the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 17, 2009
When Democrats tried to sell the latest version of health care reform at dozens of town hall meetings across the country, they ran into a buzz saw of anger and distrust led by the Republican Party. In trying to claw their way back from minority status, the Republicans had attempted to confront and embarrass the Democrats and the Obama administration.
Much of what the Republicans said was pure demagogy. They said the main threat came from government rationing health care, when today people are being deprived of health care because of a lack of money. They claimed that people can pay for their own medical problems themselves, even though most ordinary working people are always in danger of losing health coverage and can less and less afford to pay all the deductibles and co-pays. They blamed increasing health care costs on immigrants and people receiving government-provided aid–resorting to the same old prejudices, blaming those who are more vulnerable and worse off. Of course, the Republicans didn’t dare put the blame for the outrageous costs where it belongs: on the rich and powerful insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and all the others who extract profits from the health care industry.
But the Republicans’ demagogic, disgusting and reactionary rhetoric still struck a nerve by appealing to popular distrust of government, not just about health care reform, but also about the enormous government bailout of the banks, increasing taxes, etc.
If the Republicans were able to get away with this, it was only because Obama and the Democrats opened the door to them. Obama spoke generally about the need for health care reform. BUT he never spelled out what he actually proposed to do. Obama pretended to hold back, waiting to see what would come out of Congress. Congress produced complete confusion, five separate bills, each over a thousand pages long.
All this was just an act. Buried in the back pages of every big newspaper were reports from behind the scenes: Obama and his chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, secretly met with representatives of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Quietly, behind closed doors, the White House and business executives hammered out the final language of the real bill that they are getting ready to push through Congress.
Their reform will force millions more people to buy health insurance. Insurance companies will be free to set outrageous prices for minimal coverage, leaving people open to enormous bills if they get sick or injured. You may have the “right” to buy insurance. You just won’t be able to afford it! Pharmaceuticals will keep their monopoly control over vital drugs, setting prices without any real control by the government.
Health care reform brought to you by Obama and the Democrats is a reform to benefit big business, aimed at increasing profits at the expense of ordinary people. It is the same old political game, of politicians saying one thing and doing the opposite.
Republicans want to continue the same old health care system, also benefitting big business.
The fight between the Republicans and Democrats over health care reform is a fake fight. They both lie.
Working people will never get the medical care we need by depending on either of them.
The only time medical care has been widened and made available to many more people was in the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid, health care coverage for retirees and the poor, were won. The massive mobilization of the black population imposed those reforms, just as it also imposed many other reforms in housing, education, unemployment and aid to children.
The system hasn’t changed since. Only by ordinary people shaking the very foundations of the power structure and threatening the rule of the capitalist elite will any meaningful gains be won.
Aug 17, 2009
“When you haven’t seen a doctor in so many years, you have a lot of questions,” said a home-cleaning worker being seen at a free clinic at the Forum arena, near South Los Angeles.
The 8-day clinic in mid-August was expected to serve 8,000 of the many thousands who lined up for blocks, day after day, around the arena, taking numbers and waiting.
The nonprofit Remote Area Medical Project normally serves isolated rural communities. But the turnout at the Forum was a graphic proof–if any were needed–that enormous numbers of people everywhere in this country are denied access to health care.
Aug 17, 2009
From the media coverage, you would think the health insurance industry would be opposed to the proposed reforms. Why then are they promoting health care reform?
Business Week, cheerleading magazine for American business, ran an August article about health insurers like UnitedHealth Group, Aetna and Wellpoint, all of which are promoting health care reform. These health insurance companies are spending millions to lobby Congress. Yet these are the very companies you would think had billions to lose if the U.S. health care system were ever “reformed.”
Industry executives understood what it meant when Congress talked about a less-expensive public option, or savings from taxing the health insurers, or negotiating lower drug prices: it was just hot air, without anything concrete, without a single promise. So of course the industry is celebrating and, in the words of Business Week, it “prepares to profit from health reform.”
As their lobbyist Tim Kahn put it, “We are confident that the Senate Finance Committee will produce a bill we can fully endorse.”
That’s why Business Week called its article “Why Health Insurers are Winning.” They are winning, while the rest of us will be paying the bill.
Aug 17, 2009
Detroit city workers are hopping mad about proposed cuts, and they’ve shown it.
