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
Aug 1, 2005
The AFL-CIO has split. Leaders of four large unions announced they would not attend the AFL-CIO convention. In the following days, three of the four unions–the Teamsters, the Service Employees (SEIU) and the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) finished the job, confirming what everyone expected: They were quitting. There were speculations that other unions might also leave–specifically UNITE-HERE, plus perhaps the Laborers and the Farmworkers. They will join the Carpenters union which already had left the federation.
If the entire coalition leaves, that would account for nearly one-third of the dues paid to the federation.
Jimmy Hoffa Jr., Andy Stern and Joe Hansen, leaders of the three unions that already left, say they are leaving so they can organize new members.
If there is anything that needs to be done these days, it’s to organize. Less than 8% of the private work force is in a union. Even counting public employees–teachers, government workers, police and firefighters–the overall rate of unionization is an abysmal 12%, down from 35% when the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955.
What does the coalition propose? It wants existing unions to merge into bigger unions, saying that this would allow labor to concentrate its forces on organizing.
If merging smaller unions into bigger unions would have paved the way to organizing and gaining more members, then the union movement should be vibrantly alive today. Between 1978 and today, there were at least 110 mergers of smaller unions into bigger ones. During the 10 years that John Sweeney has headed the AFL-CIO, there have been 31 mergers. Instead of breathing new life into the federation, merging only seems to have turned it into a bunch of old men, running out of breath.
In fact, merging was little more than a bureaucratic answer to the continuing decline in membership. Losing members, the unions lost dues. The bigger unions turned to gobbling up smaller ones to keep the money coming in to support their headquarters, their apparatus and their usual way of functioning.
Proposing to merge was the bureaucrats’ way to avoid the main problem: Why couldn’t they convince workers to join them?
It certainly wasn’t because workers had no reason to organize. The conditions literally push people to organize themselves today. But to take that step, sometimes risking a lot to confront the bosses, workers have to have confidence that when they make a fight, the union they are trying to join will back them up.
The whole federation, starting with the unions that split, is littered with the corpses of strikes that union leaders gave only grudging support to–starting with the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995, the UPS strike of 1997 up to the California supermarket strike of 2004–not to mention the Hormel strike of 1985. The man leading the attack on the Hormel strikers, cutting them off from strike benefits and all support, taking over their local, was none other than the UFCW’s Joe Hansen, who today is one of the leaders of the new coalition.
The hallmark of those who are at the top of the unions today–whether they stay in the federation or leave–is their readiness to defend the profits of "their own" bosses at the workers’ expense.
If the labor movement is to be revitalized today, it will be by the same forces that built it in the first place–the mass activity of workers striking to improve their situation, linking up with each other to make massive struggles across union lines. Unions did not grow based on decisions taken behind closed doors over which union would get the dues of which group of workers. They grew up based on millions of workers out in the streets around the country, clogging up the ordinary functioning of the capitalist economy, forcing the bosses to come to terms with them.
It’s true that the labor movement needs a new start and a new leadership–it needs militants ready to base themselves on the fighting capacities of the working class.
Aug 1, 2005
The AFL-CIO, in its convention, passed a resolution about the war in Iraq.
The AFL-CIO leadership, and the group US Labor Against the War (USLAW), say that the resolution calls for a "rapid" withdrawal of U.S. troops.
In fact, it says nothing of the kind.
There is very little in the resolution that Bush would disagree with. It doesn’t argue against the war, but merely with different aspects of the way the war is being fought–the same kinds of quibbles that Democrats sometimes raise, without calling into question the war itself.
The resolution points out that the Bush administration had misled the public about the reasons for war, while saying nothing of the Democrats’ role in this deception. It gives support for the "democratic" process in Iraq–the same sham process Bush brings out to show his policies are working there.
The resolution makes a big point of speaking about solidarity with the Iraqi workers’ movement, about supporting them in their struggle for democracy. It even mentions that labor leaders are being targeted by terrorists.
But it does NOT do the biggest thing Iraqi union leaders were hoping for, and the one thing that would really help them: it doesn’t call for an IMMEDIATE withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
The resolution does not even acknowledge that the U.S. military presence is responsible for destabilizing the country. Instead, it accepts the U.S. government statements that the U.S. will need to remain in Iraq in order to "stabilize" the country and bring about "democracy." It calls for "greater security on the ground," as an "unmet precondition" for the U.S. to leave. It just asks for some kind of vague timetable, or "benchmarks," for an eventual pullout–the same thing congressional Democrats are asking for.
