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Dreaming the NEW American Dream

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:35:01 GMT

California poets Ava Bird & Rex Butters, and....

Santa Cruz artist Russell Brutsche - Karen Kwiatkowski of Virginia

Protests to stop immigration raids ... and more.
____________________

http://www.newamericandream.net

The New American Dream

What's New?

* Karen Kwiatkowski column
* Ava Bird poetry
* Rex Butters poetry
* Gary Mennie poetry

Columns:
Sherwood Ross — why not shut down a few prisons in the United States as well?
Mickey Z — Americans are cowards, too comfortable, will never-ever-not-in-one-million-years revolt-or-even-bother-to-stand-up — no matter what the rich folks do to them.
Lydia Sems — It's The American Dream that is the problem.

and more from Jack Saunders ...

Resistance:
* Planned civil disobedience in Minnesota to stop raids against immigrants
* Protests at Creech AFB against U.S. drone terroristic activity
*100 days of protest against Guantanamo to culminate

All this, Northern Exposure, The Big Lebowski, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights ... a certificate for free toast ... and more.

Join us.

The New American Dream
Dude.
... because ... Sister Mary Anne told us, "There are no wrong questions, if you don't know the answers."

... from the Dream Team

http://www.newamericandream.net

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New Middle East Culture & Politics Tribe

Steven — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:58:31 GMT

New Middle East Culture & Politics Tribe

This group is open to all who want to discuss Near East and Middle East culture & politics and imperialist intervention in a meaningful way.

Those who want to argue using personal attacks, lies, slander, red baiting, and ridicule instead of addressing the issues will be banned from the group. People with a history of doing so in other groups will not be allowed entry into this group.

In addition, it is fine to question the legitimacy of any and all religions, but racism and attacks on entire oppressed groups such as Palestinians and Kurds is not allowed.

Join Near and Middle East Culture & Politics:
http://tribes.tribe.net/neareast

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new UNION formed, the Home Sewers & Needle Worker's Union, HSNWU

ModottiManifesto — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:01:47 GMT

UNION! UNION! WE NOW HAVE A UNION, THE HOME SEWERS AND NEEDLE WORKERS UNION HSNWU
Sun, January 25, 2009 - 1:58 PM
I have now formed a UNION,

already have ten members and it IS GROWING,

the HOME SEWERS & NEEDLE WORKERS UNION -- HSNWU

webpage: homesewersneedleworkersunion-hsnwu.blogspot.com

When the Needle Is More Powerful than the Pen and Sword though Sometimes You Need Both!

HOME SEWERS & NEEDLE WORKERS UNION HSNWU Because we aren't '"only'" sewers and needle workers, or small independent businesses or mommies making money at hobbies, WE ARE WORKERS! WORKING IN SOLIDARITY WITH HOME SEWERS AND NEEDLE WORKERS, INDIVIDUALS AND SEWING/NEEDLE COOPS, BOTH HERE IN AMERICA AND INTERNATIONAL FOR OUR RIGHTS AS WORKERS! TAKING OUR PRODUCTION BACK FROM THE HANDS OF CORPORATIONS AND KEEPING IT THAT WAY!

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Orphans Work Bill [which may be law, still looking into] also is a corporate-Corporatist type of Russification measure to strip artists and other workers of any ownership of their intellectual property, forcing them to register any design, picture, poem, sewing pattern, etc., to Several Corporations that will list on their databases [far more expensive and red tape than the use to be copyright laws] that literally strips away any ownership/rights to anything you make, write, etc.,

and makes it hard to prosecute big corporations or those with more power to take what you, the little guy has made and they can therefore sell, manufacture your ideas in a sweatshop/slave camps and there is little if anything you can do,

unless you have Bank and i do mean Bank. Just another attack to turn us all into mass slaves for the rich, powerful and despotic.

These laws especially impact low income women here at home and worldwide and men too who the only means they have of income is making small things and selling them, maybe due to disabilities or due to being caretakers, etc. Also to build empowerment,

in many societies where illiteracy is forced for theocratic reasons, women are left with absolutely no power to support themselves and are ripe for

sexual exploitation, corporate exploitation, political exploitation [children too], militarization, you name it, if they can't earn their bread they are forced to lie down like dogs for whoever feeds them,

therefore to combat this many women worldwide in the poorest regions formed their own sewing /needlework coops to Combat the forces out there that take advantage of their status. Laws like the CPSIA not only strip them from selling/forming coops with us,

they send a very powerful message, from husband to submission/slave status to the STATE.

or to the CORPORATION,

we, women sewers and needle workers in America are not going to quietly stand by and be silenced NOR will be just be passive and just accept being forced into homelessness with our children OR be forced to work in sweatshops or worse,

we are Fighting back. Not just because many of us yes, are poor and low income [some even homeless, the homeless women's sewing coops],

but because WE ARE WORKERS.

If you know of any women who are going to lose what source of income they have due to this law and others, let them know that there is NOW a Union that is By small home sewers, needle workers including coops,

and For us.

We are a Union that Fights for Women Centered Economy that Empowers Women, not Subjugates them too. We are not a a political or theocratic-political Vanguard manipulating and steering us only to throw us back to the shit pile as they Always do [history shows time and time again, why they allow women's commissions only to exile/purge and kill them off later or forcing them into brothels or as baby machines for expansionism, etc., with their continued devaluing women's UNPAID LABOR and their perpetuating of male entitlement to our bodies,

our labor, our services.

Now we have an Independent voice for women who work AND who are devalued because of that work. Those days Sisters,

are going to change...our voices WILL BE HEARD. And We Will be a Force to be reckoned with.

Solidarity,

Modotti

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

Belarus receives $2.5 billion IMF loan

Steven — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:37:33 GMT

Belarus receives $2.5 billion IMF loan
By Niall Green
22 January 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/bela-j22.shtml

Belarus has secured a $2.5 billion emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund. The bailout comes amidst a crisis of the economies of the whole eastern European region. Latvia, Ukraine and Hungary have secured large IMF loans, while Serbia and Georgia have been granted emergency credit lines. Speculation is rife that Turkey will soon approach the IMF for an emergency loan.

The IMF has lent over $40 billion in response to the world financial crisis. Its loan is very large relative to Belarus’ “quota” from the institution--the amount any country can draw compared to the amount it pays into the fund. At 420 percent of the Belarus quota, the $2.5 billion is one of the largest ever granted by the IMF.

Russia, suffering from its own deep financial crisis, has pledged a further loan of $2 billion to Minsk in order to prevent the economic collapse of one of its closest allies and trading partners.

In recent months Belarus spent about 25 percent of its gold and foreign exchange reserves to prop up its currency, in response to the rapid shrinking of demand for its industrial goods and the freeze of the international credit markets.

While Belarus is less dependent on international credit than other economies in Eastern Europe, it has suffered from the declining fortunes of Russia. The price of crude oil, Russia’s main foreign currency earner, has fallen by 70 percent from its peak in July 2008, while Western credit that has fuelled much of the property boom in Moscow and other cities in recent years has largely dried up. The Russian rouble has fallen by 30 percent against the dollar.

In recent years the value of Russian subsidies to Belarus, especially in the form of cheap oil and gas supplies, has reduced. The weakness of the Russian economy in particular, and the regional and world economies in general, have led to sharp declines in demand for Belarus’ main exports of petrochemical products, potash fertilizer and machinery.

An IMF mission visited Minsk in October 2008, after which Belarus applied to the fund for a loan to increase state gold and foreign currency reserves. Minsk also requested funds to create a “safety cushion”, likely to be used to bail out failing businesses, banks and state enterprises.

During the talks, Belarus pledged to the IMF that it would amend its monetary and fiscal policies. The IMF board has approved a 15-month programme for Belarus to slash public spending, cut wages and deepen the privatization drive in state industries.

The IMF stated that Belarus’ economy has demonstrated “remarkable growth” in recent years, but has stagnated due to the global financial crisis.

“The fund-supported programme will help Belarus achieve an orderly adjustment to the external shocks that it is facing and offer protection against its most pressing vulnerabilities”, IMF chief executive Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

“Measures agreed include a strengthened monetary and exchange rate policy framework, fiscal restraint through cuts in public investment and directed lending by banks, and strict public-sector wage restraint”, he added.

Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko threatened to withdraw from the IMF if its loan request was rejected, but his government has indicated that it is ready to impose IMF demands on working people.

At the start of January Belarus devalued its rouble currency by about one-fifth. The Belarus currency fell to 2,650 roubles to the US dollar from 2,200 roubles per dollar. The average monthly wage in Belarus was worth $400 at the end of 2008, a value that has fallen to $332 after the devaluation.

The Belarus Central Bank said the new exchange rates for the rouble would “safeguard the high competitiveness of the Belarusian economy”. Lukashenko said of the devaluation, “Russia is our major trading partner and, with a strong Belarussian rouble, our exporters had begun to make large losses trading in its markets”.

Many in Belarus have rushed to buy what they can in anticipation of sharp price rises in the coming months. Lukashenko has urged people to maintain their bank savings.

The devaluation will drive up the cost of imported goods and bring inflationary pressures. The move was blamed by Lukashenko on the demands of the IMF. He insisted that public sector workers’ pay had to be cut as a condition of the loan.

In another moved linked to the IMF bailout, the government announced a 20 percent rise in electricity and gas prices. Social spending is set to be cut significantly in 2009 and 2010.

In 2008 Lukashenko initiated a massive privatisation drive, with hundreds of state-owned or joint-stock companies sold off to foreign capital and the president’s cronies. Lukashenko has suggested that he intends Belarus to follow the “Chinese model” of economic development. Far from being a “socially oriented economy”, as the regime in Minsk characterises itself, the goal is to consolidate Belarus as a cheap labour platform for international capital ruled over by an autocratic regime.

Relations between Russia and Belarus have grown tense over the past eight years, with the Kremlin imposing increasingly unfavourable energy deals on Minsk. In exchange for continuing subsidised oil and gas supplies, Moscow has pressured the Lukashenko regime to allow Russian capital to buy up large stakes in Belarus’ industries. As a counterweight to the threat of dominance by Russia, Minsk has looked to improve relations with the West. Accompanying the privatization programme, the Belarus elite have made moves to improve relations with the European powers.

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French Communist Party congress reveals advanced crisis

Steven — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:00:59 GMT

French Communist Party congress reveals advanced crisis
By Francis Dubois and Pierre Mabut
10 January 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pcf-j10.shtml

The French Communist Party (PCF) held its 34th congress in the Paris suburb of La Défense December 11-14. The main official business of the 873 delegates was the election of its leadership for the next three years and the voting of a majority programme. However, in the present political context in France and the state of extreme crisis in which the party finds itself, what the congress clearly had on its mind was its future and very existence.

The PCF is on the verge of breaking up. In the 2007 French presidential election, the party's candidate Marie-George Buffet registered a historically low vote of 1.93 percent. At the end of the Second World War, the PCF was France's largest political party; in 1969, the Stalinists' candidate Jacques Duclos obtained 21.3 percent of the vote. In the last local elections, the PCF was only able to retain about 3 percent of the vote because of common slates with the Socialist Party.

Another clear sign of the PCF's crisis is the state of its daily newspaper, l'Humanité. The paper stopped publication for several days in August as it faced financial bankruptcy, despite its strong reliance on capitalist donors and the French state for funding.

The PCF parliamentary group has functioned since the last election as the "Group of the democratic and republican left," together with deputies from the ecology camp.

At the conclusion of the PCF congress, Buffet was re-elected to a fourth term in office as general secretary. A majority of the delegates decided to carry on with the present leadership, seeing it as the best and only way of keeping the party a quasi-unified organisation. Buffet obtained 67.7 per cent of the 873 delegates' votes, down from 91 percent two years ago. Her nearest rival, Marie-Pierre Vieu, supported by the "unitary communist" tendency, obtained 16.4 percent. André Gérin received 10.2 percent and Nicolas Marchand 5.6 percent; both are considered "orthodox" Stalinists. Some 7 percent of the delegates abstained.

Buffet stays in office as a caretaker after expressing her intention to give up the position in two years. A new "collegiate" leadership consisting of six to eight members will be appointed to facilitate a transition. This collective will be led by Buffet's presumed successor, Pierre Laurent, the present editor of l'Humanité.

The main resolution adopted by the congress is a document primarily designed to keep all the tendencies together, if possible. Vaguely entitled "To want a new world, To build it daily," it raises the need for "change" and the setting up of a broader, rejuvenated organisation, but, under pressure from the defenders of the party's Stalinist identity, it dropped the call for a "metamorphosis" of the organisation.

Prominent formulations used at the congress included "To open wide the doors of the PCF, rejuvenate the PCF at all levels" and "The priority is to open the PCF to all those who want a militant party against Sarkozy and a party that unites on the left in order to create a [parliamentary] majority." Buffet proposed to "initiate profound transformations" of the party, but rejected the idea of "constituting another party with blurred limits."

The resolution, a typical Stalinist document, contains amorphous criticisms of capitalism, but does not even consider a socialist reorganisation of society. The introduction states: "We communists, who base our commitment on the ambition to go beyond the capitalist system and all the alienation of today's world, are at a key juncture.... We engage then with this congress in an important work of refounding our analyses, of our project, of the future of our party." All of this alleged "refounding" was left to a commission to be set up to "initiate a work of reflection."

The resolution retains the nationalist rhetoric of French Stalinism. It accuses President Nicolas Sarkozy of "damaging our country and its assets, damaging its influence. The future of France is at stake." The party's participation in government with the Socialist Party up to 2002 and its own complicity in the present situation are, of course, nowhere examined.

The French Stalinist party, torn by conflicting currents and tendencies, has been declining and decaying for decades. More immediate signs of a PCF break-up appeared before the recent congress. Robert Hue, general secretary until 2002 and its presidential candidate that year, decided to leave the National Council of the party because "it can no longer be reformed."

In the pre-congress voting on motions by PCF members in October, Buffet's motion, "To want a new world, To build it daily," received only 55.3 per cent of members' support. (At the congress, it received 68.7 percent of the delegates' votes.) Of the 79,000 paid-up members, only half voted on the three documents presented, 9.2 percent of whom cast a blank or spoiled vote.

Some 24 percent voted for André Gérin's text, "Make the PCF live and reinforce it, a need for our times." Gérin, the parliamentary deputy of Venissieux, an industrial suburb of Lyons, combines orthodox Stalinism with right-wing French chauvinism. His tendency has grown directly out of the nationalist soil of French Stalinism.

In 2006, Gérin called for unity with President Sarkozy's right-wing UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party to combat "incivility" among youth who ridiculed the singing of the French national anthem at football matches. In a letter to the Paris football club PSG, Gérin argued, "These fundamental questions of insecurity and the questioning of the foundations of the Republic" call for "republican resistance to show our people that the political forces of left and right are determined to share the same diagnosis. There should be no room for electoral or political polemics on these issues."

An unprecedented 15 percent of the delegates voted for the resolution "Reinforce the PCF, reconnect with Marxism," put forward by the La Riposte group (whose origins lie with the opportunist Ted Grant group in Britain), which loosely and falsely claims to be Trotskyist. La Riposte vehemently denied wanting to remove Buffet from office. It called for the rebuilding of the PCF under the pretext that there is some "Marxist" potential left in the party. Despite this opportunist loyalty, it was not rewarded by the Buffet leadership with seats on the new National Council. All other factions were granted a few seats in proportion to their support at the congress.

The "Refondateurs" tendency, known as the "Communistes unitaires" group, behind ex-l'Humanité editor Pierre Zarka—which advocates a union (possibly outside the existing PCF) with the new Left Party of social democrat Jean-Luc Mélenchon—did not present any text to the pre-congress vote. Instead it organised a fringe meeting on December 13 under the banner: "Those who resemble each other, gather together." Zarka, whose group includes former government ministers like Jean-Claude Gayssot, denounced the main document (Buffet) as "a pledge to the hardliners in the party."

