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 5, 2007
If the war in Iraq were to stop today, here is what its cost would be.
655,000 Iraqis dead–direct or indirect victims of the U.S. invasion. These figures come from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Over three million Iraqis turned into refugees–more than one-tenth the population of Iraq, a refugee catastrophe unmatched in the modern Middle East.
Those Iraqis who have not been killed or driven into exile live with little electricity and untreated drinking water–in a country that before the war was one of the most developed in the Middle East. They live with little access to adequate food and less to medical care–in a country that once had the second highest standard of living in the Middle East.
3100 U.S. troops are dead; 48,000, wounded or harmed by the war. And 100,000 service personnel are on disability as the result of service in Iraq, with another 50,000 disability applicants waiting for the slow bureaucratic wheels of government to turn.
This does not count the number of Iraq war veterans who will turn out to be disabled in future years, either through delayed traumatic stress or illnesses coming from exposure to the weapons used in the war. (The first Gulf War lasted for only four weeks, but 43% of U.S. troops who served in that war remain on disability today, 16 years later.)
How many U.S. personnel who serve in the Iraq war will later commit suicide, in part because of the atrocities they witnessed or committed or the traumatic incidents they went through?
We have no way to know, but we do know that more U.S. veterans of the Viet Nam war committed suicide than were killed in the war itself.
Finally, there is the cost we will pay for all the useful things left undone, needs left unmet. A conservative estimate puts the total U.S. cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars at 1.2 trillion dollars. Some economists say that two trillion is closer to the mark–and growing.
Even 1.2 trillion is an unthinkable measure of what could have been accomplished. The amount spent every year is enough to double cancer research; AND treat all diabetes and heart problems in the U.S.; AND carry out a campaign around the globe to immunize every child not immunized today; AND prepare every child in this country to succeed in school by setting up pre-school for every three and four year old; AND modernize every school building in the country. There would still be money enough left over to reconstruct New Orleans plus provide medical coverage for everyone who doesn’t have it today.
All of this is the real cost of the war in Iraq–IF the war were to stop today.
But the war is NOT stopping. The Bush administration is extending it, and the Democrats, while criticizing him, are going along with it, even though as the majority they could stop him.
So, 20,500 additional combat troops are already on their way. But, according to the Congressional Budget Office, they will be backed up by 30,000 or so others required in support positions.
The war is extending–and becoming more horrifying. Iraqis are being imprisoned in their neighborhoods–while troops sweep through every living room, every bedroom, every hallway, terrorizing the civilian population. Helicopter cannons are strafing civilian neighborhoods. The U.S. is using Kurdish militias in Shiite areas, and Shiite militias in Sunni areas–adding fuel to an already volatile civil war.
There is only one stance we can have confronting the violent attempt of U.S. imperialism to use us as cannon fodder against the rest of the world. Oppose it!
U.S. out of Iraq! Bring the troops home now!
Feb 5, 2007
In 1975, the government framed up a black teen for murder. He remains in prison to this day.
Gary Tyler, a 16-year-old student, was aboard a bus with other black students who were integrating a high school in Destrehan, Louisiana, in 1974, when a mob of over 200 white people began pelting the bus with rocks and bottles. During the attack, Timothy Weber, a 13-year-old member of the mob, was shot and killed.
Afterwards, the police searched the entire bus and every black student on it. No gun was found. All evidence indicates the gunshot came from a member of the white mob. Yet Gary Tyler was arrested, and later charged with Weber’s murder. False witnesses and a gun (with no prints on it) miraculously appeared; even though the witnesses later recanted their testimony, the all-white jury found Tyler guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life without parole because, for a few short years in the 1970s, Louisiana did not have a death penalty.
It’s widely recognized that Tyler was railroaded. Even an appeals court, in 1981, found that he was “denied a fundamentally fair trial.” Yet despite that ruling, the court refused to release him, and didn’t even order a new trial!
He is still serving his sentence in the state penitentiary in Angola. He will be fifty later this year.
No government agency or court has ever done a single thing to correct this blatant injustice. So, an innocent black man continues to languish in prison after 32 years, just because SOMEBODY black had to pay for the murder of a white boy.
At the same time, countless cases remain open in which black people were lynched and murdered by the Klan, the police or other racists. And the FBI, state and local police did nothing to investigate them, even when the killers were well known.
No, there is no justice in this racist society.
