the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 16, 2008
The Democrats’ primary campaign is settled, and the November campaign has begun.
A large part of the population is fed up after eight years of Republican rule. We have every reason to be. We find ourselves in the midst of a disastrous war, with no end in sight.
We are trapped in an economic crisis, with unemployment up, prices up, and waves of speculation threatening a financial collapse.
While the Bush administration is funneling more money to the very speculators who helped create this mess, it is cutting back even more on social programs, public services and education–just when they are desperately needed.
McCain, who once had a reputation for being “independent,” is going out of his way to align himself with the Bush administration–on the war, the economy and government programs. In other words, he promises only more of the same.
Obama, on the other hand, talks about bringing “change” to Washington.
His record shows that he has opposed those measures that might bring the kind of change working people need.
He says he didn’t vote for the war–he couldn’t, he wasn’t yet in the Senate when the vote was taken. But, like most other Democrats, he’s voted for every funding measure for the war since he’s been in the Senate. And he has openly said that he wants to expand the war in Afghanistan, which the Bush administration is doing at this very moment.
He may have said he could negotiate with Iranian leaders. But, today, like Bush, he pretends that Iran is the biggest threat to peace in the region, and he threatens the use of force against Iran. It’s the language, word for word, that Bush used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
When offered the chance to censure Bush and Cheney, the architects of the Iraq war, he opposed all moves to impeach them.
Funded by big medical corporations, he voted against a bill proposed by Conyers and Kucinich that would at least have wrung some of the profit out of the U.S. medical system–the very thing that has made the U.S. system the most costly in the world, and one of the least effective.
Funded by the nuclear power industry in Illinois, he voted against a bill there requiring nuclear power companies to make public reports of accidents at their facilities.
As far as reigning in Wall Street, forget it. He and Clinton were the biggest beneficiaries of money coming from the big Wall Street investment firms.
The basic approach of his new “economic plan” is to provide more money to companies–under the pretext that it will trickle down to the population. That’s what Bush claimed. And we know what happened. There’s no such thing as “trickle-down” wealth. Only more wealth concentrated at the top.
It’s understandable that working people want to vote against Bush and make the Republican Party pay. But if working people pin their hopes on the elections, they will get burned–as people have so many times in the past.
No matter who is elected, if we sit back and wait for change, we won’t get it. To be more exact, if we get change, it will only be for the worse.
To get an answer to our problems, to have our needs met, we have to impose what we want on government. The struggles of working people in the past have forced politicians–Democrat and Republican alike–to recognize some of their demands. The same thing can be true in the year 2008.
Jun 16, 2008
Salmonella, a dangerous bacteria, has spread via tomatoes through 17 states, sickening at least 167 people.
This problem is not new. Remember salmonella in the peanut butter? Taco Bell? E-coli in the spinach?
Congress and the White House blame the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), responsible for the safety of 80% of our food, including fruits and vegetables.
The FDA claims it is short of staff, funds and doesn’t even have a computer system able to handle all the data.
Why has the FDA lacked funding, inspectors and leadership? Congress and the White House just have to look in the mirror.
Jun 16, 2008
The U.S. government continues to claim that the law of supply and demand, and Chinese demand in particular, has been driving up raw materials prices, particularly of oil. No matter how painful is the increase in oil prices, it’s supposedly natural and therefore unstoppable.
Official U.S. government figures show otherwise. Chinese demand for oil increased by 920 million barrels over five years. But, guess what, the demand for “futures contracts” in oil rose just as much.
Buying a futures contract means buying oil at today’s price, but taking delivery later, when the oil is immediately resold! In fact, the speculator never touches the oil–and his only expense is two phone calls, one to buy the oil and the other to sell it. If prices keep going up, it’s an automatic profit. Once the phenomenon is set in motion it feeds on itself.
The amount of money poured into oil futures contracts has gone up fantastically in just a couple of years. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in 2005 the value of futures contracts in oil was less than two trillion dollars. Only two years later, in 2007, it was eight trillion dollars, more than four times as high!