The disarray of the French Stalinist organisation has a special significance for the ruling elite. At every critical juncture since the Second World War, this party has played a vital role in maintaining bourgeois rule. Immediately after the war, it disarmed the working class, strangled a wave of strikes and took part in Charles de Gaulle's first government. During the next decade, it supported French imperialism against the anti-colonial uprisings, along with helping suppress the 1953 general strike. In May-June 1968, it again saved de Gaulle, and throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the Stalinists combined with Mitterrand's Socialist Party to form one of the main ruling coalitions of French capitalism.

The PCF's ability to keep the working class in check has been essential to the French elite for more than 50 years. Through its influence in the main trade union CGT (General Labour Federation), it has been instrumental in keeping Sarkozy's recent attacks on workers on track by stifling opposition.

Under conditions of explosive social and political tensions, there is concern within the ruling elite about the fate of the PCF, which, after all, was "the best of opponents." Its congress took place in the midst of a frantic repositioning of all political forces constituting the left wing of the political establishment.

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) of Alain Krivine and Olivier Besancenot is setting up a New Anticapitalist Party (NAP), abandoning its previous verbal commitment to Trotskyism. Mélenchon, a member of the Senate, has left the Socialist Party and founded the Left Party with a thousand supporters, imitating Germany's Left Party. And the Workers Party (PT) of the late Pierre Lambert has transformed itself into the Independent Workers' Party (POI) in an attempt to appeal to Socialist Party functionaries in local town halls.

The PCF intends to play a major role in this reorganisation of the "left." Hence its attempts to form new alliances, while at the same time preserving its own organisation. Politically, all the Stalinist factions remain oriented to an alliance with the Socialist Party, which in turn has reached a modus vivendi with Sarkozy's right-wing presidency.

Representatives of the entire "left" were invited to the PCF congress. Those present included Cécile Duflot, leader of the Greens; George Sarre, from the bourgeois Republican and Citizens Movement; Claude Bartelone, from the Socialist Party and a close ally of former prime minister Laurent Fabius; Krivine and Jean-Philippe Divès of the LCR; Clémentine Autain, a Parisian town councillor on the PCF ticket, who is joining Besancenot's NAP; and Lutte Ouvrière spokesperson Arlette Laguiller.

Present were also a number of members of the anti-globalist movement, Attac, as well as supporters of peasant leader and anti-globalisation activist José Bové. Some—like Mélenchon, Autain and the LCR's Divès—directly addressed the congress.

The "fraternal" presence of all these tendencies at the Stalinist congress reveals that there are no fundamental political differences separating them. They are all participating in the setting up of new political mechanisms on the left, desperately needed by the French bourgeoisie to control a coming radicalisation of the working class.

At the end of the conference, Buffet addressed an appeal to the Stalinists' former government allies in the Socialist Party and others on the "left" about the need for a "progressive front for the defence of liberties and democracy." There is a "need to come together at the point of struggles," she said. Buffet has already reached agreement with Mélenchon's Left Party for a joint election campaign in next year's European parliament elections. The new party has obviously struck a chord with sections within the French PCF and was generally well received by it.

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Latvia bailed out by IMF and European Union

Steven — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:31:36 GMT

Latvia bailed out by IMF and European Union
By Niall Green
7 January 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/latv-j07.shtml

On December 23, the International Monetary Fund approved a €1.68 billion (US$2.35 billion) rescue loan for the ex-Soviet republic of Latvia. The loan to the Baltic country is part of a €7.5 billion (US$10.5 billion) bailout that includes other funds from the European Union, the World Bank and Sweden.

The European Union (EU) has offered 3.1 billion euros, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has given a loan of €100 million, and the Nordic countries added €1.8 billion with the World Bank contributing €400 million.

The money will largely be used to prop up the Latvian currency and recapitalise its financial sector. Latvia was the second EU state, after Hungary, to receive an international financial bailout last year.

The total package amounts to over €3,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, said that in comparison with Latvia’s size, the loan was one of the largest ever offered by the Fund.

The IMF statement issued to accompany the loan claimed the measure was necessary to “stem the loss of bank deposits and international reserves”, “restore confidence in the banking system” and maintain Latvia’s fixed exchange rate with the euro.

Since the financial crisis began the IMF has also given emergency loans to Iceland, Pakistan and Ukraine.

IMF Chairman Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that Latvia faced “severe economic challenges”, exacerbated by “concern over the sustainability of Latvia’s external debt and increasing vulnerabilities associated with the unsustainable credit and growth boom that followed Latvia’s accession to the EU.”

“A deep recession and a drawn-out recovery appear inevitable,” Strauss-Kahn added.

The joint bailout is a desperate move, not just to save the Latvian economy from meltdown but to shore up the financial and monetary systems of the whole of Europe. Without the cash injection, Latvia’s currency, the lat, was expected to collapse in value, forcing it off its fixed exchange rate with the euro. This would have had a huge destabilising effect on investor confidence across Eastern Europe, threatening all the other economies of the region that are tied to the euro.

Fears of the knock-on effect that a collapse of the Latvian currency and economy would have had on Eastern Europe were expressed in the fact that the Czech Republic, Poland and Estonia together contributed 400 million euros to the bailout, despite the fact that their own economies are in a precarious position.

Since August, private sector deposits in Latvian banks have fallen by 10 percent, precipitated by a run on Parex Bank, Latvia’s second largest and owned by Latvian-based capital. Since then the Latvian Central Bank has struggled to maintain the currency’s peg against the euro.

Neil Shearing of London-based firm Capital Economics, stated that while the bailout “should prevent widespread defaults by Latvian firms and banks, the conditions attached will deepen the recession next year.”

“There’s a good chance that GDP could contract by 10 percent” in 2009, Shearing warned. Latvia’s GDP fell by 2 percent in the first half of 2008 and by 4.6 percent in the third quarter of the year. The Latvian government predicts that the country will be in recession into 2010.

Measures have been announced that make plain it will be the Latvian working class who pay for the emergency loans and general financial woes. Cuts in public sector wages and state spending have been announced, while the regressive sales tax will be raised from 18 percent to 21 percent. Protests against the hike in taxes have taken place in the capital, Riga.

The official unemployment rate is project to jump to 9 percent in 2009.

The Latvian government has been ordered by the EU and the IMF to reduce its budget deficit below 5 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, with further reductions until 2011.

A spokesperson from the World Bank insisted that its loan to Latvia was contingent on the implementation of “public service reforms”—code for privatisation and cutbacks in the provision of vital services.

In its press statement issued on the announcement of the loan, the World Bank also sought to encourage foreign finance capital not to pull out from Latvia:

“We also call on major financial institutions operating in Latvia to continue adequate financing of their activities and the national economy. We appreciate very much that foreign banks have affirmed their long-term trust in Latvia and support to their branches in Latvia.”

This was a plea in particular to Scandinavian capital, which is especially exposed in the Baltic States. Swedish banks dominate Latvia’s financial sector and are fearful that full exposure of their liabilities there could undermine their entire operations and spread financial panic across the region.

Swedbank, one of Sweden’s largest banks with major interests in the Baltic States, has attempted to reassure investor confidence in the Latvian banking system in order to prevent the banking crisis from spreading into Scandinavia. Speaking just prior to the IMF loan announcement, Swedbank CEO Jan Liden stated that his firm had “a strategic long-term commitment towards Latvia.”

“Latvia and the Baltic markets are a key part of our operations today and in the future. Swedbank will continue to support the Latvian financial system, support our customers, develop our Latvian subsidiary and make sure it is adequately capitalised,” said Liden.

Swedbank has announced that it will cut staff by 10 percent at its Latvian operation, with further job cuts likely across the 300 branches it owns in the Baltic countries.

The crisis in Latvia is just one headache for Scandinavian capital, which over the past decade, has attempted to expand beyond its domestic base to reap profits in Eastern Europe. Swedbank also has over 150 branches in Ukraine, whose economy is now one of the most fragile in Europe due to financial turmoil, falling commodity prices and Kiev’s ongoing energy dispute with Russia. Total lending by Swedish banks in Eastern Europe is equal to 25 percent of the country’s GDP.

The crisis in Latvia also poses fundamental questions about the possibility of any eastward expansion of the Eurozone—the group of EU countries that use the euro currency. While the bailout of Latvia has, for now, enabled it to retain its currency’s peg to the euro, there seems to be little prospect of Latvia or any of the other eastern European countries being able to adopt the euro for the foreseeable future. The criteria for membership of the Eurozone, established in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, includes levels of financial stability, public debt and budgetary restraints to which none of the eastern EU states are able to adhere. Even current members of the Eurozone in Western Europe, such as Ireland, are finding it difficult to remain within the rules of the currency.

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Behind the Hunger Crisis: Capitalist Profits

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:33:21 GMT

Behind the Hunger Crisis: Capitalist Profits

Imperialism Starves World’s Poor

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/919/hunger.html

The astronomical price of food on world markets threatens to condemn additional millions of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable to death by starvation. The overall price of cereals on international markets increased 92 percent in the year ending in April. In the first five months of this year, the world price of rice, a staple for more than half the planet’s population, more than doubled. As prices peaked, the total bill paid by people in underdeveloped countries for imported food was almost double what it was in 2000. Today, the world’s poorest people spend 50 to 80 percent of their total household income on food.

Even before the current crisis, an estimated 850 million people suffered from chronic malnutrition, over half of them children. Today in impoverished Haiti, many residents of the vast slums like Cité Soleil survive on cookies make of dried mud mixed with sugar, salt and vegetable oil. In Egypt, at least eleven people died on breadlines in March and April—some were killed when fights erupted among frantic customers, others were pushed beyond exhaustion by the endless wait for food. In Afghanistan, a country devastated by U.S./NATO military occupation, grain prices reached such heights that many farmers have switched to growing wheat instead of raising poppies for the heroin trade.

In a number of countries, the surging food prices have sparked riots and demonstrations, sometimes backed up by striking workers. In northern Egypt, rioting broke out after a planned strike on April 6 at the Mahalla al-Kobra textile mills, the country’s largest industrial complex, was headed off by a massive show of police force. For two days, thousands clashed with police, who fired on protesters, leaving three dead. In Bangladesh, an explosion of rage by some 20,000 textile workers in Fatullah, south of the capital, culminated in a strike on April 15 by thousands of garment workers, many of them women, in the capital city, Dhaka. A sweater machine operator, who earns $30 a month, declared: “With our poor salary, it is now impossible to buy three meals a day” (Agence France-Presse, 12 April).

In April, the Haitian prime minister was sacked after more than a week of rioting in which at least six people died. At the same time, several days of food riots in Yemen left at least a dozen dead, as tanks were deployed against street barricades, and police stations and military vehicles were torched.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the food crisis has been compounded by years of drought, brutal communalist wars and the AIDS epidemic. Unions in Burkina Faso called a two-day general strike in April to protest soaring food and fuel prices; this came after widespread riots in February in which official buildings were burned and government representatives stoned. In Senegal, rioters last November torched municipal buildings and attacked the former headquarters of the ruling party, while in Mauritania rioters were dispersed by the police, leaving one dead. In February, at least six people were killed in protests in Mozambique, while in Cameroon the death toll in anti-government riots reportedly numbered at least one hundred.

Because they perpetuate the conditions of economic impoverishment and cultural backwardness, the imperialist powers are ultimately responsible for the horrific conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. The wholesale economic devastation of the African continent has been deepened by the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92. The existence of the Soviet Union, which acted as a counterweight to U.S. imperialism, had allowed maneuvering room for “Third World” capitalist rulers, who garnered economic and military aid by offering themselves as clients to Moscow or Washington (see “Imperialism Starves Africa,” WV No. 561, 16 October 1992, reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 10, February 1993).

With the world capitalist economy now entering a recession, global prices for agricultural products and a number of other commodities have slipped from their record highs. This is true of oil, whose skyrocketing price helped drive up the cost of fertilizer, fuel and many other goods and services. But this will not alleviate widespread hunger in Third World countries. Hundreds of millions of workers, peasants and urban poor will still not have the money to buy sufficient food for their families. A global recession will increase mass unemployment and drive down wages even as it dampens the current inflation of food prices.

The excruciating fact is that the terrible famines which are endemic to the capitalist Third World are not the result of food shortages. Figures published by the UN World Food Programme indicate that the amount of food currently produced is more than one and a half times what is needed to provide every person on earth with a nutritious diet (Tony Weis, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming [2007]). But food is distributed according to the ability to pay. As with all commodities under capitalism, food is sold on the market in order to make a profit. Like any other business, agribusiness seeks to monopolize and control the market to keep prices as high as possible and maximize profits.

That starvation has become the increasingly common condition of a large portion of humanity is rooted in the very logic of the capitalist system. As Lenin explained in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916):

“It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture...if it could raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital.... But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production.”

The country most cited as the “success” story for the development of commercial agriculture in the face of imperialist competition is Brazil. Starting in the 1960s, Brazil used state credits and tax breaks to create a livestock sector based on nationally produced grain, becoming in 1980 the world’s main supplier of soybean meal for cattle feed. Yet this “success” was achieved through the destruction of local food production, massive eviction of peasants from their land and ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest. After several decades of such “success” under capitalism, fully one-tenth of the Brazilian population suffered from malnutrition. Today, 3 percent of the Brazilian population controls some two-thirds of all arable land, while five million rural families remain landless.

The current food crisis cries out for an internationally planned socialist economy based on the most advanced levels of technology. Such an economic system would enormously increase agricultural output throughout the world while also greatly reducing transport costs, thereby facilitating a rational international division of labor. But how can a worldwide society of economic abundance be achieved? Only through proletarian socialist revolutions, above all in the advanced capitalist-imperialist countries of North America, West Europe and Japan where the productive wealth and technological resources of the world are now concentrated. Only then can production and distribution be based on social need rather than profit.

Tortilla Protests in Mexico, Strikes in South Africa

In Mexico early last year, the soaring price of the main staple food, tortillas—which are made with corn—provoked a series of demonstrations, including a protest in Mexico City of 100,000 people called by the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (National Union of Workers) and composed largely of labor and peasant organizations. A major factor in the impoverishment of the Mexican masses was the imposition in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which we Marxists have opposed as the “free trade” rape of Mexico by the U.S. imperialists.

In a 27 January 2007 leaflet titled “Mobilize the Working Class Against Hunger and Repression!” (reprinted in WV No. 886, 16 February 2007), our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League, raised a series of transitional demands seeking to link the immediate struggles and consciousness of the masses to the program of socialist revolution. The GEM demanded the expropriation of the corn magnates without compensation as part of a call for the working class to fight against the capitalist class as a whole. The GEM called for “labor strikes that demand a subsidy for tortillas so everyone can have them” which, together with the call for “the distribution of food for all under control of the trade unions, organizations of poor peasants and the urban poor,” aimed at ensuring food distribution among the workers and the poor. The leaflet declared: “The only way to end hunger is to seize the means of production from the capitalists through proletarian revolution and its extension internationally.”

In an underdeveloped capitalist country like Mexico, the national ruling class depends overwhelmingly on credit and investment from its imperialist masters. Because bourgeois populists, like the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in Mexico, stand for the continuation of capitalism and defend the rule and interests of a wing of the national bourgeoisie, they inevitably reject in deeds the democratic demands they at times promise.

The road to national and social emancipation in countries of combined and uneven development (where modern industry exists alongside backward, traditional economy) was charted by Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which was verified by the experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The only path forward is the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, standing at the head of all the oppressed, above all of the peasant masses. This would place on the order of the day not only democratic but also socialist tasks, such as collectivizing the economy, giving a mighty impulse to the international socialist revolution. Short of the international extension of the revolution, particularly to the advanced, industrialized imperialist centers, socialist construction will be arrested and ultimately reversed.

While in most countries the recent food-price protests were spontaneous upheavals of the urban and rural poor, in South Africa mass anger over price hikes for food, transport and electricity has been channeled into protests organized by the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). These included a series of one-day strikes in the country’s various provinces in July, culminating in a one-day nationwide work stoppage on August 6 that effectively shut down Johannesburg and other major cities as bus and taxi drivers joined the strike. Tens of thousands of trade unionists and township poor participated in protest rallies in Pretoria, Cape Town and elsewhere. Both the provincial and nationwide strikes had strong support from mine workers—a large percentage of whom are immigrants—who constitute that section of the working class producing South Africa’s main exports.