Feb 5, 2007
Federal officials arrested and charged James F. Seale with kidnapping, stemming from the abduction, torture and murder of two 19-year-old black men in 1964.
Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore were abducted near Natchez, Mississippi, taken into the woods, tied to trees, and beaten to within an inch of their lives. They were then driven across the border into Louisiana, tied to an engine block, and dumped into the Mississippi River to drown.
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hailed the arrest and indictment of Seale as a step forward for racial justice, saying, “part of moving forward comes through addressing as best as we can and as soon as we can the terrible crimes of the past.”
What a lot of hogwash! It “only” took 43 years to charge Seale for the crime!
In fact, on every level, federal, state and local, the government, FBI and police have done everything they could to try to bury this crime–for 43 years.
Seale was arrested soon after the bodies of the two men were found in 1964. It was common knowledge in the area that Seale and a friend of his, Charles M. Edwards, had taken part in the kidnapping/beating/murder. It was common knowledge that Seale was a member of the KKK, as well as a deputy sheriff in the county. Edwards had even given a statement to federal authorities that he, Seale and others had beaten Dee and Moore. Still, local authorities never charged Seale or Edwards with any crime, and both men walked away free.
At the time, it was the federal government that pretended that it would uphold the law even when the authorities in the South didn’t. But, what did the FBI do? They just threw up their hands and said they had no jurisdiction in the case. This was a complete lie, given that state lines had been crossed in committing the crime.
Then, 36 years later, in 2000, a reporter who was investigating the case pointed out that the beatings had taken place in a national forest–which meant that the Feds DID have jurisdiction.
So, the FBI announced that it was reopening the case.
It then did nothing to follow up on it. Only after the brother of one of the victims, Charles Moore, tracked Seale down himself and told the FBI where he was living, did they actually begin to investigate anything.
That was in 2004. Still, nothing more happened–until just now. Were they waiting for Seale to die, so they could just drop the case again? Even now, Edwards, who is still living, has been charged with nothing. And Seale is not charged with murder–only kidnapping.
The federal government has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, every inch of the way in this case.
Today, there may not be the open racist terror of 1964–but the government is still up to a lot of its old tricks.
Feb 5, 2007
The Maryland General Assembly just voted to hand over nine million dollars to Marriott International from its “Sunny Day” fund. This little gift came on top of 73 million dollars in subsidies and infrastructure improvements that the state of Maryland gave Marriott in 1999, after the company threatened to move its headquarters out of Maryland to Virginia. In return, Marriott promised to add another 700 jobs at its headquarters. Did they add these jobs? No, they added 117. But the lawmakers gave them the money anyway!
So the Maryland taxpayers are paying Marriott about $624,000 per job added.
The jobs were simply an excuse for the politicians to funnel more tax dollars to an enormous Fortune 500 company. Marriott had 670 million dollars in profits last year. This company is certainly the poster child for success–success of those with billions able to grab millions more from the taxpayers.
Feb 5, 2007
Television coverage of the Super Bowl in Miami showed off high-rise luxury buildings and hotels, night clubs and other attractions. Hardly shown were the various demonstrations carried out by the working poor in the city against their conditions.
Former residents of the Scott-Carver public housing project erected “The Wall,” a giant billboard listing the names of all the people forced to move out when the project was torn down three years ago. 850 families were promised new homes, but nothing has been built.
Some shanty town residents organized a Gentrification Teach-In and conducted a Tour of Shame. The Glitz and Glam Granny Cheer Squad–organized by homeless women from the demolished Scott-Carver complex–rolled up on a flat-bed truck and waved their pompoms for new public housing, an event organized to attract the media in town for the NFL.
Miami is the third poorest city in the U.S. More than one-third of Miami-Dade County’s 835,000 households are supported by workers earning the minimum wage or less. The Miami-Dade Homeless Trust estimates that someone earning the minimum wage can afford no more than $268 for rent. Yet even run-down studio apartments in Miami’s poorest neighborhoods cost at least $600 a month.
Many of the homeless clean and provide services in buildings occupied by the rich. Others of the working poor work in concession stands in places like Miami International Airport or the football stadium.
Wouldn’t their story make a heck of a Super Bowl half-time show!
Feb 5, 2007
There have been a number of protest rallies in Chicago against the new plan to cut back on neighborhood health facilities.
