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 20, 2011
The economy stalled badly last month. Economists spoke openly of their fears of a double-dip recession.
Of course, for some 27 million workers who are still without a regular job after 3 years of recession, there is no “dip,” there is only one long catastrophic plunge. New jobs created in May were reportedly 54,000, a tiny number, invisible to the millions who are desperate for work.
In May, in the state of Michigan, home of the alleged recovery of the auto industry, the private sector eliminated 31,000 more jobs than it created. And this is the month when hiring would normally pick up, as companies look for temporary help to fill in for vacations.
Across the country, young people cannot find the summer jobs they depend on.
For four years, Democrats and Republicans alike have been claiming that their bailouts, tax breaks for the rich, and other proposals will “create jobs.” Of course no actual jobs have appeared! But the politicians have no chance to continue in office if they don’t at least pretend.
But when it comes to taking care of the high rollers, the politicians don’t pretend. They deliver–and they don’t wait four years.
What happened to the enormous commercial and investment banks that wheeled and dealed with worthless mortgage securities? They wheeled and dealed until the whole pyramid started to collapse in March 2007, collapsed utterly in September 2008, and sucked the last strength from the consumer economy. But what happened to these big crooks?
First under Bush the Republican, then under Obama the Democrat, the government classified these crooks and liars as “too big to fail” and showered them with 600 trillion dollars in bailout funds and no-interest loans. Their executives took the money–and continued merrily on their way. Executive pay is up, dividends up, speculation up, profits up–but no jobs.
Yes, companies were given investment credits–which they used to reduce their tax bill.
The biggest businesses, the high, the connected, the bailed-out, are sitting on their mountains of bailout cash–gambling on mergers, gambling on the stock market, gambling on speculation in raw materials, oil, copper, minerals, gambling on food futures, wheat, corn, rice, cocoa.
Their gambling hurts us twice. They take money out of the productive jobs-creating economy. And they drive up prices with their endless bidding wars–the reason our food and gas costs more.
All of this proves one thing–there is money in this economy, floods of money–dammed up at the top. It could be used to create jobs for people who don’t have them.
The big corporations will say they don’t need to hire, they don’t need more production. Such an enormous lie! Our society’s infrastructure is riddled with holes like Swiss cheese. Immense production is necessary for installation and repair of water, sewer, and electrical systems, for rebuilding roads, public schools, and other facilities.
But, if corporations continue refusing to produce these things, then make them share out the work that is available. Share it out, among all those who are able to work, cutting no one’s pay, paying the new hires a decent living wage. There will be more than enough “consumer demand” to make the economy run again, once people are back to work and all workers have regular pay.
The CEOs and their politicians will say it’s impossible. But what is really impossible? Men went to the moon a long time ago.
What’s truly impossible is to believe that politicians and CEOs will make things get better–if we just wait. No! It’s impossible to keep waiting on promises! It’s impossible to let them continue to have their way.
Jun 20, 2011
The Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) are two neighborhood groups in Chicago taking on a multi-million dollar power company, Midwest Generation.
These and other groups have staged several actions in the past few months: they’ve held neighborhood meetings; hosted an art contest around this issue; taken part in some protests at the plants. A student group at Juarez Academy, the local high school, held a march to protest the pollution as well.
Recently, PERRO and LVEJO gave testimony in a public hearing before the city council. Their aim is to force Midwest to clean up or close down.
For decades Midwest’s coal-fired power plants have polluted the air of Chicago’s Hispanic working class Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods. The Crawford and Fisk power plants spew tons of mercury, lead and dust into the air nearby. A public health study carried out in 2001 estimated these plants contributed to 2,800 asthma attacks, 530 emergency room visits and 41 deaths in these neighborhoods every year.
Midwest Generation is owned by Edison International, which had 1.2 billion dollars in profits last year. They threaten to close the plants if they’re forced to clean up, in which case 200 unionized workers would lose their jobs.
Working people and activists in the neighborhood are right. There is absolutely no reason to allow a big company to dirty the air of Chicago while they swim in profits. And no reason to accept job cuts.
Jun 20, 2011
Last week Washington D.C. had several days of record high temperatures and humidity, with the heat index well over 100 degrees. So what happens?
Several thousand residents lose electricity–no A.C., no refrigerators. Some people were taken to the hospital for heat-related illnesses.