The COSATU bureaucracy felt pressure to call the protest strikes because its members are among those hardest hit by the skyrocketing prices of food, fuel and electricity. However these protest strikes were not directed against the capitalist government that enforces the brutal exploitation and immiseration of the predominantly black workers, rural toilers and township poor. Quite the contrary. The strikes and rallies were held with the explicit support of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and were intended as a pressure valve to let off some steam and channel the discontent of the workers and poor into support for the ANC’s new, more populist leader, Jacob Zuma.

The leadership of COSATU is largely in the hands of the reformist South African Communist Party (SACP), which plays a major role in the government in its bloc with the bourgeois-nationalist ANC. COSATU itself also participates in the government, which is commonly called the Tripartite Alliance. We describe the Alliance as a nationalist popular front through which the SACP and COSATU misleaders tie the working class to the mainly white capitalist class and their black front men, who are committed to maintaining neo-apartheid capitalist rule.

While the strikes and rallies were initially called over the escalating cost of food, fuel, transport and utilities, shortly before the first of the provincial strikes the COSATU tops announced that they were complying with a court injunction limiting the official demands to protest against the massive increases in electricity rates by the state-owned power company, Eskom, and any job losses resulting from the rotating power outages. In fact, this was a state-sanctioned COSATU “general strike.” Despite the official line, stickers, posters and banners at the Pretoria rally sought to address the broader crisis for the millions facing hunger across South Africa. “Away with high food prices,” was one of the most prominent slogans.

Spartacist South Africa, section of the ICL, intervened in the strikes and rallies, putting forward our revolutionary program. Along with Workers Vanguard and Spartacist South Africa, our comrades also distributed at the August 6 protest a leaflet issued in May as a wave of pogromist attacks against immigrants swept the country (see “South Africa: Mobilize Trade Unions Against Anti-Immigrant Terror!” WV No. 915, 23 May). The leaflet called for “Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!” and declared:

“It is the ANC/SACP/COSATU Tripartite Alliance government that oversees neo-apartheid capitalism, under which the overwhelming majority are locked in grinding poverty and black people remain on the bottom. The poor in this country, and hundreds of millions around the world, are faced with starvation from rising food prices, which are at bottom caused not by shortages but by price-gouging and other capitalist profiteering.”

Above all, we explained to strikers and demonstrators that the working class, especially its most politically advanced and organized sector, must break with the Alliance in order to fight for a black-centered workers government that would seize the means of production from the conglomerates that dominate neo-apartheid capitalism. Only such a government can bring decent living conditions and national liberation to the exploited and oppressed black, coloured (mixed-race) and Indian masses. Among other measures, a proletarian regime would expropriate the large, white-owned commercial farms and promote collectivized and state-owned agriculture under the control of farm workers. The collectivization of agriculture is especially necessary to achieve social equality for the downtrodden immigrants from Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa who make up a good part of the farm labor force.

South Africa is key for the sub-Saharan African population. The black population in South Africa has been partially absorbed into the bottom of a modern industrialized society that can, based on the revolutionary reorganization of society, provide a decent life for all who live there. Our call for a black-centered workers government is part of our struggle for a socialist federation of Southern Africa that would begin to lay the material foundations for social equality throughout the region. This can be fully realized only through the extension of socialist revolution to the most advanced capitalist countries and the establishment of a collectivized, planned world economy.

Biofuel and Other Rackets

The record food prices crushing the world’s poor are occurring at a time of booming global agricultural output. Last year’s total cereals crop of 1.7 billion tons was the largest in world history; it was 89 million tons more than 2006, another bumper crop year. What then explains today’s sharp increase in food prices?

A confidential study by the World Bank last April, “A Note on Rising Foods Prices” by Donald Mitchell, was leaked to and published by the London Guardian. Its summary conclusion:

“The World Bank’s index of food prices increased 140 percent from January 2002 to February 2008. This increase was caused by a confluence of factors but the most important was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and EU [European Union]. Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate.”

The study estimated that 75 percent of the price increase between 2002 and 2008 was due to the massive diversion of food grains and cooking oils into biofuels.

In the U.S., the biofuels bill passed by Congress in the summer of 2005 mandated the use of ethanol in motor fuels, granting generous subsidies and tax credits for its production, on top of pre-existing tariffs on the cheaper and more efficient ethanol produced in Brazil from sugar. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support, including from Barack Obama, an early champion of the biofuel racket. His state, Illinois, is a leading corn producer, and he has received support from ethanol magnates. The biofuel bonanza has, in part, been sold as a means of achieving “energy independence” from Near Eastern oil as part of the reactionary “war on terror.” Most biofuels are also touted for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but a study in Science (4 January) noted that the main biofuels “have greater aggregate environmental costs than do fossil fuels” and concluded that “multibillion-dollar subsidies for U.S. corn production appear to be a perverse incentive from a rational cost-benefit perspective.”

This year, an estimated one-third of the corn crop produced by the U.S., by far the world’s largest exporter of corn, is being withdrawn from the food market to be used for biofuel production. In turn, this deliberately provoked shortfall in the food grain harvest is driving up the prices of other grains as they are used to replace corn—or as their cultivation is cut back to free up land for growing corn. The UN’s Special Reporter on the Right to Food earlier this year denounced using food crops to produce biofuel as a “crime against humanity.”

That crime has paid off handsomely for U.S. capitalists in the form of record profits. The family-owned agribusiness giant Cargill is so awash in earnings that the personal fortunes of the two family heirs more than doubled last year to $4.4 billion each. In the first three months of this year, the net income of grain conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland (the country’s largest ethanol producer) soared 42 percent, while seed and herbicide giant Monsanto has reported earnings up almost 300 percent. That didn’t stop Congress, with liberal Democrats in the lead, from passing a new farm bill this spring containing huge subsidies to wealthy farmers and agribusinesses.

West European imperialists are just as involved as their U.S. counterparts in the worldwide biofuel scramble and in colossal land grabs for biofuel cultivation at the expense of food. If the Americans have devastated the rural and urban poor in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, the Europeans are responsible for seemingly endless lines for previously available basic foodstuffs in much of East and South Asia and Africa. It is not corn that has been shifted to biofuel cultivation in Malaysia, for instance. It is palm oil, an important source of calories in Asia, that has been diverted to produce biodiesel, particularly for use in Europe. In Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, where 110 million people live on less than $2 a day, the sharp rise in the price of cooking oil is devastating. “The Other Oil Shock: Vegetable Oil Prices Soar” headlined the International Herald Tribune (19 January). The article pointed out that edible oil prices have increased more than any other category of food prices.

While U.S. agribusiness moguls are shifting production into corn-based ethanol to replace gasoline in automobiles, European countries have been subsidizing biodiesel (though some have cut back as the exaggerated claims of biofuels’ environmental benefits have been exposed). In addition, Germany now has 1,800 combined heat and power plants using palm, soy and rapeseed oil, and Britain has similar plants in the works. Since European agriculture does not grow all of the feedstocks necessary for biofuels used in the EU, parts of Africa and countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Philippines are being enlisted to provide such feedstocks at the expense of food.

The worldwide scramble for biofuels takes place in the context of competition between the main imperialist states. Finance capital flows into the construction of fully integrated biofuel networks, involving cultivation, shipping, processing and distribution. Substantial sums go to countries that sign special deals or have preferential trade access to the U.S., the EU or Japan. The competition for feedstock resources is an element of the imperialists’ moves to redivide control of the world’s semicolonies.

Also contributing to the skyrocketing prices for foodstuffs has been a shift of speculative money capital into primary products of all kinds. Commodities as diverse as crude oil, gold, lead, uranium, cattle and cocoa were trading at or near record prices earlier this year. The slide of the dollar against other world currencies has buoyed the prices of raw commodities in dollar terms. This, in turn, prompted a wave of buying by large banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions seeking “hard assets” as a hedge against inflation—or as simply speculation on further price increases. One hedge fund manager told a May 20 Senate hearing that such “institutional investors” had poured some $55 billion into speculative commodities trades in just the first 52 trading days of this year. He asked rhetorically: “Doesn’t it seem likely that an increase in demand of this magnitude...could go a long way in explaining the extraordinary commodities price increases in the beginning of 2008?”

In contrast to the capitalist biofuel producers, the People’s Republic of China, the world’s third-largest producer and consumer of ethanol, has an official policy of prohibiting biofuel production from competing with food cultivation. Initially, China produced significant quantities of ethanol from corn, but this drove up domestic corn prices. Worried that surging food prices might cause urban proletarian unrest, the Chinese government in December 2006 decreed that biofuel production would not be undertaken by utilizing arable lands and food grains. Instead, China has moved to produce ethanol from stale grains in the national reserve and from non-grain crops. A Chinese official declared: “In China the first thing is to provide food for its 1.3 billion people, and after that, we will support biofuel production” (Fengxia Dong, “Food Security and Biofuels Development: The Case of China” [October 2007]). This is just one illustration of how China is a fundamentally different type of society from the capitalist countries.

China is not a capitalist but a workers state, albeit one that was bureaucratically deformed from its inception. The overthrow of capitalist rule in China by the 1949 Revolution, leading to the building of a collectivized economy, represents a historic gain for the working class internationally. While the U.S. and other imperialists aim to destroy the Chinese workers state and restore bourgeois rule, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialist attack from without and counterrevolution from within. At the same time, we call for proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic and nationalist Stalinist bureaucrats and to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

The U.S. achieved its dominance as the world’s premier exporter of grains and other foodstuffs in the post-World War II period through a policy of massive government assistance to U.S. agriculture and forcing world grain prices down in order to drive out the competition. Grain prices on the world market were kept low by dumping U.S. grain at artificially low prices and by massive food aid (through the so-called “Food for Peace” program). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. aid accounted for more than a third of the world wheat trade.

The result was a fundamental shift in the world food trade. Before World War II, Europe was the only continent that was a net importer of food. Most territories in Europe’s colonial empires produced almost all the foodstuffs they consumed, little as it was. By the 1960s, this situation had been fundamentally altered as the newly independent semicolonies of Asia and Africa as well as much of Latin America became dependent on imports for their food. By 1978, Third World countries bought more than three-quarters of U.S. wheat exports.

At bottom, U.S. policy was a continuation and intensification of that followed previously by the colonial powers, which sought to eliminate subsistence farming in favor of cash crops for the market. Only in this way could the labor of the colonial subjects be transformed into profit to fill the colonialists’ coffers. The colonial powers seized vast tracts of land and turned them into plantations. Peasants who retained their land were constrained to stop producing food for their own consumption by such measures as taxation (which required cash crop production in order to have money to pay the tax), stark coercion and even subsidizing food imports. By imposing cash crops, often to the exclusion of staple foods, colonialism sowed the seeds of famine.

To be sure, precolonial societies in Asia and Africa based on rudimentary subsistence agriculture also suffered periodic famines and mass starvation resulting from drought and other natural disasters. But in the capitalist-imperialist era, starvation in this part of the world is man-made to bolster the profits of the masters of Wall Street, the City of London and the banks of Frankfurt and Tokyo.

Many semicolonial countries are caught in the blind alley, inherited from colonialism, of concentrating their agriculture on tropical cash crops for sale on the world market. The market for tropical commodities is characterized by chronic over-supply. Many suppliers compete with each other while a few giant trading companies centered in the U.S., West Europe and Japan, often having a near-monopoly, drive down world prices by playing suppliers off against each other. Until the record price boom of the past few years, prices for tropical exports fell steadily because of the imperialist stranglehold on the world market. Chronically obliged to borrow to finance food and other imports, semicolonial countries are forced by the imperialists and their agents in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to increasingly concentrate on cash crops to “export” themselves out of the debt crisis—simply pushing them further into the red.

When the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants knocked the U.S. from its position of hegemonic imperialist power—a decline that included the devaluation of the dollar in August 1971—agriculture was slated to play a key role in shoring up the declining U.S. economy. In 1972, U.S. leaders engineered a world “food crisis” which drove food prices to then-unprecedented levels by taking over 50 million acres out of production and cutting U.S. grain reserves. Despite famines in Africa and Bangladesh in 1974, the U.S. cut food aid to one-third its 1972 level. As a result of Washington’s drive to slash food aid and boost agricultural export earnings, by 1980 U.S. exports of grains and feeds had jumped to eight times the 1970 level. Today, after years of deindustrialization, the importance of agriculture to the U.S. economy can be seen in the fact that, while exports in the first half of this year increased over 7 percent (helped by the declining dollar), commodities accounted for 41 percent of the increase while manufactured products accounted for just 12 percent.

In addition to seeking profits, the U.S. imperialists used their power to drive poor countries into starvation as a way of furthering Washington’s anti-Soviet Cold War. President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly interrupted food aid to India, as it was suffering from the terrible famine of 1965-66, in retaliation for criticisms of the U.S. war in Vietnam. In 1974, as a million people in Bangladesh perished in a famine, the U.S. cut off food aid because Bangladesh sold jute to Cuba. In 1982, when famine struck Ethiopia, the U.S. held up relief assistance because Ethiopia was a Soviet ally. The cutthroats in Washington have turned death by starvation into a routine instrument of foreign policy.

The “Green Revolution” and Its Effects

The development of world food production has been prodigious, outstripping population growth since the 1960s as a result of the “Green Revolution” in agricultural technology. Yet under capitalism even such gains have translated into increased hunger and misery. They have also translated into vast profits for agribusiness giants who can patent hybrid strains of food crops and monopolize the seed market.

The “Green Revolution” was launched in 1943 in Sonora, Mexico, where Norman Borlaug (who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize), with the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, used genetic selection to develop “miracle” strains. Since they were introduced in the mid 1960s, hybrid strains of wheat, rice and corn have provided spectacularly increased yields. India went in five years from severe famine to being self-sufficient in grains. Indonesia, which had been the world’s largest rice importer, became self-sufficient in two years. The new hybrid strains were touted as solving the problem of world hunger.

In fact, the hunger of the world’s poor has increased as a result of the “Green Revolution.” Hybrid strains will grow only if they have irrigation, fertilizer and insecticides which require enormous capital outlays. Only the largest landowners can profit from the new technology, and small peasants, unable to compete, are driven from their land. (Indeed, part of the impulse behind investing in the “Green Revolution” in the early 1940s was a ruling-class backlash against the policies of the previous Mexican president, the bourgeois populist Lázaro Cárdenas. In order to head off social upheavals in the turbulent period of the 1930s, he had distributed substantial tracts of land to the rural population—in addition to nationalizing the Rockefeller Standard Oil subsidiary.)

Moreover, the “Green Revolution” has not been self-sustaining. Over time, the hybrid strains developed and introduced in the mid-late 1960s and ’70s have become increasingly susceptible to plant diseases and crop-killing pests. For example, when the rice variety IR8 was introduced in 1966, it produced almost ten tons per hectare (2.5 acres); now it yields barely seven (Economist, 19 April). Throughout the Third World, yields not only of rice but also of wheat and maize have fallen steadily in recent decades. Moreover, commercial agriculture now depends on a limited number of plant varieties; the lack of genetic diversity of the seed stock means that one pest or disease could quickly wipe out a significant portion of world production.

India, the country in which “Green Revolution” technology has been applied on the widest scale, is often cited as the archetype of its “spectacular success.” That “success” drove so many poor peasants from their land that, over the past two decades, the country’s urban slum population has more than doubled and now exceeds the entire population of Britain. By one estimate, some 150,000 poor peasants, driven to desperation by poverty and crushing debt, have committed suicide. Poverty is so entrenched that almost 46 percent of India’s children under the age of three suffer from malnutrition—a higher rate than in sub-Saharan Africa (London Times online, 22 February 2007).