The newly elected Democratic Party president of the Cook County Board, Todd Stroger, is proposing to close 16 clinics that serve some of the poorest neighborhoods in the county. Obviously, if the county closes these clinics, the consequences would be dire. Many won’t be able to make the trip to the few clinics and hospitals still available. And those who do will face much longer waits and worse health care.
At the same time, the cutbacks would eliminate all dental services in the county system. It goes way beyond the care of teeth, since dental care often uncovers oral cancers, hypertension, HIV/AIDS and other serious diseases.
The reason for these proposed cutbacks is not a lack of money. The state didn’t turn over 243 million dollars of Medicare money to the county. The state’s own web site shows it gave 1.2 billion dollars in subsidies to corporations over 14 years.
The money is there. If people want to stop these cuts in health services, they have to be organized and forceful.
Feb 5, 2007
The Senate and House recently voted to increase the federal minimum wage from $5.15 per hour now to $7.25 in 2009–in three steps spread out over more than two years. The increase has not yet become law. But leading Democrats are already hailing it. Senator Edward Kennedy said passage of the increase was a “step to help lift America’s working poor out of the ditches of poverty and onto the road toward economic prosperity.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if a minimum wage worker puts in 40 hours a week for all 52 weeks in a year, the increase will raise him or her and one other family member just up to the government’s official poverty line. And in reality it is virtually impossible for anyone to survive at this low level of income in most big cities, where rents, transportation and other necessities are sky high.
This increase in the federal minimum wage will not lift the working poor out of poverty, but guarantee that many workers and their families remain in poverty.
Feb 5, 2007
Could a verdict be more astonishing? Witnesses call 911 to report young boys in a street fight. Three months later, a judge–not a jury–declares eight juvenile girls convicted of felonies!
That’s what happened in Long Beach, California, on January 26.
The prosecution of the girls grew out of a street fight last Halloween night. Ordinary street fights among young people happen day in and day out. But last Halloween, on a street in Long Beach, California, the street fight involved wealthier college-age white women and working-class black high-schoolers. Cops usually try to get little involved in neighborhood fights, beyond breaking them up. But they jumped all over this one.
The local cops ignored several witnesses’ reports of young black males fighting and then running away. The cops arrested a group of young black females, plus a brother of one of them. The cops ignored accounts of the whites initiating racial taunts. Cops pulled a kangaroo line-up in a dimly lit parking lot and on the description of “hair-dos, earrings and clothes,” charged the young black females and kept them in jail for 87 days. All were under l8. One was 12. One was not allowed to call her mother for 5 days.
In court, evidence from the defense lawyers was ignored and never investigated, while statements from the white women were taken for absolute truth, regardless of witnesses and of contradictions in their stories. One woman claimed not to have been drinking–the doctor who examined her after the fight said she had been. Another woman claimed to have been close enough to identify assailants. But her friend said, and she then admitted, she had been driving away and only saw the fight in her rear-view mirror, in the dark.
None of that, and none of the other evidence, testimony, and character references, mattered in the judge’s final decision. The judge found all of the young black people guilty, except for the one who was only 12 years old. The judge also convicted them of felonies–of “hate crimes,” mainly because of the hysteria drummed up by the local news media.
We live in a society ruled by the rich, and divided by racism–as this entire show trial demonstrates.
Feb 5, 2007
The following is excerpted from a talk given at the January, 2007 SPARK public meeting in Detroit.
The U.S. auto companies claim to be in crisis. They claim they may go bankrupt. But this is nothing but a big public relations production, calculated to flim-flam the workers. A scam. The companies are trying to create a mind-set that the industry is failing and the only thing workers can do is get out now with whatever they can. It’s a big ongoing corporate swindle, a con job. Workers need to blow the whistle.
The Delphi Corporation has been in its phony bankruptcy for two years and some now. Well, Fraud #1, that’s not Delphi–it’s a part of General Motors which changed its legal name. If YOU change YOUR legal name, do you get to walk away from those credit cards with your OLD name on them? Well, of course not. But then, you aren’t the world’s largest manufacturing corporation. GM does what it wants.
Delphi in bad shape? Nonsense!