About 200 bus drivers and supporters protested a plan to cut bus service completely on Sundays, and drastically cut it back on Saturdays. Other groups of workers, including water department workers and teachers, have also protested proposed cuts in their areas. Mayor Dave Bing threatens massive layoffs unless city workers take massive pay cuts.
Workers in Detroit who depend on buses to get around will be stranded without ways to get to their jobs or shop for groceries. And layoffs for other city workers will mean all sorts of services will go down the tubes.
Bing says the city has a budget deficit. But he found millions to give to Meijers, a grocery store chain. He can find the way to give millions in new tax breaks to General Motors so they’ll keep their headquarters in Detroit–when they weren’t even talking about moving out!
One worker, quoted in a local paper, said it all: “WE didn’t blow the money. Why are they punishing us?”
Detroit city workers and residents don’t have to accept Bing’s punishment. Another protest against the proposed bus service cuts is planned for Wednesday, August 19 at the Spirit of Detroit statue downtown. A fight by any workers in Detroit is in the interest of all.
Aug 17, 2009
Detroit’s new mayor Dave Bing is only a first-term politician. He hasn’t yet learned to hide what he thinks behind flattering phrases. And in an interview for the Detroit Free Press, he showed exactly what he thinks of Detroit city workers and the working people of Detroit. He said:
“Instead of people bellyaching about losing their job with the city, take the challenge of going out and getting the necessary training so they can get a job, maybe a better job, in another industry. People who think that their jobs ought to be protected are unrealistic.”
Bellyaching?! How dare he!! People have put their whole work lives slaving away for the city–of COURSE they expect to have a job! And they should!!
What BS! Bing’s repeating the same old lie that there are jobs out there, if only people went out and got more education! Tell that to all the people working on advanced degrees, putting themselves further into debt, only to find themselves STILL without a job.
Aug 17, 2009
Did you hear, it’s our fault if the recovery is lagging? There was a drop in consumer confidence at the end of July. And retail stores already announced they expect a drop in back-to-school sales this August and September compared with previous years.
Yes, those media mouthpieces suggest that we are to blame, we the consumers, who have lost confidence.
Our fault? Our fault that so many of us are laid off? Our fault that some of us have lost or may lose our houses? Our fault when unemployment benefits reach less than half of those who are unemployed? Our fault that we feel we have to pinch pennies?
Did we hold onto money that somehow prevented the economy from recovering? Of course not. The banks did. We, the working people, are broke.
Those people who laid us off and cut our wages are the ones responsible. Let them be the ones who pay for the crisis.
Aug 17, 2009
“Too much job security” for teachers, that’s what L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez complained about in an August 2nd column.
Never mind that L.A. Unified just laid off more than 2,000 teachers! Never mind that this means bigger classes and less education for students!
This is the voice of the big bosses–who take trillions from the government, denying the schools their funding.
Teachers are under attack–but the real big attack is on millions of working-class children, whose very future these thieves are stealing.
Aug 17, 2009
The Detroit Public Schools are at the spear-point of the horrors caused by “No Child Left Behind.”
Following the demands of “No Child Left Behind,” Robert Bobb, the DPS’s “financial czar,” has “reconstituted” one quarter of all the schools in the Detroit district. The teachers in those schools were forced to reapply for their jobs. Some will stay in the same school; others will be moved to different schools; others will lose their jobs.
Less than a month before the school year starts, thousands of teachers don’t even know where they are teaching or even what classes to prepare for. Schools where teachers had managed to provide some stability for the students have been ripped to shreds. And–worst of all–class sizes will be larger, putting real education still further out of reach.
If students get anything at all out of these substandard schools, it’s because of the efforts made by most teachers in the face of a system that regularly tosses young people aside. But now, with this so-called “reconstitution,” Robert Bobb has undercut even these efforts, throwing the schools into chaos.
“No Child Left Behind” and bureaucrats like Bobb blame the teachers for the poor performance of the students, when the biggest factor is the lack of money and resources given to big city schools.
Students in Detroit and other poor school districts receive on average HALF the funds per student that the wealthy school districts provide. They need the same money and resources devoted to them that the rich school districts provide.
Bobb and the governor who appointed him serve the interests of a capitalist system–a system that has never spent the money needed on the education of working class children.
“Reconstitution” is nothing but a way to cover up this terrible inequity.
Aug 17, 2009
The Porsche family is the third richest group in Germany, worth 22 billion dollars. Another branch, Porsche-Piëch of Austria, ranks number one, worth 34 billion dollars.
