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
Apr 6, 2009
15.6%–that was the broad rate of unemployment in March, according to the U.S. Labor Department. That included 8.5% of the work force, who are recently unemployed, another 1.3%, made up of part of the long term unemployed, and 5.8%, who are partially unemployed, working part time, but needing full time.
The numbers boggle the mind. In the 16 months since the recession “officially” began, over 5.1 million jobs have been cut. Today, all told, 28.7 million people, one out of every six workers, cannot get the work they need. And even these figures hide a good part of the unemployed–all those who aren’t working, who want a job, but don’t meet some bureaucrat’s arbitrary definition of the unemployed.
The leaders of this society–political, business, media–pretend that since consumers aren’t buying, of course factories must reduce production, and if factories reduce production, of course there must be lay-offs and unemployment.
Why?
It’s not logical–or rather, that’s the logic of those who put profits before everything else, before human needs, before the requirements of the whole society.
Unemployment flows from the wretched logic of capitalism.
Today, that system is producing a disaster, a human disaster–one that will mark the future for years, with today’s children ripped from pillar to post, losing their education years because their parents have lost their jobs and then their homes, forced to move from city to city, doubling up with relatives, ending up finally in tent cities.
This is not like Katrina–a natural disaster which the system tried to blame for its own failings. This vast ocean of unemployment is the failing of the very system itself, a capitalist system that produces unemployment as one of its ways to reinforce profits.
Don’t look to that same capitalist system and its defenders for answers. The answers it has are of no use to working people.
It’s necessary today that every single job be preserved–even if production goes down. It’s necessary, in fact, that the work be divided up, that people be brought back to work, that income be maintained.
Not only is it necessary, it’s possible. IF all those profits–the ones still being made today, and the vast amount made in previous years–were tapped, the factories could be kept producing, the offices working, the services still be provided.
Working people have every reason to put our own demands forth, in the midst of this economic crisis that we did not create. Divide the work up among every one who needs a job, without cutting the wages that any of us are paid each week.
Yes, the capitalists respect force, not just demands. But when we fight, when we use our forces, we have to be sure to demand something more than just a few crumbs off of capital’s table.
We need income to survive and to survive decently, fully.
Apr 6, 2009
Big banks and investment funds sucked money from the real economy, using it to speculate–until their bubbles burst.
The biggest speculators protected themselves, however. A very small study by the Wall Street Journal found “fifteen corporate chieftains of large home-building and financial services firms,” who each banked more than a hundred million dollars between 2003 and 2009.
That’s well over one and a half billion dollars–in the hands of only 15 individuals!
All told, the Journal found over 21 billion dollars given as “compensation” to executives and directors–and that’s studying only 120 companies.
That sort of “compensation” rightfully belongs to everyone thrown out of work by the collapse of these thieves’ economy. As for them, they deserve an entirely different kind of “compensation”–like, 20 to life!
Apr 6, 2009
Lawrence Summers, Obama’s top economic advisor, last year got more than five million dollars from the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and another 2.7 million dollars from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money.
He was invited to “speak” to Goldman Sachs, who gave him $135,000 for a couple hours; J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, who each gave $67,500 and Citigroup, $45,000
Those are the very same banks that paid their executives huge bonuses–bonuses that Summers and company denounced, while pretending there was nothing they could do.
Apr 6, 2009
Everyone’s income is going down in this horrible economy. But for the top 25 hedge fund managers, “down” means only down to 12 billion dollars.
The top three managers averaged two billions dollars each in 2008. That comes to about five and a half million dollars per day. The “lowest” paid of these fund managers got about five million dollars per week.
And for what? For helping to inflate a speculative balloon, whose deflation wrecked all those 401(k)s.
Apr 6, 2009
Banks sure have their tricks to make more profit off of credit cards–such as higher late fees and cash-advance fees. Some banks have gotten even more “creative” lately: they impose a penalty on customers who “make little progress paying off their debts.”
But isn’t that what the same banks want their customers to do in the first place, so the customers pay more in interest?
Not at all. All that matters to the banks is their bottom line, and so far these scams have paid off for them. In the past two years, banks made 37 billion dollars in penalty fees alone.
As hard times hit more and more families, these bloodsuckers called banks are rushing to take advantage of people’s despair.
Apr 6, 2009
Banks have raised interest rates on credit card debt in recent months.
But hasn’t the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates? Well, a federal regulation allows banks to charge whatever interest rate they want–including increasing it on existing debt.
And the banks are doing it! They put loan sharks to shame.