There’s a bidding war going on for it, a bidding war over how much money different financial groups will invest in this supposedly out-of-date, uncompetitive Delphi! Actually a fight to give Delphi money! But get this. The supposedly bankrupt Delphi told the judge it wanted only the SMALLER amount! Highland Capital had offered to hand over 4.7 billion dollars to this broke company, but Delphi told the judge it only needed the much smaller offer from Appaloosa and Cerberus, 3.4 billion dollars. The size of these investment offers means that the big financial players know Delphi is not, and never was, going out of business. That’s why Delphi stock started 2006 at 12 cents and today is $4.00.
What is this Cerberus Capital Management group? A so-called private investment company with not much more than a name on the door of some fancy Wall Street office. It makes nothing and runs no plant or equipment. GM is worth 26 times what Cerberus is worth. But behind Cerberus is Citigroup, the big Wall Street bank that provides capital–and marching orders–to GM. This deal is a legal cover to guard GM’s assets for as long as it takes to finish screwing the workers to the wall.
GM and Delphi made it look like the workers have no option but to take buyouts. They threatened plant closings–so workers had better take the buyout now or they’ll get nothing. They managed to chop off about 51,000 workers who used to get $28 per hour and real benefits.
And then a strange thing happened. Only a few of the many threatened plants actually closed. New workers were hired to do the old jobs. But the new workers are paid only $14 or $16 an hour and NO benefits!
This was the original GM plan when it got Steve Miller out of retirement to be Delphi’s CEO. Steve Miller knows nothing about producing auto parts for GM. But Steve Miller does know how to steer a phony bankruptcy, in order to dump workers’ wages, pensions and benefits, and then make a bonanza re-selling the company’s assets. That’s what Steve Miller did with Bethlehem Steel. That’s what Miller intends to do with Delphi. When the bankruptcy began, Miller said Delphi’s bankruptcy was “well planned, well structured and well financed.” Yes, a well planned legal swindle of the workers!
GM plays the Delphi card
GM itself tried the bankruptcy scam all during 2005 and 2006. It claimed to be losing l0.6 billion dollars a year and was near bankruptcy. “Bleeding” cash, losing market share, because of ... their workers’ health care costs! GM mounted a huge media campaign to convince the workers that giant GM wouldn’t last much longer. GM got top union leaders and the federal court to break the contract in mid-term and take a dollar an hour away from active workers, and take health insurance premiums away from retirees.
Workers weren’t supposed to hear the inside comments like those made by Jerry York, a GM board member. He said that GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner had done a “great job warehousing cash.” Yes, more than 50 billion dollars in cash and marketable securities at the time.
Anyway the scam played on, workers were taken by surprise, a vote was hustled through and narrowly passed. GM got rich off the workers’ concessions.
But it’s never enough. GM is laying out plans to get still more concessions. This month at the Auto Show, GM Vice President Bob Lutz told reporters that GM was not the kind of company to be satisfied with only a few billion dollars of profits.
That’s the first truth GM has told: big companies will not be satisfied with any amount of billions of profits. They will take, and take, and take, until they are stopped.
Ford is well under way with its own copy of GM’s tricky script. Ford is pretending financial trouble even though it has nearly 34 billion dollars in ready cash. Ford made a big show of “mortgaging” its assets for loans. 25 billion in loans. Actually Ford Motor Co. has much more money than that. It’s just in other places. The company makes the money, and then they take it out. For instance, in 2000 Ford Motor Company paid out a special dividend of 24 billion dollars in cash and stock to the Ford family and other major stockholders. Milking the company is a regular thing that they do.
The banks know that Ford’s has the resources and so there’s no problem getting these monster loans–and publicizing them, just one more part of setting up the scam.
Here’s a loan Ford Motor Company took out in 2002, for five billion dollars, from who?–from the Ford Capital Fund Trust Number 2. How much is in that fund? What about Fund # 1 and Fund # 3 and how many others? Then there’s Ford Motor Credit Company, where Ford sticks its profits, pretending it makes no money from producing and selling cars–only from loaning money to those who buy them.
Big companies stash money in places that aren’t reported and aren’t open to public examination. They have many ways to adjust the books as they wish–to show a profit, when Wall Street wants a profit, to show a loss when they’re scamming the workers.
Ford in trouble? It had no trouble putting its private fleet of jets at the disposal of Executive Vice President Mark Fields to commute to his Florida home every weekend. Estimated cost about 3½ million a year! When a local TV reporter wouldn’t get off the story, Fields said–for the sake of window dressing–he would fly commercial. Sure, for a minute or two. Forget the propaganda. The Fords aren’t selling their yachts and mansions and multiple vacation homes any time soon.