These two branches are in fact the descendants of one man, the engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who prospered in Nazi Germany. He won the bid for supplies to build the famous “Volkswagen,” the “people’s car,” which Hitler wanted. The initial capital to build the car factory was taken from the personal savings accounts of the population, who became stockholders. During the war, the factory produced more tanks than cars and its managers used forced labor.
The production of Volkswagen cars really took off only after World War II, with help from the British occupiers. The German people’s investment was quickly expropriated. But, Ferdinand Porsche, Hitler’s personal friend, kept the profits of his investment, using his design department in Stuttgart to make high speed cars for wealthy Germans. Profitable contracts signed with Volkswagen ... and above all royalties that the family received on each Beetle sold (21.4 million up to 2003), allowed Porsche to expand, leading a profitable business for the past 40 years.
Under the Nazis, Porsche prospered; under British occupation, Porsche prospered; under modern German political parties, Porsche prospers.
Aug 17, 2009
The following was written by a correspondent in German and published in Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Porsche (sales of 99,000 cars a year) and Volkswagen (sales of 6.3 million cars a year) officially announced their intent to merge on July 23. Porsche, one sixteenth the size of VW, had earlier announced it wanted to buy Volkswagen.
In 2006, stock investors pushed up the price of VW shares from $42 a share to $112, after Volkswagen announced its plan to get rid of 20,000 jobs. In 2007, when Porsche announced its intent to buy VW, the stock hit $280. One day in October 2008, VW stock climbed to the fantastic price of $1,400 a share!
And that’s why Porsche showed a profit higher than all its sales in 2007-08–because it owned a lot of VW stock!
By 2008, Porsche had gobbled up 50% of VW’s shares. Its CEO announced that he was ready to close several VW factories, which he said “should have been closed a long time ago.... I know how to make money with cars.”
Then came the crisis. Car sales dropped. The price of auto companies’ stocks dropped as well. Porsche found itself deep in debt, with banks shutting off credit. Porsche rapidly had to find between 12 and 20 billion dollars to pay off its debts. Porsche could no longer buy all of VW–it had to settle for a merger.
But don’t cry for Porsche! VW will pay 11 billion dollars to Porsche for the “privilege” of merging!
Thus the Porsche-Piëch family plans to solve its problems on the back of the workers–Porsche and VW workers–trying not to lose a penny of its immense fortune. VW’s reserves, like all the dividends of VW and Porsche that the Porsche-Piëch family has pocketed since the beginning of the year, are the fruit of the exploitation of the workers, an exploitation that has increased a lot in recent years. If Volkswagen continues to make profit for the Porsche family despite the crisis, it’s not only thanks to the European “Cash for Clunkers.” It’s thanks, above all, to management’s elimination of 35,000 or so workers, increasing the work week by four hours a week and imposing much lower wages on new hires.
And finally, part of the money that VW used to pay its stockholders–including the Porsche family–comes from the funds that are supposed to pay for the pensions of its German workers.
Aug 17, 2009
The Obama administration recently announced it had worked out a new agreement with Colombia to allow U.S. forces to use seven Colombian military bases and increase U.S. military personnel in the country.
During the past ten years, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars arming and reinforcing the Colombian military. Pretending to fight against drug production and trafficking, the U.S.-backed Colombian military has been carrying out a war to suppress opposition to the government. In rural areas, attacking anti-government guerilla forces, the military has brutalized and murdered many thousands of civilians. An estimated four million people have been driven from their homes, some of them into surrounding countries. In urban areas, trade unionists and others opposed to the government have been murdered. At the same time, drug production and the drug trade have continued to flourish under the protection of the military.
Recently, Colombia’s military claimed the guerilla forces are using safe havens in neighboring countries. President Obama backed up this murderous military saying, “I think Colombia has some legitimate concern about the [guerillas] operating from over the border. I hope that could be resolved in conversations with its neighbors.”
These threats have alarmed the leaders of neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador and others in Latin America, who understand that the new U.S. agreement with Colombia could open the door to a wider war in the region. In response, Obama said, “We have no intention of sending large numbers of additional troops into Colombia, and we have every interest in seeing Colombia and its neighbors operate peacefully.”
From long experience, the people of Latin America know otherwise. The U.S. has always acted as if the governments of Latin America are there to serve the interests of U.S. capital, and to suffocate even the slightest expression of popular aspirations. Among other things, consider these U.S. actions:
• The U.S. engineered the military overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954.
