of "calm" dissolved into gun battles between U.S. troops and local militias said to be loyal to cleric Muktada al-Sadr. These battles left 40 Iraqis dead and 202 wounded–also mainly civilians.
What are behind these latest U.S. offensives?
Over the last several months, the Iraqi resistance has forced the U.S. to retreat first from most of what the U.S. calls the "Sunni Triangle," the swath of territory in the center of the country that includes the cities of Falluja, Ramadi and Samarra, and more recently from key sectors in the south around Kufa and Najaf. U.S. forces retreated only after their bombing and rocket attacks left thousands of people dead and much of the cities destroyed. Perhaps the most ferocious and destructive of these battles took place in Najaf just last month.
But the retreat of the U.S. troops from big parts of Iraq has only allowed the insurgency against the U.S. to grow undisturbed, gaining more support, force and power. The U.S. military reports that the insurgents are searching out U.S. troops in more sophisticated ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. This accounts for the rising death toll and the even faster rise in the number of U.S. troops seriously wounded. In August, for example, there were 65 U.S. deaths–and 1,100 troops seriously wounded. September is shaping up to be even bloodier, with 25 U.S. fatalities in just the first week! The bloodiest single attack took place outside Falluja on September 5, when seven U.S. Marines were killed, the single highest death toll for U.S. troops in several months.
The latest U.S. offensives in Tal Afar, Falluja and Sadr City were most likely in response to these attacks. Of course, the offensives made the Iraqi population, including women and children, pay the heaviest price, in an effort to try to break the spirit of the population and isolate the resistance. But everything indicates that these attacks are creating the exact opposite, that is, they are only feeding the resistance. When a New York Times reporter questioned a couple of ordinary people in Sadr City after the most recent gun battles, one person said, "Of course, the violence is the fault of the Americans; they entered the city. Just imagine if I came into your home, arrested and killed members of your family. You would protect yourself." Another person said, "Even if people don’t support Muktada, they will join him if the Americans come into the city."
These latest U.S. offensives are certainly only the preludes to much bigger ones that the U.S. will launch after the November election–no matter who is elected president. Both Rumsfeld and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, have already assured the press that those offensives are now in the advanced planning stages, guaranteeing that the future death toll will skyrocket, first of all, for the Iraqi population, but also for U.S. troops as well.
No, "there is no light at the end of the tunnel," as the politicians used to say four decades ago during the Viet Nam War. On the contrary, Senator John McCain, the outspoken Republican hawk, recently told CNN that he expects U.S. troops to be fighting a war in Iraq for "the next 10 or 20 years."
What a grim and bloody future for us all–until the U.S. population finds the way to force the U.S. government to stop the bloodbath it is now carrying out in Iraq.
Sep 13, 2004
At least 400 people, and maybe as many as 600, were killed in a frightful massacre in Ossetia, in southern Russia. The carnage at the school in Ossetia surpasses the number killed in all preceding hostage taking, whether in Russia or elsewhere. Most of the victims were children, taken hostage with their parents and teachers on the first day back in school. The pictures of disfigured, charred and mutilated bodies brings the horror home.
It’s difficult to say who played the rottenest role in this tragedy–the hostage takers or the Russian military forces. The band of terrorists who took the hostages are certainly vile. They are like all those people who use terrorist methods, no matter what pretext they give. The fact that those killed were mostly children on their first day in school only shows how despicable the terrorists are.
But the Russian army commandos who intervened pretending they were going to save the hostages are worse. The Russian authorities may cover the details of what happened with a veil of silence and lies. But it’s obvious the Russian soldiers wanted to make their Chechen adversaries pay dearly, without worrying a bit about the school kids who were locked up. Trained troops had to know there would be a real massacre when they used tanks and cannon against a building.
The forces of order didn’t use half measures. Once "the affair" was settled in a pile of cadavers, Putin made only a half hour visit to a Beslan hospital, at night, without warning the local authorities. He was afraid, not so much of possible terrorists who might have escaped, but of the reactions of the victims’ families. The press, including the part of the Russian press which is closely controlled, said that the families accused the authorities and special forces of being in part responsible for the killings.
In his television speech after the massacre, Putin lambasted "international terrorism," without saying a word about his dirty war in Chechnya. Kommersant, a Russian daily owned by a man close to the Kremlin, said indignantly, "As if the Russian children weren’t dead because of the war in Chechnya, which has lasted ten years." It concluded, "Blaming ... international terrorism from now on permits all the governments of the world to avoid taking responsibility for the death of their citizens."
The Russian leaders say there were foreigners among the hostage-takers–Arabs and Turks. Maybe. But it wasn’t Al Qaeda that produced armed terrorist bands in Chechnya. The terrorists exist because of the indignation aroused by Russian repression. In fact, these gangs have been able to impose themselves as leaders over their own people because of the Russian repression.