Bush blames China for outrageous oil prices. No! Blame the speculators who continue to drive up the price. Blame Wall Street.
Jun 16, 2008
Former Detroit Public School (DPS) Board president Jimmy Womack thought he was slick, getting rid of two activist teachers last year on trumped-up charges. An administrative law judge thought otherwise.
Steve Conn and Heather Miller were placed on administrative leave last summer after the two joined students who were demonstrating against DPS-proposed school closings and cutbacks. At the demonstration on May 1, 2007, students were pepper-sprayed and arrested by DPS police officers. The police then arrested Conn, then went looking for Miller, whom they also arrested.
Later Conn and Miller were charged with “endangering” the students who took part in the protest.
To put it lightly, the judge, Doyle O’Connor, found the charges to be a bunch of BS, declaring that it was in fact the DPS who had endangered not only the students but Miller and Conn’s ten-year old daughter. DPS police had ripped Miller away from her daughter, leaving the girl in the middle of a busy street.
Judge O’Connor ruled that the School Board had acted illegally, by suspending and seeking to fire Conn and Miller for protected activity–taking part in a demonstration. He also found that Womack had a personal vendetta against Conn and Miller, who have helped organize numerous fights against the School Board in the past.
During these hearings, DPS police officers denied over and over that they had ever pepper sprayed the students–despite photos, video and audio recordings showing that they clearly had. Judge O’Connor called their testimony “willfully untruthful.” And, he found that Womack had directly stated his intention to “get” Conn and Miller, and to “starve them out” by putting them on unpaid administrative leave and dragging the process through the courts for months.
O’Connor ordered the DPS to reinstate the two teachers immediately, with full back pay.
What was the response of the School Board? A subcommittee of the Board recommended–to fire the two teachers anyway. A final decision of the Board was yet to be announced.
Clearly, the group of thugs that controls the School Board can stand no opposition to its plans–plans to dismantle the school district piece by piece, and to hand it to their cronies to squeeze every last dime out of it!
This time they got caught out.
Jun 16, 2008
It was in the news the other day that people living in southern California have been crossing the border into Mexico to buy gas at a $1 less a gallon.
Is gas cheaper to produce in Mexico? The answer is no. It’s just like being able to buy prescriptions cheaper in Canada for the same drugs that are higher in the U.S.
The big companies will charge whatever they think they can get away with.
Jun 16, 2008
Tens of thousands of customers of DTE energy in the Detroit area still had no electricity six days after they lost power during recent storms!
Some people suffered through 90 degree temperatures for days with no way to cool their homes, losing food in their refrigerators and freezers. One couple near Flint died from carbon monoxide poisoning from running an electrical generator inside their home.
State regulations require DTE to restore power to 90% of customers who lose power within 2½ days of an outage. DTE had restored power to only 67% of affected customers within that time. After three days, DTE’s call center still was not working for people to report outages, which they claim was because they were using a new company’s phone system.
The spread of this outage and the inability to repair the damage was a consequence of the drive by DTE, just like all the bosses, to cut workers–and then cut and cut some more. They don’t keep enough workers to do basic maintenance–in DTE’s case, maintenance like removing diseased ash trees that toppled, pulling down power lines during recent storms. DTE has known these trees were a problem for more than a year. But it did nothing. And what’s worse, it cut back on its workforce so much that it can’t handle emergencies from the aftermath of a summer storm. You would think DTE didn’t know that in Michigan, thunderstorms are a common occurrence in the summer and snowstorms in the winter.
The bosses think they can get away with having the bare minimum of workers on hand to just get by. That’s why we see poisoned tomatoes, crane collapses and cars built with serious defects. And why 360,000 people went days and even a week without a basic necessary service.
How crazy is this capitalist society? In the thirst for ever more profit, the bosses cut out jobs that are needed, letting services go down the drain and impoverishing the population.