Peasant Agriculture in the Chinese Deformed Workers State

An explanation for rising world food prices put forward by U.S. agribusiness corporations, the Bush administration and others is that a raised standard of living in India and China has led to increased meat consumption, in turn boosting the demand for cereals to be used as animal feed. The defense minister of India, where per capita meat consumption is one twenty-fourth that in the U.S., aptly called President Bush’s “explanation” of high food prices a “cruel joke.” In China, it is true that per capita meat consumption has increased prodigiously—it is now ten times that of India—but as the Economist (6 December 2007) pointed out: “Because this change in diet has been slow and incremental, it cannot explain the dramatic price movements of the past year.”

In fact, China and India are two fundamentally different kinds of states and societies, a fact highlighted by the current food crisis. India, a capitalist regional power that is nonetheless dominated by imperialism, exports foodstuffs such as rice and wheat for profit on the world market. Meanwhile, according to UN estimates, India has more hungry people than any other country in the world.

The People’s Republic of China is a bureaucratically deformed workers state and has been since the 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew capitalist/landlord rule and ripped the world’s most populous country out of the clutches of the imperialist powers that had long held China in their grip. Despite the bureaucratic parasitism and mismanagement by the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the collectivization of the economy has resulted in enormous social gains for workers, peasants and women—not least an end to centuries of chronic starvation in the countryside.

Smashing the Chinese workers state is a strategic goal for the capitalist powers, particularly the American and Japanese imperialists, who seek to turn China into a vast sphere of untrammeled exploitation and super-profits. To that end, they are increasing the military pressure on China while pursuing a policy of internal economic and political subversion, including promoting counterrevolutionary provocations, as in Tibet in the name of “human rights.”

The economic slowdown in the U.S. has been accompanied by increasing calls for chauvinist protectionism that are pushed by both Democratic politicians and the trade-union bureaucracy. Protectionism is deadly poison for workers in the U.S., not least because it is based on the lie that their enemies are the workers of other countries, while serving to conceal the fact that it is the capitalists and their system that are responsible for the destitution of the working class. During the Cold War era, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy was among the most rabid supporters of American imperialism against the Soviet Union. Today, these labor misleaders are directing their virulent hostility toward the People’s Republic of China in the name of “workers’ rights.”

As Trotskyists (i.e., genuine Marxists), we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, just as we stand for the military defense of the other remaining deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—including their need to develop and possess nuclear weapons. Defense of the Chinese workers state is undermined by the rule of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy whose policies are encapsulated in the anti-Marxist dogma of “building socialism in one country” and “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism. We call for a proletarian political revolution to oust the venal and oppressive CCP regime and replace it with a government based on democratically elected workers and peasants councils, a government committed to the program and perspective of international proletarian revolution.

Following the death of Mao in 1976, the regime of his successor, Deng Xiaoping, introduced a series of market-oriented policies in the name of modernizing the economy. One of the first economic “reforms” was the decollectivization of agriculture and its replacement by the so-called “household responsibility system,” family farms based on long-term leases (currently 30 years). Land, however, was not reprivatized and restrictions were imposed on the transfer of leaseholds.

Some 700 million of China’s 1.3 billion people are still engaged in agriculture, working small plots 90 percent of which are less than one hectare. Production techniques remain extremely labor-intensive, while China also uses three times as much chemical fertilizer per unit of land as does American agriculture (Paul Roberts, The End of Food [2008]). By international standards, China’s cropping intensity is among the highest in the world. In southern China, two or even three crops are produced on the same piece of land within a year. To achieve this, China has developed varieties with a shorter period of growth. Through such means China has to date maintained effective self-sufficiency (over 90 percent) in basic food grains—wheat, rice, maize.

However, in recent years China has experienced a steady decline in the arable land while the average size of a farm becomes ever smaller. Two years ago Beijing government officials warned that the country was fast approaching the “red line” of 120 million hectares, the minimum amount of land necessary for “grain security” (Economist, 19 April). A major reason for this shrinkage of farm land has been the illegal seizure of peasant leaseholds by local CCP officials who then turn the land over to industrial or commercial enterprises. Such illegal seizures and other bureaucratic abuses have provoked widespread unrest in China’s countryside, at times igniting pitched battles between rural toilers and the police. We defend peasant families against the seizure of their farms and demand full compensation by the government for their loss of livelihood.

Nonetheless, social and economic modernization requires that China move from peasant smallholding to large-scale mechanized farming. The question is how. A government based on workers and peasants councils would not only prohibit or restrict the hiring of labor and leasing of additional land by rich farmers but would also promote the voluntary recollectivization of agriculture. This does not mean reverting to the rural communes of the Mao era, which were basically an aggregate of backward peasant holdings. For the mass of Chinese peasants to give up their own holdings in favor of collective farms, they must be convinced that this will result in a higher standard of living for themselves and their families. Thus a government based on workers and peasant councils would offer, among other incentives, reduced taxes and cheaper credits to peasants who joined collectives.

A rational collectivization and modernization of Chinese agriculture would signify a profound transformation of the society. The introduction of modern technology and the whole complex of scientific farming into the Chinese countryside would require a qualitatively higher industrial base than now exists. This is a vital necessity in order to overcome the fact that with 21 percent of the world’s population, China has only 9 percent of the arable land (and an even smaller share of the world’s fresh-water resources).

In turn, an increase in agricultural productivity would raise the need for a huge expansion of industrial jobs in urban areas to absorb the vast surplus of labor no longer needed in the countryside. Clearly, this would involve a lengthy process, particularly given the limited size and relatively low level of productivity of China’s industrial base. Both the tempo and, in the final analysis, the very realizability of this perspective hinge on the aid that China would receive from a socialist Japan or a socialist America, underlining the need for international proletarian revolution. This perspective is counterposed to that of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, from Mao to the current Chinese leaders.

Agriculture and the Imperialist Offensive Against China

Agriculture has in recent years been an arena of conflict between American imperialism and the People’s Republic of China. In the negotiations leading up to China’s joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, the Beijing regime effectively resisted pressure from Washington to open its domestic food supply to a flood of cheap imports from heavily subsidized, highly mechanized agribusiness in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries.

The WTO agreement allowed China to protect its agriculture through a system known as tariff rate quotas (OECD Review of Agricultural Policies: China [2005]). As long as the total quantity remains below a certain limit (referred to as a “quota”), imports of basic food grains—wheat, maize and rice—were subject to a nominal tariff of 1 percent. For imports above that level the tariff became quite steep (65 percent). The quota limit for imports at world market prices was and remains low relative to China’s domestic grain production (less than 10 percent).

Since then, the American and European imperialists have sought to break down the barriers protecting China’s agriculture mainly through the Doha round of trade talks launched in Doha, Qatar, under the auspices of the WTO. More generally, these negotiations were an effort by the Western capitalist powers to use food as a weapon in gaining even greater control over the semicolonial world. The U.S./European Union bloc attempted to shackle efforts by “developing nations” to use tariffs and other trade policies to protect their own agriculture, rather than increasing their dependency on food imports from heavily subsidized U.S. and European agribusiness.

Fearing the massive unrest that has already erupted from soaring food prices, Third World governments pleaded with the Western imperialists to reduce such government subsidies, a measure the U.S. categorically rejected. The talks collapsed in late July when China, supported by India, refused to submit to the demands of the U.S./EU bloc to cripple defensive Third World tariffs. Lu Xiankun, a spokesman for Beijing’s WTO mission, defended his country’s efforts to shield cotton, sugar and rice from Western capitalist agribusiness by pointing to the hundreds of millions of farmers in China earning around $2 a day (New York Times, 29 July).

As a result of the breakdown in the WTO talks, many bourgeois commentators have raised the spectre of increased interimperialist economic conflict. American and European capitalists are now more likely to compete for separate trade agreements with dependent Third World countries at one another’s expense. Economic analysts commented that the collapse of the WTO talks “could symbolise an end to multilateral trade agreements” (BBC News online, 29 July).

We opposed China’s entry into the WTO because it undercut the state monopoly of foreign trade. It potentially opens the Chinese economy to greater imperialist penetration and pressures. We wrote: “The actual economic effects of entry will be determined by the struggle of the Chinese working class and rural toilers against the privations caused by the ‘market reforms’ instituted by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy” (“Workers Protests Shake China,” WV No. 782, 31 May 2002). By the same token, fear of the growing unrest in the countryside is a major factor explaining the Chinese bureaucracy’s resistance to making concessions during the Doha round of trade talks.

Toward a World Without Hunger

It has become commonplace among leftists, including professed Marxists, to praise peasant-based, petty-bourgeois radicals like the Mexican Zapatistas and also bourgeois-nationalist regimes like that of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela for propping up small-scale farming. Along similar lines, the South African government of the African National Congress, South African Communist Party and COSATU trade-union federation has been calling for more emphasis to be placed on small farms, proclaiming that the use of every inch of possible farm land could solve the problem of hunger. Such pronouncements come in the context of the regime’s much vaunted, and quite stillborn, “land reform” program by which 30 percent of the white-owned farmland, concentrated in large-scale commercial farms, is supposed to pass into the hands of black smallholders. It is truly grotesque to place the burden of overcoming hunger, caused by the capitalists’ manipulations of the market for food, on capital-starved black small farmers.

The idealization of small-scale peasant farming by many self-styled leftists is a reactionary utopia. World hunger can be eradicated only through large-scale farming, utilizing the most advanced industrial technology and scientific research, and based on an internationally planned socialist economy.

The qualitative superiority of socialist economic planning over capitalist anarchy was proven in practice by the historical experience of the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution demonstrated the ability of the proletariat to seize the reins of state power and construct a modern industrial society in which workers have access to medicine, science, education and culture. To deny the historic gains of the Russian Revolution, social democrats, anarchists and liberals point to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which in fact grew out of the isolation of the Russian Revolution in a single, economically backward country. Even given the tremendous bureaucratic distortions due to the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union was able to construct an advanced industrial economy almost from the ground up.

The destruction of the USSR in 1991-92 through capitalist counterrevolution, prepared by decades of Stalinist misrule and lies as well as imperialist pressure, led to a catastrophic social and economic collapse in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics unprecedented in the history of any other modern industrial society except in wartime. A striking index of the resulting social pathology has been the sharp decline in life expectancy.

Marxists understand that the qualitatively higher level of industrial productivity of socialist society compared to capitalism will lay the basis for overcoming the division between manual and intellectual labor, agricultural and industrial labor. As we wrote:

“The development of communism will be accompanied by a corollary downward drift in the present population hypertrophy. Evidence of this can already be seen under capitalism in the industrially advanced countries of the world—e.g., Japan, North America and Western Europe—where economic and technological advancement has effected, not through fiat, a substantial reduction in the birthrate. Under communism, both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will virtually disappear. No longer will poor peasants or agricultural workers be compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land. Human beings will have far greater mastery over both their natural and social environments.

“Additionally, communist society will be based on a thoroughly different set of social values from those that exist today. The liberation of women from patriarchal domination will mean complete and unhindered access to birth control and contraception. Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited. A prolonged, mild population shrinkage based on increasing material abundance and progressive social ideals will go a long way toward ensuring that there are enough resources to guarantee the well-being of all.”

—“In Defense of Science and Technology: An Exchange on Eco-Radicals and HIV Denialists,” WV No. 843,
4 March 2005

The basic goal of Marxist socialism is, by destroying class society and eliminating want, to lay the material basis for liberating the creative powers of humanity, which have been shackled by the capitalist system and earlier forms of class-divided society. Marxists regard the development of the productivity of human labor power as the prime mover of social evolution and the underpinning of historical progress. We look to a qualitative increase in the application of known science and the development of new technology. Ultimately this will liberate the productive capacities of mankind, eliminating economic scarcity—while laying the basis for the disappearance of classes and for the withering away of the state. As Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher remarked in his 1966 speech, “On Socialist Man”:

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”

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DNC Protest, Split, and the Principled Stand of Cynthia McKinney

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:58:22 GMT

DNC Protest, Split, and the Principled Stand of Cynthia McKinney

By Steven Argue

Protest plans have been in the works against the Democratic National Convention (DNC) for some time now, with organizers opposing the Democrat Party’s policies of war and occupation, backing of continued corporate policies that cause global warming, and their attacks on immigrants.

The people who have been organizing the protest schedule formed a coalition called Recreate ‘68. A rightward split has occurred in this coalition, and another group has also been formed called the Alliance for Real Democracy. The Alliance for Real Democracy is organizing their own separate events, one of which is a reception for Democrat Party delegates complete with drinks and BBQ.

The Alliance for Real Democracy is made up of the Colorado Green Party, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, the American Friends Service Committee, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Colorado Street Medics, and Students for Peace and Justice.

While the Alliance for Real Democracy consists largely of white liberals who are trying to influence the hopelessly corporate run Democrat Party, Recreate ‘68 is made up primarily of minorities, socialists, anarchists, communists, and other radicals who have fewer illusions in reforming the Democrat Party and who instead want to organize the power of the people.

Glen Spagnuelo, spokesperson of Recreate ‘68, says he’s not bothered by the formation of the Alliance for Real Democracy, because both groups oppose the war in Iraq and neither is advocating a violent protest.

Yet, the Alliance for Real Democracy has gotten extensive coverage in the corporate media of Colorado for their violence baiting of Recreate ‘68. The stand of Recreate ‘68 is, however, one where they simply explain that they are not planning violence, but if the police attack them, they do not disavow the right of protesters to self-defense.

As Benjamin Whitmer of Denver explained in the letters column of the Rocky Mountain Times in a June 5, 2008 letter entitled, “Re-create 68 members aren't violent extremists”:

“I’m a little confused as to the media’s portrayal of Glenn Spagnuolo and the members of Re-create 68 as violent extremists. Though Mr. Spagnuolo is getting painted as Vlad the Impaler with a bag full of severed heads, I’ve yet to hear of him engaging in a single act of violent protest. Moreover, I’ve attended several Re-create 68 meetings – meetings which, it’s worth noting, are never without a media presence – and have yet to hear a single suggestion of violent protest from him or from anyone else attending.

“The controversy seems to stem from Re-create 68’s refusal to disallow the right to self-defense to its members. Re-create 68’s explanation of this refusal is clear. There will be people protesting with Re-create 68 arm-in-arm with their children and elders. In large part, these will be representatives of communities which have most suffered from the never-ending betrayal of the Democrats. To attempt to deny them the right to defend themselves is to deny a fundamental human right.”

Yet, the Alliance for Real Democracy is demanding everyone roll over and die when and if they are violently attacked by the police, and painting those who do not have such a commitment as “violent”. The coverage their denunciations have received in the corporate media play into the hands of government attempts to deny permits, and, ultimately plays into the hands of police violence if the government does decide to physically attack these protests. In fact, the Alliance for Real Democracy’s denunciations of the right to self-defense and denunciations of Recreate ‘68 as “violent” creates a ready made excuse for the police and government that may actually cause police violence.

In addition, the Green Party of Colorado has issued false statements to the press and all over the internet claiming that Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney will not be participating in the Recreate ’68 events. Here is one such statement from Dave Chandler, co-chair of the Colorado Green Party, Green Party candidate for U.S. Congress in the Seventh Congressional District, and supporter of a Denver ballot measure that would seize the vehicles of illegal immigrants:

“Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate for President, and Rosa Clemente, Green Party candidate for Vice President are NOT participating in any Recreate ‘68 activities. Both candidates, and the Green Party of Colorado, are refuting this announcement and are stating that neither candidate, nor the Green Party of Colorado, are in any way associated with Recreate ’68, nor will any of their candidates be speaking at or attending any event, nor are they in any way associated with the group Recreate ’68.”

This is a blatant lie. Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente will be speaking at the Recreate ’68 events.

Liberation News does not endorse the Cynthia McKinney campaign, partly because she is running on the Green Party ticket, a capitalist party. Yet, she has the right positions on many issues, and does show what a candidate who is not beholden to corporate interests can speak out on, such as for single payer healthcare, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and for freeing political prisoners in the U.S. like Mumia Abu-Jamal.