Russia’s war in Chechnya is a filthy war–carried out with the complicity of the so-called civilized imperialist world. We shouldn’t be surprised that George Bush supports what Vladimir Putin does in Chechnya, since Bush leads an equally dirty war in Iraq.
Several hundred Russian children have paid with their lives for the action of the armed terrorist Chechen bands, but also for the policy of the Russian leaders. The men and women we see on television, their faces streaked with tears–Russians, Ossetians and Chechens mixed together–will continue to pay for the policy of their leaders. And the Chechen people will pay for what the Chechen terrorists did at Beslan; Ossetia will serve as a pretext for the Russian authorities to intensify repression whose main victims are not the armed bands but rather the civilian population. But the Russian population will pay also, because its children don’t die only when they are taken hostages by terrorists, but also as soldiers in the war itself. It will pay further because the "war on terrorism" will inevitably serve as a pretext for the regime to repress the whole population.
Russian repression and Chechen terrorist attacks both dig a deeper and deeper ditch of blood between peoples who have long lived together in the same region and all of whose lives are stuck in the same poverty. Just as the war in Iraq digs a deeper ditch of blood between the people of the U.S. and the people in all the rest of the world.
Sep 13, 2004
On September 9, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that genocide was going on in Sudan. He said that economic sanctions might be necessary and called for a settlement of the rebellion in Darfur, in the west of the country, which has continued since 2003.
What b.s.
In Sudan, like other parts of Africa, new sources of oil and other resources have been discovered. The various imperialist powers have, in turn, either encouraged the development of rebellions against the central governments in various countries or aided the central government to put them down, depending on which way they thought was easier for putting their hands on Sudan’s riches. Sometimes, one imperialist country supported rebels, while another supported the central government.
In Darfur, a rebellion has grown. Over the last 18 months, military confrontations there have led to tens of thousands of deaths and more than a million refugees. The Sudanese government has armed and supported the Janjaweed militias who are rampaging through the region.
Darfur includes different populations: on the one hand, so-called "Arab" tribes herding livestock, although Arabic is spoken only by a minority; and on the other hand, black African farmers. Conflicts between livestock raisers, who seek water and pasture, with peasants, who protect their harvests, aren’t new. In the past, these conflicts were settled in a more or less friendly manner, but now with drought, the population explosion and the total neglect in which the government has left the region, the conflict between the two groups is more severe.
The government in the capital Khartoum has played on ethnic rivalries in its attempt to end the rebellion. Its planes bomb villages, while the Arab militias finish the destruction by pillaging, raping and murdering the population. Rebel movements have brought together "African" tribes who oppose both the violence of the Janjaweed militias and from the Sudanese army.
The big powers today are talking about a "humanitarian" intervention. The French government cites its "aid" to refugees from its troops stationed in neighboring Chad. The British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jack Straw, came to a Sudanese refugee camp to show the concern of British and international opinion.
In reality, these countries, which ruined Africa during and after the colonial period, maintain troops in Africa only for the purpose of guarding their interests and keeping an eye on competitors, like the United States.
For some time now, the U.S. has had a growing military presence in Africa. The U.S. put heavy pressure on the Sudanese government to end an earlier war with rebels in the south of the country. Though not everything is settled, the government agreed to divide some government positions and resources, especially oil, with the rebels.
In southern Sudan, oil wells were what provoked this "international" interest in restoring order in the region. From the Congo to South Africa, from Angola to Nigeria, the region is packed with mineral riches like oil. The ways to get it must be made "secure," so, in 2003, Washington intervened in a coup d’etat in Sao Tomé and Principe. U.S. oil companies then obtained the rights to explore for oil in the Gulf of Guinea. With the possibility of a Chad-Sudan oil pipeline, it’s no wonder the governments of the imperialist powers now are involved in defending the areas where their corporations are hunting for wealth.
While the different imperialist powers talk about genocide and humanitarian missions, they’re busy trying to figure how to use the situation to put their own oil companies into Sudan, ahead of their competitors.
Hypocrites!
Sep 13, 2004
After giving away several billion dollars in tax breaks to corporations, Michigan’s governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, discovered a billion-dollar state budget deficit. To cover part of this deficit, she and the state legislators have done a deal to raise county property taxes–even though they insist it’s not a tax increase, it’s just "timing."
The scheme is to make taxpayers pay their taxes early. County property taxes will be due on earlier dates, so that over the next three years, taxpayers will pay 16 months’ worth of taxes every year.
"It’s not a tax increase, you’ll just pay sooner." Even George W. Bush couldn’t lie any better than that.
Sep 13, 2004
As part of their new budget agreement, Michigan’s legislators and governor agreed to withhold a $75.00 per student increase in funding for the 22 wealthiest school districts in the state–those that spend more than $9,000 per student. This would save the state 6.6 million dollars.