Jun 16, 2008
“Get workers to give back” screamed a nearly full-page headline in the Chicago Sun-Times. The paper was backing business groups who demand that the state of Illinois extract major concessions in pensions and retiree health care from state employees as a way to erase the state’s deficit.
Yet these businesses are the main beneficiaries of this year’s seven billion dollar budget deficit, with the state spending more than it takes in before borrowing money. Businesses are getting 1.5 billion dollars in various tax exemptions. The state gives 700 million dollars to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to directly subsidize companies. And the state is turning over most of 11 billion dollars in the “Illinois Capital Works” program to private construction contractors, under the pretext of improving schools, transportation and other buildings, which still remain in a deplorable condition.
In peddling the call for more concessions from state workers, the Sun-Times lines up with its fellow capitalists.
Jun 16, 2008
In early May, a lunchtime fight at Locke High School in South Los Angeles made the national news. As intolerable as they are, school fights are common in L.A.’s deteriorating high schools. But what’s different about Locke is that it is scheduled to be turned into a charter school on July 1.
Publicizing the incident widely, the media called Locke’s conversion into a charter school a “hope.”
Locke sure has problems: it has a graduation rate well below 50%, and its test scores are low. The school has practically no extracurricular activities left besides sports teams. With daily truancy sweeps and “boot camps” for cutting class, the campus resembles a prison rather than a school. And Locke is not alone–this is what most of L.A.’s inner-city schools are like.
But the question is: How will turning public schools into charter schools–that is, handing them over to private companies funded with taxpayer money–solve the problems?
In fact, there is every evidence it won’t–and this despite all the extra help charter schools get from authorities to make them look good. Charter schools are allowed to select their students and refuse to take those they don’t want. They face less scrutiny than public schools in terms of mandatory student testing. And yet, to this day, charter schools have not shown better test results than public schools overall, and in many cases, they are worse.
How could it be otherwise? Since the company that takes over a school takes a slice of money off the top for itself, either for profit or its own institutional interests. So there is less money to meet the needs of students.
Parents have every right to demand a good education for their children, and they already pay taxes for it. But workers have to watch out. As bad as public schools are, the working class as a whole has always suffered when large numbers of the schools have been put into private hands. The right to public schools was won by struggles of working people. Throwing away that right is to turn back the pages of history, to a time when workers’ children had no schools.
Jun 16, 2008
The recent flooding in parts of the upper Mississippi basin is so extreme it has been called a “500 year event.” And large parts of the Midwest have been hit by waves upon waves of serious storms this spring. Is all this the result of global warming–as many people ask?
It may not be possible to say exactly what’s behind any particular weather disaster. But there is general agreement among scientists who have studied long term weather patterns that a warming of the planet will produce not only more heat, but more dryness in some areas, more wetness in others, more severe storms, hurricanes and tornadoes and even more cold in some areas–that is, much greater extremes.
The most recent floods and storms give the population in the Midwest a glimpse of what a further warming of the planet can mean. It takes only one such event to destroy many thousands of lives.
Any rational society faced with what scientists know about the dangers raised by global warming would do everything materially possible to prevent human activity from adding to it. It certainly would prepare now by strengthening all the systems aimed to prevent flooding and other weather damage.
But rational planning has no place in capitalism, a system where the individual drive for profit rules.
Jun 16, 2008
“In the Valley of Elah” could stand on its own as a very good who-done-it murder mystery and police thriller. But in this case the murder victim is a soldier who had been home from Iraq only four days when his remains are found a couple yards off the army base. The army authorities want to quickly write it off as drug-related, in other words, cover it up.
Seeing the lack of an investigation, the father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) moves in to help the local police. A Vietnam veteran who hauls gravel for a living, he finds all the clues that the police miss.
