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 27, 2004
With five weeks to go until the November elections, plans for sending more U.S. troops to Iraq are in their final stage. The armed forces have issued orders calling up another layer of the reserves and national guards. The marines and army are issuing new stop-loss orders for troops in Iraq coming to the end of their rotation.
Whether Bush or Kerry wins in November, plans have already been made for the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to jump up. Kerry may accuse Bush of secretly preparing for a step-up of the war right after November 2, but the fact remains that important spokesmen from both parties have been calling in near unanimous agreement for more troops to be sent to Iraq.
Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, of the Armed Services Committee, declared "We have to do what we have to do to push back the enemy. I wouldn’t take an increase in troop strength over the short term off the table." Republican John McCain, who often speaks for the military, bluntly called for adding 70,000 more army soldiers and 20,000 to 25,000 more marines–to be sent as soon as possible.
Kerry, himself, three months ago already called for 40,000 more troops to be sent to Iraq.
In fact, while any big new U.S. troop mobilization may wait until after November 2, the war itself is already heating up. Bombs falling on Iraqi cities tell the story. Iraqi civilians in areas ranging from Mosul in the north to Fallujah in the west to Amarah in the south were subjected to a real reign of terror coming from U.S. and British warplanes.
No matter who wins here in November, the results will not slow down this juggernaut to a bigger war one bit. Nor will the victory of either of these two parties bring the war to a close anytime soon.
Both parties agree on that. Steven Metz, a guerrilla war expert at the U.S. Army War College and a Kerry military adviser, recently predicted that the war may last "something like 10 years." Senator McCain told CNN that he expects U.S. troops to be fighting a war in Iraq for "the next 10 or 20 years." Kerry, himself, making an electoral promise to bring the war to a close, said he would TRY to bring troops home–four years from next summer!
The least we can do in November is to repudiate the two parties that have brought us into this vile war and today make it clear they have every intention of continuing it almost indefinitely.
Don’t give them our votes. Refusing to vote for both of these parties may not seem like a lot. But if we vote for them, that’s the same as putting our stamp of approval on their cynicism, their lies, their evasions ... and their war.
Sometimes we can’t stop a street hoodlum from beating us up and robbing us, but we certainly don’t write up a good reference for him, commending him for doing a very good job of it!
We shouldn’t commend these big-time thugs either.
Sep 27, 2004
Grandstanding for the voters, Congressmen said they wanted to help the middle class, and passed an extension of last year’s tax cuts.
While last year’s tax-cut law provided a few barely-noticed dollars to some poor and working families, that law mainly put millions into corporate bottom lines. Extending the law did even more to help companies evade taxes–hidden behind their babble about helping the "middle class," the Congressmen voted for more than 20 different business tax cuts.
Boardrooms around the country could celebrate anew. From 2001 to 2003, pre-tax corporate profit rose 26%–but corporate tax payments fell by 21%! More of the same is now guaranteed, for the wealthy.
A study, Corporate Income Taxes in the Bush Years, done by Citizens for Tax Justice, found that big companies can legally hide half of their profits even before they begin to calculate the taxes they might owe. Then the tax breaks are so immense that, for example, 28 companies with combined profits of 45 billion dollars paid no taxes whatsoever between 2001 and 2003.
That’s really adding insult to injury.
Sep 27, 2004
The Bush Administration recently announced that premiums paid by senior citizens and the disabled for Medicare-B will increase by 17%, or $11.60 per month. It is the largest premium increase in Medicare’s history. It makes the new premium $78.80 per month, or $945 a year.
Part of the increase goes for increases to hospitals, clinics, doctors, etc. But part will go to subsidies to private insurance companies. The subsidies were snuck into the legislation that created the new Medicare drug plan passed last year.
It costs private insurance companies more to provide insurance, because they have higher administrative costs than Medicare, so the politicians are making it easier for the insurance companies to compete with Medicare.
Seniors will pay the costs for this as part of the increase in premiums, whether they receive their insurance from a private company or not.
This is nothing but a blatant robbery of retirees–in order to step up the privatization of Medicare.