In the guise of being an anti-war resolution, this is actually a justification for further support of the war.
(And if anybody’s wondering what the new split-off union coalition had to say about the war–they haven’t said a thing.)
But the AFL-CIO leadership must be feeling a certain pressure from below to even pretend to make a statement against the war. It’s the mark of the depth of the opposition to the war in the AFL-CIO rank and file–and in the public as a whole. It shows what workers COULD do, if they really used the power they have to force their views to be heard.
The goal of US Labor Against the War has been to get the AFL-CIO to take a position against the war. Well, if we wait for these folks to act in our interest, we’ll be waiting a long time.
Aug 1, 2005
Leaders of the new "Change to Win" split from the AFL-CIO sometimes compare their split to the formation of the original CIO, led by John L. Lewis.
Unfortunately, the two events are about as different as day and night.
By the end of 1935, when Lewis and other AFL leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization inside the AFL, there was already in the working class an upsurge of very militant strikes, wildcats, even sit-downs. In the U.S. in 1932 there were 841 recorded strikes involving 324,000 workers. In 1933 there were 1695 strikes involving 1,168,000, and in 1934 there were 1856 involving 1,467,000. By 1937 the strike wave would grow to 4,740 recorded strikes involving 1,861,000 workers.
Three strikes in 1934 were especially significant: the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the San Francisco general strike, and the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike (actually three strikes in a row). These strikes showed that the working class was in a fighting mood, ready to battle against the conditions forced on them by the bosses’ Great Depression.
The workers also demonstrated their willingness to follow a fighting, militant leadership, different from the AFL craft-union approach often called "business unionism." Leaders of those 1934 strikes–militants of the American Workers Party in Toledo, the Dunne brothers and Carl Skoglund and other militants of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis, Harry Bridges and Communist Party militants in San Francisco–were influenced to a great extent by revolutionary and socialist ideas and by the successful workers’ revolution in Russia in 1917.
In l935, it was clear to John L. Lewis and his allies inside the AFL that a vast workers’ uprising was already in progress. Their ambition was to run after the workers’ movement, catch up to it, seize its leadership and impose their own policy upon it–in a word, to substitute themselves for the socialist militants then at the front.
At the October 1935 AFL convention, Lewis ally C.P. Howard of the International Typographical Union spoke: "Now let us say to you that the workers of this country are going to organize, and if they are not permitted to organize under the banner of the American Federation of Labor they are going to organize under some other leadership."
The CIO founders’ aim was precisely to interpose themselves between the working class and its rising, class-conscious, militant leadership. To begin to accomplish this, they separated from their old AFL; to signal the completion of that job, in 1955 they rejoined the AFL.
Andy Stern, SEIU president and founder of the Change to Win split-off, writes that his proposals, if adopted by the AFL-CIO, would have been "a dramatic event as historic as the founding of the CIO in the 1930s." But whatever the drama of the original CIO, it was inside the larger drama of a whole working class lifting its head, flexing its muscle, daring by mass actions to do battle with the bosses. The workers began to do whatever was necessary to win, enthusiastically creating a wave of sit-down strikes which declared that the working class could even begin to seize for itself the bosses’ holy property.
Unfortunately, no such drama exists today. If a workers’ movement arose today as vigorously as in the 1930s, then the same leadership issues would arise as well. And people like Stern and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. would rush to contain it.
Aug 1, 2005
On July 28, U.S. Army Sgt. Kevin Benderman, an Iraq combat veteran, was convicted by a court-martial of "missing movement" of his unit. Benderman was sentenced to 15 months in jail, busted to private, and ordered dishonorably discharged. He was not convicted of the harsher charge of desertion.
And what was Sgt. Benderman’s crime? He became opposed to war because of what he’d seen on his first Iraq combat tour in 2003. He applied for conscientious objector status just before his unit returned to Iraq for a second tour. He also went public, speaking and writing about his experiences and his moral convictions.
Perhaps it was exercising his freedom of speech that earned Benderman the harshest sentence yet delivered to a GI who refuses Iraq duty. In any event, the court-martial delivered quite a message to U.S. troops: you are free not to obey, but if you use that freedom, we are taking away more of your life!
Which is, by no coincidence, approximately the same message being delivered to the whole Iraqi population by the U.S. military machine today.