Ten years ago, Michigan voters passed Proposal A, which shifted the funding of schools from local property taxes to state sales taxes. Supposedly it would equalize funding across all school districts.
In fact, the legislators built into the law a continued disparity in funding between the different school districts, guaranteeing the wealthy districts got more money. And ever since then, they continue to roll over that disparity from one year to the next.
When the state proposed this year not to give the extra money to the wealthy districts, there was a big hue and cry from politicians in those communities–especially Oakland County, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, with six of those school districts.
Sure enough, the legislature decided to revisit the question. Now they say they’ll find that 6.6 million dollars for those school districts from the state’s general fund–budget crisis or no crisis. The money will come from the sale of state properties like Executive Plaza, its former main office building in Detroit.
Just goes to show that the government does listen to the citizens–so long as the citizens are rich!
Sep 13, 2004
A newly filed lawsuit against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan reveals a little more of the big health-care concession foisted on workers in last year’s contracts between the big auto companies and the United Auto Workers (UAW).
The lawsuit was filed by associations representing most Michigan MDs and osteopaths. The doctors claim that Blue Cross illegally cut back what they are allowed to charge for an office call.
Last fall, the UAW pushed workers to accept new contracts with Ford, GM, and Chrysler. UAW president Gettelfinger assured workers that the union had held the line on health care and there would be "no cost shifting." Well, at least there was no cost shifting that the workers were told about before voting on the contract. Not until this spring did UAW leaders let workers in the traditional Blue Cross plan know hat their plan was ended and that they were now in a PPO plan, like it or not.
The plan "features" increases in some fees that workers used to pay–except for office visits, which go down about $20. And since this is exactly what the doctors are suing over, the court suit may wipe out even this small benefit!
The new plan also puts new restrictions on which doctors workers can use–Blue Cross has already said it is disqualifying ten% of the doctors that workers were using.
As Blue Cross cuts doctors out of the plan, pressure is put on the ones left. Everyone knows that some doctors scam the system, but there are many other doctors who are careful about their patients’ health and order preventive testing and exams. With Blue Cross dropping doctors, the ones left will feel a pressure not to order a routine exam, not to mention an expensive one.
There is also a mandatory prescriptions-by-mail program, which has now kicked in, requiring workers to finish lots of paperwork and other requirements in order to get their prescriptions.
The prescriptions are sent without regard to problems faced in the mail: heat, cold, or even theft. Second, there’s uncertain cross-checking for harmful drug interactions. Third, in case of problems, there is no pharmacist to go to for help. Those workers with serious, chronic problems like diabetes and blood pressure are especially at risk with this new system.
A General Motors spokesman defended the new plan by saying, "We’re hoping it will provide our workers access to the most high-performing doctors in the state." Yes, exactly like the companies measure high performance: profit first, numbers second, and workers’ welfare last.
Sep 13, 2004
As we go to press, Hurricane Ivan has become the third hurricane in a month to come across the Atlantic, tear through the Caribbean and hit the American mainland. And the hurricane season isn’t over yet.
The exceptional number of hurricanes this year was predicted by meteorologists, based on changes in water temperature and salinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Five or six major hurricanes were predicted for 2004, far above the average over the last 50 years. Ivan is the fifth actually to happen.
Meteorologists say they think this pattern will continue at least for the next few years. Whether the changes in ocean temperature are cyclical or are tied to global warming isn’t clear, but the authorities certainly are doing their best to ignore the question.
The damage done by these hurricanes is immense. Together, Hurricanes Charley in August and Frances at the beginning of September killed at least 43 people in the Caribbean and the U.S. It is estimated they destroyed a combined total of about 20 billion dollars worth of property. Even before hitting the Cayman Islands, Cuba and the American mainland, Ivan, the most powerful of the three, has already killed at least 56 people in the Caribbean, most of them on the little island of Grenada, where 90% of all the houses were destroyed or heavily damaged.
The devastation from these hurricanes is massive; nonetheless, their impact varies greatly depending on which class people belong to. During the storms, millions of ordinary people had to evacuate and crowd in with relatives, or sweat it out in bare-bones public shelter facilities. The rich were able to fly away to other homes they own elsewhere, or party it up in fine, well-built hotels that had stocked up with food and drink in anticipation of their patronage during the storms.
As for the fate of people’s homes, the cheaper homes and trailers that most ordinary people live in are the most susceptible to damage. What happened on Grenada showed this very well.
In this capitalist world, governments do not organize society’s resources to help repair or rebuild damaged houses. Supposedly, private, for-profit insurance companies do this. But what insurance does for the rich is different than what it does for poorer people, many of whom can’t begin to afford full hurricane insurance. For ordinary working people and many small businessmen, these storms will be a catastrophe. With the limited coverage they have, and with big deductibles, they face years of rebuilding, if they are able to rebuild at all. Most rich people will recover from these storms just fine, because the insurance policies they can afford to buy cover all, or almost all, of the expense of rebuilding. The insurance companies will make out like bandits, no matter what they pay out. Government regulations guarantee it.
