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
Jun 6, 2005
Go ahead and dump your retiree health benefits–the courts will let you. That’s what Sanford Bernstein, a Wall Street research firm, recently told GM.
And–wouldn’t you know it–a series of articles soon appeared in legal journals, pushing the very same conclusion.
It’s no wild coincidence! Wall Street is simply floating a very big trial balloon. The big money men want GM to tear up its retirees’ medical plan.
They’re already starting. Along with Ford and Chrysler, GM is right now rewriting the terms of medical plans covered in current contracts with the auto workers, reducing coverage, one item at a time, increasing co-payments, one at a time.
But to tear up the whole plan in one blow would be a much bigger attack on a much larger group of workers than anything we’ve seen up to this point.
And we’ve certainly seen a lot. A large part of the steel industry declared bankruptcy in order to dump their pension plans into the lap of a government agency–in the process, getting rid of all medical coverage. The airline industry, the auto parts industry, big retailers like Kmart and thousands of small companies all rushed to the courts to follow steel’s example. Bankruptcy became the prime mechanism for tearing up promises made to workers over the last 50 years.
But bankruptcy has some inconveniences for the biggest companies like GM and Ford. So some legal hot-shot has now figured out a scheme to let them do what bankruptcy does without going through the trouble of bankruptcy.
It’s a scheme put together by the biggest capitalists in the country. It’s a declaration of war: they want to take all medical benefits away from GM workers. IF GM is allowed to get away with this, every other company will rush to follow.
So what should the workers’ response be? Stop this attack dead in its tracks–that’s what!
Easier said than done–that’s what some people will say. Of course, that’s true. But no matter how hard it is to fight back–it will be harder still if we don’t fight.
Hard, you say? No, hard would be if there were no money available to pay for what we need. But there’s plenty of money. The wealthy class has been accumulating more and more of it, by stealing everything away from us.
Well, take back some of that wealth!
Think it can’t be done, you say? Just look at how quickly George W. Bush began to back-pedal when he saw he couldn’t convince us to go along with his plans to destroy Social Security.
Oh yes, he’ll be back, trying to come for Social Security in another way. But see what it means that this man with all this power in his hands had to step back. And we hadn’t even done anything–other than say NO, we don’t agree.
We have more power than we realize. We have the means to back them off all their plans to attack us.
Just saying NO won’t stop them–but it does start us going in the right direction!
Jun 6, 2005
A new documentary is out called "Enron: Smartest Boys on the Block." It is based on a book written by two business reporters, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. McLean was among the first reporters to dare question Enron’s accounting figures during its hey-day.
In the 1990s, Enron rose to become the seventh largest company in the country. Year after year, it was considered to be one of the most admired companies in the world. As the film shows, it was all smoke and mirrors. For example, Enron created thousands of off-shore companies to hide tens of billions of dollars in debt. Enron could not have done this alone. Enron had the top lawyers in Texas and the top accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, helping to okay the deals. Enron’s bankers (Citicorp, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch), then helped finance them. Together, they made huge amounts of money.
These companies also worked with Enron in the cover-up. When a Merrill Lynch stock analyst questioned whether Enron was a good stock to buy, Enron complained and Merrill Lynch fired him. And when Enron was under an SEC investigation as its stock began to fall, Andersen shredded tons and tons of Enron documents.
The film shows how Enron’s top executives had the backing of Bush Sr. and then Bush Jr. Ken Lay, who started out as the chief executive of a small Texas energy company, was a key advocate of the deregulation of the energy industry. After he put Enron together, he worked behind the scenes to name key people to government energy posts. Ken and his top lieutenant, Jeff Skilling, of course profited greatly from the results of the deregulation. By early 2001, Enron was selling its stock at $100 a share. It puffed up its balance sheets by buying and selling the same amount of energy many times, without ever putting it to use.
When Enron crashed at the end of 2001, the film shows how over 20,000 Enron employees lost their jobs. Two billion dollars worth of pension money was wiped out. The accounting firm Arthur Andersen also closed its doors, and another 29,000 jobs were wiped out.
One of Enron’s biggest heists was during the 2001 California energy crisis and the rolling blackouts. Deregulation had been pushed through by Democrats and Republicans alike. In the end, energy traders were selling electricity, which had gone for $34 per unit, for the price of $1,000 at the peak of their maneuvering. The people of California had to pay an extra 34 billion dollars in their energy bills. The Enron guys are heard laughing as they bank their multi-million dollar bonuses for shutting off electricity to the world’s sixth largest economy.