On the one hand, Pepco is not maintaining its infrastructure. And on the other hand, it’s contributing to the area’s unemployment by not hiring the thousands of people needed to help repair and improve its infrastructure. Too many people are right this moment looking for training and decent jobs. Two sides of the same rotten coin!
Jun 20, 2011
After months of protest and community outrage, Detroit’s Catherine Ferguson Academy will remain open after all. But it’s not a victory: the Detroit Public Schools will hand it and several other schools over to a for-profit company to run them as charters.
The Ferguson Academy is special: a school for pregnant teens and young mothers, it graduates 90% of its students and sends nearly all of them on to college. Along the way, it provides day care and early childhood education for these young women’s children, assuring a daily attendance rate of nearly 100%. It is one of only three schools in the country that do this.
But the Detroit Public Schools was talking about closing this extraordinary school anyway, saying it’s too expensive to run. Really? Yes, it has a bigger budget than most schools, but more than a million dollars of its 1.7 million dollar budget comes from state and federal at-risk grants, including Title 1 funds. If the district were to close the school, all of those funds would be lost to the district–so closing it never made much sense from a budget standpoint, even with a 327-million-dollar deficit.
Now the plan is to hand the school to a for-profit charter school company, Evans Solutions–which means all those state and federal funds will go to Evans now.
Evans promises that all the school’s programs (as well as the students, teachers and the principal who founded the school 27 years ago) will remain, intact–but promises are made to be broken, especially when profits are at stake.
How do profit-making charters improve their profits? They cut expenses–that is, teachers’ salaries, building upkeep and “expensive” programs that benefit the students–while stuffing their pockets with public money. Why would Evans Solutions be any different? Just because they say so now, when they’re being handed this cash cow?
How soon before the school’s on-site four-acre farm and medical care are deemed “too expensive”? The community, the students and even the principal would have no control over this; only Evans Solutions would.
At the same time, it was also announced that two other schools for at-risk students (who’ve been expelled from their neighborhood public schools for disciplinary reasons) will be “saved”–by being closed, and folded into other Evans charter schools. There goes even more federal funds, from the public schools into Evans’ pockets! Meanwhile, seven more DPS schools will just be closed. They didn’t have extra funds, so no charter company wanted them!
This isn’t a victory. It’s a money grab pure and simple, with Detroit’s students as the victims.
Jun 20, 2011
The Obama administration is done using carrots to get states to gut their public schools. Now it’s using a stick.
Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is using the threats in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to get more states to allow many more charter schools and attack teachers’ unions and job protections.
Up to 80% of the country’s schools are in danger of being labeled “failing” under No Child Left Behind. NCLB requires all schools to achieve 100% proficiency in math and English by 2014, or be closed or taken over–that is, whole public school systems could be dismantled.
Duncan offers another “solution”: his office will grant states waivers on the NCLB demands–IF those states implement the attacks on teachers contained in “Race to the Top.” If they don’t–the deadline stands.
The message to the states is this: don’t worry about NCLB demands–just dismantle your school districts directly!
Jun 20, 2011
The AARP (American Association of Retired People) announced that it now supports cutting Social Security benefits to retirees.
The Obama administration has made it clear that, like the Bush administration, it would try to impose big benefit cuts–under the guise of “saving” Social Security.
But Bush was not successful. So the Obama administration and Congress have carried out a propaganda campaign, setting up commissions, and issuing reports, providing the excuse for the news media to blast new headlines about the supposed danger that Social Security would run out of money.
None of that really changed public opinion, especially amongst seniors. A February Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 84% of people age 65 and over oppose benefit cuts.
No wonder. Social Security benefits are already ridiculously small and inadequate. After working and paying into Social Security for their entire working lives, seniors get back only a tiny fraction of what they need to survive on.
Over the years, the politicians have slashed and whittled away at what seniors receive in Social Security benefits–up until now, indirectly. The politicians fiddled with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) so much over the last three decades that economist John Williams of the Shadow Government Statistics website estimates that: “Social Security checks would be about doubled had the various changes not been made.”
The last big “reforms” of Social Security, carried out in 1983 under the Reagan administration with the support of the Democratic majority in Congress, gradually increased the age when full benefits are available, from 65 to 67 in 2022–but it was phased in slowly, and didn’t touch existing beneficiaries.
These “reforms” allowed the politicians to literally steal trillions of dollars in benefits from seniors. Of course, politicians claimed that this surplus was put into a trust fund, which today is supposed to be worth over 2.4 trillion dollars. But what the government was really doing was folding all this money into the federal budget, which the politicians put at the disposal of the bourgeoisie to help fund their wars, as well as to fund big subsidies and tax cuts to the corporations and wealthy.