These storms–or rather their impact on people–are no different than other aspects of life in this capitalist society.
Sep 13, 2004
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors in Detroit requested that the convictions of three Moroccan immigrants on terrorism-related charges be thrown out. Two of the men, Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, had been convicted in June 2003 of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and the third, Ahmed Hannan, had been convicted of document fraud. The prosecutors acted to prevent the judge, Gerald Rosen, from exposing this government frame-up in open court.
Prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense that would have caused any responsible jury to acquit the defendants. Prosecutors prevented the defense from obtaining notes from interviews with their star witness against the men, Youssef Hmimssa. Hmimssa was promised a reduced sentence on his own charges of credit card fraud in exchange for his testimony. The prosecution withheld a letter from a friend of Hmimsaa, Brahim Sidi, who was ready to refute the accusations. The government then deported Sidi before he could testify.
The prosecution also kept from the defense a letter from a cellmate of Hmimssa attacking Hmimssa’s credibility.
The prosecution’s withholding of evidence was no simple technicality or mistake. It was part and parcel of a frame-up–aimed at convicting innocent men. This case was the highlight of a whole offensive to make the U.S. population believe the government is protecting it from terrorists.
Since 9/11, the government has detained and deported 13,000 Arabs and Muslims. While charges of "terrorism" are continually floated, these 13,000 were deported for visa violations, which are a common occurrence in this country, with its millions of immigrants. The ruling class, in fact, wants to keep a class of immigrants whose situation is not legalized, so they can be forced to work for very low wages.
When the government wants to pick up illegal immigrants and charge them with something, they are not hard to find.
In this whole propaganda campaign, only 300 people were charged with anything, and only 179 people were convicted. Most of those were only for document and credit card fraud or immigration violations. Only in the Detroit case was someone actually convicted of terrorism.
And now it has been tossed out, shown to be a frame-up.
This is nothing but a good old smear campaign–aimed at making the population fall in lock step behind every repressive twist and turn of the government.
There is someone using terror here all right, the U.S. government!
Sep 13, 2004
Since September 11th, we have repeatedly been told the government is doing everything it can to keep us safe from terrorist attack. If that were true, the government would be dealing with natural disasters in a totally different way.
The very services needed to deal with hurricanes or fires or power outages–emergency services, medical care, firefighters, utility staffs–have been cut and cut again. And these are the same people whose jobs would be to help the population in the event of a terror attack. Yet in the three years past, every level of government has cut back, saying it is impossible to pay for what is necessary.
At the local, state and federal level, the politicians lie in our face, even while attacking us. What we really need is to be safe–from them.
Sep 13, 2004
Eight months after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft personally announced the prosecution of a lawyer under Clinton’s 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. The lawyer, Lynne Stewart, had been the court-appointed attorney for an Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Stewart was charged in 2002 with "providing material support for terrorist activity" because she issued, as his lawyer, a statement he made to the press. In addition, a para-legal, Ahmed Abel Sattar, and a translator, Mohammad Yousry, also involved in Rahman’s case were charged.
Stewart’s trial opened in June of 2004. There has never been any evidence presented that the lawyer, the translator or the para-legal had anything whatsoever to do with terrorism. Instead, the prosecution sought to inflame the jury by talking about terrorism. Their trump card was to introduce a video during the week before September 11th, which showed Osama bin Laden calling for Sheik Rahman’s release from prison. Nothing linked bin Laden with Rahman, much less with Stewart or her co-defendants.
It was simply guilt by association, and a very remote association at that. If there were a case to be made for guilt by association with bin Laden, then the government of course would have been prosecuting members of the U.S. government who first paid bin Laden, helping him to set up terrorist squads in Afghanistan against the Russians. It would be going after the Bush family, guilty of association with the bin Laden clan by way of their oil connection.
All Stewart did was to continue to serve her client as she was appointed to do. Rahman is under prison restrictions almost as severe as those at Guantanamo. Sattar, the para-legal, took notes in visits to the prison where Rahman was held. Yousry, the translator, kept his notes for a thesis he was writing AGAINST Muslim fundamentalism.
This trial is not about fighting terrorism. It’s about using fears of terrorism to attack a lawyer who has always defended clients the government charged for political reasons. This trial is part of the government’s witch-hunt today–aimed at intimidating lawyers who might defend some of those the government has railroaded.
Anyone involved in protesting what is happening in the U.S. today can become the target of such a witch-hunt: unionists protesting benefit cuts, activists protesting against attacks on abortion rights, people demonstrating against the war in Iraq. We all have reason to defend Stewart and Sattar and Yousry.