The movie does have problems. It pretends that the Democrats in California, especially the governor, Gray Davis, opposed Enron during the electricity crisis. The exact opposite is true. Davis was on the phone with Enron’s Lay almost every day, and Davis did Lay’s bidding.
Another problem with the movie is that it pretends that Enron is the exception. This is also complete nonsense. Capitalism is based on lying, cheating and stealing. Enron was just a fabulous profit machine–run by a gang who marketed themselves as "the smartest guys on the block." And they were the envy of every other gang of capitalist crooks!
Jun 6, 2005
Seventy-four billion dollars–that’s the profits made by only four oil companies in 2004: ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco. Every day of the year these four companies alone took in two hundred million dollars in profits.
For the first three months of 2005, these four companies made another 24 billion dollars in profit from selling gasoline and fuel oils.
A financial analyst was quoted in the Detroit News:"I have never seen anything like this. It’s like they’re printing money."Good news for the big insurance companies, banks and investment houses, which own big amounts of oil company stock–but bad news for those of us who work for our living.
Jun 6, 2005
The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave the country’s infrastructure a D grade in its 2005 Report Card for America’s infrastructure. That’s even worse than the D+ grade it gave in 2001.
According to the engineers, the nation’s water is not safe, the sewer lines are decrepit, and several thousand dams are in dangerous shape. They indicated that the roads and mass transit systems are getting worse, with the average driver spending $275 per year in repairs related to bad roads. One in three urban bridges are "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete."They also pointed out that electrical transmission capacity is decreasing in the face of increased demand and that less and less is being done to clean up toxic waste sites.
Of course, the civil engineers may have their own ax to grind–they’d like to see more jobs for engineers. But everyone has seen or heard about the results of the crumbling infrastructure–cement falling from bridges onto people’s cars, sinkholes caving in due to collapsing sewer pipes, not to mention the electrical blackout of August 2003 that impacted a huge portion of the country. Detroiters were recently surprised to read that Detroit’s roads were not the worst in the country. They came in ahead of at least 25 other cities, despite the fact that 33% of the area’s roads were reported to be in poor shape and another 38% are mediocre!
Infrastructure is one of the things that distinguishes a developed country from an underdeveloped one. That so much is in decay in the U.S. today is a mark that the society itself is going backwards. It’s not that there isn’t money to pay for improving things, it’s where the money is going instead–for tax breaks to the corporations and wars against the rest of the world’s populations.
Jun 6, 2005
Detroit’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, and its city council are embroiled in a battle over whose budget will decide Detroit’s fate.
Both try to present themselves as defending the population against attacks being made by the other side.
Which is pretty funny, because both the mayor’s budget and the city council’s include massive cuts for city employees and thus for city services. If it’s true that Kilpatrick’s budget contains slightly fewer cuts, it’s only because he’s up for re-election this year.
There’s one thing that both agree on: neither the mayor nor the city council proposes to cut the huge tax cuts that have been handed out to corporations, both large and small.
And there’s one other thing neither of these "representatives" of the people proposes to do–that’s to mobilize the population to go to the state and federal governments–to DEMAND more money to save the schools, and to repair the crumbling infrastructure.
When it comes right down to it, there’s no real difference between them at all. Just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Jun 6, 2005
George Bush nominated Congressman Christopher Cox to replace William Donaldson as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This has been portrayed as a move to take a more "hands-off" approach toward business.
David Chavern, director of corporate governance at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says, "When Mr. Donaldson came in, there was a need to restore investor confidence. It’s a different environment now, and we have fundamental concerns about the competitiveness of U.S. capital markets and about regulatory overreach."Regulatory overreach? In recent years, we’ve seen companies collapse after overstating profits and running up huge debts. Major banks have helped companies to make their "cash flow" appear larger by carrying out complicated financial transactions. Major firms have been allowed to declare bankruptcy to get out of pension obligations only to quickly return to profitability later. The stock market bubble burst only to be followed by a new bubble. Real estate prices have ballooned in no relation to reality, as anyone who drives by all of the vacant strip malls can see. Everyone who has a 401(k) plan has seen their value plummet. All while the SEC watched.
It’s hard to see how the SEC could now take a more "hands off" approach!
Jun 6, 2005
In Prince Georges County, Maryland, near Washington D.C., anyone who calls 911 gets a recorded message and then is put on hold. Naturally, when someone in an emergency is put on hold, they hang up and call back. But then they are put in the back of the line and have to wait longer for someone to answer.