Apr 6, 2009
“Economic turmoil (e.g., increased unemployment, foreclosures, loss of investments and other financial distress) can result in a whole host of negative health effects—both physical and mental,” said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on its Web site in a recent article entitled, “Getting Through Tough Economic Times.”
The fact is that many don’t get through “tough times.” For every one% increase in the unemployment rate (1.5 million people), 47,000 additional people die. These include 26,000 deaths from heart attacks, 1,200 from suicide, 831 murders, and 635 deaths related to alcohol consumption, according to studies by Dr. Harvey Brenner, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Of those who do survive, many are scarred for life. For example, a 2004 study by the National Institute of Justice found that the rate of domestic violence against women and children doubles and then triples as unemployment increases.
The impact of rising unemployment and other “economic turmoil” on workers is little different than post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of soldiers and civilians caught in the middle of wars.
“Try to keep things in perspective,” so advises the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In other words, calm down.
No–don’t calm down! Throughout history, workers have used collective action, that is mass strikes, demonstrations and movements, to force the capitalists and political bosses to come up with the kinds of jobs and pay that reduce not only suffering and despair, but also open up new perspectives for all of humanity.
Apr 6, 2009
One unemployed worker in Detroit told about her experience at a job fair:
“One-fourth of the vendors were there to ask you to invest in something (when the markets are crashed!); one-fourth were community colleges there to see about you going to school (and pay them!); one-fourth were some kind of website or marketing firm, having you get on their websites to search for jobs; and the only group there offering jobs was Kelly Services.”
Bad enough? It can get worse–many job fairs charge entrance fees these days–$15 or more–for putting you through this abuse!
Apr 6, 2009
Last month, the government gave the giant mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac another 200 billion dollars, on top of the 200 billion it had already given them.
This month, Fannie and Freddie announced they are giving out more than 200 million dollars in bonuses through 2010. That includes over one million dollars apiece to Fannie Mae’s four top executives.
Why wouldn’t they? They saw how hollow the politicians’ harsh words toward AIG were!
Apr 6, 2009
California politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, are telling school districts they’ll have to run schools with 10% less money from the state–which provides more than half of the schools’ funding.
To facilitate the cuts, the politicians quietly lowered the financial penalties for districts that violate the 20:1 student-to-teacher limit for elementary schools. For high schools, they did away with any limit altogether!
If there is one indicator for student success, it’s small class size. Problems in big city schools are tied to the fact that teachers have too many students to give the attention needed. In the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles, classes are already super over-crowded. Los Angeles school officials say they expect class size in 11th and 12th grades to surge from 40 to 43. Imagine yourself in a classroom with 43 teenagers!
The announcement that 26,000 California teachers might be laid off drew some outcry from parents, students and teachers. Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, announced he would release four billion dollars that could be used for California schools–but he left it up to the state how to spend it. State politicians said they had to keep part of the money to balance the state budget. And school officials complained that, because of deadlines set by the state, it’s too late to change their budget plans.
It’s the usual blame game politicians always play. They could cut all the red tape to get the money to the schools–if they wanted–and they could do it fast. They certainly did it for the big banks and AIG!
Apr 6, 2009
On March 27, a jury in Wichita, Kansas acquitted Dr. George Tiller of 19 counts of violating the Kansas statute on late-term abortions. Tiller had faced the possibility of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine on each of the 19 counts against him.
Kansas law requires a second opinion from another Kansas doctor for all late-term abortions. Prosecutors claimed that the doctor who signed off for Dr. Tiller was not “independent” of him. Obviously the jury did not believe the state.
However, their verdict did not prevent the state from trying to get Dr. Tiller by another means. Just moments after he was acquitted, the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts publicly issued a complaint against him on similar allegations that could lead to his medical license being suspended or revoked.
Tiller is in the cross hairs of right-wing fanatics because they have already succeeded in shutting down most other doctors who perform late-term abortions. He is one of only three doctors in the entire United States–just three!–who currently perform the procedure. Hundreds, even thousands of others have been scared off by the outright terrorism that has been directed against doctors by anti-abortion fanatics.
Dr. Tiller, for example, had his clinic bombed in 1985, faced massive protests and threats at his clinic in 1991 and was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent in 1993.
For decades, government officials have reinforced this terrorism by prosecuting doctors and putting legal hurdles in their way. The right for women to control their own bodies is nothing but words so long as religious zealots and politicians can, with impunity, impose their reactionary views on every woman in this country.