Sep 27, 2004
A recent study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that at least four million people, or one-third of all retirees on pensions with drug coverage, will quickly lose some or all of their current drug coverage when the new Medicare drug program starts in 2006. Many companies are expected to either completely drop their own, private drug coverage for retirees, or else scale it back substantially.
Compared to the private pension drug plans, the government Medicare drug coverage will be very limited, not at all covering the same varieties of drugs, and it will also have very high out-of-pocket expenses, including very high premiums, co-payments, deductibles, etc.
As for those companies that decide to keep their drug coverage for retirees, the Medicare drug extension plan will provide them with a large outright subsidy, or government payout, at a cost estimated to start at about 10 billion dollars per year and go up from there. Under this plan, the government will cover about 28% of the drug costs for each retiree in a corporate pension plan. The subsidy will have the added advantage of also being tax free, and the government has also assured these companies that the subsidy will not reduce the substantial tax deductions they already get for providing drug benefits.
Who will pay for this new subsidy to these companies? The seniors themselves–through their higher Medicare drug coverage premiums, deductibles and co-payments.
All the opinion polls show that a big majority of seniors oppose this Medicare drug reform. They can do without a "benefit" that is not beneficial for anyone but the companies.
Sep 27, 2004
Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority (DDA) approved a $200,000 loan to three shops opening near the new Compuware headquarters. But what a loan!
The terms of the loan forgive the interest in any year that the stores’ gross sales, above 275 million dollars, are less than the amount needed to pay the interest!
Not only that, if the stores manage for three years in a row to evade interest charges–the whole loan is forgiven!
It’s not very clear why Nike, Athlete’s Foot, and JB’s are so poor as to need any sort of loan in the first place.
But for a loan that will be forgiven if we say we can’t pay–hey, where do the rest of us sign up?
Sep 27, 2004
In August, school boards in California closed the 60 charter schools run by the California Charter Academy, one of the country’s largest charter school operators. Faced with financial problems, C. Steven Cox, the company’s owner, had simply walked away from his business, leaving thousands of students without a school and hundreds of employees without a job.
With the school year less than a month away, parents had to look for new schools for their children–not an easy task, as most public schools were already full. Even the California Charter School Association admits that 20%, or 6000, of the students had still not found a school to enroll in two weeks into the school year.
Politicians have been promoting charter schools as a remedy to the problems of public education. Diverting money from public schools to these privately run schools, they argue that private enterprise would run the schools more efficiently and improve the quality of education. That’s how someone like Cox, a former insurance executive whose only experience in education was a brief stint on a local school board, was handed 100 million dollars in taxpayer money to start 60 schools, mostly in working-class neighborhoods. Subsequently, he got $5000 from the state for every pupil he claimed was enrolled, plus money from the parents in all sorts of indirect charges, plus money from the public school systems from which his students came.
The fate of Cox’s schools alone shows why privatizing education is just a bad idea. But it’s also a lie that charter schools provide a better education–as test results prove year after year.
None of this should come as a surprise. How can anyone expect that education–or, for that matter, any public service–could be improved by privatization, that is, by subtracting a sizeable chunk of the available funds and handing it over to some businessmen as profit?
It’s true that the public school system provides a poor education for children in this country, especially in working-class neighborhoods. But politicians and businessmen are simply lying when they tell workers that their children will be better off in schools run privately but funded with taxpayer money. They are only interested in putting their hands on some of that money.
What’s needed is to put all the money into the public school system and then add enough more money so that every school can provide the books and equipment required; enough money so every student gets the attention needed from qualified teachers.
Sep 27, 2004
In campaign speeches, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader says that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq ... six months from now.
And after that, what? Replace them with "peace-keeping forces, for a limited duration, from Islamic countries from nearby and neutral countries like Scandinavia, who are used to that sort of task," says the longtime consumer advocate.
Shouldn’t the Iraqi people have the right to run their own country themselves? The Iraqi population’s growing support for the insurgency stems exactly from the desire to boot a foreign occupier out of their country.