The system does not triage phone calls. They expect people to know, to understand the system and to have patience–in an emergency situation!
Two people have already died because of this system.
The solution is simple–911 needs more phones and more workers!
Jun 6, 2005
In its latest annual report, Amnesty International indicted the U.S. as the year’s worst violator of human rights. As Amnesty’s Secretary General Irene Khan pointed out, " The U.S., as the unrivaled political, military and economic super-power, sets the tone of government behavior worldwide."This well-known human rights group specifically criticized the following behavior: "While the U.S. government is pursuing a public relations exercise to persuade the world that what the Abu Ghraib photographs revealed was a small problem that has now been fixed, thousands of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and secret locations elsewhere remain at risk of torture or ill-treatment.... More than a year after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. courts have the jurisdiction to consider appeals for the detainees held in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, not a single detainee held there has had the lawfulness of his detention judicially reviewed."Like other repressive regimes criticized by Amnesty International, U.S. officials pretended to be indignant. "Absurd," said President Bush. It is the product of people who "hate America." "Frankly, I was offended by it," said the suddenly sensitive Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Administration officials were particularly annoyed that Amnesty International described the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "gulag"–the notorious forced-labor camps in Siberia used during the Stalin regime to persecute opponents.
In fact, "gulag" barely describes the situation. It is not just at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan that thousands of people are abused, tortured and sometimes murdered. And it’s not just this year. With the help of vicious local dictators and their armies, funded and supported by the U.S. government, U.S. corporations have imposed starvation wages on laborers in poor countries around the world. Using the repressive methods seen at Guantanamo–and much worse–the U.S. has turned entire countries into little more than forced labor camps for entire populations.
Jun 6, 2005
Europe may be unified at the level of the bosses. But it’s never been unified as far as the situation of the workers. The following article excerpted and translated from the June 3 issue of Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the French Trotskyist group, explains the situation.The inequalities of pay among European workers are enormous. Salaries in Denmark, for example, are on average eight times higher than salaries in Slovakia, despite the fact they come from the same multi-nationals which hire them all.
A recent article in a Paris newspaper gave the example of different factories owned by Michelin, the tire-makers. For German workers at the Karlsruhe factory, monthly pay is more than 2700 euros; for Spanish workers at Michelin’s Valladolid factory, monthly pay is 2300 euros. For Polish workers at Michelin’s Olstyn factory, monthly pay is 875 euros.
Michelin, which employs them all, announced profits of 527 million euros in 2004. The boss, Edward Michelin, got more than four million euros in 2003. His pay comes out to 10,000 euros (currently worth about $13,000) each and every day of the year during 2003.
All the big capitalist groups have long since unified the European countries by installing affiliates everywhere, by buying up companies in all the countries, and by draining surplus value from thousands of workers of different nationalities. They take advantage of monopolizing economic activity in the poorer countries of Europe to impose worse working conditions and lower salaries on these workers.
Here’s exactly why all European workers, who often have the same boss, always have an interest to carry on the same fight together.
Jun 6, 2005
(First in France and then in the Netherlands, voters rejected referendums for the European constitution. The following article is a translation from the June 3rd newspaper of the French Trotskyist organization Lutte Ouvrière, Workers Struggle. It explains a little more about what the vote in France means.)As was hoped and expected in working class neighborhoods throughout France, a large majority voted against the European constitution. In city after city, the working class areas voted not only against the European constitution, but in so doing against those who proposed and defended it, beginning with President Jacques Chirac.
Since the top government officials campaigned for a "YES" vote, the constitution and the government were really tied together. Over the last three years these same government officials carried out one attack after another against the working class. So it is only right that voters rejected the constitution that these officials sponsored.
As for the leadership of the Socialist Party, which is not in power, it too has been discredited by its total alignment with the policies of the right wing and the leaders of the right-wing parties. Part of the Socialist Party electorate had trouble swallowing a lot of that party’s policies after it called for a vote for the right-wing Chirac during the 2002 elections. In supporting the referendum, the leaders of the Socialist Party tried to pull the wool over these voters’ eyes yet again.
As soon as voters rejected the European constitution, politicians of various political stripes began fresh political in-fighting. On the right, it’s Sarkozy versus Chirac; on the left, it’s Fabius versus Hollande, without mentioning any others.