It is for these reasons, and the good principled stand that McKinney is taking on the protests at the Democrat National Committee, standing up to the leadership of the Green Party of Colorado, that Liberation News prints Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente’s statement on the DNC in full:

*******
Open Letter from Cynthia McKinney

As the United States activated Navy ships and the Air Force to begin an airlift of non-specified goods into the former Soviet state of Georgia, and military exercises began in the Persian Gulf near Iran, I received communications from certain individuals among the Colorado Greens who were organizing campaign support events there, suggesting that I not participate in an anti-war program being organized by other individuals in Colorado.

Perplexed, I began to do my research to understand the nature of the fissure that I seemed to be placing myself in the middle of. The communications to me about not participating in one of the scheduled events became more and more shrill. The events ran through August 26th. When the lineup of speakers, including Rosa and me, was announced for the events in question, I received multiple communications stating in various ways that the sender from the Green Party of Colorado, was on the verge of desperation over the latter.

Within a few hours, I was reading messages stating that the Green Party of Colorado would be ruined if I participated in the End the Occupations/End the War march and rally slated to take place on the morning of August 24th on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol, or if Rosa participated in a Freedom March and Rally for Human Rights and Political Prisoners at Civic Center Park the following day.

An article appeared in a local Colorado newspaper stating that Rosa and I would not appear at the events for which we had been scheduled. Rosa responded to our Colorado Green Party contact that yes, indeed, we were appearing at the two events. Both Rosa and I then received messages demanding to know by a time certain what our plans were, and asserting that the Green Party of Colorado would be totally ruined if we associated with the group sponsoring the events. In addition, we were told that at least one resignation and sustaining membership would be tendered to the Party, and that Rosa and I could expect no support on the ground in Denver from the Green Party of Colorado, including a planned fundraiser and a place to stay.

Without receiving any additional response or information from either Rosa or I, the correspondent sent a message informing us that all Green Party of Colorado events previously scheduled for us had been canceled. Further, the message stated that ballot access petitioning by Green Party of Colorado would cease in neighboring Wyoming and that all efforts would be made to remove Rosa's and my names from the ballot in Colorado. The message also noted that the Colorado delegation overwhelmingly supported Elaine Brown at the Green Party Convention.

With the e-mail messages flying "fast and furious," I hope I have mentioned the highlights of this episode in somewhat chronological order. What Rosa and I would like to address now, is the ideological and rational order that produced this outcome. At the very first Green Party debate held in San Francisco earlier this year, I pleaded for unity of action and purpose as we face the challenges that confront us as a country. Rosa and I are proud to join with others who are sick and tired of war, occupation, human rights abuses, and the continued incarceration of our political prisoners. We are proud to join with others who are willing to do something about it. In the context of activities in Denver, that means cooperating with some organizations new to us and others with which Rosa and I have had a long-standing relationship. Let me explain some of those relationships.

I am proud to have received a Backbone Award from the Backbone Campaign, one of the co-participants of the anti-war, anti-occupation events in question, according to the organizers.

Rosa and I are pleased to have received the endorsement of M-1 of Dead Prez, who put out a video of endorsement and is rallying other conscious Hip Hop, Generation X voters to the Green Party with Rosa and I as its nominees. Rebel Diaz was on the stage with Rosa as she accepted her Green Party nomination for Vice President. Both Dead Prez and Rebel Diaz are participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Fred Hampton, Jr.'s mother, a victim of COINTELPRO, came to Georgia in the mid-1990s to help me gain reelection after a malicious redistricting case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Ward Churchill has traveled to my Congressional district to educate my former constituents on the COINTELPRO of yesterday and the COINTELPRO of today. Natsu Saito introduced me to other victims of COINTELPRO. I asked Kathleen Cleaver to co-author a report that was submitted to Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time of the World Conference Against Racism, on the unsolved murders of Black Panther Party members who were victims of COINTELPRO. Fred Hampton, Jr., Ward Churchill, Natsu Saito, and Kathleen Cleaver are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

As a Member of Congress, I supported the release of all political prisoners and welcomed information from the American Indian Movement about Leonard Peltier. I have at many times in my political career been allied with the ACLU, and have always supported Pam and Ramona Africa and the MOVE Organization. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, King Downing of the ACLU, and Pam and Ramona Africa of MOVE are all participating in the events in question, according to the organizers.

Mumia Abu Jamal has endorsed the Power to the People Campaign and my Green Party candidacy. According to the organizers, Mumia will transmit a message to all of us participating in the events in question.

Finally, I have appeared on various stages with many Palestinians; I have proudly spoken at rallies organized by Larry Holmes. Debra Sweet with World Can't Wait was among the very first to my knowledge to organize around impeachment as an imperative and I support hers and all other impeachment groups in their efforts. And finally, I have known Ben Manski for a long time as a socially conscious activist who is also a member of the Green Party. According to the organizers, a Palestinian refugee is slated to speak at the events in question, as well as Larry Holmes, Debra Sweet, and Ben Manski.

Rosa and I have not been given any rational, ideological, or strategically-acceptable reason by the Green Party of Colorado to dissociate ourselves from the movement that this country so desperately needs and that these individuals and organizations participating represent, as we all attempt to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its complicity in all of the crimes of the Bush Administration. Therefore Rosa and I will keep our appointments in Denver and we hope that the members of the Green Party of Colorado will attend our sessions and listen to what we have to say. I have faith that by taking principled stands against war and occupation, human rights abuse, the prison-industrial complex, and in support of freedom for political prisoners, the Green party will emerge stronger.

Cynthia McKinney
Green Party Nominee for President of the United States

Rosa Clemente
Green Party Nominee for Vice President of the United States

*******
Liberation News endorses and encourages people to attend:
Recreate ‘68 Protest: Speakers and Free Concerts Schedule
http://recreate68.com/?p=135

FYI:
Alliance for Real Democracy: drinks and BBQ for Democrat Party delegates and their other scheduled events:
http://slapstickpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/07/alliance-for-real-democracy-dnc.html

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:30:34 GMT

New tribe against the occupation of Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

Massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan began in 1978 and continues to this day. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues to kill thousands of Afghan civilians and cause extreme suffering due to horrendous injuries, the displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods, home invasions, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the general humiliation of the Afghani people.

As this author stated for Liberation News on September 12, 2001:

“Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians. Terror against civilians is never justified…

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate [oil pipeline] interests.” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2001

The Taliban was put in power by U.S. intervention. U.S. occupation today is a cause for war and continues to keep an extremely reactionary religious government in power. Afghanistan had secular governments with much wider women's rights before the U.S. began its massive intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970's. All U.S. imposed governments have been religious and anti-women. In Afghanistan, the Afghanis are better qualified to solve the problems caused by U.S. imperialism than U.S. imperialism is.

Yet rather than get out of Afghanistan Obama and McCain are proposing more troops, more helicopters, and more war.

NO TO THE BIPARTISAN OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN!!!!

NO TO OBAMA and MCCAIN'S PROPOSED SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN!

U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!

http://tribes.tribe.net/outnow#

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July 25-27, NYC, TROTSKY LEGACY CONFERENCE

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:27:54 GMT

[While I consider myself to be to the left of the speakers at this conference, and I do have some differences with Trotsky, I would attend if it were closer, so I thought it might be interesting for like minded people in NYC. -Steven Argue]

July 25-27, NYC, TROTSKY LEGACY CONFERENCE

Start: 07/25/2008 - 11:00
End: 07/27/2008 - 14:30
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
July 25-27. Fordham University, NYC

SCHEDULE FOR THE TROTSKY LEGACY CONFERENCE

FRIDAY

11:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Registration and LUNCH

1:00 – 1:15 pm: Opening/Greetings

1:15 – 3:15 PM: Permanent Revolution and the Evolution of World
Realities Since the 1960s

· Ahmed Shawki, ed., International Socialist Review
· Suzi Weisman, author, Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope
· Alan Benjamin, ed., The Organizer

3:15 – 3:30 PM: BREAK

3:30 – 5:30 PM: Workshops

5:30 – 7:00 PM: DINNER

7:00 – 8:15 PM: James P. Cannon and U.S. Trotskyism

· Bryan Palmer, author, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the
American Revolutionary Left

8:15 – 8:30 PM: BREAK

8:30 – 8:45 PM: Introductory Remarks (to the film) – Esteban Volkov

8:45 – 10:15 PM: "Trotsky in Mexico" (new documentary – U.S. Premiere)

SATURDAY

8:00 – 9:00 AM: BREAKFAST

9:00 – 9:30 AM: Registration

9:15 – 9:30 AM: Opening Remarks

9:30 – 10:00 AM: Reflection on the Legacy of Leon Trotsky – Esteban Volkov

10:00 – 11:30 AM: Lessons of the SWP Experience: 1960 – 1980

· Robin David
· Kipp Dawson

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: LUNCH

1:00 – 2:30 PM: What Happened to the SWP?

· Linda Thompson
· Paul Le Blanc
· David Walters

2:30 – 3:45 PM: Workshops

3:45 – 4:00 PM: BREAK

4:00 – 6:00 PM: Social Movements and Class Struggle in the U.S.

· Kwame Somburu
· Marilyn Vogt-Downey
· Dan Kaplan

6:00 – 7:30 PM: DINNER

7:30 – 9:30 PM: Revolutionary Struggles in Latin America

· Celia Hart (video)
· Eloise Linger
· Martine Sanchez
· Gerry Foley

9:30 – 11:00 PM: July 26th Celebration

SUNDAY

8:00 – 9:00 AM: BREAKFAST

9:00 – 9:15 AM: Opening Remarks

9:15 – 10:45 AM: Building the Revolutionary Party

· Sharon Smith, International Socialist Organization
· Steve Bloom, Solidarity (for id only)
· Workers International League Speaker

10:45 – 11:00 AM: BREAK

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: Revolutionary Socialists and the Antiwar Struggle

· Gus Horowitz
· Tom Bias
· Chris Gavreau
· CAN Speaker

12:30 – 12:45 PM: BREAK to get box lunches

12:45 – 2:15 PM: Workshops and BOX LUNCH

2:15 – 2:30 PM: Closing

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Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:13:59 GMT

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

By Steven Argue

In a July 14, 2008 New York Times Op Ed, Barack Obama says:

"As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

In other words, he does not plan to get all of the troops out of Iraq and he will only get most of the troops out in two years. And what does he explain he will do with these troops? Redeploy them. Redeployed where? His rhetoric has been clear: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

Obama goes on to call for a surge in Afghanistan as well as war in Pakistan:

"Ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan [...] As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters [...]"

U.S. intervention has also been very bad for the people of Pakistan. It is US intervention that has kept a long series of dictators in power there. The US has no right to intervene against those fighting that dictatorship that it labels "terrorists". Likewise, it is US intervention in support of a long series of Pakistani dictators that is the cause of Bhutto's death, brutal repression against the majority, exploitation, and poverty, all of which has resulted in rebellion against the Pakistani government. The US has already harmed the Pakistani people enough with massive aid to dictators and would do more harm by sending in troops.

NO TO OBAMA’S PROPOSED MILITARY INTERVENTION IN PAKISTAN!

Massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan began in 1978 and continues to this day. The ongoing war in Afghanistan continues to kill thousands of Afghan civilians and cause extreme suffering due to horrendous injuries, the displacement of people from their homes and livelihoods, home invasions, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the general humiliation of the Afghani people.

As this author stated for Liberation News on September 12, 2001:

“Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians. Terror against civilians is never justified…

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen. With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate (oil) interests.” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2001

The Taliban was put in power by U.S. intervention. U.S. occupation today is a cause for war and continues to keep an extremely reactionary religious government in power. Afghanistan had secular governments with much wider women's rights before the U.S. began its massive intervention in Afghanistan in the 1970's. All U.S. imposed governments have been religious and anti-women. In Afghanistan, the Afghanis are better qualified to solve the problems caused by U.S. imperialism than U.S. imperialism is.

Yet rather than get out of Afghanistan Obama is proposing more troops, more helicopters, and more war.

NO TO OBAMA”S PROPOSED SURGE IN AFGHANISTAN!

U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW!

In addition, at AIPAC, Obama’s speech laid the groundwork for war with Iran:

“The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. [...] The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

A war on a major oil producing nation under the imperialist excuse of weapons of mass destruction. Sound familiar? Bush would have a good case for a charge of plagiarism against Obama.

And what will the Iranians think of more imperialist intervention?

In 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and put the brutal dictatorship of the Shah in power. Mossadegh had plans to nationalize the Iranian oil fields, a plan that would have taken a good chunk of the oil profits out of the private control of major international oil companies. Such nationalizations have greatly helped people in other countries, such as Venezuela, where oil wealth is used to better the conditions of the poor and provide needed programs like healthcare.

The CIA sponsored overthrow of the Mossadegh government paved the way for 26 years of dictatorship under the U.S. backed Shah. Freedom of speech did not exist under the Shah, and the CIA participated in the torture of political opponents to the Shah. Meanwhile, U.S. oil corporations made massive profits from Iranian oil while the vast majority of the Iranian people lived in extreme poverty and did not benefit from the oil wealth.

The Iranian people rightly saw the Shah as a puppet of U.S. imperialism, and finally overthrew his dictatorship in 1979. Unfortunately, repression was so bad under the Shah that the only place that people could organize opposition was in the Mosques. This gave the Mullahs a tremendous advantage in taking control of the revolution. The Islamic nature of the revolution led to a deterioration of women's rights and socialists, many of whom had naively supported the Islamic Revolution, were executed by the clerical fascist state.

Despite the brutal nature of the new Iranian government, in that respect the same as the old regime the U.S. had supported, the U.S. was not satisfied. The new regime nationalized the Iranian oil fields under government control. In addition, the new government was full of anti-imperialist rhetoric and took American hostages; a natural result of 26 years of U.S. imposed dictatorship and exploitation. The U.S. government hated the Iranian revolution most for nationalizing the oil, and they feared that the Iranian Revolution may become an influence for similar anti-imperialist revolutions in the region.

As a result, the U.S. encouraged then ally, Saddam Hussein, to send Iraqi troops to invade Iran. During the war, the U.S. armed both sides, but most armed Iraq and provided Iraq with military intelligence. The Iraqi invasion of Iran began on September 22, 1980 and the war continued until 1988. As a result of the war, between half million and a million and a half people died. This U.S. support to Iraq also helped enable Iraq to murder between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign of 1988. At the time, the U.S. corporate media was silent about this crime, and only exposed it later when U.S. alliances changed.

So U.S. intervention against Iran imposed decades of dictatorship, repression, war, exploitation, poverty, and, just in the Iran-Iraq war alone, the deaths of around a million Iranian people. Like Iraq, U.S. troops on the ground in Iran will not be treated as liberators.

The Iranian working class has many scores to settle with their Iranian rulers, but as bad as the current regime in Iran is, Iranians need only look across the border into Iraq to see that U.S. occupation will be much worse. War, a puppet capitalist regime, a million dead, torture, millions of refugees, and an occupier mainly interested in privatization to loot resources. As Iraq shows, there is no liberation at the hands of U.S. occupation. And as the CIA’s Shah showed; there is no liberation under a U.S. imposed puppet. Only anti-imperialist socialist revolution can begin to solve the problems faced by women, ethnic minorities, and the working class of Iran.

NO TO OBAMA’S THREATS AGAINST IRAN!

U.S. HANDS OFF IRAN!

On Iraq, Obama has never promised to fully withdraw. In a debate in September 2007, when asked if he would have U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013 Barack Obama said "I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out." ("The Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC", New York Times 9/26/07).

The U.S. must leave by air, sea, and land as quickly as possible. U.S. imperialism has created a horrible situation, but that is no excuse to stay, and U.S. troops, Halliburton, etc. are only making matters worse. Over a million Iraqis are dead. These deaths are not just caused by the civil war that the U.S. has ignited, nor are they just caused by the death-squad government that the U.S. has put in power. U.S. guns and bombers are also the direct cause of a large number of deaths. Iraq needs to be turned over to the Iraqi people through immediate withdrawal.

In addition, Obama has directly supported the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq by voting in the Senate to fund it. If it were not for the Democrat votes in congress, the recent $162 billion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have never passed.