But if Ford isn’t in trouble, why is there this drumbeat of doom and gloom?
First, if you pay for as much advertising as an auto company does, the media will say what you want them to say. Notice how they quote the same three analysts all the time? Two of the three come from the Center for Automotive Research, which is run by the son of a former GM CEO. Who, incidentally, saw nothing wrong in Mark Fields’ 3.5 million dollar commuting expense! Even if a few reporters try to give the workers’ side or just information, the reporters have bosses–editors. The editors know what will make their advertisers happy.
Second, what, above all else, are these companies good at? MASS MARKETING! They know how to get you interested in that new Edge when really you could care less. That same know-how, they put into faking workers out of their jobs and benefits. One paper actually printed an account of how Ford hired marketing specialists and did focus-group research, the whole nine yards. It figured out the most effective ways to manipulate workers into taking buy-outs, costing most workers hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The paper was careful, though, not to print this until AFTER the buyout deadline.)
Chrysler had only 12 straight quarters of profits. The Chrysler Group had MORE sales in 2006 than in 2005. It’s a tougher sell to the Chrysler workers, to make the company look like it’s failing.
More to the point: after Ford and GM workers nearly voted down the concessions–or even actually did–the companies and top union leaders knew they couldn’t bring that vote in at Chrysler.
So Chrysler chairman Dieter Zetsche pouted and told reporters, “It’s a very strange position that we should first lose 10 billion dollars before we have the same as Ford and GM ... We will not stop before we get the results we need.” And sure enough, the next quarter, Chrysler’s books were arranged to show a very unexpected 1.2 billion dollar loss! And threats about cutbacks and sell-offs and restructuring started flying. And are still flying.
The companies are manipulating the workers into giving up good jobs, trading a little money for uncertain lives in a poverty environment, and the worker’s kids will make little more than burger flippers. Why? So that the highest of financiers, the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, the tiny few of the very richest families on earth, can book more enormous profits. The manufacturing companies are only conduits for those billions of dollars. The dollars flow up to the banks and super-rich investors who own millions of shares.
But in high finance, the returns are never big enough, the milk from their cash cows is never rich enough. If it’s not a record year for profits then it’s a lousy year. Finance wants more. And MORE can only come from driving down the standards of living of the millions of us in the working class.
The attack on auto workers is important because of the pattern that auto sets. The companies think if they make auto settle for less then they can make all workers settle for less. It’s a corporate campaign against all workers.
This is not the first time that workers have been scammed and flim-flammed and backed so far in the corner there was no other choice but to fight. What was the Great Depression? Big financiers protecting their wealth by closing plants and throwing workers on the streets to starve. What ended the workers’ Great Depression? They got organized, they fought back, little and big fights, until finally they could sit in, take over the profit-making machinery, take possession of it and make it stop. Hold it until the companies gave in. If there is a difference today, it is mainly that the financiers have ever so much more money to meet our needs! But they only understand force. We are that force, we, the working class of this world, and it’s long past time we start using our force, in our own behalf.
Feb 5, 2007
The auto companies are on a campaign to "sell us’ the FALSE idea that the auto industry is dead or dying and so workers must give up concessions.
Auto bosses get bonuses if they can trick workers into accepting concessions. Ford just announced executive bonuses after workers there had concessions forced on them.
The auto industry is alive and cyclical as always. They are playing "shock and awe" games to soften up workers for more concessions.
Feb 5, 2007
Recently, DCX made a big ooh-ahh announcement that they signed a deal with Chery Automobile Co. to eventually build a new line of sub compact cars in China. They deliberately gave the impression the cars would be sold in the U.S. But according to the Detroit Free Press, “most Chery-Chrysler vehicles will be sold in Asian, European and South American markets where demand is much higher for small cars.”
Feb 5, 2007
The following article comes from the January 15 issue of Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Workers Power), the publication of the African Union of Internationalist Communist Workers (UATCI), active in French-speaking Africa.
Over the last decade, Western Union, the money transfer company, has developed throughout Africa. By mid- 2006, it already had 1,000 agencies in Nigeria. It flourishes everywhere immigrant workers need to send money to their families. It has had so much success because the states of African countries like Mali and Senegal don’t have post offices that function properly. When immigrant workers in France send money home, their families have a lot of trouble receiving it. Not only are there delays, but they have to grease the palms of post office employees to get it. Village dwellers have to go to a big city and spend several days, while only getting a part of what was sent them.