Aug 1, 2005
Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader, suddenly declared himself in favor of stem cell research, breaking ranks with President Bush.
Up to now, Frist has marched lock-step with Bush in supporting the prejudices of the religious right–prejudices which oppose science on many fronts. Frist, for example, a heart surgeon, felt himself perfectly able to declare Terri Schiavo’s brain capable of recovery, although Frist did nothing but view a video of her. If this had much more the appearance of a seance than a medical examination, the Schiavo autopsy later removed all doubt. Frist had actually staged a sort of seance–with all the attendant smoke, mirrors, and accuracy!
Frist aides told reporters that he made his stem cell decision based on science. It’s strange to hear that from a man who has never before let science stand in the way of politically useful calculations. But perhaps it’s no different this time. Frist has presidential ambitions. Perhaps it’s the science of polling voters that truly has gotten his attention.
Aug 1, 2005
Today the Chicago Public Schools say they have 9,000 students who don’t have homes, up from 3,500 in 2000. As bad as the schools are for most poor and working class children, it’s exceptionally hard for homeless children. Some are simply too tired to come to school after being all night in a noisy homeless shelter. Others take care of younger brothers or sisters, as a parent tries to survive on a minimum wage job.
Over the years there are fewer and fewer low rent apartments available in Chicago. Landlords have converted whole areas where the poor formerly lived into expensive housing. Many thousands of people have been pushed out of Chicago Public Housing high rise buildings, which have been torn down or the space turned over to the wealthy. And many thousands who were living illegally in those buildings, as bad as they were, found them better than privately owned slums. Now many are homeless.
Further, the so-called safety net has unraveled. Clinton "ended welfare as we’ve known it" in 1996, and the Democratic Party, which has totally controlled Chicago and Cook County over the years, has cut back on programs that offered some support to the poorest.
What a statement about capitalism that in one of its biggest cities, Chicago, home to dozens of the biggest corporations in the world, a city of incredible wealth–there are 9,000 homeless children in the schools. And how many uncounted more on the streets.
Aug 1, 2005
Under the guise of doing something to lower energy prices and reduce U.S. dependence on "foreign oil," both houses of Congress just passed a so-called "energy bill." President Bush said he would sign it immediately.
The bill actually does nothing that will lower energy prices. What it does is give billions of dollars of tax breaks and subsidies not just to the big oil companies, but also to the big gas, coal, nuclear power and utility companies, as well as big agribusinesses.
Oil and gas companies will get at least 1.6 billion dollars, coal fired power plants at least 2.9 billion and electric power transmission companies more than 1.2 billion.
The bill provides for loan guarantees and insurance worth billions of dollars more to the companies that build the first six new nuclear power plants.
Big agribusinesses will benefit handsomely from a requirement to double the amount of ethanol added to gasoline.
How much will all the tax breaks and subsidies cost the rest of us who pay taxes? Experts say it will total in the tens of billions of dollars. But don’t wait for the price of gasoline to drop or your gas and electric bill to go down. The "experts" are also saying that isn’t going to happen. And they should know–they speak for big business.
Aug 1, 2005
The day after the failed second bombing attempt in London, police shot Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician, to death on a subway train. The police say they were carrying out surveillance at his apartment building, and followed him from his apartment building to the train station.
The cops first tried to claim that Menezes was a terror suspect. Later they were forced to admit that they shot an innocent man. The cops say Menezes ran from them. If he ran, it’s not hard to imagine why. The cops who chased him were in plainclothes, and four of them surrounded him. The cops had Menezes down on the ground when they shot him seven times in the head. They claim he looked suspicious because he was wearing a "thick" coat in warm weather. It turns out the thick coat was a jean jacket.
Obviously, after failing to prevent the first terror attacks, and after two weeks of not producing any results in their investigations of the bombings, they were looking to get anyone they could and they shot a man for wearing a jean jacket on his way to work.
After the shooting there was a big outcry against the cops shoot-to-kill tactics. Many people in Britain have begun to say that the terror attacks were the "fruit of Blair’s war" in Iraq.
It’s obviously what’s behind the sudden flurry of activity by the British police. It’s part of a campaign aimed at public opinion to show they can handle terrorism.
So far they have detained thirty people, sixteen of whom they already released. Every time they arrest somebody, they make a big fanfare that they have caught someone really important to the case. When they release someone, on the other hand, you never hear a word.
