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
Feb 27, 2006
The civil war that many people had been predicting for Iraq broke out in the open last week. The bombing of the Shiite al-Askari Shrine in Samarra provoked attacks by Shiite militias on Sunni mosques. And these attacks in turn provoked Sunni attacks on Shiite mosques. Caught in the middle of all this violence was the population, which suffered attacks coming from all sides.
Attempting to stop the violence, the Iraqi government issued a total 24-hour curfew for three days over the weekend. This may have dampened the violence a little–but only a little. At best, it may return things to how they were before the bombing, when a civil war was simmering just below the surface. Even before the bombing, civilians were being killed, militia members were being taken aside and executed by members of rival militias–with the rivalry sometimes between Sunni and Shiite, or Sunni and Kurd, but sometimes between two Shiite militias, which are the military arms supporting rival Shiite factions. Morning after morning, the bodies of a dozen or so people were found on the streets, with bullets through their heads, shot from behind the ear, execution style.
The situation exploded so rapidly last week because the civil war had started months before. Over the last several months, official estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths had put the figure at about 800 a month. (To understand what that means–if the U.S. were to suffer a similar rate of civilian casualties, we would be seeing almost 9,000 civilian deaths a month.)
Last week, when the civil war broke out into the open, none of the military forces that have been built up in Iraq could or would stop it. They only made it worse.
When faced with sectarian bloodshed, the parts of the Iraqi army staffed by Shiites stood aside while Shiite militias attacked Sunnis–or even joined in the attacks. Similarly, with Sunni segments of the army, which helped in the attacks on Shiite areas.
And everyone knew this would happen since the Iraqi army had been built up along sectarian lines. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. helped the Shiites to arm, enabling them to form their militias. And it funded the establishment of Kurdish militias in the Kurdish areas. With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s army, the U.S. created a new Iraqi army, based on these militias. When Shiites rose up in Karbala, the U.S. used Kurdish militias to put them down. When Sunnis rose up in Falluja, the U.S. trotted out Kurdish militias and their Shiite counterparts in the Iraqi army, to help destroy the Sunni city.
So is it any surprise that the army split last week along sectarian lines?
Bush used last week’s fighting to insist, once again, on the necessity of “staying the course.” To leave–so said Bush–would only bring about a civil war.
No, the civil war is here, right now, and it was brought into being by the presence of the invading armies, with the U.S. at the head of them.
The only thing the U.S. can do for Iraq is to get out. NOW. Would there be sectarian fighting when the U.S. left? Probably–because there’s sectarian fighting going on right now, and it’s getting worse from day to day.
To believe that the U.S., whose very policies have led to this bloody situation, is capable of overcoming it is to live in Never- Never-Land.
The U.S. should get out of Iraq! It should leave Iraq’s oil in the hands of the Iraqis, not of the U.S. corporations, for which the U.S. originally waged this war. It should abandon the 100 military bases it has built up in anticipation of using Iraq as its military fortress in the Middle East.
The only reasonable answer to the worsening situation in Iraq is to demand: U.S. hands off Iraq!
Feb 27, 2006
New Orleans threw a mini-Mardi Gras celebration and touted it as proof that New Orleans is “coming back.”
Well, maybe for the rich and famous who can party anytime, anywhere, even under the most ghoulish circumstances.
For others, the disaster remains a disaster, six months later. There is no recovery. Doctors issued alerts that the medical system was not ready to handle Mardi Gras. The barge that crashed through the levee at the 17th Street Canal is only now being removed. Corpses still rest undiscovered in houses where people have been unable to return. Six months later!
The status of New Orleans today reveals class society at its extreme. No effort is spared to provide restaurants, hotels, and night life for wealthy tourists–while no effort is made to return the general population to its homes, work, and life.
Mardi Gras this year was turned into a Disneyland for the rich–amid continuing destitution and the ignored corpses of the poor.
Feb 27, 2006
Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, announced her proposed budget for next fiscal year. Embarrassed by a recent spate of cases where children who should have been removed from their homes were killed or severely abused, she included a 7% increase for Children’s Protective Services workers in DHS.