This most recent New York Times Op Ed from Obama continues on with a pro-war position. Obama is clear. He wants a gradual redeployment of the majority of troops to fight other wars while calling for continuing to keep some troops fighting in Iraq.

On Blackwater mercenaries fighting in Iraq, Obama also refuses to support a ban, and promised to continue to use Blackwater when he becomes president (Democracy Now!, June 2, 2008).

The US government has no right to be in Iraq murdering, torturing, and humiliating their people while making massive profits for the military industry and other contractors. The U.S. is attempting to privatize Iraqi oil to eliminate Iraqi control over this most important resource and give U.S. and British oil companies control over the oil. The puppet government the US has set up is a death squad government that should not be protected by U.S. troops. Continued occupation of Iraq is a continued attempt to subvert the national will of the Iraqi people and it must end immediately, yet Obama's plan is to only leave, partially, after a couple years, and this, assuredly, only after the oil law has been passed and oil ownership handed over to the multi-nationals. This, as Obama's own use of the term "redeployment" indicates, will free U.S. troops up for other oil wars.

NO TO OBAMA’S “PHASED REDEPLOYMENT”!

U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!

U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD!

Another major cause for war in the Middle East is U.S. military support to the racist regime in Israel. Obama promises to continue this practice. At AIPAC Obama promised:

“Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As president, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defense. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO.”

This despite Israel’s recent war of aggression against Lebanon, a war that, if it were not for the heroic resistance of Hezbollah fighters, would have ended in another Israeli occupation like Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon that took place in the 1980’s. That occupation included crimes against humanity committed by Israeli and allied Christian Phalangists when they massacred thousands of Palestinians in cold-blood at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps.

In addition, Obama’s speech made no reference to the suffering faced by the Palestinian people as a result of the creation and continuation of the Jewish state. Israel is a state that created a homeland for one people, through force and violence, by denying the homeland of Palestine’s original inhabitants. Also missing from Obama’s speech was the brutal blockade currently being carried out against Palestinians in Gaza. Obama expressed zero sympathy for the Palestinians and other Arabs, only promises to supply Israel with the weapons to kill more Arabs.

Massive U.S. military aid helps keep the repressive governments of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in power. Instead of promising more U.S. military aid, that aid should be cut off to better allow the people of the Middle East to decide their own future.

NO TO OBAMA’S PROMISE OF BILLIONS TO ISRAEL!

Another indicator of where Obama stands on imperialist war is how he sees the past wars of the United States. Of H. W. Bush and his war on Iraq Obama recently stated, "I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm." (Barack Obama, from David Brooks article, "Obama Admires Bush, NY Times, May 16, 2008)

Leading up to that war, Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi Ramaila oil fields. Iraq saw this as theft. In addition, the Kuwaiti monarchy went against OPEC quotas and increased oil production by 40%, bringing down the price of oil on the world market, something Saddam Hussein called economic warfare.

Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was, at that time an ally of the United States in the wars against Iran and the Kurds. He had received massive U.S. military backing in those wars. When he assembled troops on the Kuwaiti border, US ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein and told him, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

Saddam Hussein saw this as a green light from his powerful U.S. ally to invade Kuwait. Soon after, he did.

But Saddam Hussein was set up by the United States because the U.S. wanted a war. The reason for this was to prop up the profits of the military industrial complex. The Soviet Union had just fallen, and the military industries needed an excuse to keep spending billions of dollars of our tax dollars on the military.

Saddam Hussein was the perfect boogie-man to meet their needs. The U.S. corporate media pointed out that he had murdered tens of thousands of Kurds, never mentioning why they were silent when the operations were taking place with weapons supplied by the United States.

The U.S. corporate media also claimed that premature babies in Kuwait had been taken out of incubators and left to die so that the incubators could be shipped back to Baghdad. The whole story was a complete fabrication, and the corporate media even admitted it after the war, but the lie served its purpose in swaying many people who otherwise questioned going to war for the repressive Kuwaiti monarchy.

In addition, President H.W. Bush claimed as reason for war, "Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that I decided to act to check that aggression." This was based on supposed Pentagon satellite photos. Yet, from commercial satellite photos acquired by the St. Petersburg Times, this was proven to be a lie, the desert Bush senior and the Pentagon referred to was nothing but empty desert.

While playing up false stories of baby killers and the new Hitler that was going to march across the Middle East, the U.S. corporate media ignored Kuwait’s theft of Iraqi oil as well the historic claim of Iraq to Kuwait, with Kuwait being a construct of British imperialism to divide the territory and limit Iraqi access to the sea.

In addition, the U.S. corporate media completely ignored the repressive nature of the Kuwaiti monarchy that U.S. troops were sent to fight and die for. The vast majority of those living in Kuwait were denied the right to vote and other more basic rights. This included women and people labeled foreigners, many of whom had been in Kuwait for generations. Some who had ancestors in Kuwait prior to 1920 were even denied Kuwaiti citizenship. Palestinian workers built modern Kuwait, but they were kept in second class status. This situation was so bad that many Palestinians aided the Iraqi troops and saw them as a liberation army. After the U.S. re-installed the monarchy, most Kuwaiti Palestinians were driven out of Kuwait.

For women in Kuwait the Iraqi invasion also brought hope. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Under Saddam Hussein, over 50% of Iraqi doctors were women. Iraqi women were allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They were allowed to drive. Iraqi women could even freely criticize men. In addition, Iraqi women had the right to work and control their own funds. This was in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive monarchy of Kuwait where women had / have no rights what-so-ever.

In carrying out the war to defend the Kuwaiti monarchy the U.S. used depleted uranium (DU) weapons that have contaminated Iraqi water, soil, and food with radiation. This radiation has caused large numbers of birth defects and other diseases for the Iraqi people. In addition, U.S. soldiers were not given protection and, as a result, became ill in massive numbers with the symptoms of radiation poisoning. Like Agent Orange poisoning in Vietnam, the military brass pretended they had no clue to the cause of this illness that became dubbed “Persian Gulf War Syndrome”. Yet this was later exposed as a lie when reports were made public warning the military brass of the health risks of DU weapons before the war.

Government demographer Beth Osborn Duponte lost her job when she estimated the civilian loss of life in Iraq to be around 83,000, 13,000 directly from U.S. bombing and another 70,000 civilians dead as a result of U.S. targeting of civilian necessities such as water treatment facilities, medical facilities and supplies, and the electric power grid.

In addition, Duponte estimated deaths of Iraqi troops to be around 40,000. Many of the Iraqi troops killed were buried alive. In defense of U.S. actions Col. Lon Maggart said, "People somehow have the notion that burying guys alive is nastier than blowing them up with hand grenades or sticking them in gut with bayonets, well it's not."

So Obama has no problems with Bush targeting civilians, irradiating U.S. troops and the Iraqi people, burying people alive, lying to the American people, and re-installing a repressive monarchy in Kuwait. In addition, Obama wants to escalate the war in Afghanistan, send troops into Pakistan, is already threatening Iran with war, will never fully pull out of Iraq and only promises to pull out most troops in two years after an extended gradual re-deployment of troops to other wars, will continue to use murderous Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, and promises billions in military aid to Israel. Enough said.

Obama will be nominated the presidential candidate of the Democrat Party on August 24-28 at the Democrat Party National Convention (DNC). In opposition to the DNC convention, protests are being organized, with organizers stating:

"On August 24-28, the ruling elite and their defenders will converge in Denver Colorado, in an attempt to recuperate the gains of global social movements and produce another myth of progress. Lip service to global warming, the economic crisis and the war will endow them with the magic to spread amnesia across the hearts and minds of North America... Outside those doors, however, so many will exclaim, smash and sing a harmonious ‘no.’...”

In addition, there will be protests at the equally pro-war Republican National convention being held September 1-4 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Although virtually ignored by the corporate press, there are other presidential candidates who are running in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans who are for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. These include Cynthia McKinney running on the Green Party ticket, Brian Moore of the Socialist Party, Gloria La Riva on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket, and Róger Calero on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Corporate controlled elections and media assure that these authentic anti-war candidates will not get elected, but these candidacies do help expose people to positions of politicians not controlled by corporate interests and the pro-war Democrat Party machine. In addition, through some of these campaigns, more people become exposed to socialist ideas and the ideas of class struggle methods to bring about change.

A vote for Obama or McCain is a vote for war! So that's what, in active terms, you're really voting for when you vote Democrat or Republican. Those of us voting for third parties in order to try to help build the kinds of parties and ideas that would really bring change, and those of us refusing to vote in order to not participate in such a blatantly rigged system, neither will change the country through these up-coming elections either, but at least we won’t be dumb enough to vote for own oppressors and exploiters that are waging imperialist war. And we will not be drawn into making apologies for imperialist war politicians like Obama. Instead, we will have the sense to be working for something different.

And those of us in unions should be angry that our hard earned union dues are being squandered on the Democrat Party when that money should instead be put into stronger strike funds to strengthen our ability to fight for better contracts, for socialized medicine, and for bigger strikes against the wars.

Build the Anti-War Movement! For More Strikes for Immediate Withdrawal Like the May 1st ILWU Anti-War Strike That Shut Down 29 Ports! Support Soldiers Refusing to Fight Including the 10,000 U.S. Soldiers Who Have Gone AWOL! Build the Socialist and Anti-Imperialist Movements! U.S. Hands off Iran! U.S. Out of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!

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US longshore union leader : "don't vote for Obama"

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:24:05 GMT

US longshore union leader : "don't vote for Obama"

SHORT VIDEO OF JACK HEYMAN'S COMMENTS ON OBAMA AT PERMANENT REVOLUTION WEEKEND SCHOOL IN LONDON

Try either of the links below for the video

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=2202

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2202

Also from Jack Heyman, see:

Longshoremen to close ports on West Coast to protest war

http://uspolitics.tribe.net/thread/0de5539d-06be-406e-a4a8-e45eaef28b9f

******************************************

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Unionists Protest Uribe Venezuela Visit

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:26:35 GMT

Uribe visit to Venezuela

STATEMENT OF CCURA UNION TENDENCY ON URIBE VISIT

July 6--The Corriente Clasista Unitaria Revolucionaria y Autonoma of the National Union of Workers (U.N.T.) rejects categorically the visit that has announced of Alvaro Uribe to Caracas, top representative of the bloody Colombian oligarchy. Venezuelan workers have shown that we are anti-imperialist fighters in fact and not just in words. We do not share the judgment issued by President Chavez when he referred to the Colombian president as a "brother" and "friend" in the opening event of the Non-Aligned Ministers Conference, We know he represents the drug traffickers and paramilitarists that kill Colombian workers and peasants. He can never be a friend or brother of our people.

The Venezuelan government has announced a meeting between Chavez and Uribe on July 11th. It will be one month since the infamous act of President Chavez, together with representatives of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, announced "the productive reimpulse" through a strategic alliance with the exploiters. Just as the class enemies of Venezuelan workers form alliances with the government, now the maximum representative of imperialism in South America, Alvaro Uribe, will visit Caracas to give a "reimpulse" to relations with the Venezuelan government.

But the workers know who Uribe is and no government can fool us and present him as a friend or ally. Our class brothers are persecuted and murdered by the paramilitaries headed by Uribe, as Colombia has been the country where the largest number of trade unionists in the world have been murdered. This year several activists and worker fighters were murdered because they participated in a national march against the paramilitaries and state terrorism. Our brothers and friends are those who are carrying the democratic struggles against the fascist government
of Uribe.

We salute the action of community radio ECOS 93.9 of Merida and other revolutionary collectives to organize a massive mobilization in repudiation of the visit of Uribe, and our organization will join this action which will class struggle, revolutionary and anti-imperialist.

(translated by Earl Gilman)

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NYT: Obama admires Bush Sr.: ''no complaints about handling of Desert Storm"

Sat, 17 May 2008 18:36:09 GMT

Support for Empire is support for Empire -- any way you cut it. There's a reason Corporate American bankrolled Obama's campaign
...
**************
"I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don't have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm."

Source:
- Barack Obama, from David Brooks article, "Obama Admires Bush, NY Times, May 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/opinion/16brooks.html?em&ex=1211169600&en=1577a90ae5048a04&ei=5087%0A

See:
Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming
by STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/10/18478172.php

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

Police Break 60 Year Old Homeless Woman's Arm

Sat, 10 May 2008 19:00:32 GMT

[Donna Deiss is a politically active homeless woman in Santa Cruz, who was also an advocate for tenants rights before she was unfairly evicted. The homeless in Santa Cruz, as well as activists who criticize the local government, are often victims of police harrassment, false arrests, and police violence. -Steven Argue]

60 Year Old Homeless Woman Says Police Broke Her Arm
by Robert Norse
Saturday May 10th, 2008
Donna Deiss called in last night to report that yesterday around 5 PM, Officer La Moss (Badge #114) assaulted her, broke her arm, and then put her in handcuffs when he attempted to question her at Three Tree Lot near Lighthouse Field. Deiss was taken to the Watsonville hospital, had to wait hours for x-rays, whichconfirmed her arm was broken.
Deiss reported the following to me in a phone message last night and an e-mail this morning:

She was talking with friends yesterday on Westcliffe Drive near her RV. An undercover police officer, whom she later identified as Officer LaMoss, arrived in a black unmarked car and said he wanted to talk to her and others in the group. She read La Moss a statement from the ACLU about the rights of community members vis a vis the police and walked to her RV.

The cop followed her. She got in and tried to close the door. Le Moss, not saying she was under arrest or detained, reached in and grabbed her right arm, pinching the skin as he twisted it behind her back, breaking it. She screamed her arm was broken, but his response was to call for backup. 4 more police cars arrived. She continued screaming for 911 and finally paramedics showed up.

The police said they were impounding her RV, which she lives in.

She was taken to Watsonville hospital, waited hours for x-rays and painpills. She is charged with battery and an additional charge. X-rays confirm her arm was broken. She needs an attorney and community support.

This is an account from Donna Deiss (with someadditions from her friend Shane). Donna has previously been harassed by rangers as part of the 'clear out the hippies' campaign at Three Tree Lot and the other lots around Lighthouse Fields. Recently the City's Parks and Recreation Department had its 'No RVs' signs painted over by state Rangers, for apparently violating state law and policy regarding parking (i.e. RVS are allowed to park).

See related stories: 'Harassment of Homeless in RVs, a Letter from Donna Deiss' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/10/08/18452903.php ,

'Superintendant Hammack Stonewalls on RV Ban in Coastal Parking Lots' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/09/12/18447267.php , and

'Coastal Access Denied to Motorhomes and Trailers in Santa Cruz' at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/08/30/18444952.php for related stories.

HOMELESSNESS AND POLITICAL REPRESSION, THE GREEN PARTY FAILS THE TEST IN SANTA CRUZ by Steven Argue
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2001/12/5085.shtml

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Cuba approves free sex-change operations

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:47:03 GMT

Cuba approves free sex-change operations

By WILL WEISSERT,
Associated Press Writer

HAVANA - Cuba has authorized sex-change operations and will offer them free for qualifying citizens, an official said Friday. The move is the latest in a series of changes implemented by President Raul Castro since he succeeded his elder brother, Fidel, in February. Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela, heads Cuba's National Center for Sex Education, which strongly backs the new policy.

Health Minister Jose Ramon Balaguer signed a resolution approving sex-change surgery, said an official at the center who spoke on condition of anonymity because the measure has not been formally published. The resolution will be posted on the Internet on Saturday, the official said.

The procedure would be available to Cubans for free as part of their country's health-care system.

The sex education center has said previously that 28 transsexual Cubans have asked to undergo the surgery and that Cuban doctors have trained with physicians from Belgium to prepare for the procedures.

According to the center, a clinic for transsexual health will be created to perform the procedures, but it was not clear when it will start operating.

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ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:22:00 GMT

[Liberation News is in agreement with the following article of the Internationalist Group and both have also actively advocated these kinds of industrial actions.]

For Workers Strikes Against the War!

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, "One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq."

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor's power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism - Democrats and Republicans - and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force - that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked "if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events." Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!"