If the British police can so blatantly shoot someone down in public like this, one can imagine what they are doing to people they have detained behind closed doors. They’ll take a confession any way they can get one.
They say they have the whole bombing "network" in custody. Anyone who’s read a John LeCarré novel knows how ridiculous that is. If it were so easy to track down terrorist networks, the U.S. would have already tracked down everyone involved in the 9/11 bombings and all the bombings in Iraq.
Terrorism is an outrage, no matter who carries it out. Those who carried out the London bombings did not take the side of the oppressed. Rather, oppressed people were their victims.
But no one should believe that the U.S. and British governments are opposed to terrorism either. It’s their terrorism, like the shooting by the British police, with all the power of the state behind them, that produces terrorism in the first place.
Aug 1, 2005
This August 14th is the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII.
The 20th century has been a century of war, with estimates of combined military and civilian deaths put at more than 110 million people. World War II was estimated to have cost almost 50 million deaths, with disruption to hundreds of millions all over the planet. Since then, there have been 150 wars in which almost as many died as died in World Wars I and II combined.Yet "... people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." This quote comes from Hermann Goering, one of the Nazi leaders, during his April 18, 1946 testimony at the Nurnberg trials.These words could have come out of the mouth of President Bush, when he prepared the U.S. population to accept war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or these words could have been said by Roosevelt before the U.S. entered World War II, during the period when U.S. government maneuvers and attacks on Japan provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The end of World War II brought new threats to imperialist control of the world. Leaders of the U.S. and the other imperialist powers had already seen what could happen with the end of World War I. At that time, the capitalists of the world were threatened by populations ready to revolt, most importantly, in the Russian Revolution. When the Allied leaders met at Yalta and Potsdam, even before World War II ended, they were attempting to split the world into zones they could control. They were already trying to prevent the oppressed from using the end of the war to overthrow their rulers and demand independence.
The leaders of the colonial powers were nervous because, even before the fighting was over, rebellions had been breaking out. The Dutch faced an uprising in Indonesia; the British had long faced simmering insurrection in India; the French would send armed forces back to put down revolt in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia. The British and the Americans were faced with a dilemma in a China aflame with peasant revolt.
This situation was the background for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945. The war in Europe had been over for three months; the fighting in the Pacific for all practical purposes had stopped, and the Japanese government was asking for surrender terms. Yet the U.S. government chose to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. Most of the inhabitants of two Japanese cities died and the survivors suffered severe consequences for the rest of their lives.The question is often raised about why the U.S. did so. The dropping of the atomic bomb was a warning to all the peoples of the earth: the American century had begun and the American imperialists would keep the "peace" their way. Their "way" shown by the Marshall Plan was whatever way benefitted their multi-national corporations.
In the end, dropping the atomic bomb did not prevent the peoples of the world who wanted their independence from rising up to gain it.
For these reasons, the U.S. sent its armed forces to intervene in other countries more than 40 times since World War II ended. The U.S. intervened in Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, in Cuba, in Grenada and Panama, in the Congo, in Lebanon, Afghanistan and now twice in Iraq. And no matter that politicians called Korea and Viet Nam a "military intervention"; tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in those wars, as did millions of Koreans and Vietnamese civilians.
In most cases, U.S. politicians have justified these wars with excuses about bringing "peace" and "democracy" to the people of the world. And like Goering, they appealed to people’s sense of patriotism to justify the sacrifices involved.
What these policies have brought the world is death, misery and exploitation.
Aug 1, 2005
For over a year now, the population of Niger, in West Africa, has faced famine. According to a U.N. representative, in Niger "150,000 children already show signs of severe malnutrition and face death if they do not receive aid" in the near future.
Niger, a French colony until 1960, is one of the poorest countries on earth. According to the U.S. State Department, the income in Niger per person was $170 a year in 2001. The death rate for children under five is enormous: one in four. Last year, the peasants faced another dry spell in a country two thirds of which is already desert. Their fields were invaded by locusts. And the price of the country’s main staple, millet, has increased 500% since last October.
Over three million people, about a quarter of the Niger population, are living on the edge of starvation. Reports say some people are eating leaves and searching for seeds of grain in termite hives. Thousands of children have already died.
Yet government authorities refused to distribute free food. Why? According to a government spokesman, distributing grain would upset the interests of the grain growers, that is, it would lower their profits. The freedom of the "free" market to profit is more important than malnutrition and impending famine for much of the population.