That doesn’t even start to make up for what’s been cut.
Just 25 years ago, overall there were 78,000 state employees. Now it’s just over 50,000. That huge reduction in employees means a similar reduction in social services and protections. That’s why abused children are not protected, why bridges crumble and unemployed workers have no coverage.
This proposed increase is just a meaningless gesture to save face in an election year.
Feb 27, 2006
Oakland County Michigan’s politician L. Brooks Patterson is talking about a possible ballot proposal to cut corporate taxes further by completely eliminating the Single Business Tax. As usual, he pretends this will create jobs.
Year after year since the 1990’s, Lansing has been cutting taxes for businesses. So what has been happening? Michigan has been losing jobs.
Cutting taxes to the rich and big business does NOT create jobs. It only lines the pockets of the wealthy.
Feb 27, 2006
Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda told the media that he expects to take from Chrysler workers and retirees the same concessions on wages and healthcare that were taken from Ford and GM workers.
While he is saying this, the DaimlerChrysler Group (DCX) is reporting its profits and dividends for the year.
Reported profits rose half a billion dollars to $3.4 billion. That works out to “earnings per share” of $3.32.
Out of those profits, DCX will give $1.78 per share to shareholders. In other words, more than half of its profits will not be put back into the business. It will be given away as a windfall to holders like Brandes Investment Partners, Deutsche Bank, or JP Morgan Chase–holders who do nothing but sit on their assets all year long and wait for the money to roll in.
DCX’s report actually states that the dividend “takes account . . . also of our expectations for the coming years.”
If their expectations for the coming years are so rosy that they can afford to give away more than half of their net earnings–why do workers have to give away anything at all?
Feb 27, 2006
General Motors made a public relations announcement that it would invest 545 million dollars in upgrading five manufacturing sites in Michigan.
Governor Granholm waxed enthusiastic, saying “GM’s decision to invest more than half a billion dollars in these manufacturing plants clearly signals their belief in our highly skilled and dedicated work force.”
Let’s put it in perspective. From 1999 to now, GM has given well over 260 million dollars in pay and bonuses to five people–its top five executives. That’s almost half of the value of their announced investments in five plants.
So just exactly what is their “signal” worth?
Feb 27, 2006
In 2005 alone, oil companies cheated the U.S. government out of 700 million dollars in royalties for natural gas they extracted from federal lands. And the government as much as told them to do it. The Bush administration had ordered fewer audits of oil company books and fired some auditors who were trying to get the oil companies to pay what they owed.
But that 700 million lost dollars is only a small part of the problem. Because the biggest cheating is not the illegal cheating, but the legal kind.
According to the New York Times, the oil corporations can avoid paying as much as 9.5 billion dollars in oil and gas royalties over the next five years using just one of their tax loopholes. This loophole was approved by both Congress and the Clinton administration in 1996. And if an extension is approved through the courts, this gift could grow to 35 billion dollars.
Thirty-five billion dollars is about the same amount of money the Bush administration is now proposing to cut from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years.
It’s not enough that the big oil companies rip us off at the pump and in our heating bills every day. They are stealing money from health care and other vital social programs–with the help of both parties!
Feb 27, 2006
Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) says electric rates will shoot up between 40% and 80% in July, when the legal cap on rate increases ends.
Constellation Energy, the parent company of BGE, is a major power company. It earns good profits and the price of its stock has been going up. Constellation bosses are making plenty of money.
Why will they try to boost our rates so high? Because there is no limit to their greed . . . only some small legal limits on how much they can satisfy their greed at our expense.
Feb 27, 2006
Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old black youth, died at a Florida boot camp after guards punched and kicked him and shoved ammonia agents in his face. Some of the guards held Anderson while others beat him. A nurse on hand at the time watched the beating and did nothing to intervene.
The medical examiner exonerated the guards, ruling that Anderson’s death resulted from internal bleeding caused by his carrying the sickle cell trait.
And that’s where it would have been buried, if not for the fact that the news media got hold of a security video that showed the whole vicious incident.
Despite the video, Florida Governor Jeb Bush defended the camp and the medical examiner!