The evidence begins to point to the soldier’s closest friends from his unit. But the father has met them and doesn’t believe it. He says to the detective (played by Charlize Theron): “You haven’t been to war so you don’t understand–you do not fight along side a man and then do that to him,” meaning kill him and in such a brutal way. In fact, the father is wrong.
The film is based on the 2003 case of Richard Davis, who was tortured and stabbed 33 times shortly after his return from Iraq. The three people convicted were his fellow soldiers, who had just returned from one of the bloodiest battles of the initial invasion.
Near the end of the movie, you see one of the soldiers laughing as he’s describing how they tortured Iraqis. But the movie also shows how they didn’t start out that way. In one earlier scene they are shown playing ball with Iraqi children. Then they’re in a Humvee convoy and ordered to “just keep driving”–right over a child in their path. They are new in Iraq and visibly upset by what has happened. It’s the soldier who is the most upset by this incident who eventually becomes the cruelest in his treatment of ordinary Iraqis.
Most of the soldiers are played in the movie by non-professional actors–Iraq war veterans. In the DVD extras they talk about how accurate the movie seemed, including the convoy scene. And one of them describes the insanity of the mental health screening they received when they returned home.
Of course it’s insane to believe that homicides (as well as suicides) among soldiers can be prevented with better “screening.” It’s the war itself that’s the problem, and that’s what this movie shows so well. But there’s at least one aspect that seems to have been Hollywood-ized: In the movie the father is portrayed as a patriot who only turns against the war as a result of the investigation. The real father of Richard Davis–like the majority of people–was against the war before it began.
Jun 16, 2008
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a black activist and outspoken journalist and radio broadcaster who has been in prison for 27 years for a crime it’s obvious he didn’t commit. He remains in prison despite numerous protests worldwide–most of them in other countries, much to the shame of this one. He is held under horrible conditions, including, for example, not being allowed to present new evidence, whether or not it would exonerate him.
Following are some excerpts from a letter sent out by Robert Bryan, lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal, regarding the most recent ruling on his case:
“As widely reported in the media, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued its long-awaited decision on March 27, 2008.... We view the opinion of the three-judge panel as a mixed bag with some good, some very wrong ...
A new jury trial has been ordered by the federal court on the question of whether Mumia should be sentenced to life or death, due to the trial judge’s unconstitutional and misleading instructions to the jury. It is a positive step in any capital case when a court finds that the death penalty was wrongfully imposed. Mumia is pleased with this part of the ruling because it could help others on death rows across the U.S. The prosecution now has various options including seeking reconsideration by the federal court and petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to have the death sentence remain intact.
It was a great disappointment that the federal court rejected our quest for a reversal of the conviction and a new trial on the question of guilt and innocence. To say that Mumia and I are unhappy with this would be an understatement, for the decision flies in the face of the United States Constitution and case precedent. The facts are that the prosecutor did engage in racism during jury selection, and made a false and misleading argument to the jury which turned the concept of reasonable doubt and presumption of innocence on its head. The trial judge was biased and bigoted, even stating in reference to my client that he was “going to help ‘em fry the n----r.” Unfortunately the court used against Mumia the failings of the lawyers who represented him in state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus proceedings. Their mistakes should not serve as an excuse to rationalize away the fundamental constitutional violations that occurred in this case....
The District Attorney appeared livid that the federal court had ordered a new penalty-phase jury trial. At a press conference on March 27, 2008, the day of the decision, she vowed that her office will continue pursuing the execution of my client....
The issues in this case concern the right to a fair trial, the ongoing struggle against the death penalty, and the political repression of a courageous author and journalist. Based upon three decades of successfully litigating murder cases involving the death penalty, I am convinced that we can win an acquittal upon a new jury trial. My goal is his acquittal upon retrial. I intend to see Mumia go home to his family. I will not rest until that occurs.
Mumia is still on death row and in great danger. His life is hanging in the balance. We must remember that racism, fraud, politics, and unfairness are threads that have run through this case since the beginning....