And what did the head of the European Union, the U.N. representative and the French ambassador to Niger propose in place of this brutal government decision? They suggested grain should be sold "at moderate prices" to a population too ruined and too hungry even to work in their fields.
Only in July did the governments of the rich countries begin to move funds and food aid in the direction of the poor people of Niger. These governments, like Niger’s, always concern themselves about their grain growers, and other business interests, before worrying about poor people who may starve to death.
Aug 1, 2005
The Bush administration has a way of burying reports it doesn’t like.
The U.S. Labor Department had commissioned the International Labor Rights Fund to do a report on labor conditions in Central America. This was in preparation for the passage of the Central American Free Trade Act, or CAFTA.
When the report was completed, it concluded that working conditions in Central America are horrible, and that any labor laws that exist, go unenforced.
The Labor Department promptly sat on the report, and refused to release it for over a year. It finally released it last April.
The Labor Department explained its refusal by calling the findings "biased and academically flawed." In other words, the report laid out the bare, unvarnished truth.
Aug 1, 2005
In Saudi Arabia, women don’t have the right to go out without being accompanied by a man from their family. As a result a young woman who just got her pilot’s license was hired ... along with her father, in order that a man authorized by religious law to look after her would be present in the plane that she was flying.
The ridiculousness of the situation, organized by a wealthy member of the royal family who hired the pilot after financing her studies, was aimed at underlining the repressive situation that Saudi women are in. But this is as far as protests can go in Saudi Arabia–even when the protester is a member of the royal family! For ordinary women, no such possibilities exist. They can’t even drive a car, much less have access to any advanced or technically skilled education!
Saudi Arabia–with its oil wells–is the faithful ally of the "Western" world. So Bush, Blair and other imperialist leaders who lecture other countries on democracy and progress shut up about its fundamentalist state religion and its monarchy. As long as the oil flows, the situation of Saudi women isn’t worth worrying about. Western defenders of "democracy" are even less courageous than a Saudi prince.
Aug 1, 2005
July 19 about 200 Iraqi women and a few men took to the streets in Baghdad to protest parts of a draft of the new constitution, scheduled to be completed mid-August. The protesters were from women’s rights groups and included secular Iraqi women politicians.
The draft of the entire constitution is religious and sect-based. It gives lip service to equal rights for women–but only as long as those rights do not violate Shariah or the law based on the Koran. If these changes are implemented, it would severely set women backwards in important ways.
The women are outraged by Article 14, which includes a provision that women, regardless of age, would need their family’s permission to marry. Under Shariah, a man could get a divorce just by expressing his wish three times in front of his wife. Women would also be denied inheritance rights.
Article 14 would replace a personal status law enacted in 1959 and continued up until the U.S. took over. It is one of the more progressive laws in the Middle East in acknowledging women’s rights. It gives women the right to choose a husband and requires divorce cases to be decided by a judge. Article 14 would chuck that body of law and require cases dealing with marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to law practiced by the family’s sect or religion.
The draft appears to deepen the divide between Sunnis and Shiites, without acknowledging legal rights for mixed marriages. Women also protested a proposal to phase out a current measure requiring that one-out-of-four parliamentary seats go to women.
The women made sure their small protest was visible and noisy. They chose to demonstrate in the square in downtown Baghdad where U.S. troops pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003. On a very hot day, they handed out leaflets and waved banners in the midst of heavy traffic. One banner said, "Stop the violence against Iraqi women."This was not the first such protest. A few months after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Iraqi women took to the streets when religious Shiite politicians tried to abolish the 1959 law. Their protest was effective.
Of course, no constitution in itself is ever a guarantee of rights. Over the decades in Iraq, it was mostly middle class, educated women who benefitted from these rights. Poor women have often been subjected to barbaric conditions.
Nor will the U.S. ambassador to Iraq defend women, even if he criticizes some of these new provisions. He pretends to defend "democracy," meaning he would leave things as they are now–with a constitution that is ambiguous and women’s rights attacked in daily life.
Nevertheless, considering the reactionary climate in Iraq–with the U.S. military occupation on the one hand and the thrust towards religious fundamentalism on the other–it is significant that even a small group of women are willing to stand up and publicly demand elementary rights for all women.
Aug 1, 2005
August 11 marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Watts rebellion, which was concentrated in the South Central part of Los Angeles. Watts marked a turning point in the black movement, as urban revolts began to sweep through the big industrial cities of the North and West–that is, the very centers of political and economic power.