When the AARP, which claims to be an advocacy group for seniors, publicly supported the Democratic and Republican leadership calls for cuts in benefits, it was the clear announcement that the fix was in: the two parties intend to gut Social Security this year. The politicians hope to use the AARP–which itself has close ties to the insurance industry–to reduce and deflect anger against these benefit cuts.
What can stop this enormous attack is the very social explosion that the politicians hope to avoid.
Jun 20, 2011
The only country in the world to ban women from driving is Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the U.S. A 32-year-old Saudi woman spent a week in jail, arrested for driving–and putting a video of herself doing this terrible crime on YouTube. She was accused of “inciting public opinion and harming the country’s reputation.”
On June 17, about 30 more Saudi women risked arrest by driving and in support of the woman who had been jailed. At that moment, the Saudi police were told to ignore the women drivers.
The Saudi monarchy, big ally of the Western powers, is a profoundly reactionary regime. Recently the Saudis sent troops to intervene in Bahrain to support the dictatorship against which the population had been protesting. The Saudi rulers also show their attitudes by imposing religious rule on their own population. Women are the first victims, subject to humiliation and violence every day.
Fortunately, Saudi women in greater and greater numbers are standing up against this situation.
Jun 20, 2011
In May, Coca Cola celebrated its 125th anniversary with bands playing.
Coca Cola is the leading producer of non-alcoholic drinks, with 400 brands. More than a billion of its cans and bottles are drunk every day all over the world. In 2010, its profit reached close to seven billion dollars. But this success rests on realities that Coke doesn’t brag about.
In 2000, Coca Cola opened 50 bottling plants in India. Its billion inhabitants represent a vast market, not to mention a low-wage work force. To operate these factories, Coke got authorization to drill wells, pumping 125,000 gallons of water every day (it takes nine quarts of water to make a quart of Coke). In Kerala, where villagers are deprived of water for home and agriculture, the population has been protesting this excessive water usage since 2003.
The company not only pumps the water, it discharges it in polluted form. Some residents report skin and breathing problems near Coke facilities. Last February, the state of Kerala took legal action, demanding compensation from Coke.
In Colombia, South America, a union is accusing Coke of making use of private paramilitary companies, not only as guards, but possibly as assassins. Eight union militants at a Coke facility were murdered. There are two similar cases in Turkey.
In El Salvador, where Coke uses child labor in its sugar cane fields, its employees are exposed to toxic chemicals. In 1998 at the soccer World Cup games, promotional balloons handed out by Coke were made by children laboring in Pakistan.
In the U.S., Coke has been closing bottling plants and imposing concessions on employees still working. It demands that workers pay more of their health insurance. And it has announced plans to eliminate the stock work of its drivers who handle displays in stores.
Coke is the perfect example of the multinationals that dominate the planet in search of profit.
Jun 20, 2011
Thousands of protesters continued their demonstrations against austerity measures in all the large cities of Greece. On June 5, for example, a human tide–made up of old and young, retired, students, workers–enveloped the square in front of the Parliament in Athens. And on June 15, two unions, one public, one private, called for a general strike. The number of demonstrators continues to grow, showing how anger against the government’s measures is increasing.
The European Bank and the European Commissioners and the International Monetary Fund want to impose yet more measures against the Greek population, a veritable war against the population.
The bankers and states at their service want the Greek government to put in a program of privatization worth 70 billion dollars. Everything is for sale–the ports, the airports, the phone companies and the utilities, even the betting shops.
It’s not just that public services are being sold at a discount, impoverishing the entire country, but also workers are being attacked at the work places. The buyers are saying that enterprises are badly managed, not competitive and costs must be reduced. Deutsch Telekom, which already owns 30% of the Greek phone system, may want to acquire the rest, at a very low price, of course. They say electricity prices, among the lowest in Europe, must be deregulated, that is, they must go up! Otherwise it won’t be possible to find a buyer for part of the electric utility PPC.
Unemployment is already high, 15% of adults and 30% of youths in Greece. On average, salaries have been forced down by 20%; sales taxes have gone up drastically, along with taxes on small businesses. Of course, with the economy slowing down, even less tax money goes to the treasury. It becomes impossible to pay back the interest on the debt, let alone the debt itself.
It’s a vicious circle for which the bankers of all countries are responsible. Their speculation weakened the world’s economies, squashing the Greek population. The demonstrators are right to want the bankers to pay.