Apr 6, 2009
“Poor Rick Wagoner, tossed out on his ear by the Obama administration.”
Or, “Way to go Barack Obama–for tossing GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner out on his ear!”
Wherever you are in the country, you’ve heard a version of this story repeated by the media. But just how hard did Wagoner get tossed?
His executive pension will give him $4,523,400 a year for the next five years–which comes to 22.6 million. Plus another half million or so in “deferred compensation.”
On top of that, he will receive a pension of $68,900 a year for life–small for an executive, but two times as much as a newly retired auto worker will get with Social Security–and many times more than most current retirees.
Not to mention, he got 40.2 million dollars over the past three years. Didn’t he save any of that money?
All those auto workers being tossed out would love to land like that.
Apr 6, 2009
When Chrysler threatened bankruptcy in 1980, the modern age of concessions began. The UAW leadership blinked. They agreed to re-open the 1979 contract they had just signed. They told workers that taking concessions would save Chrysler–and save their jobs.
In fact, neither was true. Workers’ concessions–eleven lost yearly holidays, frozen wages, COLA reductions, and shop-floor speedup–although large to the workers, were a drop in the bucket to Chrysler. It made a miraculous recovery. Iacocca became the highest paid CEO of his day. Loans to the government were repaid early. But workers’ concessions remained lost, not recovered to this day!
And jobs were lost, first by the thousands, and then the tens of thousands.
The union leadership openly declared a new era of company-union “partnership” in order to “be competitive.” Eventually, the UAW’s Bob King termed this a “non-adversarial” relationship.
This non-adversarial, don’t-fight policy was sold time after time to the membership as a “save jobs” policy. It is still sold that way today. But the actual results are job losses in the hundreds of thousands! In 1979, just before Chrysler’s bankruptcy ploy, the UAW’s membership was 1,528,000, of which 720,000 were Big Three jobs. The most recent membership figures are 465,000, of which only 173,000 are Big Three jobs.
The UAW’s rollover at Chrysler was followed by “downsizing” at every big car company during the 1980s. Productivity rose dramatically as workloads on each worker doubled or tripled, mostly uncontested by the UAW. GM, Ford, and Chrysler parts plants were “spun off” in a long process of moving jobs to lower wage and still lower-wage factories.
Every auto worker knows that “partnership” has meant nothing but the continual bargaining away of what they once had. But how did the auto workers come to have something to bargain away? Those wages, benefits and conditions that the companies are set on taking back today were not handed over by friendly managements. Those gains had to be won in battle, in struggle with the corporations. Workers made gains when they understood that the bosses were not their partners, but their enemies–and acted accordingly.
What did the workers think, those in 1937 who sat down in GM’s Chevrolet plants and held them for 44 days, against police assaults, and facing the National Guard? They certainly did not consider GM to be their partner!
What about the tens of thousands of workers who took inspiration from the GM sit-down, and launched sit-downs of their own, thousands of strikes and sit-downs across the industrial Midwest? Were they deluded into thinking their bosses were their partners?
No, those workers were not deluded. They understood the roots of their exploitation and poverty. They acted accordingly. They gathered their strength in numbers and forced their enemies to raise their pay, improve their conditions, accept their unions and respect their human dignity. All that was won in bitter struggle.
Most UAW workers no longer remember what it was like to strike for 60, 90, 111 days–two and three months on the picket lines, two and three months without paychecks. But such determined struggles were the way that gains were won from the workers’ enemies–the same gains that today are being given away, given away to the enemies who the UAW now calls “partners.”
After World War II, GM workers struck for 113 days to win a 17.8% wage increase, simply to catch up to the wartime rise in prices.
Wanting to avoid a repeat of that struggle, the companies proposed to give COLA and an automatic 3% per year raise in the next contract.
In 1950, Chrysler workers struck for 104 days to establish autoworkers’ rights to pensions and to hospital and surgical insurance 50% paid by the company.
In 1961, amid a rash of local strikes at GM plants and after a 17-day strike at Ford, workers won fully paid medical insurance for active workers, and 50% paid for retirees.
In l964, the Big 3 agreed to fully pay medical insurance for retirees and provide prescription drug coverage for active workers.
In 1970, GM workers struck for 67 days to gain 30-and-out retirement.
Important struggles by workers always bring a new force to bear on society. New social and political arrangements have to be made to accommodate workers’ demands. And as one important part of the workforce raises itself up, other workers benefit from the new standards.
But the cycle also works in reverse.
Surely, twenty-nine years of decline should be clear enough proof that “partnership” is an utter failure. The working class and the employing class have nothing at all in common.