Finally, we are grateful for all those who do so much to bring the injustice in this case to public attention, whether it be through demonstrations, writing to newspapers, meetings, or circulating information on the Internet. This is all important. We are of one voice in this campaign for justice: Free Mumia!
Yours very truly,
Robert R. Bryan
Jun 16, 2008
Since the huge increase in food and energy prices have driven hundreds of millions more people all over the world to the edge of starvation, Bush has made a big deal about increasing funding for U.S. international food assistance programs.
It’s a fraud and a scam. Even the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) found that two-thirds of U.S. food aid money goes to supposed “administrative” costs, that is, to the big U.S. agricultural distributors and shippers. The system is so corrupt, CARE, the Atlanta-based international charity, recently announced that it is cutting its ties to the U.S. program.
In many ways, the U.S. government food assistance program causes even more hunger and starvation. For when U.S. flour and grain are dumped on markets in poor countries, it helps to drive many of the local farmers out of business–thus contributing to a catastrophic drop in the local production of food–and making the population even more dependent on the increasingly expensive food exports from the U.S.
Under the guise of “international food assistance,” the U.S. government takes U.S. tax dollars and hands it over to Big Business. At the same time, this “assistance” is used as a weapon in the U.S. government’s economic war in which the biggest U.S. companies increasingly starve the poor in the rest of the world for their own profit.
Jun 16, 2008
“We can’t go on like this. No electricity, no cooking oil, no gas, no food, no water, no wages: we have nothing. It is indescribable. And there is no reaction in Europe nor in the Arab states, as if the Gaza Strip has already been eliminated from the map.” That is how one inhabitant of Gaza described it.
Western diplomats and special emissaries who visit the region describe the same reality, whether it is in Gaza or in the West Bank.
Gaza lacks everything and in the broiling heat of summer, the lack of water is intolerable. Families are obliged to search constantly, even late into the night, for the rare moments when water is provided to the inhabitants. To drink a glass of pure water has become a privilege. The water that is available has an offensive color and odor.
More than half the children in Gaza under the age of five are undernourished due to a lack of food. The health conditions are such that many sick people die because they have no care. Infant mortality has reached 21 out of 1000 births in Gaza, while in comparison it is just 4 per 1000 in Israel. These are some of the consequences of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
In the West Bank, even if the situation is different because of the military occupation there, it is no less difficult. As a European diplomat put it, “…since the Annapolis conference of November 2007, settlements have accelerated at a pace not seen before. Construction permits in the settlements of the West Bank have increased ten-fold. Not only in the zones that Israel intends to annex, but also even on the other side of the wall, in what are called the illegal advanced posts. The framework dividing up the area is being put in place at an accelerated rhythm. This doubles the impact of the conscious economic strangulation of the Palestinian economy. The people can no longer live.”
According to the Office of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations, there are now 607 barriers set up by the Israeli government to prevent the free circulation of Palestinian people and goods in the West Bank.
Even former U.S. President Jimmy Carter recently declared that the blockage of the Gaza Strip “is one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the world.” But neither U.S. government authorities, nor those of the European Union, took any action. As far as they are concerned, silence is the word.
Democratic presidential candidate, Barak Obama, has already made his position clear. In a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main pro-Israel lobby, Obama did not utter a single word concerning the suffering of the Palestinian people. Instead, he spoke of the “common interests and the shared values” between the U.S. and Israel. And to conclude, Obama declared that, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Thus he turned his back on one of the major demands of the Palestinians concerning the recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state–a demand in the past he had seemed to support.
In the end, Israel has accomplices that match its aims: the Western states, which have cut up the whole planet to serve the interests of their own ruling classes.
Jun 16, 2008
The two-tier wage concessions in the auto industry started at Delphi, spread through the U.S. auto industry, and now have been exported–to Mexico.
A union at Ford’s Cuautitlan plant agreed to cut new hires’ wages down from $4.50, to $2.25 an hour.