Nader obviously thinks that, somehow, U.S. troops have "unfinished business" in Iraq, to be accomplished in "six months."
And what will happen during those six months? More U.S. bombing, more U.S. killing of civilians, more U.S. destruction of whole neighborhoods and towns, more of the mess that is the total and sole responsibility of the U.S., which has devastated Iraq for the last 13 plus years.
And what if U.S. troops "need more time," say, because not enough of those "peace-keeping forces" are found?
This is what Nader calls a "responsible withdrawal," implying that Iraq would collapse into civil war if the U.S. were to leave right now.
Iraq has already collapsed into a civil war–engulfed in it, precisely because of what the U.S. has done and is doing.
When Nader makes this proposal, he accepts the outrageous proposition that the U.S. has the right (what he calls the "responsibility") to determine for other people what happens in their countries.
For 13 years, the U.S. has been carrying out a war on the Iraqi people–sometimes very openly, sometimes less so, but always very deadly.
Six more months? NO! Not a single day more!
To be against this war means to tell the truth about it–and the first and most important truth is that every single day the U.S. stays, every single day Iraq is occupied, the situation will only grow worse.
Get U.S. troops out of Iraq NOW!
Sep 27, 2004
"Unimaginable working conditions and extreme exploitation," says a report from "Human Rights Watch" describing how immigrant workers are treated in Saudi Arabia.
Eight million foreign workers, mostly from Asian and African countries, work in a real hell there. These workers, making up a third of the population of the country, are tied hand and foot to their employers, deprived of any way to fight back. Slavery may have been officially abolished in Saudi Arabia–in 1962!–but immigrant workers continue to suffer under a form of "extreme exploitation," which is little more than slavery.
The report testifies to impossibly long work days, with no breaks, unpaid overtime, even entire weeks or months of salary stolen, all kinds of bad treatment. A worker from Bangladesh worked 10 or 12 hours each day and sometimes all the night, without getting any extra pay, repairing underground tunnels in Tabuk. Unpaid for the first two months, he had to borrow money from his co-workers to eat. An Indian worker told of being paid $133 for a month of 16-hour workdays. A Filipino restaurant worker talked of working 16 and 18 hours per day. A Bengali working as a butcher was driven out of the country by his employer, who paid him NO salary for the six months he had worked.
The situation of women workers is still worse. In addition to what the men suffer, they are shut up in buildings next to their workplaces, living packed into a tiny room with many other women. Add to that the women being raped and beaten by their employers, who know they can do what they want without the slightest consequence.
On top of the horror inflicted by their bosses is the horror of what the Saudi state may do to the immigrant workers, hidden under a veil of secrecy. Foreign workers can be arrested after being denounced by their employer, thrown in jail on someone’s whim. In jail they suffer not only isolation and beatings but sometimes torture and "confessions" extorted from them in a language they don’t even understand. Some are condemned to death by having their heads cut off. Workers might simply disappear, with their spouses, parents, and children never knowing they were given a secret trial and executed. How many such cases are there, right this minute, of workers held in secret waiting for execution? No one knows.
The responsibility for this situation certainly lies with the wealthy Saudi classes and the Saudi state administration–these feudal reactionaries who bring such pressure on hundreds of thousands of workers to keep the oil royalties flowing like water. But while oil makes the Saudi bourgeoisie rich, it makes the American, French and British oil company shareholders even richer.
Behind the barbarous Saudis–and above them–stand the imperialist barbarians who are content to go along with this situation and who depend on this dictatorship to maintain order for them.
Sep 27, 2004
Many people in New Orleans, Louisiana escaped a potential disaster when Hurricane Ivan veered away from the city at the last minute. The city had no mechanisms in place for how to evacuate the poor.
As the hurricane approached the southern coast, city officials warned people to evacuate. More than a million people jammed the interstate highway trying to get out of town. It took some people seven hours to drive 60 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Some radio broadcasters actually told people not to get on the interstate, saying they could be trapped in the traffic jam when the storm hit.
People with no cars had no way to leave and nowhere to go. The Red Cross has stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated over Category 2. Hurricane Ivan was a category 4 storm. The city told people who could not leave to go to high-rise hotels.