If workers hope to stop the downhill slide and begin to improve their conditions once again, they will need to recover the methods their grandparents and great-grandparents knew: the methods of class struggle.
Auto workers are still in a position to stand up and lead the way for others.
Apr 6, 2009
Don’t try to tell us GM didn’t make money producing cars. The money was stolen by all those parasites who live off the productive economy.
Just look at a few examples.
For 8 years, from 2000 through 2007, GM was shifting profits out of production over to its finance unit, GMAC. While claiming to lose 14.4 billion dollars on production, it pretended it made 21.6 billion on its finance operations.
In fact, it was draining profit out of production in order to speculate, buying up more than 20 mortgage companies during those years. Its bankers–Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, which all had representatives on GM’s board of directors–pushed GMAC to grind out sub-prime mortgages. Those same bankers specialized in spewing out all those mortgage-backed securities, the so-called “toxic assets” that finally brought down the financial markets.
Where did GM get the money to buy or enlarge its holdings in Daewoo, Isuzu, Suzuki, Subaru and Saab? It borrowed it, of course, enlarging its debt load, eventually crushing itself under ballooning interest payments.
And when GM started losing money, how did it keep paying out bonuses–220 million dollars to just five top five executives–in seven years, not counting the hundreds of millions more to the lesser execs? How did it pay out 8.2 billion dollars in dividends to big investors? It borrowed more money, running up even bigger debts.
GM may have big debts, but it also has big money. If not, what did it put into all those offshore banks–blowfish? GM has subsidiaries in eleven tax havens like the Cayman Islands–where they don’t make cars, but certainly can hide money.
Now, the same thieves that wrecked GM are pushing to tear down the workers’ standard of living.
No way! No more money to the thieves, no more letting them living high off our hog!
Apr 6, 2009
Cerberus, a “strip-and-flip” private equity company, bought Chrysler in 2007–and proceeded to run it deep in debt.
Practically the first thing it did was to borrow ten billion dollars from the banks to which it is closely tied–JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. And, in a highly unusual move, it pledged all of Chrysler’s plants and machinery as collateral.
Cerberus didn’t use that extra money to expand Chrysler or develop it. It didn’t develop new vehicles–as this year’s Detroit auto show proved. It didn’t build new plants. It didn’t work out new technologies. No, it just borrowed the money, which apparently ... evaporated!
It split Chrysler into three separate companies–the auto production company; the finance company; and a real estate company. The auto production company got all the debt. The finance company ended up getting the profits on the sales of the cars, while the auto production company absorbed the losses on leasing cars. And the real estate company got Chrysler’s own headquarters, for which Chrysler must now pay rent!
How much money did the Cerberus partners take out of Chrysler? No one knows, since they don’t even have to pretend to let anyone see their books. But one thing we do know is how much money these sharks made from running all the different companies they bought and sold into the ground. In 2007, managing companies worth a total of 27 billion dollars, Cerberus had revenue of 100 billion dollars–in just one year.
And just a little note: Cerberus’s main guy, Stephen Feinberg, recently spent 15 million dollars–just to renovate his NYC townhouse.
Now, to complete the circle, those same banks aligned with Cerberus are threatening to push Chrysler into a bankruptcy–so they can grab the collateral, that is, the Chrysler plants, and sell them off.
Workers have no interest in giving up more for these thieves. Take back the money from these thieves. Use it to keep the plants open.
Apr 6, 2009
On December 19, then-President Bush extended loans to the auto companies on the condition they extort big concessions from their work force.
Not satisfied with those concessions–which, taken altogether would mark an enormous drop in the standard of living of auto workers, active and retired–on March 30, new President Obama issued demands for still greater concessions.
Bush implicitly held the threat of bankruptcy–with the loss of jobs and the shredding of the whole union contract–over the workers’ heads. Obama and his Task Force on Autos said it explicitly.
The bankruptcy that Obama’s Task Force is talking about is just a word–a legal fiction.
The Auto Task Force doesn’t intend to take GM away from GM’s owners. They intend to keep GM running, spilling out profits, making money for all those banks and investors.
The only point of this legal fiction–threat or actual–is to extort as much as possible from the workers.
Whether or not Obama, his task force, GM and Cerberus/Chrysler take this deal through the bankruptcy courts, there is only one response that workers can have, only one that allows them to protect themselves: Refuse. Refuse to give up concessions, refuse to lose any more jobs, refuse to be pushed aside, refuse to let the standard of living of their families be lowered, to see their neighbors and their whole city destroyed–just so a bunch of scheming bankers can take the money and run.