The rebellion, which lasted six days, took its toll: 34 people killed, 1000 wounded and tens of millions in property damage. And this is what officials of every stripe point out. But the fact is, the rebellion made possible important gains and breakthroughs for the first time in U.S. history. It forced industry to open up jobs that had previously been closed to black workers, especially in better-paid heavy industry, such as aircraft, steel and auto. Lockheed even built an aircraft factory near Watts. It backed off police who had been used to terrorizing black neighborhoods. It also forced the government to fork over money to provide vital social services. For example, not one major hospital served South Central Los Angeles. Suddenly, after 1965, L.A. County quickly built one, which was later named after Martin Luther King, along with a medical school.
The movement, of which the Watts rebellion was one of the key battles, never was able to develop to the point that it could throw out the power structure responsible for the exploitation and oppression that underlies the 400 years of racism of this society. By the early 1970s, the movement began to recede, thus allowing the ruling class to return to the offensive, and begin to take back some of the gains it had been forced to give up. During the recession of the early 1990s, Lockheed closed its plant in Watts. And now the county government is in the feeling-out stage that could very well lead to the closing of Martin Luther King Hospital, a hospital that is already very poorly funded and run, but that is still vital to the health of the hundreds of thousands of people, mainly working class and poor, who depend on it.
In other words, the promise that the Watts rebellion ushered in remains to be fulfilled.
Aug 1, 2005
Little Scarlet, a murder mystery by Walter Mosley, is set in Los Angeles, during the 1965 Watts riots. We see the events through the eyes of Easy Rawlins, a private investigator who is a regular feature in many of Mosley’s novels.
A black man who grew up poor in the South, Rawlins identifies with the people in L.A.‘s black neighborhoods who exploded in anger at one too many indignities. But at the same time, he is uneasy about the wisdom of rioting. He worries about the loss it causes, in both lives and property. And trying to protect a neighbor–a white shopkeeper whom he knows as a decent man–Rawlins almost gets into a fight with a black rioter.
Yet Rawlins finds himself standing up to the racist attitudes of white people, especially cops, in ways that before the riot he normally wouldn’t have done. And this surprises him. In fact, the riots have had a profound effect on him.
Rawlins sees the same kind of change of attitude in other black people, and he realizes that white people, including cops, have been forced to change their attitudes, too–even if grudgingly. The determination of those black masses in the streets has demanded respect from the cops and, more generally, the white population.
Through the lives of some of the people around Rawlins, Mosley gives us a hint that the changes were not just formal and superficial. One direct consequence of the riots is, for example, that companies go out of their way to hire more black employees, including for better-paying positions.
The story contrasts the riots with other ways in which people try to escape the suffocating constraints of racism–trying to hide behind light skin-color, for example. Even if these efforts may seem to provide some individual relief from racism, the reality of this racist society eventually catches up with these individuals. And the consequences can be tragic, as they are in this novel.
Through fiction, Mosley in Little Scarlet does something history textbooks choose not to do: to explore what a momentous event in history really meant to the people who were part of it.
Aug 1, 2005
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, three farm workers died of heat stroke while picking bell peppers, cantaloupes and grapes in 105 to 108 degree temperatures in mid-July.
It wasn’t just the temperatures that killed these workers–but the absolutely barbaric working conditions. None of the farms provide shaded areas or water and sanitary facilities to their workforce, even when the temperature rises past 95 degrees. In the vineyards, for example, the farm owners don’t even provide umbrellas and sorting tables. So the workers have to sort grapes while sitting on plastic sheets on the ground in the middle of the blazing sun. Besides that, instead of a 30-minute lunch break, which is supposed to be the law, the workers are often allowed only 15 minutes.
These farms are in one of the richest food producing regions in the world, where most of the best land is owned by a handful of big farm barons, who act with virtual impunity. Certainly, the "labor friendly" Democratic Party-dominated legislature has not dared challenge them with some form of farm legislation. As for Cal-OSHA, it has yet to finalize the writing of emergency labor regulations for farm workers–after 15 years of trying!
A week after the three deaths, thousands of farm workers staged an angry rally in the local town of Arvin. That–and more activities like that–can begin to change the situation farm workers face.
Aug 1, 2005
In the second half of July, there was a renewed outbreak of violence in Iraq. A new wave of suicide bombers struck the government and U.S. forces, as well as Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods.