There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of "national security," just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the "war effort," and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!

The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington's broader "war on terror" which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers' power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses' war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people "at home."

ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War

Workers strike action against imperialist war isn't new - it just hasn't happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to "hot cargo" (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they
also did during France's war in Indochina in the 1950s.

In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the "slave labor" Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about "reds" in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as "military" to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a "mechanization and modernization" contract that slashed union jobs.

As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of "anti-terrorist" government repression, as police fired supposedly "less than lethal" munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.

Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators' orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see "Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper," The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would "plan workplace rallies, labor
mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war." The Call to Action stated:

"ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called 'war on terror' is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor's muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.

The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the "war on terror."
Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.

This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour "No Peace, No Work Holiday" against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania's death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.

At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, "are you sure you want to do this action." The delegates overwhelmingly said "yes." Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we've had it with this war, we've got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a "stop-work" meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.

The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks "labor peace" with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to "express support for the troops by bringing them home safely," although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the "support our troops" game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what's needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor's muscle to put an end to the war.

Mobilize Labor's Power to Defeat the Bosses' War!

For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front "peace" coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had "no resonance" among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, "Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the opportunists Don't]"). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses' war "at home" by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.

That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into "the enemy within." Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.

At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver's licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with "background checks," warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for "trials" in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the "evidence" or even the charges against them - all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers' strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let's not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.

Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.

This is an Article of the Internationalist Group:
www.internationalist.org

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SF May 1st Strike: Cynthia McKinney, Danny Glover and Cindy Sheehan speaking

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:46:39 GMT

PORT WORKERS MAY DAY ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Clarence Thomas and Jack Heyman, Co-Chairs
Phone: 510.333.4301 * Fax: 510.215.2800
Email: news@may1.org

MEDIA ALERT

April 23, 2008

The Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee is proud to announce that Cynthia McKinney, former Congresswoman from Georgia; Danny Glover, renowned actor and political activist; and Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star mother whose son Casey was killed in Iraq four years ago, will be among the featured speakers at our "No Peace, No Work" Holiday mobilization in San Francisco on May 1st.

The West Coast longshore workers have voted to stop work to protest against the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Port Workers May Day Organizing Committee and the other rank-and-file committees in ports up and down the West Coast have received pledges of support from labor councils, local unions and anti-war, anti-racist, immigrant and other social justice organizations across the country and around the globe.

The "March with Longshore Workers" will assemble at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 1st, at the Longshore (ILWU) hall at Mason & Beach, and will march down the Embarcadero for a noon rally at Justin Herman Plaza.

Also see:

ILWU to Shut Down Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
http://tribes.tribe.net/nobloodforoil/thread/f02f3fd2-9632-403e-8829-e3817def77c0

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Join the Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

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Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:30:02 GMT

Join the new “Cool Earth Party” tribe

The Democrats and Republicans are the paid agents of the oil, armament, and insurance industries. Their continued rule of America will assure a future of more imperialist war, a healthcare system that doesn't work, and no meaningful action on global warming (the single biggest threat to the future of humanity and a healthy planet).

The Cool Earth Party is being established on the principles of revolutionary democratic socialism. We call for an end to the dictatorial power of the wealthy through the nationalization of major industries and for the establishment of a planned economy run to meet human and environmental needs. This socialist society must be established within the framework of full democratic freedoms and multi-party proportional democracy. To be truly Democratic all parties running in elections will be legally guaranteed equal time in the media, big campaign spending will be outlawed, and electronic voting machines (which are presently used to rig American elections) will be eliminated.

Upon taking power the Cool Earth Party will establish a system of socialized medicine for the United States, end all U.S. military occupations of other countries, end U.S. military aid to repressive governments, and nationalize the auto and energy industries to carry out immediate emergency measures to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cool Earth Party
http://tribes.tribe.net/coolearth

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Biofuel Caused Hunger Brings Down Haitian Prime Minister

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:08:24 GMT

In this Liberation News Mailing:

1. Biofuel Caused Hunger Brings Down Haitian Prime Minister
2. UK Protests call for Biofuel Targets to be Scrapped
3. Other Suggested Reading

********************
Movement to cap food prices brings down Haiti's prime minister
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
By: Silvio Rodrigues
(Reprinted with permission of the Party for Socialism and Liberation)

Food crisis sparks mass demonstrations

Pressured by mass protests and riots against rising food prices, Haitian lawmakers dismissed Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis in hopes of defusing the crisis. Just days before, 16 of 27 Haitian senators signed a letter calling for the resignation of Alexis.

Demonstrations began on April 2 in Les Cayes, but quickly spread to other areas of the country. For several days, Haitians erected barricades of burning tires and old cars in the streets.

On April 8, thousands of Haitians marched to the presidential palace to protest the sharp increase in food staples and to demand the resignation of the President René Préval. (Utah Independent, April 8)

Demonstrators rammed the palace gates with a rolling dumpster in an attempt to storm the building. U.N. occupation forces in jeeps and assault vehicles responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Soon, the U.N. troops were overwhelmed by the size and fury of the crowds, who turned their anger against the surrounding stores. (Times Republic, April 8)

Opposition lawmakers spearheaded the vote against Alexis, a close ally of Préval, in hopes of mitigating popular anger and capitalizing on the crisis. Youri Latortue, nephew of former prime minister Gerárd Latortue, played a key role in the opposition campaign. Gerárd Latortue became prime minister following the 2004 coup against Aristide, working hand in hand with Washington and its imperialist allies. (Reuters, April 10)

Whether the opposition’s move will be effective remains to be seen. About 25 demonstrators gathered to chant "Aristide or death" outside the parliament following the vote. ""Alexis left? What's the difference?" asked a Haitian chicken vendor. (International Herald Tribune, April 12)

Alexis’ dismissal will do little to fill the stomachs of hungry Haitians. The poorest Haitians live on less than $2 a month. The country suffers from scarce arable land and imports most of its food, including more than 80 percent of its rice. (CTV News, April 12)

Cookies made from dirt, salt and shortening are a staple of the Haitian diet, costing only around 5 cents as of January. Doctors say that relying on the cookies for sustenance can be dangerous; for Haitians, they alleviate the pain caused by hunger. (National Geographic, Jan. 30)

The rising price of foodstuffs is a global phenomenon—protests have erupted in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Burkina Faso and elsewhere.

The crisis springs from the inherent anarchy of capitalist production. Producers make economic decisions that affect the lives of billions with only their own short-term gains in mind. Among other factors, the growing demand for ethanol has shifted agricultural production away from food crops.

Because capitalists must constantly seek the most profitable alternatives in order not to be driven out of business by their competitors, they are unable to avoid such crises—or to offer a way out of them, for that matter. Subsidies or international "aid" are at times provided to temper popular unrest when it threatens imperialist interests.

It is hard to say whether such "relief" would appease the ire of Haitians at the present juncture. For the impoverished masses, the food crisis was the catalyst for an explosive outburst of deep-rooted hatred for the occupation. The February 2004 coup that toppled Aristide left an indelible mark in the consciousness of a people already well-familiar with imperialist intervention.

René Préval was elected to the presidency in 2006, supported by poor Haitians largely because of his past association with former president Aristide. At the time, two years had passed since the coup and Haiti was already under U.N. occupation. Some sectors of progressive and liberal opinion believed that the 2006 "democratic" elections indicated that things were getting better.

The imperialist occupation under the U.N. flag has continued throughout Préval’s presidency. One only remains in power under occupation by adhering to the framework stipulated by the occupiers. The Préval government has not—and cannot—end the imperialist occupation.

With neither the government nor the opposition offering a way out, poor and working Haitians are growing increasingly reliant on the most powerful force for change—themselves.

***************
UK Protests call for Biofuel Targets to be Scrapped

16 April 2008 joint press release by Biofuelwatch and Global Forest Coalition

London-There were demonstrations in London yesterday and groups across the UK also protested against the introduction of mandatory biofuel blending.

Outside Downing Street speakers from Friends of the Earth, Global Forest Coalition, GM Freeze, campaign against Climate Change and Biofuelwatch condemned the government's decision to go ahead with its biofuel policy against overwhelming evidence of catastrophic impacts on climate, communities, biodiversity and food security.

Other protests were held outside the constituency offices of Ruth Kelley, Secretary of State for Transport, and Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment. More protests took place at BP and Tesco fuel stations. BP and Tesco are two of the companies with significant investment in biofuels (also called agrofuels) from large-scale monocultures. They have been strongly lobbying for mandatory biofuel blending.

"The UK has chosen to ignore a vast mountain of evidence that biofuels are contributing to hunger, climate change, deforestation and human rights abuses," said Dr. Rachel Smolker, main author of "The Real Cost of Agrofuels." She continued, "Perhaps they are counting on new technologies using cellulose from wood and grasses, but these won't sidestep the problems either. Whatever feedstocks are used will result in further expansion of industrial monocultures, possibly including genetically engineered trees. The bottom line is that there is a limited amount of land available, a large population to feed and a desperate need to preserve remaining biodiverse ecosystems. Instead of focusing on improving efficiency and reducing consumption, the UK is mandating further destruction."

Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch adds, "Protests against the agrofuel industry and this government's biofuel policies will not end. The government is talking about vague 'sustainability standards', whilst agrofuels are causing ever greater harm to the climate, to forests and other ecosystems, to communities in the global South, to biodiversity worldwide, and to food sovereignty and food security. We need a moratorium on all agrofuel incentives and targets to prevent those catastrophic impacts."

On 8 April, twenty-nine UK and international groups wrote to the UK government, calling for an agrofuel moratorium and demanding a suspension of the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation, and opposition to new EU biofuel targets - both the proposed 10% biofuel target in the Renewable Energy Directive, and the inclusion of biofuels in the draft new Fuel Quality Directive. Around 200 organisations from North and South have signed a call for an EU moratorium on agrofuels from large-scale monocultures, and there are separate calls for a U.S. agrofuel moratorium and for an African agrofuel moratorium, as well as growing number of declarations from the Southern groups that are deeply concerned about the impacts which biofuel policies in Europe, including in the UK, are having on their communities, food sovereignty and environment.

Contact:
Almuth Ernsting, Biofuelwatch, +44-1224-324797 (UK, any time)
Orin Langelle, Global Forest Coalition, +1.802.578.6980 (U.S., any time)

*************************************
3. Other Suggested Reading:

Biofuels and The Internationalization of Genocide
by Fidel Castro
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/abril/mier4/14refexf.html

Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming
by Steven Argue
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/10/18478172.php

US Marines occupy Haitian capital amid charges Aristide was kidnapped
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/hait-m02.shtml

***************
Subscribe free to Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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NAZIS TO ATTEMPT RALLY, WASHINGTON DC ON 19 APRIL, 2008

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:56:52 GMT

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/142834/index.php

[ In order to see the video and the comments to this posting from indymedia click on the link above ]

Youtube video:
www.youtube.com/watch

Assemble at 11:30 AM on the Southwest corner of Constitution Ave NW and 14th St NW
Neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement Plans to Rally on National Mall near Washington Monument

On, April 19, 2008, at 12 PM (noon) the neo-Nazi, white-supremacist organization known as the “National Socialist Movement” is planning to march and rally “against illegal immigration” on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on the North Side of the Washington Monument. The monument is located to the South of Constitution Avenue NW, between 15th St NW and 17th St NW.

Coming on the heels of the racist immigration ordinance passed in Prince William County, Virginia (and similar laws passed elsewhere in the US), and coupled with the alarming rise in the number of known hate groups in the United States, we feel that the march of these racist bigots must be confronted vigorously, and with strength.

Despite claims that those opposed to immigration are concerned about “the rule of law”, terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement have always attempted to blame immigrants, African-Americans, Jews, non-heterosexual people, and all people of color for what they perceive to be “societal problems”. It is clear that their hatred is based on racial prejudice, and the law is merely an excuse to spread their white supremacist beliefs. We believe that it is not any coincidence that xenophobes and white supremacists share views on immigration, and immigrants.

The National Socialist Movement, according to their website, are “America's Nazi Party”, and are “…inspired by our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler.” The group is currently, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States, largely due to the implosion of several other neo-Nazi groups.

They are the same organization that, in order to stir up hatred, marched in Toledo, Ohio (in 2005) in a neighborhood largely made up of people of color. They did indeed, get a reaction, as riots ensued, and the Nazis, and the police protecting them, were run out of the area for a time.

We invite all those opposed to fascism and racism to come and confront this very real, and dangerous neo-Nazi group. Gather at 11:30 AM on the Southwest corner of Constitution Ave NW and 14th St NW (the Mall side), to assemble before confronting the fascists.

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EGYPT--General Strike this Sunday, April 6!

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:12:57 GMT

Egyptian opposition groups are calling for a one-day, nationwide strike on April 6. The strike is directed against the brutally repressive Egyptian government; the strike movement responds to the rising costs of food, which is a worldwide phenomenon now, and poor wages for Egyptian workers. The opposition has called for ceasing all economic activity on Sunday, which is reportedly a workday in the Muslim world. In response, the Egyptian government has removed taxes on *some* foods, which suggests that in general, food is taxed in Egypt. The government also banned political rallies in mosques.

* * *

[From www.arabisto.com]

April 6th General Strike in Egypt Draws Together Diverse Groups Using
Newest Technologies

April 02, 2008 05:15 PM
By Courtney C. Radsch

Cairo, Egypt (for arabisto.com) - Using FaceBook, blogs, SMS,
independent media and good old fashion word-of-mouth, activists and
workers in Egypt are preparing to stage a countrywide general strike
on April 6. Calling it the "Egyptian Intifida" supporters are calling
for civil disobedience, asking everyone to stay home from work and not
buy anything; demonstrations of solidarity planned for embassies
around the world. The strike is aimed primarily at protesting the
rising cost of bread and other basic necessities and to demand
increased wages. Networks and event invitation have appeared on
FaceBook. The "General Strike in Egypt" FaceBook group has more than
54,000 members, an event another 2000 confirmed). The cyberspace
activism coupled with on-the-ground grassroots organizing promises to
test the political efficacy and continued relevance of the Egyptian
activists blogosphere and cyber-activists following a government
crackdown on Kifaya and Muslim Brotherhood over the past year that
seemed to take some of the wind out of the sails of cyber-activism.

The text of the document from [which] all this activity apparently
springs is as follows:

"All national forces in Egypt have agreed upon the 6th of April to be
a public strike. On the 6th of April, stay home, do not go out; Don't
go to work, don't go to the university, don't go to school, don't open
your shop, don't open your pharmacy, don't go to the police station,
don't go to the camp; We need salaries allowing us to live, we need to
work, we want our children to get education, we need human
transportation means, we want hospitals to get treatment, we want
medicines for our children, we need just judiciary, we want security,
we want freedom and dignity, we want apartments for youth; We don't
want prices to increase, we don't want favoritism, we don't want
police in plain clothes, we don't want torture in police stations, we
don't want corruption, we don't want bribes, we don't want detentions.
Tell your friends not to go to work and ask them to join the strike."
It was signed by and supported by the Al-Karama Party, the Al-Wasat
Party, the Labor Party, Kifaya, the Bar Association, Educational
Workers Movement, University Professors, Grain Mill Workers and of
course the Ghazl Al-Mahala workers. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo,
however, does NOT support it and has threatened to fire anyone who
misses work on Sunday.

The primary event is the workers strike in Ghazl el-Mahalla, with
several strikes planned in solidarity with the workers and organized
through the blogosphere. Hossam's 3arabawy is, as usual, a central
information node about the strike, as is Manalaa's Bit Bucket. (There
may or may not be a demonstration in Tahrir). The national press,
however, has been silent, while the independent and English language
press seems to portray it primarily as another worker's strike rather
than as something larger (though it was interesting to see the Daily
News Egypt quote a blog on the front page - clearly showing that they
have become legitimate information sources here as they have in the
U.S.) Kifaya is on board with the strike - though the movement has
been pronounced dead by many it seems to be struggling to resurrect
itself - as is, of course, the leftist/socialist bloggers, although
their activities have been focused on giving workers logistical and
media relations support rather than leading demonstrations or strikes.
This is a tactical move designed to protect the workers and their
indigenous efforts from accusations by the government that they are
being co-opted by the blogger activists and thus tainted by
association. It seems that rather the cyber-activists have found
renewed inspiration in the activism of workers and sympathetic
university students to reenergize and unify their political activism.
One group that is conspicuously absent from the milieu, however, is
the Muslim Brotherhood. ...