• The CIA directed the attempt to overthrow the regime of Castro in Cuba in 1961.
• The U.S. military invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 and overthrew its elected government.
• The CIA engineered the 1973 military overthrow of President Allende of Chile and the bloody repression that followed.
• The U.S. military directed and paid for the Contras fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua during the 1980s.
• U.S. forces invaded Grenada in 1983, toppling its government.
• The U.S. invaded Panama in 1989, replacing its president with a U.S. flunky.
• The U.S. financed the death squads in El Salvador during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Obama may think he can fool people in the U.S. about the peaceful intentions of the United States. But the peoples of Latin America know better. Their memory is filled with the violent acts of U.S. imperialism.
Aug 17, 2009
The U.S. has spent ten years and more than six billion dollars arming and training Colombian military forces to suppress popular opposition to the government there. Now the U.S. is about to get an extra payoff for this effort: CBS News recently reported that Colombian Special Operations troops will soon be going to Afghanistan to fight alongside U.S. forces. General Freddy Padilla de Leon, Colombia’s top military official said, “Very soon ... maybe in August or September. This will be our first opportunity in our history.”
At a moment when European governments are backing off from their commitment of troops to the Afghan quagmire, the symbolic readiness of Colombia’s military to send troops is at least a propaganda coup for the U.S. government–a little added return on its investment in the Colombian military.
Aug 17, 2009
Today the most competent pharmaceutical labs in the world are involved in developing a swine flu vaccine. But there’s another fatal disease that hardly gets any attention: African trypanosomiasis, otherwise known as sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly. This disease, raging in sub-Saharan Africa, attacks the nervous system, leading to death. Increasing ever since 1970, this disease infects between 300,000 and 500,000 new people each year. According to the World Health Organization, it is the main cause of mortality in this region of Africa, causing more deaths than AIDS.
While there is no vaccine against trypanosomiasis, there are treatments. The story of one medicine used for trypanosomiasis shows how little human health counts compared to the law of profit.
Aventis, the big pharmaceutical company, abandoned the most efficacious treatment, DFMO, because it didn’t consider the vaccine profitable enough. Aventis even turned the patent over to the World Health Organization, but no company tried to use the patent because the market for a medicine aimed at the poor of Africa wasn’t profitable.
In another twist on the supposed laws of the market, DFMO turned out to be profitable–when used as a depilatory cream in the U.S.! Bristol-Myers Squibb started to make the depilatory, while producing the medicine at a lower cost for Africa.
However, making a medicine isn’t enough. It’s necessary to administer and distribute it, using human beings and a medical infrastructure. First of all, it means screening for the disease, which is fatal when it isn’t caught in time. The World Health Organization estimates that 60 million people are susceptible to sleeping sickness, but only three or four million have been screened. As a result, 80% of those contaminated by the tsetse fly end up dying.
And in recent years, the situation has worsened. The tsetse fly has been chased from its natural savanna habitat by the spreading deserts. Its new habitat is certain big cities of Africa, like Abidjan in Ivory Coast and Kinshasa in Congo, where it threatens to increase the disease among populations there.
The dangers of this disease could be lessened. In some regions of Africa, like Zanzibar, sleeping sickness was completely eradicated through a campaign of sterilization of the tsetse fly. But the African states that are affected by disease don’t have the funds for such a campaign. So it’s not profitable enough for any business to take up.
Aug 17, 2009
There is a race against the clock to make a vaccine against the swine flu before the pandemic reaches its maximum. A vaccine would reduce the number of victims this very contagious disease could cause.
When the first cases of infection by the new flu virus became known in April of 2008, a centralized system at the global level functioned to identify the new virus and produce the virus strains essential to making a new vaccine. This same system, coordinated by the World Health Organization, makes possible each year a new vaccine against whatever strain of flu is expected in the coming year.
But now that the big pharmaceutical companies have received the viral strain, each one is out for itself! Each company is trying to produce the vaccine before its competitors, in order to get the biggest possible slice of the cake! Baxter Labs seems to be ahead in the profit race. It just announced that it had finished making its first batch of vaccine, which it could provide by mid-September, if it gets permission to put it on the market. The other great pharmaceutical companies–Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur–are a little behind, and probably won’t sell their vaccines until October or November. But they made sure of their profits by getting firm orders from governments, even if they cannot ensure their vaccine will be ready in time. What’s at stake are billions of dollars in sales.