A union at Volkswagen’s Puebla plant conceded to cut new hires’ wages down from $1.95, to $1.50.
Others are expected to follow suit, as companies whipsaw plant after plant.
Union leaders in the U.S. started this disaster in recent years, when “solidarity” disappeared from their vocabulary. They gave concession after concession–especially two-tier wages–as part of their “partnership” policies toward the corporations.
The dominoes began to fall. As soon as the 2007 Ford, GM and Chrysler contracts were settled, a Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio announced a new hire rate of $10. Toyota plants in the U.S. said they would start new hires at $12.50. Now the dominoes have fallen into Mexico.
Anyone who dares tell us that we have to accept less to compete with other workers is lying.
It’s not Mexican wages pulling U.S. wages down–it’s Big 3/U.S. wages pushing everything else down!
Jun 16, 2008
OSHA law doesn’t allow for the criminal prosecution of a company when workers are injured on the job. Only when workers die can a boss be prosecuted under OSHA–and even then, the charge carries with it only a maximum sentence of six months in prison. For killing someone!
Some prosecutors, aching to see justice done, have prosecuted some cases as environmental crimes–when they can. When workers have been poisoned by chemicals on the job, the company can’t be criminally charged; but under environmental laws, sometimes they can be.
Laws protecting the environment are nearly useless–but as weak as they are, they’re infinitely stronger than those protecting workers.
Maybe the courts will find a company that injures workers guilty of criminal violations–if a pigeon got crushed in the process.
Jun 16, 2008
The United States is only one of a small handful of countries that does not offer guaranteed paid maternity leave for women–not to speak of leave for men helping to care for newborns. The other countries that, like the U.S., don’t offer this are Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland–extremely poor and underdeveloped countries. Most other countries guarantee at least 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. Of course, one has to be legally employed to qualify for this–which still leaves out a lot of unemployed women, or women earning a living in temporary or small jobs under the table, especially in most underdeveloped countries.
But in the U.S., paid maternity leave is not only not guaranteed for all, it is legally considered to be a disability, treated like an illness or some other medical problem. And just as with other medical problems, less and less do employers cover this. Over the last 10 years, the number of employers offering paid time off for women when they have a baby has dropped by almost half. According to a new study by the non-profit Families and Work Institute, only 16% of employers now offer post-childbirth pay for new mothers down from the already low 27% in 1998. The study also found that those employers that still do offer paid maternity leave are slashing the amount of time mothers–as well as fathers–can get off to take care of their new born baby.
Workers and their infants are literally being sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly more brutal drive for profit.
Jun 16, 2008
Even more than Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has been virtually ignored by the news media in recent months.
They’d like us to forget that the U.S. has 28,000 troops in the country, and that the number is increasing to 32,000 over this summer. In total, over 65,000 international troops are stationed in the country right now–and yet, the government of the U.S. puppet, Hamid Karzai, barely controls the capital of Kabul. Civilians continue to suffer; even the U.S. admits that over 500 civilians were killed in the first five months of 2008. But given the way the warlords control most of the country, no one can have any idea of what is happening in most areas.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan has just as little to do with ending terrorism as the war in Iraq does. But for seven long years, the Afghan people have been suffering the results of a terrorist war–carried out by the U.S. against them.
The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on 9/11, any more than the people of Iraq did. But just like the people of Iraq, the people of Afghanistan are being made to pay so that the U.S. can flex its muscle around the world.
This war, like the war in Iraq, was planned and carried out by the Bush administration–but it was wholeheartedly supported by the votes of both parties in Congress.
So what can we expect from the presidential candidates of these two parties in this election?
John McCain, of course, backs the war in Afghanistan, just as he supports the war in Iraq. He states openly that he would continue to do so as president.
But Barack Obama is no better–and in some ways, he’s worse. According to him, the problem in Afghanistan–is that there need to be MORE troops there. His proposed Iraq De-escalation Act of 2007 stated directly that troops pulled out of Iraq should be redeployed to Afghanistan.