For workers, what is there in all this? Right after the vote results were announced, the top officials made fools of themselves on television trying to twist the truth and explain away the vote. Except for the Communist Party, all the leaders of the big parties had called for a "YES" vote. Thus, the big "NO" vote was a defeat not only of the right-wing officials now in power, but those of the left-wing Socialist Party who hope to return to power, after being out of power for the last three years.
Of course, the NO vote does not by itself change the social situation. The layoffs and closing of work places will continue as long as the capitalists believe this is a way to increase their profits. The buying power of wage earners will continue to be slashed, while employment becomes more and more insecure. Chirac may switch prime ministers. But a change in faces does not mean a change in the government’s anti-worker policies. These politicians will no doubt look for ways to use the NO vote to justify imposing more austerity measures on working people in the future....
If the NO vote will lead to a change of the situation for workers, workers will have to find the means not just to fight against the words of a constitution, but against the big capitalists in the workplaces. The capitalists’ drive for profits, which is what causes unemployment and low wages, doesn’t come from a constitutional text but rather from the stranglehold the owners of capital exercise on the entire economy.
The political maneuvers of politicians from the right as well as the left do nothing but disarm the working class. It was a joyful evening when we found out that the constitution was defeated. But that moment is over. The future depends on the ability of the working class to go on the offensive against the bosses.
Jun 6, 2005
More than three decades after the Watergate scandal brought down the Nixon presidency, W. Mark Felt, the former Number Two man in the FBI, admitted that he was the high government official who supplied the newspapers with some of the most damaging information fueling that scandal. Felt’s admission ended the speculation over who had leaked this information to Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
But the much bigger mystery about why Nixon was brought down by the Watergate scandal has still not been really answered.
According to news reports, Felt had his own reasons to leak information very damaging to the Nixon administration. Felt was one of long-time FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s top proteges and right-hand men. But in 1972, when Hoover died, Nixon passed over Felt and other top FBI officials and instead appointed one of his own people, L. Patrick Grey, from the Justice Department.
Of course, presidents pass over all kinds of people when they make appointments, and it doesn’t lead to scandal and disgrace, as it did with the case of Nixon. Neither was the Watergate burglary much of a reason for such a hullabaloo. Watergate really was just a second-rate burglary, at most. So what if Nixon had bugged the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel on the eve of the 1972 presidential election. As was pointed out at the time, other presidents, from Roosevelt to Johnson, had been known to do similar things. As for all the charges that Nixon was taken down for lying and covering up the burglary afterwards–that is just ridiculous. All presidents lie and cover up, and they do it all the time.
Neither did it seem that Nixon’s policies had lost the confidence of the ruling class, that is, the highest echelons that control the economy and the state apparatus. On the contrary, Nixon seemed to be serving the ruling class well in a difficult time period. In 1972-74, the years of the Watergate scandal, Nixon was in the process of extricating the U.S. from Viet Nam in a way that helped to lessen the damage to U.S. imperialism. On the one hand, Nixon demonstrated U.S. power by having the Air Force carry out the most massive and destructive bombing in Southeast Asia during the whole war. At the same time, with Nixon’s and Kissinger’s turn toward a policy of what they called detente, he was in the process of turning the Soviet Union and China into junior partners to help police Southeast Asia, to keep order in the region as the U.S. retreated. On the domestic front, under Nixon, the government and state apparatus were in the last phases of crushing the remnants of the black movement by assassinating important leaders of groups like the Black Panther Party and setting up and imprisoning thousands and thousands more people, including a number of those who had been active against the war.
So what was the real reason that Nixon was brought down and forced to resign in disgrace?
The fact that Mark Felt of the FBI has now come forward as the mysterious "Deep Throat"–as he was dubbed by Woodward and Bernstein–brings us no closer to answering this question. This remains a mystery because the people who run the government make the most important decisions behind closed doors. When they decided to go to war, as in the period of Viet Nam–or in the current period against Iraq, they decide secretly and then tell a pack of public lies to justify it. When presidents like Nixon, and FBI henchmen like Mark Felt and J. Edgar Hoover, had decided to try to crush the black movement or, to a smaller extent, the anti-war movement by assassination and imprisonment, they decided behind closed doors, and then told a pack of lies to justify it. Therefore it is no surprise that when the state apparatus which really runs things decided to suddenly dump Nixon in the middle of his term, they also did it in secret and created a big media and Congressional circus to justify it.
This is supposed to be a democracy. But ordinary people have no say in the important decisions that are made. The only times that ordinary people have a say is during periods of mass mobilizations and movements, that is, when ordinary people fight in their own interests.