But there was such an uproar against the medical examiner’s obvious falsification that Bush had to backpedal and appoint a special prosecutor. The county sheriff whose office runs the boot camp ordered the closing of the camp. Bush even declared the need for a second autopsy–he suddenly discovered that the medical examiner’s license was expired!
As the outcry went on, the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice ordered new safety measures at the camps. Among other things, the measures ban the use of punching, kneeing, wrist-twisting, pressure-point-pushing, electric stun guns and chemical agents.
In other words, the state admitted it had been abusing children. How many others died and how many more were severely traumatized before the video and the outcry by Martin Anderson’s parents forced the issue?
We may never know, but we do know that all these officials from Jeb Bush down to the prison guards are killers.
Feb 27, 2006
Four years after the fall of the Taliban, the representatives of the great powers met in London at the start of February to pledge five years more aid to the Afghanistan budget.
Ruined by 25 years of civil war and the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan depends on internal institutions and other countries for 90% of its budget.
According to Condoleeza Rice, “Afghanistan is a wonderful success story.” Reality is quite different. The Afghan State is completely maintained by foreign money and NATO troops, which are supposed to stay five or ten more years.
The “Afghan State” exists only in Kabul, the capital, where there are luxury hotels and 4,000 foreign residents pay rents as high as in Paris, Tokyo or London. Rich areas surrounding foreign embassies are marked by speculation: villas that sold for tens of thousands of dollars under the Taliban now sell for a thousand times as much! But many of the residents of workers’ neighborhoods have to survive without work, water or electricity.
Much of the ten billion dollars in foreign aid received over the past four years went directly into the quicksand of corruption. An army of consultants descended on the country. Paid $1,000 a day, they also took their cut from reconstruction work and phony non-profit organizations.
The rest of the country remains under the control of warlords. Several years ago, Afghan merchants paid taxes on goods imported into the country. Now they have to pay taxes in each region the goods pass through, which raises prices so much that an underground economy has grown up.
Production of opium poppies for heroin, having exploded since the fall of the Taliban, is today the major crop. Today Afghanistan produces 87% of the world’s supply.
Security doesn’t exist in the south and east of the country. At best, the government, the police, the army and NATO troops maintain a certain status quo, but they have failed to end the warlords and trafficking.
What the London conference showed is that the only solution that the U.S. and its European satellites can find is to pour in more troops and money, if they want to maintain the “Afghan State” in their sphere of influence. But these troops and money don’t help the population emerge from misery.
“Success?” This is the success of the graveyard!
Feb 27, 2006
An Italian appeals court just dealt with a sordid affair. It found in favor of a man who had been convicted of raping a teenager–since the victim was not a virgin when she was raped!
The rapist, a 40-year-old man, appealed his conviction after being sentenced in 2001 to three years four months of prison for forcing sex on the 14-year-old daughter of the woman he lived with.
In 2003, a lower court turned down the rapist’s appeal, saying the rape interfered with the “harmonious development of the sexual life of the victim.” The higher appeals court could have continued this line of reasoning, taking into account not only the victim’s young age but also the rapist’s abuse of his authority in the family. But to the contrary, the judges considered the age of the young girl an aggravating circumstance . . . against her! They argued in fact that “from the sexual point of view, she was much more developed than one would normally expect from a girl of her age.” Therefore, the sexual abuse was less serious!
These judges employed the shocking and disgusting argument always used by rapists on trial throughout the world that the raped girl sought it and got what she deserved. In the past, rape was justified by a misogynist judge because the victim was supposedly flirtatious or wore a mini-skirt. Today, it’s because a teenager is “precocious.”
Thanks to this scandalous decision, the rapist got a reduced sentence, unless the court system is forced to reverse itself due to a giant outcry. The court decision did provoke protests and angry reactions, especially from women’s organizations, as it should have.
Feb 27, 2006
In the beginning of February, a 35-year-old Warsaw mother with three children filed a suit against her country Poland in the European Human Rights Court. In 2000, when she already had two children and became pregnant, doctors warned her that giving birth would cause her serious problems because she had severe myopia, which could hemorrhage, causing her to lose her sight.