This war has been carried out–quietly, but murderously–for almost seven years now, seven years of catastrophe for the Afghani population.
We can’t wait on elections to demand an end to it.
Jun 16, 2008
Improvement? In Iraq? It’s a lie every bit as blatant as the ones told to justify invading Iraq over five years ago.
What could “improvement” possibly mean for the Iraqi people? Today, they are imprisoned in ghettoes, many driven out of their own neighborhoods or villages by violence, herded into quarters established along ethnic or sectarian lines, and kept penned up there by militias armed to the teeth by the U.S.
What “improvement”? There are even fewer doctors and medical facilities than before. “Improvement”? Ever higher food costs are producing a whole generation of malnourished infants. Sectarian militias force women to wear the veil or face the constant possibility of rape, torture or death, and this in a country that once was one of the most secular in the Middle East.
There may be fewer Iraqi deaths today–but only because so many people have already been killed or driven from their homes. Over one hundred thousand were killed by military action, perhaps another 700,000 or more are dead from the consequences of the war. Over five million Iraqis were turned into refugees.
No, there is no improvement, neither for the Iraqi people, nor for a whole generation in this country who ended up in Iraq, often because they saw no prospects for decent jobs or education here unless they joined the armed forces.
It’s possible the Bush administration may find the way to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, putting more of the filthy work controlling the Iraqi people into the hands of mercenaries and sectarian militias armed and paid for by the U.S. But if so, it’s only so the U.S. can send more troops on to Afghanistan or even on to Pakistan.
The results for U.S. troops will be the same.
They will come home in body bags–over 4600 already have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, with over a thousand more who died in this country, waiting for treatment at VA hospitals. They come home ready to kill themselves, learning too late what this war is about. No one knows exactly how many died by their own hand, but we do know this: more have killed themselves than were killed in the war.
There is no improvement in Iraq–there is only that hell which is war. U.S. vets will go on paying its price long after U.S. imperialism has gone on to other wars against other people–just as vets from Viet Nam continue to pay today.
Jun 16, 2008
George W. Bush will go down in history blamed for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he didn’t take the country to war alone.
When Congress authorized the war on Afghanistan, only one person, Barbara Lee, voted against it.
When the U.S. Senate authorized the U.S. war on Iraq, only 23 voted against, 77 voted for. The vote in the House of Representatives, was similar, 133 against, 296 for. Most who voted against were Democrats. But Democrats still voted the funds to carry out the wars.
While some Democrats voted against the war symbolically, the Democratic Party was lining up practically to make the war happen.
Since 2006, the Democratic Party controlled the majority in both houses of Congress. They had enough votes to stop the war. They didn’t do it.
Their presidential candidate, Barack Obama, says he never voted to authorize the war. Well, of course not–he couldn’t vote at all, he wasn’t yet in the Senate.
Obama also promised, when running for the Senate, that he would not vote to fund the war–a promise he tore up as soon as he got to the Senate. He’s voted every funding measure since.
In 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson, running for re-election, promised to stop the U.S. move to war in Southeast Asia, branding his opponent, Barry Goldwater, a war-monger. In fact, both were war-mongers. But many opponents of the growing Asian war took Johnson at his word, disarming themselves while the U.S. moved into open war in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.
The Viet Nam war was finally brought to a stop by the troops of the line. They refused to go out in the field. They fragged their officers. They mutinied. They organized open opposition in the army, publicly denouncing the war, exposing its reality. At the same time, the black population was in the streets, revolting against a society treating them as second-class citizens, pushing aside those black politicians who sought to hold them back. Students took their cues from the black mobilization, pushing to make their voices heard.
We may not yet be there today. But the opposition that has grown up in the army, the widespread disaffection in the population are laying the groundwork for bringing these wars to an end.
Don’t let the opposition to the war be diverted into support for politicians or for parties who have demonstrated how little their word is worth.