Until the storm was just hours away, the city had provided no shelters for those who could not afford hotels. Only then did they open the football stadium, the Superdome, for those with nowhere else to go. In any case, who knows how safe the Superdome would have been in a category 4 hurricane?
People have known for a long time that New Orleans is at risk of sinking under the right hurricane conditions. The city sits below sea level, between a large lake, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters had predicted this would be a bad hurricane season and yet the city had no real plans for everyone to evacuate. The only arrangement they made to deal with the worst-case scenario was to have ten thousand body bags on hand.
The people of New Orleans were lucky–this time. The experience, however, shows capitalism’s weight on the population–which turns natural occurrences into socially-caused disasters.
Sep 27, 2004
As of the last week-end in September, at least 1100 people have died in Haiti as a result of the tropical storm Jeanne. Extensive damage was caused by the high winds and flooding that hit the north and northeastern parts of the country, including Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city, and the island of Tortue.
The number of victims can only rise in the coming days in Haiti, a country that is without decent roads or communication, where emergency services are almost nonexistent. Many areas remained inaccessible one week after the storm passed through.
Hurricanes are frequent in this part of the world. But the effects they have vary tremendously between different countries that are hit. When Ivan hit the coast of the United States with winds many times more powerful than those of Jeanne, some 30 people died. In Haiti, the number of victims is already 33 times more, and could go as high as a hundred times more.
This is not surprising, given the extreme poverty in which the Haitian people live. Many people, too poor to pay rent, live in home-made shacks in the hills, or even sleep on beds placed in dry riverbeds–which flood with every rainfall. Running water and sanitation are nonexistent. With each rain, the poorly constructed roads turn into rivers of mud. The government is unable to prepare for a crisis; it gives no warning to the population and it takes no emergency actions. All these things mean that any problem in the weather can produce a disaster. Last June, torrential rains set off a mudslide that devastated a whole region, leading to thousands of deaths.
Beyond the deaths caused directly by the winds and floods of Jeanne, there will be many more victims in the storm’s aftermath. In a country that is among the poorest on the planet, the lack of drinkable water, of food and of sanitation can only produce more and more victims as the days and weeks unwind.
In fact, the Haitian population is the victim more of Haiti’s underdevelopment than of the storm. And the responsibility for this is not nature, but rather American and French imperialism, which over centuries held the Haitian people in slavery and drained the country of its resources, starting in the colonial period, up through the international corporations that continue today to take the riches out of Haiti, bleeding the country and its people, leaving them in dire poverty.
Sep 27, 2004
An outbreak of a dangerous form of hepatitis has been reported in two areas of Iraq.
In Baghdad, 155 cases of hepatitis E have been reported in the past two months. In Mahmudiya, 35 miles south of Baghdad, 60 new cases were reported just last week. Hepatitis E is especially dangerous for pregnant women. So far, nine pregnant women have been diagnosed with the disease; one has died.
Since health officials have only enough equipment to test a very limited number of all the people showing symptoms of the disease, they are saying that these numbers are only a very small fraction of the actual cases that exist in the country.
Hepatitis E, which is caused by a virus, is usually spread by sewage-contaminated drinking water. Water and sewage treatment systems have collapsed all across the country–stemming from over a decade of U.S. bombing and sanctions after the first Gulf War–made much worse by repeated attacks by U.S. bombers since the current war began.
The reported cases of typhoid fever, which is also spread through contaminated drinking water, are also up sharply this year.
Hepatitis E could be easily treated–IF the proper medications were made available, the proper facilities were built, and the proper equipment supplied. But the U.S. did not go to war to improve medical care for the Iraqi people or the country’s infrastructure. U.S. money has been spent on weapons of destruction and on protecting the oil wells there.
With poverty increasing by leaps and bounds in Iraq, with even basic services disappearing altogether, words about democracy not only ring hollow–they are vilely cynical.