This is why Western Union grew so rapidly almost everywhere in Africa. Its bosses are proud to announce they are in 195 countries, have a growth rate in sales of 10% a year, and had a profit of more than three billion dollars in 2005.
In fact, Western Union earns a lot of money from the transfer of money to poor countries. Sending $100 costs $17 from Paris to Chad and $10 from Paris to Dakar, Senegal. These are exorbitant fees. But immigrant workers have to pay it, since sending money with a family member returning home has become riskier. There have already been several attacks by bandits on people bringing money to villages, robbing them on the road, for example, in Mali.
Under these conditions, leeches like Western Union rub their hands with glee. The company even gives itself a “humanitarian” image. For example, to celebrate its 10th anniversary in Africa, it gave scholarships to some African universities and some school materials, right in front of TV cameras. But a thief remains a thief, even if he distributes some handouts.
Feb 5, 2007
On January 19, the journalist Hrant Dink, an Armenian who raised the genocide of the Armenians during World War I and denounced far right nationalism and the Turkish authorities, was assassinated in the middle of Istanbul in broad daylight in front of his newspaper office.
In the hours following Dink’s assassination, radio and TV stations announced the news, and several thousand people spontaneously rallied in downtown Istanbul. The next day, an enormous demonstration took place in Istanbul, with 100,000 people covering three square miles. There were similar protests in other major cities. Many people were moved by the appeals of Dink’s wife for fraternity between people. The crowds cried, “We are all Armenians, Kurds and Turks” and “We are all Dinks.”
In fact, the assassination of Dink is added to an increasing number of death threats and assassinations, especially against Kurds, carried out by the far right and thugs with shadowy ties to police and government.
Faced with a public outcry, the government authorities were forced to arrest the assassin. In the past, the police had refused to even take the testimony of an eye witness to the attack.
The assassin, Ogun Samast, is a 17-year-old youth, the unemployed son of a poor family. He hung out with a far-right group tied to Veli Küçük. It’s clear he acted on behalf of someone. This penniless youth had just taken five round trips by plane.
Given these facts and pictures published in the press, the government arrested six more people tied to the far right. The government also fired a local official in a city known as a far-right stronghold, where there had recently been lynchings of far-left militants and the assassination of a priest by a youth, a crime that very much resembled the Dink assassination.
In fact, the majority of the population believes Dink’s assassination is the work of the “shadow forces,” that is, the secret services and death squads organized inside the police, who enjoy the complicity of the entire state apparatus.
Prime Minister Erdogan declared several days after the assassination that these “shadow forces” have existed since the Ottoman empire and that it was necessary to “reduce them to the minimum and if possible eliminate them.” This was an attempt to avoid his responsibility in the matter. As head of the government, Erdogan covers up for the actions of an entire section of the state apparatus that is infiltrated by the far right and paramilitary organizations.
Feb 5, 2007
On January 31, a demonstration, reportedly about 100,000 people, filled Mexico City’s main square. Marchers protested the doubling of the price of corn, from which their staple food, tortillas, is made.
The price of corn on the world market is soaring, due to the U.S. government’s new interest in ethanol. Ethanol production is still very small, but already, speculators and grain dealers are taking all the profits they can.
Due to the impoverishment of the small farmers of Mexico, the buying up of their lands by large agribusiness, and the conversion of the land to cash crops for export to the U.S., Mexico now imports one-fourth of the corn needed to feed its population.
As a recent article in Scientific American pointed out, conversion to ethanol will do nothing to improve the environment or to decrease global warming. It takes as much or more energy, oil and natural gas, to grow the corn, harvest it and turn it into fuel at processing plants and then transport it as do conventional forms of fuel.
Using corn for ethanol will contribute to the further impoverishment of the Mexican population. It will contribute to the number of desperate Mexicans trying to leave their country. And it will contribute mightily to the profit margins of the world’s largest agribusinesses.
Feb 5, 2007
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released what is considered to be the definitive report on climate change up until now. The report reaffirmed that not only is there global warming, but that it is accelerating–with dire consequences that have only just begun to be felt.