Where is the Money?
Why is Greece in particular so broke in this latest recession? The media claims it’s because the Greeks don’t pay their taxes! They say the Greek tax men could have collected 20 to 30 billion euros more in 2009 (28 to 42 billion more dollars).
But if there is tax fraud, it is above all fraud committed by the wealthy. And most of it is perfectly legal–shipbuilding, for example. Greek shipbuilding accounts for 16% of the shipping tonnage around the world. Many of these companies are registered in Cyprus, quite legally, which has its own kind of fiscal paradise for the Greek owners. Their assets are held in Cyprus so they don’t have to pay taxes in Greece. Onassis’ fortune, based on shipbuilding, has funneled into Switzerland, and it may have cost the Greek treasury three to four billion in taxes. The Latsis family, another Greek shipping owner worth billions, escaped even more billions in taxes.
A Greek union estimated that the 6,000 largest companies in Greece manage to evade some 21 billion dollars’ worth of taxes. A Greek builder Aktor Group got the contract to build a bank in Qatar. The Greek capitalist might be smaller than those elsewhere, but they manage to grab their share and then avoid paying taxes.
The other group evading taxes is the Greek Orthodox church, which owns a huge amount of woods and acres of pasture, bringing in rich revenues, plus 300 apartment buildings and other enterprises. The taxes are low and the church’s rich monastery on Mount Athos, a tourist and pilgrim attraction, escapes all taxes. Nonetheless, the church leaders recently complained they are so overburdened with taxes that they “can’t even afford to buy candles.”
Meanwhile, the Greek state pays the salary for all the Church authorities and lets the church grab buildings built for the Olympic Games for a song.
So the Greek state does not make the big capitalists nor the church pay, despite their riches. Some contractors got rich off the Olympic Games held in Athens in 2004 but overall, the Greek economy gained nothing. The Greek debt grows as these vultures enrich themselves.
By contrast, the government demands that the population pay ever more taxes on their salaries, and pay for the crisis with lower salaries, and with higher sales tax, all of which weighs heavily on those least able to pay, including the unemployed. By the end of 2011, another 250,000 Greeks are supposed to lose their employment to pay off the debts run up by the Greek state for the wealthy.
Global investors say the Greek bonds are “speculative,” meaning they are risky. It’s an excuse to charge very high interest rates. These speculators expect to make big bucks from Greek misery. They demonstrate exactly how the world of international finance works.
Ordinary people are expected to pay and pay and pay. The Greek demonstrators are showing what they think of this proposal.
Jun 20, 2011
Glenn Carle, an ex-CIA officer, has told the New York Times that the Bush White House ordered the CIA to dig up dirt on a vocal critic of their wars.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor, started publishing a blog called “Informed Comment” in 2002, to discuss the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cole has been critical of the way these wars have been carried out.
Carle says his superior at the CIA told him in 2005 that the White House wanted them to discredit Cole. Carle says he refused because it was illegal for the CIA to spy on American citizens. But he learned months later that the Agency had found someone else to do the job.
Cole is outraged, and rightly so. He says this was illegal, and he’s right.
But it’s also very common. When government itself carries out atrocities–like the support of Jim Crow, or the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq–people expose government policies, protest, rebel.
As this chilling story makes clear, the government’s response has never been to stop its atrocities. Those atrocities are carried out in the interests of the wealthy class the government represents.
No, the government has used all the resources at its disposal to “neutralize” those who protest–spying, defaming its critics, not to mention charging them with crimes. To the authorities–it’s made no difference whether this activity was legal. They hold themselves above the law.
Jun 20, 2011
Last week, Hillary Clinton, while visiting Zambia said, “We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave. And when you leave, you don’t leave much behind for the people who are there. We don’t want to see a new colonialism in Africa.” And then Clinton accused China of carrying out this “new” colonization.
What bloody hypocrisy!
The U.S. is still the leader of the “new colonialism,” finding new ways to loot Africa’ riches. Recently, this has been done through grabbing land. According to the World Bank, in 2009 alone, nearly 60 million hectares in Africa–an area the size of France–have been bought or leased by foreign companies. A California firm investigated and found, a “majority of these deals belong to Western firms, wealthy U.S. and European individuals, and investment funds with ties to major banks, such as Goldman Sachs and JP MorganChase.”