Sep 27, 2004
The following article was excerpted and translated from an article appearing in the July 2004 issue of "Voix des Travailleurs" (Workers Voice), a publication of the Organization of Revolutionary Workers in Haiti. It gives a picture of the deteriorating situation in Haiti following the forced departure of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile. The social and political chaos described herein only added to the disaster left by hurricane Jeanne that hit in September.
While politicians maneuver and settle accounts with each other inside the State apparatus put in place by this year’s U.S. military intervention, the State itself is rapidly disintegrating.
For some time now, the State has abandoned all its public service functions, like hospitals and garbage pickups. The State doesn’t even repair the roads, which become impassable. Electricity is on only randomly, even in the capital. And there are no public health facilities.
For decades, the Haitian State apparatus has been corrupt from top to bottom. Those with power try only to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, stealing from the State and selling their influence when they have nothing else to sell.
Any State, even the most democratic, is in the last resort an apparatus of oppression against the poor in the service of the bourgeois ruling class. But in Haiti, where those in power have long used their control of the State to personally get rich, the situation of the poor is particularly dire....
Today, Haiti has been turned over to the law of rival armed bands. There are official armed bands of police, who are incapable of assuring public safety. Unofficial armed bands of the old Armed Forces of Haiti parade and demand that the army Aristide had dissolved be reconstituted. There are private armed bands in the service of the rich. Bands of hoodlums called "chimeres" fight each other for power in working class neighborhoods over the right to pillage, steal and rape with impunity....
Workers’ neighborhoods become unlivable. Hoodlums on the loose open fire to punish those who encroach on their territory. Women and children have been raped in the middle of the street or in their homes. In Port-au-Prince, the capital, the poor are kidnaped in order to be raped. Confrontations between armed bands cause more victims in the population than among the gangs. Certain nights are transformed into nightmares, and many workers go out to work in the morning after a sleepless night....
Workers’ neighborhoods get no protection from the police, when the police themselves aren’t part of the attacking gangs. The authorities leave the workers’ neighborhoods to the law of armed gangs. The "international protective force," set up to protect the airport, official buildings, and the industrial zone, isn’t there to protect the population.
The damage isn’t only material. There also is a degradation of the collective behaviors that had developed in the population. Confronted by poverty and exploitation, the poor population for years cared for and looked out for each other in ways that very often protected them from the powerful and the authorities.
But today, the recent violence isn’t calling forth such collective reactions. Fear pushes people to withdraw into their own corner, isolating the victims from one another, making it easy for those with a revolver or knife, who live as parasites.
And yet, hope for the working population is in collective reaction. An act of isolated banditry can be prevented by unarmed people, on condition that they act collectively, on condition that they don’t leave anyone alone with their fear to face their aggressor. A woman who is molested must be able to count on everyone else reacting violently toward the rapist. The hoodlums, even armed, will hesitate before taking on a neighborhood where they know the inhabitants are ready to aid one another.
That appears difficult today, when the rot of society and the decomposition of the State have disrupted social life and undermined collective reactions. The only place where there is any collective organization is in the industrial zones where the necessities of capitalist production regroup an important part of the poor population. Organizing among workers to defend themselves in front of the boss is already a big step toward forging a collective will. Establishing links between workers of different enterprises, who often know each other, would be another step. If the workers learn to organize themselves in the industrial zone to defend their collective interests, they will know how to organize themselves in their neighborhoods. They will be able to link themselves with others–small merchants who are shaken down, women who are attacked, youth, the unemployed and casual workers who, though poor, haven’t become bandits. And when people are organized and capable of a collective will, they also find the means to neutralize the arms of their enemies, the big and little parasites.
Today, does this seem to be difficult even to imagine? Undoubtedly. Nevertheless, life leaves us only one way: substituting for the faltering power of the rich another power, our power, that of workers conscious of their interests and the interest of all the exploited classes.
Sep 27, 2004
Bosses, being disconnected from the real world, need pollsters to tell them what everyone else knows.
A perfect example was a "first-of-a-kind" Gallup poll of workers in southeast Michigan. The absolutely earth-shattering and amazing discovery of this poll was that in general, only one out of three workers is committed to the company they work for–and in the auto industry, only one worker out of seven is committed. Everyone else puts in their time, but not their "energy or passion," to use Gallup’s words.