According to the report, global warming will lead to massive shifts in climate over a relatively short period of time. On the one hand, global warming, which is already melting glaciers and parts of the north and south poles, will lead to big rises in sea levels. Low lying areas, where hundreds of millions of people live, will be flooded. On the other hand, the flow of cold water from melting ice floes will also disrupt ocean currents, leading, among other things, to the freezing of northern Europe. Global warming will also bring about big droughts and much more powerful storms than anything the world has experienced for thousands of years. One consequence could be the spread of new diseases.
The report unequivocally blames global warming on the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases. They say that these gases come from human activity. What this means is, first of all, the burning of fossil fuels, like coal, oil and gas.
The findings of this study are as close to irrefutable as can be. The panel was an agency of the United Nations and was composed of hundreds of scientists. It presented preliminary drafts of the report to governments around the world a year ago, seeking their comments.
Of course, nothing in these findings is new. Prominent scientists began to raise warnings about global warming back in the early 1970s. But instead of taking these warnings seriously, the biggest companies in the world, starting with the oil companies, electric utility companies and auto companies, denied them and tried to ridicule and discredit them. And the U.S. government, loyal tool of these companies, followed suit.
Clearly, none of these companies wanted to take the smallest measures to cut emissions or invest in new technologies, because it would cut into their profits and make their big investments worthless.
Even today, as the global warming report was made public, it was revealed that the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank partially financed by Exxon-Mobil, invited scientists and economists to undermine the findings, offering $10,000 and travel expenses for their work.
The dramatic and brutal climatic shifts that scientists predict–storms, droughts, floods, the freezing of Europe–will impact all of humanity, including the capitalists and their descendants. But just as capitalism creates untold poverty, wars, economic crises and depressions–it also creates environmental catastrophe.
One cannot expect the very system responsible for the problem to take measures to deal with it.
Feb 5, 2007
This year George Bush finally mentioned global warming in his State of the Union speech. His main proposal is to cut gasoline usage by 20%.
In other words, they expect the population to pay higher gasoline prices and make more sacrifices than we already do now.
Of course, if the politicians really tried to tackle the problem, no workers would have to sacrifice. Instead, companies would be required to put in new technology to protect the environment. It would not be necessary to completely get rid of coal-powered energy plants, for example, if companies implemented controls to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.
To address the problem of emissions from vehicles, the government could reduce the necessity of people to use cars by creating a public transportation system. The U.S. doesn’t have one, but it has an auto industry. Auto workers could be put to work building the vehicles for a mass transit system. The construction industry could be put back to work building the system infrastructure.
If the public transportation system were cheap, comfortable, easy-to-use, and frequent, most people wouldn’t want to use their cars.
And the money to pay for it could come by taxing the people who’ve made fortunes off the auto and oil industries–the capitalists who politicians like Bush are there to protect!
Feb 5, 2007
For 2006, ExxonMobil reported the largest profit in U.S. history, more than 39 billion dollars. That number translates into more than 100 million dollars–in profits–every single day of the year.
The oil companies claim the reason for the outrageous prices was that their costs had gone up. They blamed the OPEC countries. “Look,” they said, “we have to pass the higher cost of crude on to you.”
These absolutely obscene profits prove what a lie their argument is.
No, the main beneficiaries of the high prices are none other than the big oil companies. These companies then turn those profits over to their investors in the form of dividends and stock buy-backs.
And who are the oil companies’ investors? The capitalist class itself.
Feb 5, 2007
The Pentagon performed a magic trick on their website at the end of January: They made tens of thousands of casualties seem to disappear.
The Pentagon made the move after a Harvard professor, Linda Bilmes, published an article in the Los Angeles Times including the total of all non-mortal casualties in both wars–over 50,000.
ONE person reporting that high number was too much for the Pentagon–so they just got rid of that number on their website. In its place, they left a lower number, totaling just over 31,000.
The new total does not include wounded soldiers whose injuries the Pentagon considers “minor”–because they were not evacuated out by air.
Poof! They just made over 16,000 casualties disappear–because all of a sudden they decided those casualties weren’t “serious”.
And that doesn’t even count the big under-reporting that’s already going on. The Pentagon has accorded disability status to over 100,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans whose illnesses or injuries were diagnosed after they returned stateside; another 50,000 are still waiting. NONE of these soldiers are listed in any of the Pentagon’s casualty lists.
The Pentagon can play all they want with figures–but for all the soldiers injured and made sick in these wars, their suffering is very, very real.