After a lot of agonizing and failed attempts, she finally got a certificate from a general practitioner justifying an abortion. But the director at her public hospital rejected her right to an abortion. The young woman tried to get an illegal abortion, which is what tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of women do each year in Poland. But these abortions are expensive, usually costing more than $400. In her case, the bill would have been three times as much, since she needed an anesthesiologist because of prior Caesarians. It was more than she could afford.
So she had the baby by Caesarian section once again. As the doctors had warned, she did suffer a retinal hemorrhage, which left her almost blind within a few months. Because any exertion could now leave her completely blind, she can’t do any physical work, and she doesn’t see well enough to do office work. She gets a disability check for only $167 a month, on which she is supposed to support herself and her three children. But she decided to do something about this. Polish Family Planning, founded in the 1990s, aided and supported her. She filed suit against the hospital director who refused her an abortion, but with no success. This is why she filed suit with the European Human Rights Court. She hoped, “If Poland is condemned, other women will follow and dozens of suits will be filed.”
Poland has had a very restrictive abortion law since 1993, under the influence of the Catholic Church. Abortions are legal only in the case of the most serious medical problems, rape or fetal abnormalities. As a result, the number of legal abortions fell to 151 in 1999, while there were 100,000 each year up to 1990. Many public hospitals refuse to perform any abortions, as was the case with this young woman, even if they would be legal, and even when the mother faces severe medical risks if she gives birth. This explains the growth in back alley abortions, which are both expensive and unsafe. At the same time, many fewer women today use the pill, the surest form of contraceptive. The government has made its price too expensive, and under the weight of the Catholic church, it eliminated compulsory sexual education from the schools in 1999.
This is a catastrophic step backward for women’s rights in a country where abortion was legalized in 1956, well before it was in the U.S., Britain, Germany and France!
At present, three conservative right-wing parties are in power in Poland. One of them is the League of Polish Families, whose program is “religion, family and country,” and is made up of Catholic fundamentalists who have waged a campaign comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
The result of the most reactionary right-wing parties coming to power weighs on the entire population, but especially on women. Polish women unfortunately have many struggles to carry out to defend their minimum rights, including obtaining control over their own bodies.
Feb 27, 2006
The South Dakota state legislature has voted to outlaw all abortions except those necessary to save the woman’s life. It is on its way to being signed into law by the governor.
In doing so, they are going against the will of the majority even in their own state. The legislature acknowledged this when it refused an effort to place the bill on a ballot referendum for all South Dakota voters to decide.
There are no exceptions in this bill. Not for incest. Not for rape. Not even in cases where the health of the woman is at stake.
This puts the lie to the pretense that the opponents of a woman’s right to abortion are “pro-life.” In fact, they are attacking the lives of all women in a fundamental way.
In passing this law, the legislature is attempting to crystallize legally what has already become a de facto reality: in the entire state of South Dakota, there is only one open abortion clinic.
South Dakota is not the only state where this is true. The ability of women to obtain a legal abortion has been under attack across the country for years. In the year 2000, 87% of counties across the U.S. had no abortion provider at all. That number has only gotten worse since then.
Christian fundamentalists and the Catholic church, who have been pushing the attack on abortion, believe they can now take the final step and go after any semblance of a legal right to abortion. They have chosen South Dakota as the state where they can begin their final assault on women.
This law, if passed and upheld, will not mean fewer abortions. Even before Roe v. Wade, there were nearly as many abortions performed per year as in the years after its passage. Legal or illegal, there have been around a million abortions performed each year, with this difference: before 1973, women regularly died. More than 90% of abortions were illegal, performed under unsafe conditions. Nearly 350,000 women a year arrived in hospital emergency rooms as the result of botched abortions; the number of women who died from them each year ranged from 1,000 to as many as 5,000 each year.
The scumbags who passed this bill should be honest and call it what it is: a proposal to murder women!
This is an attempt by politicians pandering to a small minority of religious fanatics to impose their dictatorship over all women.
The right to abortion will be defended in the same way it was gained: by a massive mobilization of women who refuse to be trampled on by religious bigots.