Gallup also discovered that one out of three workers in the auto industry "acts out their unhappiness" at their workplace.
While this may be exceptional news in the world of bosses, workers can only wonder: where did Gallup find two who are satisfied?
Sep 27, 2004
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors announced on September 13 that they would close the trauma unit of the Martin Luther King/Drew hospital near Watts.
The county supervisors say that the trauma center needs to be sacrificed so that money and staff can be diverted to other units to "save the hospital."
There is absolutely no guarantee that the hospital will be "saved." The supervisors played a similar game two years ago when they threatened to close two other trauma centers. Voters then approved a property tax hike, supposedly to keep the facilities open, but that obviously hasn’t "saved" the trauma units from being attacked again.
L.A.‘s trauma care capacity has already shrunk dramatically. Over the last 20 years, the number of trauma centers in L.A. County has gone from 23 to 13, while the population has been increasing. In a drive to maximize their profits, private hospitals have been simply eliminating services they find "too costly," such as trauma units and emergency rooms.
Instead of trying to close the gap created by these closures, the county has actually widened it by following the example of the private sector. The share of health care spending in the county budget, which was 20% in 1984, is now down to almost 5%. And the supervisors are looking for ways to cut it down even more–targeting "expensive" services such as trauma care.
Trauma centers treat the most severely injured, such as victims of shootings, car crashes and industrial accidents. The King/Drew trauma unit has been treating over 2000 patients a year, the second highest in the county. Even just the extra travel time that will result from the closure of King/Drew will cost many lives, because, in trauma cases, every minute can decide the question of life or death.
Trauma care may be costly, but it literally saves lives. And it’s simply not true that we as a society can’t afford this vital service. The county supervisors certainly have the money to give to corporations for big projects with huge cost overruns–such as the subway construction that has been going on for decades, to name one example.
No, the money is there; it’s just a question of priorities. For the bosses and politicians who run this capitalist system, corporate profits will always come before human lives.
Sep 27, 2004
US Airways, the seventh largest airline in the country, has asked a bankruptcy court judge to order four unions at the airline to accept 800 million dollars worth of cuts in wages and benefits. A fifth union has already agreed to such cuts.
In addition to pay cuts of 23%, US Air wants court permission to stop contributing to workers’ pension and 401(k) retirement plans, as well as permission to contract out some mechanics’ work, to require longer hours from flight attendants and pilots and to lay off more workers.
This is the second time in just two years that US Air has declared bankruptcy. The last time around, officials at two unions had already convinced the workers to go along with big pay cuts in the summer of 2002. But US Air, then the sixth largest airline in the country, wanted more pay cuts, increased contracting out, and bigger co-pays and deductibles for workers’ health care.
Faced with workers’ anger over the new demands, the airline went into bankruptcy court, threatening to get the court to impose what it wanted.
The maneuver worked: Union officials argued that if the workers didn’t agree to big cuts "voluntarily," the courts would impose even bigger ones. Under this pressure, the workers agreed to a total of almost two billion dollars in wage and benefit cuts on top of the cuts they had accepted just a few months earlier.
Having worked so well the last time around, US Air is now trying the bankruptcy route again. The trick is even more blatant this time, since US Air doesn’t even pretend to be losing money. It just says it needs the new cuts in workers’ pay and benefits in order to accumulate a bigger reserve.
That hasn’t prevented union officials from immediately jumping forward, volunteering to negotiate the cutbacks, to "prevent the judge from imposing them."
Hopefully, this time enough workers will see through the game and tell the airline bosses, union officials and the bankruptcy judge where to park themselves!
Sep 27, 2004
The Secret Service says it’s "investigating" "threatening remarks" made towards George W. Bush by a 55-year-old New Jersey woman who lost a son in Iraq.
Sue Niederer’s son, Army Lieutenant Seth Dvorkin, 24, was killed in Iraq last February. Since then, she has regularly joined protests against the war.