A collaboration between the scientific teams of the different pharmaceutical companies could possibly produce the vaccine sooner, at less cost and in greater quantities. But that isn’t what moves these capitalist firms, among the richest companies in the world. Their main function isn’t caring for people, but generating profit.
Aug 17, 2009
Young women in Illinois under 18 will be denied access to abortion unless a parent or guardian is notified 48 hours in advance. For 14 years, a law passed requiring parental notification was held in abeyance by an injunction. The U.S. Court of Appeals has just quietly dissolved the injunction.
If a young woman is old enough to take on the responsibility of rearing a child, she is also old enough to decide for herself whether she should do it.
That’s the essential issue.
The issue of parental notification is a false issue, a stalking horse for the anti-abortion crowd. Parental notification is another attempt to whittle away at the right to abortion. And it’s hypocritical. The same politicians–the big majority of whom are male–restrict decent sex education in the schools and make emergency contraception difficult to get.
The fact is most young women discuss the problem with their parents. But for that small proportion who don’t, a legal requirement for parental notification can be deadly. According to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine on a Texas parental notification law, young women put off abortion until later, raising the risk of complications.
For the anti-abortion crowd, the lives of these young women are irrelevant. So-called “parental notification” further tramples on the right of all women to decide for themselves on some of the most important aspects of their lives.
Aug 17, 2009
There were 360,000 foreclosure filings in July, a 32% increase over a year ago, according to a monthly report by RealtyTrac. The number set a new record–the third record in the last five months.
By all accounts, most of the people being hit by foreclosures today have been in their homes for years. They were not tricked into risky subprime mortgages. They are losing their homes because they lost their jobs or their wages were cut.
Michelle Jones of Consumer Credit Counseling Service, an agency that works with homeowners around the country, says that 72% of people calling the agency in June cited a reduction in income or a loss of employment as their reason for calling.
And by every true measure, unemployment is getting worse and is going to continue to worsen. Despite the big pronouncements about the number of new jobless claims going down last month, the proportion of the population that is employed hit a 25-year low in June.
As a result, people who have lived in their homes and been paying their mortgages for decades are being thrown into the streets.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg; more is yet to come. Almost half of all homeowners are expected to be “underwater”–they will owe more than their house is worth–by 2011, twice as many as at the end of March 2009.
Home ownership, under latter-day capitalism, is a quick trip to poverty.
Aug 17, 2009
Mortgage companies have modified loans for only 9% of homeowners eligible under the “Home Affordable Modification Program” announced by the Obama administration in February.
Why is that? Perhaps because the mortgage companies make so much money keeping mortgages in delinquency.
Mortgage companies typically collect as much as 6% in late fees when a monthly payment is late. Their subsidiaries are paid for services like title searches, insurance policies, appraisals, and other legal paperwork involved in delinquent loans. Besides, the mortgage companies no longer own the homes–they only service the mortgage. So if the value of the home drops during the delinquency period, it matters little to the mortgage company. It is simply interested in cashing in on fees as long as it can.
Such fees are so lucrative that one company, Ocwen Financial, reported that 12% of its income came from fees made on late mortgage payments in 2007.
It’s to the mortgage companies’ advantage to keep homes in delinquency as long as possible. As a result, from June 2008 to June 2009, the number of mortgages 90 days or more delinquent skyrocketed from 1.8 million to 3 million. On the other hand, the number of homes taken into ownership by banks went down during the same period from 333,000 to 245,000.
The government’s loan modification program makes for good public relations, but it cannot fix a rotten system that feeds off the misery of the population.
Aug 17, 2009
Good news for the executives in seven taxpayer-bailed-out companies! The Obama administration will help them keep the amounts of their pay and bonuses a secret. Because, of course, they are entitled to their “privacy.”
These companies include GM, Chrysler, GMAC, and Chrysler Financial. Before the bailouts, the workers–who had nothing to do with running the companies into the ground–saw their pay, benefits, and pensions endlessly dissected in public, when they weren’t outright inflated.
On top of that, these workers’ taxes were used to bail out the companies, propping up their profits and executive bonuses.
We may not know the dollar amounts, but we certainly do know who is taking–and who is being taken.
Aug 17, 2009
Politicians all over the country are boosting the sales tax, a very regressive tax that hits workers and the poor much harder than the wealthy. In cities like Chicago and Los Angeles the sales tax now approaches 10%.