Feb 27, 2006
Scientists have developed two vaccines that could prevent cervical cancer, a disease contracted by 10,000 women each year and which kills 4,000 annually.
The vaccines work by preventing infection by human papillovirus (HPV), which is believed to cause most cervical cancer. HPV is transmitted by sexual contact. The most effective way to administer the vaccine is during childhood, before children are sexually active, whether consensually or by force.
Unfortunately, the idea of vaccinating children against a sexually transmitted disease offends the “morality” of some religious fundamentalists. They argue that vaccinating children at an early age would encourage promiscuity!
What a disgusting mind these people have! Most women, knowing the risk, would want to see the vaccines approved and administered to their daughters to prevent the spread of the virus. And many are fearful, today, that the treatment won’t be made available, since George Bush appointed Reginald Finger, a Christian fundamentalist, to the Center for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
There is good reason to be fearful, since a Bush appointee to another “advisory” committee was used to ram through a reversal of FDA’s science panel’s recommendation to allow emergency contraception. Then, too, the argument was it would encourage promiscuity.
These are the same fundamentalist religious forces that are leading the attack on access to abortion. This tiny minority of religious fanatics would rather condemn thousands of women to death than allow the use of an effective medical weapon. It is a reflection of their rabidly reactionary views toward sexuality and women.
Don’t let them impose their reactionary world view on the whole population.
Feb 27, 2006
February 19, a ball of methane gas was ignited at the Mexican coal mine in San Juan de las Sabinas near the Texas border. It caused the three main tunnels into the mine to cave in. Fifteen miners outside one of the entrances were immediately rescued. But 65 others remain trapped deep underground.
One week later, company bosses finally came out from where they had been in hiding. They told angry relatives that evacuation efforts had come to a halt for at least a few days because high levels of methane gas threatened search crews and could cause further explosions in the tunnel. And that rescuers had “been unable to find any bodies, clothing or even a shoe.” As of this writing, officials and inspectors predicted all 65 miners were dead.
Everything about the mining operation reveals the primitive equipment and lack of modern technology in a poor country, where coal miners earn between $50 and $100 a week. The supply of oxygen the miners carried with them was enough to last only six hours. The “pick-and-shovel” rescue effort of trained rescuers and a good number of volunteers was hampered from the beginning by more cave-ins, blocked shafts and “unbreathable” air, requiring rescuers to wear oxygen masks.
On the third day of keeping vigil, tears began turning to anger as families expressed outrage at the slow pace of rescue efforts, the lack of updated information, and the disappearance of government and company officials. As days dragged by, they shouted when officials told them to be patient. Relatives angrily reminded officials that miners many times over the years had pointed out specific unsafe conditions to government officials, but nothing was done about it. Families hurled insults at officials when told of the halt to rescue efforts.
This sounds tragically familiar to our ears, having just gone through three recent coal-mining disasters here. In January a total of 16 miners were killed in three accidents in West Virginia. The worst disaster was at the Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners died.
If it sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because capitalism exists in both countries, with the coal mine owners driven to maximize profits at the expense of the health and safety of the workforce.
But Mexican miners carry a double burden. U.S. imperialism has long sought its close neighbor Mexico as a source of cheap labor, with maquiladora plants, abuse of the environment and huge tax breaks. The U.S. bourgeoisie has looked for ways to suck the wealth out of Mexico to the advantage of U.S. capitalists. Mexican coal miners are paying the price for this double layer of exploitation.
Feb 27, 2006
On Saturday, February 4, fighting erupted in Los Angeles County’s maximum-security prison in Castaic, widely known as “Supermax.” The violence was apparently planned and coordinated, as fights began in dozens of dorms almost simultaneously and along racial lines–with Hispanic prisoners attacking black prisoners. During the four-hour rampage, a 45-year-old black prisoner was beaten to death and 50 other prisoners were injured.
The sheriff put the entire prison system on lockdown, confining all the county’s 21,000 inmates to their cells. He also ordered the segregation of black and Hispanic inmates at Castaic. These measures, however, did nothing to prevent the fights from continuing and spreading to other prisons. In the end, nearly two weeks of prison fights in several of the county’s jails left two inmates dead and hundreds wounded.