In one instance, a Texas investment firm, Nile Trading and Development, paid $25,000 to lease 400,000 hectares of land in Sudan for 49 years! The lease allows this U.S. firm to exploit all natural resources, including oil and timber.
Such deals force people off the land, adding to the already mass starvation in Africa. For example, in Tanzania a U.S. corporation AgriSol Energy got a contract worth 700 million dollars to speculate on land in two locations. But there are refugee settlements in the two locations, holding up to 162,000 people who have been farming these lands for more than 40 years. Before the project starts, these settlements will be closed and the people will be forced out.
The Western countries colonized Africa beginning in the 19th century. Africans have never been free from the grip of this looting. And the U.S. concerns today are, by far, the biggest culprits among the colonizers.
Jun 20, 2011
Recently, West Virginia state investigators found that a combination of ineffective ventilation, an ineffective sprinkler system, excessive coal dust, faulty safety equipment, failed water pumps and ignored safety checks caused an accumulation of an explosive mixture of methane and coal dust in underground tunnels in the Upper Big Branch coal mine. A spark was enough to ignite the massive explosion that ripped through Massey Energy’s mine on April 5, 2010 and killed 29 miners.
Before the explosion, mine workers had been reporting these dangers regularly. Over five years’ time, government inspectors cited the mine for 1,342 safety violations. In January 2010, a Federal inspector reported that the underground air was flowing in the wrong direction, and the rock dusting system, which is used to spread crushed limestone on tunnel surfaces to prevent coal dust build up, was not operational. He found coal dust everywhere.
Massey was allowed to operate the mine. The government did nothing to enforce any of its own safety regulations.
Since the explosion little has changed. In May 2011, Federal inspectors at Massey’s Randolph mine in Boone County, West Virginia, issued 20 citations for excessive coal dust, weak water sprayers on mining equipment, illegal use of mining machines and failure to properly ventilate areas being mined. These were the same kind of safety lapses that occurred before the explosion in the Upper Big Branch mine.
But, once again, Massey continues to operate.
When it comes to a choice between miners’ lives and company profits, the government chooses profits every time.
Jun 20, 2011
Doubling bridge tolls this year, Maryland’s politicians claim the transportation fund is broke. Pardon us, if we don’t believe them–we wonder what happened to the 23¢ per gallon we have been paying into the transportation fund.
What happened? Political deals, of course. The Maryland Transportation Trust fund has been raided over the past eight years under two governors, one a Republican and one a Democrat, to the tune of 947 million dollars. They pretended to solve a budget shortfall–but it was a shortage caused by giving away deals to big wealthy companies–especially developers and financial interests.
It’s past time the Maryland politicians were dropped into some pot holes of their own making.
Jun 20, 2011
Catrina Wallace, a black mother of three from Jena, Louisiana was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison on trumped up charges. Wallace’s prosecution was aimed at exacting retribution for the role she had played in organizing a massive campaign of protests in defense of black students who were themselves victims of racist attacks in this small Louisiana town run by racist politicians.
In 2007, after several black students sat under a tree designated by white students as “for-whites-only,” three nooses were hung from the tree. The principal expelled three white students responsible for the nooses, but the school board reinstated them, calling it a “harmless prank.” The district attorney, Reed Walters, refused to charge them with anything, saying they broke no laws.
But when black students organized a protest to defend themselves, District Attorney Reed Walters told them, “I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.”
And that’s exactly what Walters tried to do as he prosecuted the black students on trumped up serious charges and as he is trying to do with Wallace today.
She, along with about a dozen others, were hounded in the middle of the night, in a supposed drug raid. Their homes were invaded, torn apart, yet no drugs nor any physical evidence was found. They were convicted based solely on the word of a convicted drug dealer–meaning it was a police frame-up. Wallace, because she had played an important role in organizing the earlier protests, was especially targeted.
She had never been charged before with any crime; there was no evidence against her. Nonetheless, she was charged with drug distribution and given three five-year sentences to run consecutively, which are almost unheard of in the kind of drug case the police pretended they had.
It’s clear there was a political motivation behind her prosecution. Racist officials in Jena wanted to exact revenge for her participation in the earlier protest campaign, which had freed the black students Walters tried to imprison.
The demonstrations that took place in Jena in 2007 pushed back racists like District Attorney Walters. Jena, Louisiana racists are now trying to turn the clock back.
Catrina Wallace will be saved in exactly the same way she helped save the earlier victims–by the population opposing its forces to those of the legal lynchers.
