The Spark

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

Protecting "Intellectual Property Rights"—In Biological Weapons

Oct 7, 2002

For 24 years now there has been a Biological Weapons Convention, an agreement between many governments to limit biological weapons. You’d think that someone who wants to protect the world from such weapons–as Bush claims to do–would do everything he could to see that it was enforced.

But on July 26, 2001 the Bush administration pulled the U.S. out of the negotiations aimed to set up inspections under the Convention. Pretending, at first, that the inspections would not be thorough enough to detect biological weapons, the Bush administration finally got to the main point: they would threaten the proprietary business information of U.S. companies whose biological weapons labs are inspected. In other words, the inspections would turn up what the U.S. corporations have been doing to produce such weapons–like the ones they sent to Iraq 15 years ago!