The L.A. county sheriff and other officials blamed the fighting on outside influence: a conflict between black and Hispanic gangs had spilled over into the prison system, they said. This may be true. But still, it doesn’t explain why the fighting spread to so many prisons, lasted so long and involved so many inmates. Nor does it explain the fact that inmate-on-inmate attacks at Castaic have nearly doubled since 2003. Last year alone, 33 major incidents were reported, more than half of them at Supermax. In 2000, more than 100 inmates were injured during fights that went on for several weeks.
The explanation for this violence lies in the horrible conditions that plague the prisons in Los Angeles, which has the largest prison system in the country. Above all, the county jail system is severely overcrowded. More than 4,000 inmates are crammed into Supermax alone, and the situation in other facilities in the system is not any better. The Men’s Central Jail in Downtown L.A., for example, was built in 1963 to house 3,300 inmates. Today it has more than 7,000 inmates. It’s typical for five inmates to share a four-man cell, with one sleeping on the floor, which is usually filthy. Under these conditions it’s no surprise that a drug-resistant infection known as “staph,” or MRSA, has reached epidemic proportions in the county jail system. In 2004 alone, 2,500 cases were reported.
Naturally, the overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and the absence of any productive activity for inmates cause tensions to boil over. Any fight between two inmates can easily and quickly escalate into prison-wide fighting, where the dividing line is almost always ethnic: Hispanics, who make up 60% of the county’s prison population, on the one side and black inmates, who make up 30% of it, on the other.
That the battle lines in the prisons are drawn according to race is hardly a surprise. It’s in fact a reflection of what has been going on in L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods. Territorial conflicts among gangs, whose membership is predominantly based on ethnicity, have become more deadly in the last two decades. And it’s not uncommon for the gangs randomly to target non-gang members who happen to belong to the rival gang’s ethnic group.
This type of violence between black and Hispanic gangs has tripled since the 1990s, raising and reflecting, in turn, interracial tensions in L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods and overcrowded public schools. Last spring there were a series of school fights, pitting black and Hispanic students against each other–not unlike the prison fights. And just like the prison fights, these school fights, and more generally the brewing inter-racial hostility in the neighborhoods, can’t be explained by gang activity alone. In fact, the formation of gangs engaging in crime and violence, in itself, is a reflection of the deteriorating social conditions for the working class.
For young workers entering the job market today, unionized jobs in the manufacturing sector practically don’t exist anymore. Instead, young workers have to compete for jobs that don’t even pay a living wage or provide benefits. As competition for jobs gets ever more desperate and in the absence of a fight against this situation, people can turn against each other. And when people turn against each other, it’s often along existing divisions.
Immigration from south of the border adds another dimension to the problem. In Los Angeles, most neighborhoods that were predominantly black a generation ago are now more than 50% Hispanic. Historically subjected to the racism of not only native-born whites but also groups of earlier immigrants, many working-class and poor blacks now feel pushed aside by and often face the same racist attitudes from Hispanic and other newly arrived immigrants.
Those attitudes were reflected in remarks made by Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, at a meeting with Texas businessmen in Mexico: “There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States.” The disgustingly racist nature of the remark was obviously not lost on black people.
On the other hand, black politicians who have no answer to give to the black population’s increasing desperation end up pointing the finger at immigrants as the cause of the problem. The anti-immigrant sentiments politicians try to tap are certainly on the rise in the working class, including not only black, but also white and already-established Hispanic workers who have citizenship.
But history shows that such divisions and infighting among workers and the poor are not inevitable. There are also times when workers come together and fight for their common interests. In the 1960s and 70s, for example, when the black population was mobilized and fighting militantly against open and institutionalized racism, Hispanics followed their lead. The reforms that were won by that mobilization benefitted not only the black population, but also Hispanics–in fact the whole working class. Not only did big corporations feel forced to open their doors to groups who had historically been denied better-paying jobs; but wages also went up for everyone. Government put more money into social programs and public schools and universities. And new social programs were started, including Medicare.
The black mobilization was also reinforced when it spilled over into the work places, pushing forward a period of widespread strikes. (Compare, for example, the year 1974, when there were 424 major strikes, to 2005, when there were 24.)