Refuse!
Apr 6, 2009
Workers from two auto parts plants in Windsor, Ontario occupied one of the plants March 17 to protest their sudden closure by Catalina Precision Products, when Chrysler terminated contracts.
Catalina refused to pay the workers 1.5 million dollars in severance and termination pay it owed them, saying Chrysler owed it money.
When Chrysler started to remove equipment from the plant, workers responded by blockading the plant. That got Chrysler’s attention. It offered the workers a total of $205,000 to be divided up among 80 workers, about four weeks of pay. When workers voted 64 to 36% to reject that offer, some of them took over the plant, welding the doors shut. The next day Chrysler doubled its initial offer to $400,000. The offer amounts to about eight weeks of pay for each worker.
When workers left the plant, Jaime Hernandez, a 16-year veteran of the company, said, “I wish I could have more, but at least I get a crumb from the table. Catalina should be penalized for doing this. It’s like a hit-and-run. They make a crime and they just take off.”
Certainly Chrysler’s offer amounts to crumbs. But the workers would not have gotten anything if they had not taken control of the plant and its equipment.
At the end, workers climbed on the plant roof, raising a sign saying, “Fighting Back Makes a Difference.”
Yes it does!
Apr 6, 2009
This is a translation of articles from comrades of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the revolutionary workers’ group active in the struggles in the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Although the general strike was officially suspended almost a month ago, a number of strikes are taking place in Guadeloupe. The climate is such that rumors continue to spread that a new general strike will take place soon. This gives a sense of the atmosphere.
For the most part, these strikes were called in order to make the bosses apply the Bino Agreement. This agreement was signed during the strike (accept by those bosses associated with the MEDEF federation), but a number of bosses have not respected the agreement or have tried to reinterpret it as they like. The workers won’t agree that wages are increased by only 50 or 100 euros a month, instead of the 200 euros the bosses had agreed to.
In a large number of companies, the workers have already enforced the terms of the Bino agreement. And while the signed agreement officially concerned only 17,000 workers, today some 30,000 workers have already obtained the increase. Either the strikes have forced the bosses to give in, or the fear of the strikes led them to sign the agreement.
Nearly all the workers who have not obtained the benefits of the agreement resent the inequality and injustice. With this feeling, they are determined to fight to obtain the benefits. That includes the workers on the docks, those on the banana plantations, the employees of private clinics, those in the thermal energy plant at Moule, of the diesel plant of Jarry, of the IEDOM (Institute of Emission Controls in the overseas territories), and the workers in a number of hotels who have all taken their turn to strike. All together, today there are nearly a thousand workers on strike across some 15 different industries.
The workers of the thermal energy plant at Moule effectively blocked the functioning of the sugar factory of Gardel. As a result, the workers of the Gardel factory decided to redouble their efforts. On March 31, they sequestered the three directors of the factory after they had seen their pay stubs. Those bosses soon gave in.
Strikes are taking place on the banana plantations, where the békés, the old white planters, refused to sign the accord. The workers in a number of public enterprises that are not officially named in the agreement nonetheless decided to include themselves. The employees of the associations for agriculture are also on strike. At the post office, all the workers decided to go on an unlimited strike beginning April 2.
The raise of 200 euros net is for all the workers who receive a base salary between the minimum wage and 1.4 times the minimum (1,849 euros per month, or about $2,400 per month). But also in the agreement, those with a base salary between 1.4 and 1.6 times the minimum wage obtained a raise of 6% and those with a wage over 1.6 times the minimum gained a raise of 3%. So all together, there are a large number of workers concerned by the Bino agreement.
The general strike and the combativity of the militants of the coordination committee (LKP) have reinforced everyone. Everyone is aware that it is because of their general strike that they obtained these increases. Only the struggle pays.
Apr 6, 2009
At the end of March, U.S. and Iraqi, mostly Shiite, forces arrested a former Sunni ally in Baghdad. Minutes later, his supporters opened fire from rooftops and street corners against American and Iraqi forces. The U.S. then brought in Apache helicopters, which strafed and fired rockets into the Baghdad neighborhood. The heavy street fighting lasted several hours.
The man arrested was one of over 100,000 former Sunni insurgents who had joined what were called Awakening Councils in 2006 and 2007. The U.S. government paid these former insurgents to support the Maliki government and the U.S. “surge.” After the U.S. stopped paying them, the Iraqi government promised jobs either in the Iraqi government or military, both of which are dominated by Shiites. But few ever got jobs, and those who did haven’t been paid.