Politicians blame tax hikes on skyrocketing budget deficits. In fact, those budget deficits are caused by the draining of state budgets into the pockets of the biggest corporations. The system of collecting sales taxes is one way states provide money to major retailers.
There are no national figures on how much sales tax money companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot get to keep for themselves. But a research group called Good Jobs First estimates that Wal-Mart alone pockets close to 100 million dollars every year.
Former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston exposed this fraud in his book Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill).
He showed, for example, that local governments rebate or advance sales tax money as a direct subsidy to the stores. Other localities divert a portion of the sales tax to finance tax-free bonds, used to pay for roads and other infrastructure projects for the stores.
And that is just the beginning. State and city governments often provide land for the stores. They build the stores to companies’ specifications. Finally, the stores are given decades-long tax breaks, allowing them to avoid paying any property taxes.
Jobs are destroyed. The big stores drive the smaller stores–which don’t get any of these subsidies–out of business. The drop in taxes leads to cutbacks in government services and more job cuts. One more vicious capitalist circle.
Aug 17, 2009
For almost eight years, the U.S. has made war on the people of Afghanistan. Wanting to demonstrate resolve after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. moved to make Afghanistan an example to the world–not because Afghanistan had done something to the U.S., but because it was a convenient scapegoat.
The Taliban regime, based on religious students organized in militias, was an infamous regime, with its backward fundamentalist practices, its dictatorship over the entire society, and overt mistreatment of women.
When the U.S. invaded to overthrow the Taliban power, it promised democracy and modernization for Afghanistan. Eight years later, there is no democracy and no modernization–only a permanent state of war. The regime the U.S. calls democratic is based on local war lords, a thoroughly corrupt regime in the capital, and a president who is a puppet of the Western powers. Modernization is limited to high rise offices in Kabul for foreign embassies and businessmen, leading to a surge in real estate speculation. Nothing has changed in the rest of the country, neither in its feudal social structure nor in the oppression of women.
Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shiite men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey whatever their husbands demand of them sexually. The legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work or even to go out of the house.
The Afghan population paid a heavy price for the war led by Western troops, which cost many tens of thousands of people their lives.
For a long time Afghanistan has been one of the poorest countries in Asia. It paid for the wars led on its soil by Great Britain, which tried to colonize it several times; then, more recently, by the USSR; and now by the U.S. and its henchmen.
People never like it when their country is occupied by foreigners, and this is even more true with the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which instead of bettering people’s conditions even a little, has made it worse. Misery and hatred for the occupation combine to permit the Taliban, which was driven from power eight years ago, to find support in the population and to reinforce itself. Today, it controls over half the country and leads military operations up to the outskirts of the capital.
The Western armies aren’t establishing the basis for peace. They are pushing the population into the arms of the Taliban.
Since they can’t get rid of it, the Western leaders more and more openly envision coming to an agreement with the Taliban. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its henchmen are sowing still more death and destruction in the country.
We’re told that U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan fight for peace and democracy. In reality, they kill and are killed to defend the economic interests and diplomatic rights of big capital throughout the whole Middle East.
Aug 17, 2009
The Obama administration wants to spend a billion dollars on buildings to quickly increase the U.S. State Department staffs in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Most of this money is for new fortress-like embassy facilities in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, apparently similar to the giant new U.S. embassy in Iraq’s capital Baghdad.
The State Department also wants millions of dollars to revamp its consular buildings in the Pakistani city of Lahore. (Its staff in Karachi already moved into a new building there.) To get new facilities quickly in Peshawar, the plan includes buying the city’s only five-star hotel, its pool and large surrounding grounds.
In Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, the U.S. is negotiating to purchase 30 to 40 acres of land to expand the U.S. embassy there.
How long is the U.S. planning to have big military forces in all these countries? Clearly for a long time!
Aug 17, 2009
On August 14th, Sergeant Travis Bishop was convicted in a court martial and given one year in prison for disobeying a direct order to go to Afghanistan. Bishop was the second soldier from Fort Hood in two weeks to be court martialed. Specialist Victor Agosto had just been sentenced to a month in jail for refusing to deploy. Both soldiers had served a lengthy tour in Iraq.
Today the U.S. military, by its own reports, has a problem. Between 2000 and 2006, more than 40,000 troops from all branches of the military deserted, more than half from the Army. And desertion rates jumped by 42% from 2006 to 2007.
In other words, the “volunteer” army is not a willing army. GI resistance is not just “something archaic from Viet Nam”–as Bishop said he had once believed, but came to know different.