Her real crime? Several days before the Secret Service opened their "investigation," in September, Niederer stood up at a rally attended by Laura Bush wearing a t-shirt reading, "President Bush killed my son." She asked Mrs. Bush, if the war was so just, "why don’t your children serve?"
Niederer, who had a ticket to the event, was arrested and charged with trespassing. The charges were later dropped.
The Secret Service SAYS their investigation stems from remarks Niederer made in an interview she gave last May. She was quoted as saying that she wanted to "rip the president’s head off" and "shoot him in the groin area."
Really? If that were true, if those remarks made the Secret Service see her as a possible threat to Bush’s safety, it didn’t stop them from giving her a ticket to the Laura Bush rally, after she showed her own ID. It didn’t stop them from letting her into the rally, after her name had been added to the guest list.
Clearly, they didn’t see her as a "threat" until AFTER she had embarrassed the Bushes and brought attention to the continuing deaths of soldiers in Iraq.
Sep 27, 2004
A bookstore and campaign office of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) was firebombed in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, in the early morning hours of September 11th.
The office was severely damaged in the fire. Any books that were not burned were made unusable by the smoke.
No one has yet been caught and no one has taken credit for the act, so it’s not completely certain what the motivation was.
But given the history of such acts in this country, it’s likely that the SWP was targeted for their militant activities.
The SWP is one of the few parties running candidates in opposition to both Bush and Kerry in the November election. They and their candidates have stood clearly against the war in Iraq, and for the rights of workers, black people and women.
"This is an attack on the rights of working people to think and act," said Brian Taylor, SWP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania. "It is aimed at intimidating anyone who wishes to speak out in defense of the working class."
It’s not surprising that the police have not yet arrested anyone for the crime. Solving cases of attacks against activists has never been high on their list of priorities.
But it’s in the interest of all workers, and anyone committed to social justice and to putting an end to the war in Iraq, to speak out in protest against this act of intimidation.
The Socialist Workers Party is asking that people send a message to Hazelton Mayor Louis Barletta, 40 N. Church Street, Hazelton, PA 18201, asking that all possible steps be taken to apprehend those responsible.
The SWP also asks for money contributions to the 2004 Socialist Workers Campaign, to help rebuild the office.
Sep 27, 2004
The U.S. military has dropped spy charges against Ahmad Al-Halabi, a Senior Airman in the Air Force, in exchange for his guilty plea to minor charges.
Al-Halabi was originally charged with being part of a spy ring along with three other men at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Charges have already been dropped for two of the other men, James Yee and Jackie Farr. The case of the fourth man, Ahmed Mehalba is still pending.
In exchange for dropping the spying charges, the government required Al-Halabi to plead guilty to carrying classified material without proper covers or locks. (If all the people who did the same thing at other government offices were prosecuted, there would be no one left working!)
The other charges against him stem from the fact that he kept some material showing the atrocious conditions at Guantanamo: two pictures he took of the prison camp; a list of prisoners, a sketch of the camp and the summary of an investigation of an argument between a translator and a guard when the translator protested the treatment of a prisoner.
Given what was going on in Guantanamo, there should have been more people keeping track of the atrocious behavior being meted out to prisoners. When investigators confronted Al-Halabi about the pictures, he panicked and lied to them–not very surprising when they told him they would charge him with offenses that carry the death penalty. Ironically, the government, which charged Al-Halabi with lying, attempted to introduce a falsified letter into the court proceedings against him!
In any case, it’s obvious that Al-Halabi was not spying. The government itself admitted that, when it dropped all the serious charges before it ever went to trial, and agreed he would spend no more time in prison.
So the Justice Department has not gotten one single conviction on espionage or terrorism charges in all the cases it has brought over the last two years. But then, convictions were not the main point of the charges. Creating an atmosphere, trying to make the population believe that there are spies and terrorists everywhere–this was the aim of these cases announced with so much fanfare and publicity.
The real terrorists are those in the government who manufacture evidence and make up false charges against people–in order to terrify the U.S. population and intimidate opposition to government policies.