Instead, the Iraqi government has been cracking down, arresting and assassinating these former Awakening Council members. This has fed tensions and fighting in the Baghdad region. At the end of March, several well-planned bombings killed 123 people in and around Baghdad.
There has also been scattered fighting and bombings in other parts of the country, as many ethnic-based groupings and gangs all throughout the country continue to contend for power in the government and a piece of the fabulous oil revenues.
In no way is the civil war in Iraq over–no matter what U.S. politicians claim.
Of course, it is the Iraqi population who pay the price, not just in violence, but in the most abject poverty and misery. The U.S. super-power doesn’t even lift a finger to help the approximately five million Iraqis, or 20% of the Iraqi population, who continue to be displaced from their homes. Human Rights Watch confirms that “no structure exists to meet their humanitarian needs.” The basic infrastructure was destroyed by U.S. firepower. Close to 90% of all Iraqis still do not have access to electricity. Seventy% do not have access to clean water.
Meanwhile, as the big U.S. and British oil companies profit from increasing oil production, the Iraqi economy remains a disaster. Forty-three% of Iraqis live on less than a dollar a day. Those who are the most vulnerable are suffering the worst: one in three Iraqi children is hungry. At the same time, one in five Iraqi women suffers physical violence.
The big U.S. troop build-up in Iraq did not succeed in bringing either “peace” or any beginning of economic recovery to Iraq. Nor do U.S. promises of a troop withdrawal mean an end to the war.
Even if some U.S. troops are withdrawn from Iraq and even if Obama says that those who remain are no longer “combat” troops, the war in Iraq will continue to rage, and U.S. troops will continue to be killing and dying.
Apr 6, 2009
On April 3rd and 4th, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in Strasbourg, France. There was a gigantic military mobilization in Strasbourg and even across the Rhine River by the German government, in the face of thousands of protestors.
In its way, such a deployment of what the government calls the “forces of order” gives a picture of what NATO is. This reality has very little to do with what officials and the media pretend, when they depict NATO as a sort of force guaranteeing peace in the world.
NATO was created in April 1949, at the initiative of the United States. Along with eleven other states, including France and Great Britain, the U.S. pushed to establish the most formidable military block that had ever existed, complete with vast amounts of nuclear weapons–directed against the Soviet Union. The Cold War lasted for more than four decades without the USSR ever really threatening the West. Nonetheless, the Cold War was the pretext for reinforcing NATO.
In 1989, the Warsaw Pact, a frail copy of NATO, was dissolved. The Eastern European countries broke their last links with Moscow. At the end of 1991, the USSR itself disappeared.
NATO launched new military operations: in the 1990’s against Serbia and Montenegro, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Kosovo and in Macedonia ... and, since 2001, in the so-called struggle “against terrorism,” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Every one of these military interventions was directed against other countries. Nations were destroyed, populations suffered, so that the order of the great powers–that is to say, the interests of the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries–could be maintained.
The USSR, which had been the pretext for the creation of NATO, disappeared. But imperialism, which can’t do without force to maintain its domination abroad, did not disappear. Nor has its wars.
Apr 6, 2009
Barack Obama has announced plans to step up the Afghanistan war started under George W. Bush. And he’s expanding it widely into Pakistan, beyond anything Bush had done.
Obama has already announced plans to add 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, raising troop levels from 38,000 to nearly 60,000. Before they even get there, he’s talking about adding 10,000 more.
In addition, Obama has expanded aerial bombing of the border areas of Pakistan.
Obama has made Afghanistan/ Pakistan his war–just as Bush did with Iraq, Johnson with Vietnam, and Truman with Korea.
And just like all these former presidents, Obama is telling huge lies to carry out a war whose aim is to establish and keep U.S. control around the world.
Obama proclaimed that al Qaeda “is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan.”
It was a lie when Bush used it as his justification for invading Afghanistan in 2001; it was a lie when Bush repeated it to keep the Iraq war going; and it’s a lie when Obama uses it now.
It’s true that anger against the U.S. is growing in both Afghanistan and Pakistan–precisely because of what the U.S. has done, bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Roughly 13 million ethnic Pashtuns live on the Pakistani side of the border, and almost as many on Afghanistan’s side. These are not empty areas that are being bombed! The deaths of more Pashtuns can only fuel support for the Taliban, uniting the population of the whole area against the U.S.
The actions of the U.S. government are what put the U.S. population at risk.