The wave of attacks began on July 13, when a car bomb killed 32 Iraqi children while U.S. soldiers were giving them candy. Two days later, ten different car bombs exploded, targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces, killing 32 and wounding a hundred.
On July 16, in the Shiite town of Mussayib, a man with a bomb strapped to his waist walked up to a tanker truck and turned it into a massive fireball that consumed at least 70 people who were shopping and buying ice cream. The next day, 22 people were killed by four car bombs in the center of the country. One struck the offices of the Iraqi electoral commission.
On July 19, in Baquba, armed men opened fire on a minibus transporting workers employed on a U.S. air base. Thirteen people were killed and six others wounded.
On July 24, a suicide bomber killed 40 and wounded 25 near the al-Rashad police station in southwest Baghdad. The following day, a suicide car bomber killed 12 civilians in front of a downtown Baghdad hotel. The day after that, guerrillas shot a minibus transporting factory workers near Abu Ghraib to the west of Baghdad, killing eighteen and wounding nine.
On July 29, a suicide bomber went to an Iraqi army recruiting center in Rabia, an hour from Mosul, killing 25 people and wounding 35.
All these attacks and many more like them show how much Iraq has been plunged into chaos by the U.S. invasion and occupation. The fact that the U.S. pretends an Iraqi government is running the country changes nothing about this reality.
Pretending that progress is being made, the U.S. has been leaning heavily on Iraqi politicians in charge of drawing up a new constitution. But the population has to struggle in a country where daily life remains very difficult and certainly worse than it was before the war during the period of the embargo.
On July 17, oil exports were interrupted by a 24-hour strike of 15,000 workers who demanded wage increases and use of the oil revenue to help the population. In fact, basic services, such as water and electricity, which were in a poor state before the war, have been devastated by the war and occupation. Most of the money supposedly for reconstruction goes for military activity. Meanwhile, people going about their daily activities are in danger of being the victim of a shooting or bombing. Under these conditions, a scrap of constitutional paper seems rather pathetic.
Bush said a month ago in front of troops at Fort Bragg that no deadline was going to be put forth for leaving Iraq. Following the wave of suicide bombings, his military chief of staff said that nothing will prevent the drawing up of the new constitution and an advance toward democracy!
The U.S. government invaded Iraq in order to maintain political domination over this part of the world and its oil reserves. As a bonus, the war and occupation provided profits for giant weapons contractors.
The results of the invasion and occupation show the human cost. The number of U.S. soldiers officially listed as dead was 1,778 as of July 29. No one keeps an official list of the number of Iraqis killed, but estimates range from 11,000 to 39,000. Other estimates indicate that the total number lost in this period, including from starvation and lack of medical care caused by the war, could be 100,000!
Some democracy!
Aug 1, 2005
U.S. troops shot three unarmed Iraqi men in front of the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit in Bagdad, killing one and injuring two. One of the two injured men turned out to be Iraqi police Brigadier General Majeed Farraji. The men had done nothing more than get out of their car.
Another man, Salah Jmor, a Kurdish activist, forced by Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq years ago and recently returned to Iraq to visit his family, was shot and killed by U.S. troops just when the car he was in came near a military convoy. His brother, Abdul-Jabbar Jmor, said, "This kind of incident makes people hate the Americans more and more. They don’t care about the lives of the people. Each day they make new enemies."Another man, a physician and Knight-Ridder correspondent, was shot in his own neighborhood by U.S. troops who had staged a surprise military operation. They shot him in the forehead and in his raised hand.These killings underline the purpose of the U.S. presence in Iraq. They aren’t there to help the population achieve democracy, but to subdue and terrorize it.
These kinds of shooting by the U.S. military are common. They just got more attention because of who was shot.
A recent study by the British group, Iraq Body Count (IBC), estimates that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed by military actions since the beginning of the war in March 2003. Almost 30% of those were killed in the first two months, nearly all by U.S. bombing of the cities.
Since that time, U.S. troops have still killed more civilians–over 2,600–than all the insurgent and terrorist attacks that receive so much attention in the news.
We can expect that these numbers are in fact low, because the IBC did not count any deaths that were not reported in news sources. Many people in Iraq would probably not take the chance of reporting killings done by the U.S. military.
The terrorism being carried out today in Iraq is against the civilian population. And heading the list of terrorists is the U.S. military.