As for the Watergate scandal: the only thing that happened was one snake, Nixon, was taken out by a gang of other snakes. And they didn’t say why. That is the meaning of Watergate.
Jun 6, 2005
Northwest Airlines is demanding that mechanics accept a 26% pay cut and elimination of over 2,000 of their jobs. Northwest also wants to cut the pay of aircraft cleaners by 25% and eliminate over 800 of their jobs, plus cut the pay of custodians by 26%. Northwest said it intended to contract out one-third of its technical work to vendors, either in the U.S. or overseas, who pay lower wages.
This kind of demand would have been considered completely ridiculous just 10 years ago. But a lot has happened in 10 years. Other airlines have declared bankruptcy in order to void wages and benefits guaranteed in contracts.
Northwest apparently figures it can get a similar deal without bothering to go to the bankruptcy courts. Like a neighborhood bully who threatens to use a club to get what he wants, "Northworst" is threatening to use the courts. But bullies have often been pushed back and taught a lesson.
Neither threats nor bankruptcy courts can take things from workers who bring their forces together to fight.
Jun 6, 2005
Ford and its "independent supplier" Visteon have worked out a joint plan for slashing union jobs and workers’ pay.
Visteon is the parts company spun off from Ford five years ago. Its plants, its workforce and its business all came from Ford.
Under the latest agreement, 15 of Visteon’s UAW parts plants, along with four plants in Mexico and six salaried facilities, will be returned to Ford. Thirteen of the UAW plants will be held in a "separate holding company," and either closed or sold to other parts suppliers. Two will be reabsorbed back into Ford–after the workers there are shackled with new work rules.
This is nothing but a new stage in a shell game designed to cut workers’ wages and benefits to the bone.
When the Ford parts plants were spun off into Visteon in 2000, promises were made that wages and benefits would keep up with those at Ford.
But two years ago, Visteon, crying poor, got the UAW to agree to a two-tier wage scale: current employees would retain a $23-per-hour wage, while new hires would make only $14.
With this latest change, the plants will be brought back into Ford–but with employees now making little more than half what other Ford workers make. And 5,000 "first-tier" workers will be encouraged to retire, so more workers can be hired at the lower wage.
Supposedly, current wages and benefits are guaranteed–at least until the current contract expires in September 2007. After that, the holding company–or other parts companies who buy up some of these plants–are fully expected to demand even further wage cuts from ALL the workers, below $14 per hour.
Whether the plants have the Ford logo, the Visteon logo, or another one on their outside walls, they will all have cheaper labor costs–meaning more profits. This is what led Ford to create the fiction of an "independent" part supplier in the first place.
And yet, the UAW leadership is helping sell this deal to the workers!
UAW president Ron Gettelfinger says that the union has no choice–it’s the only thing to do, to save jobs.
But this kind of move has never saved jobs. All it does is set one group of workers against another with these different wage rates, and plunge all wages and benefits into a race to the bottom.
Just because the union leadership is helping to push this attack, that doesn’t mean the workers have to accept it. But it does mean workers can’t depend on the UAW leadership to organize a fight back.
Jun 6, 2005
Ford and Visteon claim that Visteon is going broke. Visteon has lost more than 3.2 billion dollars since the year 2000–or so they say!
For a company going broke, it sure has a funny way of showing it.
At the same time that Visteon announced its plan to dump 15 plants and freeze the wages of salaried employees, it announced it would pay its new president and chief operating officer, Donald Stebbins, 4.65 million dollars in salary and bonuses this year.
And that’s only one of its executives.
It also just finished building a new multimillion-dollar headquarters in a suburb of Detroit–only five years after taking occupancy of its previous headquarters, also new at the time!
Clearly, when Visteon wants the money, it can find it.
Jun 6, 2005
More than two years ago, Bush announced the official end of combat in Iraq. Yet the cost of this war never stops growing, in dollars but also in human lives. More than 1600 U.S. soldiers, not to mention many others in the coalition forces, have been listed officially as killed since the invasion began in March of 2003. The number of Iraqi civilian victims, very hard to assess, has to be way up in the tens of thousands.
After two years of chaos, the American contingent fighting in several regions of Iraq remains at 140,000. The U.S. has carried out spectacular military operations, like the offensive called "Matador" in the province of Al Anbar along the northwest border with Syria, using Marines, helicopters, fighter planes, artillery and armor. But the U.S. high command can still not claim victory against the Sunni guerillas. These military actions simply result in the destruction of all housing and widespread ruin for the population–and this only creates more "rebels."If more evidence is needed about the difficulties facing an army of occupation, look at the thousands of U.S. soldiers who have deserted since the war began. And the coalition of the "willing" has lost HALF its members, including the Spanish troops. There is now talk that the Bulgarian and Italian troops will be leaving.