Jun 20, 2011
If you want an idea of how out-of-control the banks were during the mortgage crisis, you just have to look at the way they treated soldiers.
It’s supposed to be illegal to seize the homes of active-duty soldiers, but that didn’t stop Bank of America and Morgan Stanley from pushing through to foreclose on hundreds if not thousands of soldiers. They just settled with the Justice Department, agreeing to repay up to 178 soldiers they’d illegally foreclosed on.
How could this have happened? After all, the law is very clear.But the law means nothing to the big banks. The banks had mortgages; the mortgages stopped being paid; so they went after anyone and everyone they could find to MAKE them pay, or give up their homes.
And these 178 soldiers who got payments are just the tip of the iceberg. No one knows how many more soldiers had their homes stolen: soldiers who weren’t part of this suit, or who were killed before getting their homes back, or are still in Afghanistan (or Iraq, or Libya, or Yemen, or Pakistan...) and can’t respond. The paperwork on these mortgages is so messed up, it’s impossible to tell.
Not only that, but it doesn’t begin to touch the legal mortgage scam orchestrated by the big banks, a scam in which 3.5 million people have lost their homes!
Even with these tiny repayments, those banks are still rolling in the dough, thank you very much!
Jun 20, 2011
Angry homeowners, in two separate incidents, turned the tables on banks who owed them money. To the amusement of many, they were able to bring out sheriff’s deputies to “foreclose” on their local bank branch.
The first case happened earlier this year in Philadelphia. A homeowner was able to use the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act to his advantage.
His lender, Wells Fargo, was making him carry excessive insurance on his house. He filed suit and won. To get his money back, he ended up with a sheriff’s notice authorizing the sale of the contents of a Wells Fargo branch. No surprise here–before the bank sale could happen–he got his money.
Next, in Naples, Florida, a couple paid cash to buy their house. They had no mortgage. Yet Bank of America started proceedings to foreclose on their home.
The couple hired a lawyer and Bank of America dropped the wrongful foreclosure. The bank was ordered to pay $2,500 for their attorney’s fees. According to the New York Times (6/8/11):
When the bank didn’t pay, their lawyer, Todd Allen, showed up at a local bank branch last week with sheriff’s deputies and a moving truck to begin cleaning out the building. Not long after, the bank paid them more than $5,700, to cover the fees and additional costs.
This is a start–on a much bigger action desperately needed: Expropriate ALL the big banks! Take back all their ill-gotten gains!
Jun 20, 2011
At the end of May a coalition of 178 liberal Democrats and 26 very conservative Republicans with ties to the Tea Party voted in the House of Representatives to require President Obama to come up with a time table to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Two weeks later, 24 Democrats and one Republican in the U.S. Senate sent a letter to President Obama urging him to begin a major U.S. drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Of course, both actions in the House and Senate are little more than token gestures–engineered to allow politicians from both parties to appear to oppose the continuing U.S. war in Afghanistan, at a time when an overwhelming majority in this country oppose the U.S. war. A CBS News poll in early June showed that a whopping 73% of Americans believe the U.S. should largely get out of Afghanistan by this summer.
But there are no signs that after 10 years of war, U.S. political leaders are planning anything of the sort. There are currently 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as an equal number of CIA, State Department, private military contractors and other hired killers, operating in the shadows.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Patraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, came out in opposition to any substantial drawdown of U.S. troop until the eve of the 2012 elections. Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, said that any substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces would have “disastrous consequences.”
The 10-year old U.S. war and military occupation of Afghanistan has been an unmitigated disaster, creating ever more death and destruction. Despite the usual claims by the U.S. government about supposed “progress” in the war, the United Nations announced that May was the deadliest month for Afghan civilians since it began keeping count in 2007. This is the progress U.S. forces are notching up–more dead civilians.
The U.S. occupation is so hated by the people in Afghanistan that an ever increasing number of Afghan troops and police have been attacking the occupying forces. A classified report written for the U.S. military command in Jalalabad was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The report, which was commissioned after an Afghan policeman killed six U.S. soldiers in November, found that the killings of American soldiers by Afghan troops was turning into a “rapidly growing systemic threat.” The study warns the U.S. military that the magnitude of the killings “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.”
First under Bush and now under Obama, U.S. imperialism continues an endless war in Afghanistan, with all its incredible costs to the working peoples and the poor in both Afghanistan and its neighbors, as well as the U.S. itself.
U.S. forces out of Afghanistan–NOW!