The gains of those years of struggles are rapidly being taken away and dismantled. No one–no individual, no group–can win them back by attacking other groups. If there are people ready to fight, the fight will count for something only if it goes up against the real cause of the problem–the big corporations and the wealthy who are stealing more and more of the wealth of this society.
Feb 27, 2006
Business Week reports that the economy is doing well.
Sure, things are going great for those slime balls at the top. Corporate profits were up by more than 10% for the 10th consecutive quarter. The wealthy are making money hand over fist.
But for the rest of us? We’re spending more than we make, going deeper in debt. And even official figures show it. Last year, for the first time since 1933, all of us together spent more than we made.
Average housing values may be skyrocketing, but so are the sizes of mortgages. Meanwhile, wages have been stagnating–or going backward. When the housing bubble bursts and values drop, millions of people will be left with a debt that they can’t possibly pay off.
Today, more and more retirees are using their houses to live. As retirement accounts and pensions dry up, they’re taking out “reverse mortgages,” in effect selling their homes to the bank piece by piece. Or, they’re outright selling their homes and living off the proceeds–until those run out.
The number of hungry people relying on soup kitchens and food banks keeps rising–by 8% from 2001 to 2005.
The corporate world wants to tell us things are good? They may be making money by the bucketful, but they’re filling those buckets with what they gouge out of our hide.
Feb 27, 2006
The Bush administration has come under increasing attack, with much of the damage coming from within, inflicted by high officials who had just left the administration and the state apparatus.
In early February, Paul R. Pillar, who was the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, wrote a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq in Foreign Affairs, the most prestigious foreign policy journal in the country. Pillar accused the Bush administration of twisting what the CIA was telling it in the period leading up to the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, and outright lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Iraqi ties with terrorists. Pillar also accused the Bush administration of ignoring CIA warnings about all the risks of getting bogged down in a long war in Iraq.
A couple of weeks later, Alberto J. Mora, the recently retired general counsel of the United States Navy with close and longstanding ties to the Republican Party, gave an extensive interview to the New Yorker magazine in order to denounce the torture of the prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay as being “unlawful,” “appalling,” and “abusive.”
At about the same time, in Congressional testimony, Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA, denounced how the Bush administration handled Hurricane Katrina. Among other things, Brown claimed that the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was so “disengaged” that briefing Chertoff during the crisis would have been a “waste of time.”
Finally, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed that Lewis “Scooter” Libby testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence. There was little doubt that the “superiors” referred to were Cheney and Bush.
Bush is coming under attack on another front. The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently investigating the NSA domestic spying scandal that broke in December, a scandal that came about because high officials in the NSA and the U.S. Justice Department gave information to the press. As Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the committee carrying out the investigation, has said, this investigation holds open the possibility of impeaching Bush, even if it is still only distant.
Obviously, there are many reasons for these attacks–including the usual settling of accounts and power struggles between rivals. But what makes the Bush administration so much more vulnerable to these attacks is the fact that its policies, starting with the Iraq war and its handling of the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, have led to such disasters for those it is supposed to be serving, the U.S. bourgeoisie. For example, the U.S. war in Iraq has created such instability in Iraq that it could spread to neighboring countries, endangering the hold of dictatorships closely tied to the U.S. that are already very fragile. Thus, instead of consolidating the U.S. hold over this vital region and buttressing U.S.-sponsored regimes, the Bush administration’s policies aggravate the situation and create many more problems for U.S. imperialism.
Of course, the first purpose of these attacks by former high officials is not to drive the Bush administration formally from office, but to make it act like most elected officials: as figureheads who let professionals in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, NSA, etc. set policy and carry it out.
While it might be gratifying to see Bush and Cheney finally come under attack, those who are doing the attacking do not in any way represent the interests of working people. After all, what they are proposing is nothing but a better and more efficient way to uphold the interests of the U.S. ruling class both abroad and at home. That is, they are defending the same ruling class that is attacking workers in this country, taking our jobs, pay and benefits, while cutting the few social programs left, like education and health care, that still serve working people.