The armed attacks on occupation troops and bombings of civilians continue with no sign of let-up. In the last four months of 2004, there were more than 1800 attacks against U.S. troops alone. In recent months, despite the formation of an elected Iraqi government, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations increased. These attacks are chiefly aimed at visible government figures, like the minister of Iraqi national security; but they are also aimed at the population. Recently, car booby traps and other bombs killed 49 people and wounded another 130 in a single day.
Recent attacks have been aimed at Shiites who lead the government and even some against Shiite religious leaders. One of the by-products of U.S. military intervention and two years of armed occupation is not "democracy" but rather the promotion of the religious parties, whose reactionary leaders have set up their own militias to fight each other for control of various cities and regions. It is the population that pays the price.
U.S. imperialism created a veritable powder keg with the invasion of Iraq. Its continuing occupation has imposed daily violence on the population. But the occupation has also allowed reactionary political currents to pass themselves off as resistance to the occupation.
Not only has the occupation opened the door to hostage-taking by terrorists and gangsters, it has put 24 million Iraqis at the mercy of this horrible and bloody war without end that Bush, Blair and company have imposed on Iraq.
The U.S. troops should get out of Iraq now!
Jun 6, 2005
Increasingly, people are protesting the presence of military recruiters in their children’s schools. They’re upset that the federal "No Child Left Behind" law forces the schools to allow access to the recruiters and even requires schools to turn over students’ home phone numbers and addresses to the military.
The New York Times carried an article on June 3 about this growing opposition. A truck driver from California requested that he be allowed to hang posters at his son’s school combating false promises by the military offering young people jobs as musicians. A mother in Seattle stood beside recruiters with pictures of soldiers injured in Iraq. Another mother from High Falls, New York voiced her opposition at a school board meeting by reading from a military handbook telling recruiters how to gain access to schools using such methods as offering free doughnuts.
Recruiters admit more people are expressing hostility when they try to contact students at home. Many are hanging up on recruiters. One father threatened recruiters who showed up on his doorstep, saying they better not come back without protection!
The Times and the military try to make it appear that the parents are standing in the way of those young people who want to join the army. Fat chance of that! If young people wanted to sign up they would easily find a way to go around their parents–and they’re not. If young people were rushing to sign up, the military would not have to resort to the hard-sell tactics they’ve been using.
Parents may have been speaking out more strongly–with reason. Many of them have been through wars before.
Jun 6, 2005
An exhibit on display at the Detroit Science Center was created by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and has been shown in several museums around the country. It supposedly focuses on the harm drugs do in the community and to the body. In fact, under this cover, the exhibit is nothing but a slimy piece of patriotic propaganda–filled with evasions and outright lies.
The exhibit, titled "Target America: Drug Traffickers, Terrorists, and You," is a justification for every recent U.S. war. It paints everyone the U.S. wants to attack with the brush of drugs and terrorism, then shows disturbing pictures of neighborhoods and children destroyed by drugs–as if these foreign governments and organizations were directly attacking people here.
In a section titled "September 11, 2001," it rehashes the events of that day, while showing graphic pictures of the rubble of the World Trade Center and children’s toys and clothing pulled from that rubble. What this has to do with drugs is only vaguely suggested.
In a section on "narco-terrorism," it mentions some gangs that "may have" gotten some of their money from drug trafficking: the Shining Path in Peru, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and, of course, Al Qaeda.
But the exhibit carefully ignores other gangs that definitely did make money off drugs–like the "Contras," whom the U.S. used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; or the Afghanistan warlords now allied with the U.S. government, who make lots of money from opium. Afghanistan now supplies over 75% of the world’s heroin.
And it especially ignores the biggest "narcoterrorists" of all–the CIA itself, which dealt heroin in the 1960s and cocaine in the 1980s to finance its terror operations in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The exhibit mentions damage done to neighborhoods in Detroit–but it doesn’t mention the role played by the Detroit police in protecting the drug traffic after the rebellion in 1967.
In short, it blames U.S. enemies for drug trafficking, while ignoring the central role the U.S. itself has played in destroying our neighborhoods with this garbage. It justifies U.S. attacks on people all over the world, by putting across the idea that they’re defending us from drug traffickers and terrorists. What a crock of bull!