Read the whole story:
<http://www.arabisto.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogID=7&blogEntryID=1010>

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"Tribe" Backs Anti-Palestinian Racists

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:08:27 GMT

Message from "Free Palestine End Zionism" moderator:

This is being sent to you because you were a member of my tribe, Free Palestine End Zionism. I would like you to know that I was notified today by a representative of tribe.net that my tribe was "anti-semitic" and that they removed it!

I am sending this so you will know why the tribe does not exist any more and so you will bear witness to the evident censorship and lack of the freedom of speech on tribe.net, plus the fabricated excuse to silence my tribe.

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Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:09:06 GMT

Clinton and Obama: Failures on War and Global Warming

By STEVEN ARGUE

Today, every national academy of science of the industrialized world recognizes human caused global warming as a fact. These include the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences who explicitly use the word "consensus" on the issue.

The problem of global warming is one that will, and is, devastating the planet’s environment, causing mass extinction of species while also destroying agricultural and habitable land through rising oceans, more severe hurricanes, droughts, more unpredictable weather, increases in tropical diseases, year round freezing weather with a potential ice age in the northern hemisphere combined with higher temperatures closer to the equator, and the potential of runaway global warming with the melting of the ocean’s methane hydride that could actually cause the extinction of the human species.

Despite the severity of the problem, and despite the United States being the biggest contributor to global warming in the world, the U.S. government and corporate leaders continue to do worse than nothing, through blocking and sabotaging all potential solutions for the past fifty years up until the present. This is due to the massive profits that continue to be made by the big oil corporations, and the political strength they have in being able to buy the politicians in Washington.

On the biggest question facing humanity, human caused global warming, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ignoring the urgent proposals of global warming experts and instead put forward conservative proposals of carbon credit trading for big corporations and proposals for so-called “cleaner” fuels for cars. Carbon credit trading, giving big corporations the “right” to buy and sell the “right” to pollute, will undermine the ability to pass other legislation that can better curb carbon pollution. And the “cleaner” bio-fuels being proposed make no substantial difference because it takes energy involving carbon emissions to grow the plants used to make bio-fuels. In addition, rainforests that would help remove global warming causing carbon from the atmosphere are being cleared to grow bio-fuels. To make matters worse, converting food-stuffs and croplands to bio-fuels increases world food prices, causing increased world hunger.

What is really needed, as opposed to the pro-oil industry measures of Obama and Clinton, is an immediate emergency program to begin the process of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 through converting to green technologies such as solar, energy conservation, and eliminating the combustion engine by going electric and cleaning up the grid. Such a program would also create jobs and could be paid for through cutting the military budget. To develop this program it will be important to nationalize the energy industries under the democratic control of society in order to run them for human and environmental needs, and to eliminate private energy’s corrupting influence on politics, where they promote policies of war and pollution. Socialists offer these real solutions. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans have made human caused global warming a reality by promoting the policies that have caused it, even though the problem was known 50 years ago. Once again in this election, the Democrats have offered no real solutions to this problem that we are running out of time to address.

Just as the energy industries are promoting the destruction of the planet through carbon emissions, they, along with the powerful weapons industries, promote the mass murder of war as well.

In September 2007, when asked if he would have U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013 Barack Obama said "I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out."

Similarly Hillary Clinton Said, “I agree with Barack” ("The Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC", New York Times 9/26/07).

The U.S. must leave by air, sea, and land as quickly as possible. Citing fear of violence and civil war is the oldest trick in the dirty book of imperialist oppression. U.S. imperialism has created a horrible situation, but that is no excuse to stay, and U.S. troops, Halliburton, etc. are only making matters worse. Over a million Iraqis are dead. These deaths are not just caused by the civil war that the U.S. has ignited, nor are they just caused by the death-squad government that the U.S. has put in power. U.S. guns and bombers are also the direct cause of a large number of deaths. Iraq needs to be turned over to the Iraqi people through immediate withdrawal.

Not only do Obama and Clinton make no promise to get out of Iraq, both have both voted for war appropriations. This puts them both in the position of having directly supported the war.

In addition, Clinton voted to invade Iraq. Obama was not yet in the Senate, so he didn’t vote on that resolution. Yet on the verge of the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq Barack Obama repeated Bush’s lies at an anti-war rally stating, “He [Saddam Hussein] has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.” (Obama, 10/2002 Speech, Federal Plaza)

Last year Hillary Clinton stated she has no remorse for her murderous decision of voting to invade Iraq saying, "Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since. No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." (Hillary Clinton, “No regret on Iraq Vote”, CNN.Com)

In trying to let themselves off the hook many Democrats claim that Bush "did not fairly represent intelligence". Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren't their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make them look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead of war, we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they might not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for the Democrats a Republicans Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats to pretend to distance themselves from the same Bush policies that they actually support.

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Bill Clinton administration. That blockade cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While the number of deaths was partly due to the capitalist nature of Iraqi economy, and a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Bill Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered well over a million people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq had the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial, and execute him, for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980's the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was being used as an asset of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise, the CIA helped Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party come to power, supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba'athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

"In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein's capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons, socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

"While defending Iraq against imperialist attack, and supporting their right to defend themselves, socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal..."

"U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women's liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

"The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise, they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead." -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were not from a crystal ball. They were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. Today in Iraq the U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops and troops of the puppet Iraqi government. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women's rights and women's rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992. The invasion has also set off a civil war that, combined with U.S. bombings and other murder, has killed over a million Iraqis, and forced millions more to flee their homes as refugees.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn't completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq's resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and nearly half-a-trillion dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need. Just as the new imperialist masters of Iraq have shown a criminal lack of interest in the rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, so too they left the people of New Orleans to die.

Yet for the ruling class, their failure in Iraq is not in the murderous, undemocratic, and anti-woman puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

The words of Hillary Clinton make abundantly clear that what she opposes is not the oil war itself, but the fact that Bush is not winning it:

"Let us not confuse the leadership's failures with either the remaining mission in Iraq or the war on terrorism or with our support for our troops. What we have here is a failure of leadership to accomplish that mission. What was hailed as our shortest war has now become one of our longest. What was hailed as a model of democracy teeters on the brink of complete anarchy. What was the leadership that quickly claimed credit for success has been lethargic in the face of misjudgments and setbacks." Hillary Clinton

Likewise, Barack Obama has made similar complaints, saying that Bush should have sent more troops into Iraq.

Unlike Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, socialists see nothing good that can come from the continuation of the U.S. war against Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We call for no support to the Democrats and we demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now!

Liberation News calls for ending the war and global warming through becoming better organized; building the mass movement in the streets; striking with political demands against arms producers and polluters; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks as has been done on a few occasions along the west coast; becoming ungovernable; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise, we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist these wars. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz who have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for the nationalization of the energy industry, building the socialist movement, voting socialist, and ultimately ending imperialism and environmental destruction through a socialist revolution holding high the principles of an egalitarian socialist economy used for human and environmental needs rather than profit, an economy controlled by the people through full democratic rights and universal suffrage.

Also see:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

Closing Our Eyes Won’t Make Racial and Ethnic Inequalities Disappear
by STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/21/18473855.php

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:28:06 GMT

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism
By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/13/18472076.php

Today, in an attempt to smear me, posts have gone up all over the internet accusing me of being an anti-Semite. Pieces of the following essay are posted with other words inserted that are not my own. In addition, accusations have been made that I have attempted to delete the following essay from the public record. To contradict this smear tactic, and to prove that opposing Zionism is not anti-Semitic, I am reposting the entire essay in full.

I wrote the following essay early in 2001 as part of a discussion on the violence and repression taking place in Israel at the time. Yet, the essay is still entirely relevant, because it takes a historical look at the roots of the conflict, and discusses how the Zionist movement has been harmful to both Arabs and Jews alike.

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism (Part 1)

In this mailing: Pro-zionist Letter on Israel from Becky Johnson and Response by Steve Argue.

Letter to Editor,

You have to go back and read your history books. Palestine was the name the British gave to the mandate they took over (in typical British imperial fashion) from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Palestinians at the time included everyone who lived there, including the Jews. Palestine ceased to exist when Israel was formed in 1948. The plan
from the UN was to have the state of Palestine right next to Israel. But all the Arab neighbors (and the Arab population within the borders of the new state of Israel) rejected this two state solution and responded by out and out war waged on the Israelis.

The Palestinians (Arabs who live or lived within the boundaries of Israel) didn't even start to call themselves that until 1968--- twenty years after the establishment of Israel. Basically the concept of Palestine is a manufactured one to drum up support for these Arabs and to decrease support for Israel by the claim that Israel is on THEIR land.

Remember, the Arabs and muslims [sic] who did not flee in 1948, but stayed in Israel have full citizenship, have freedom to practice their religion, own property, vote, have representation in the Knesset, and compose 18% of the population.

There is no Palestine. And there never was except as a British invention.

---Becky Johnson

Steven Argue responds:

Actually, history is one of my strong points. You state that I need to consult my history books, yet you make statements that are inarguably historically incorrect. Palestine was in existence as a recognized territory of the Ottoman Empire long before British control and even before the beginnings of Jewish colonization by the Zionist movement.

These inhabitants of the region also had Arab nationalist sentiments that opposed the control of the Ottoman Empire before the creation of the Zionist State and have since opposed many of the U.S., French, and British imposed kings, crown princes, emirs, sheiks, etc. that Zionists like to claim represent the aspirations of the Arab people.

Your attempt to deny a people of even the name of their homeland is consistent with an ideology that denies an entire people of the right to their homeland. The fact that bloody repression and horrible discrimination has driven the majority of Palestinians from large parts of their homeland without the right of return is not enough. The Zionist movement wants to wipe away the rightful name of the land they have conquered by re-writing history and denying there ever was a Palestine.

From its beginnings in the eighteen hundreds the Zionist movement had little concern for the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian land they would settle. Instead, they appealed to imperialist powers as potential allies against the Arab people in setting up their Zionist state. For example, Zionist leader T. Herzl stated around 1897: "If his majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could undertake to regulate Turkey's finances. For Europe, we would constitute a bulwark against Asia down there; we would be the advance post of civilization against barbarism. As a neutral state, we would remain in constant touch with all of Europe, which would guarantee our existence" (Rodinson, "Israel a Colonial Settler State?").

By being “neutral”, Herzl is obviously referring to the Zionist dealings with powers of Europe, and not to the colonial "barbarians" already in and around the land he would settle and conquer.

An Arab leader in Jerusalem named Nassif Bey al-Khalidi who tried unsuccessfully to work out an agreement between Arabs and the Zionist movement warned the Zionists with the following statement, "Be very careful, Messieurs Zionists, governments disappear, but peoples remain. The Jewish immigrants came to Palestine believing it to be a desolate, sparsely inhabited country. They were too busy with their own business and too ignorant of Arabic to notice what was going on around them. Since it was the Turks who ruled Palestine, they turned all their attention toward the Turks. This did not make them popular with the Arabs" (Neville Mandel, "Chapters of Arab-Jewish Diplomacy 1918-1922").

The Jewish immigrants never became integrated in any way with the native Arab population. This was true economically, politically, socially, and linguistically. These Jewish immigrants were so separate from the Palestinian people that they were only Palestinian to the extent that they were physically living in Palestine.

It took the weakening of the Sultan during the First World War for Europe (specifically England) to move in and grant the colonial framework for Jewish colonization that aimed itself at the goal of an exclusively Jewish state. This framework was set forth in a British political charter in November 1917 called the Balfour Declaration which stated, "His Majesty's government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

Within this framework an exclusive Jewish state was the stated goal of all but a small minority in the Zionist movement, a goal that obviously would be at the expense of the Arab people already living in Palestine. In order to placate the Palestinians, however, the Balfour declaration stated, "It should be clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

While Britain was trying to placate the Arabs, Zionist leader Jabotinsky was very clear on Zionist intentions, stating in 1923 in his Book the "Iron Wall", "There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization took place with the agreement of the native population."

In understanding the existence of a Palestinian people and the struggles yet to come, Jabotinsky went on to state, "They have the precise psychology we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope."

Jabotinsky's view, and the policy that would later be carried out against the Palestinians, could not be made any clearer than his following statement from the same writing: "We can not give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to the other Arabs. Therefore a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the native population. Therefore it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the Arab population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy."

In explaining the differences between Zionist factions in dealing with the Palestinians Jabotinsky stated, "Force must play its role - with strength and without indulgence. In this, in this there are no differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other prefers an Iron Wall of English bayonets."

On these issues Rabbi Judas L. Magnes, President of the Hebrew University Jerusalem wrote, "by definition a Jewish state means that Jews will govern other people, other people who live in this Jewish state…Jabotinsky knew this long ago. He was the prophet of the Jewish state...In his early writings he said: 'Has a people ever been known to give up its territory of its own volition? Likewise, the Arabs of Palestine will not renounce their sovereignty without violence.'"

On the morals of Jabotinsky's plans and his desire to extinguish all hopes of the Palestinian people he is as clear in the "Iron Wall" as Hitler is of his intentions in "Mein Kampf" with Jabotinsky stating: "To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer 'absolutely untrue.' This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest hope for the Arabs to impede us they will not sell these hopes - not for any sweet word nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall."

In 1940 Jabotinsky states in "The Jewish War Front": "Since we have the moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of the Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer."

While the Arabs of Palestine were extremely tolerant of the Zionists who were moving in to take their land and their hopes, the Zionist movement was never interested in forming any sort of alliance with the Arab people. Instead, the Zionist movement from its inception was openly anti-Arab and pro-imperialist, even though those same imperial powers were the same ones who were carrying out pogroms against the Jews in the ghettos across Europe. This pro-imperialist policy included close relations with the pogromist leaders of anti-Semitic Czarist Russia who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, and later Zionist support and deals that aided the fascist death camps of Nazi Germany.

Jews, in fact, are victims of Zionism along side Arabs. From the beginning of Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 the Zionist movement lent their support to the Nazis, support which lasted until at least 1944 when they aided Hitler's "final solution" in Hungary killing 800,000 Jews. On the surface, the idea of Zionist relations with the Nazis may sound illogical and seem made up. Those relations, however, are well documented.

Hitler seized power in 1933 with a clear fascistic program that called for the annihilation of all socialists, communists, labor leaders, and Jews. Despite this fact, the Zionist Federation of Germany sent the Nazi Party a memorandum on June 21, 1933 stating: "…a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life … must also take place in the Jewish national group. On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state, which has established itself on the principle of race, we wish to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…." (Brenner, Zionism, pg. 48)

The policy of supporting Hitler was later upheld at the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933, where a motion to take action against Hitler was defeated 240 to 43. Thus, the Jewish boycott of the German economy at a time of economic weakness and vulnerability was broken with the World Zionist Organization's Anglo Palestine Bank resuming trade. In fact, the World Zionist Organization became the principal distributors of Nazi goods in Northern Europe and the Middle East.

Feivel Polkes was a member of Zionist leader Jabotinsky's Haganah militia. He was sent by Jabotinsky to Berlin to inform Nazi leader Adolf Eichman of his intention to spy for the S.S. in exchange for the release of the money of German Jews for use on the Zionist project. Zionist Feivel told Nazi Eichman, "Jewish Nationalist Circles are very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews would reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs" (Brenner, "Zionism" pg. 99).

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, felt so fond of the Zionist movement and their close working relations that he wrote a 12 part report in Der Angriff (The Assault) praising the Zionist movement, and ordered a medallion struck with a swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.

Collaboration included an agreement in Hungary between Zionist agent Dr. Rudolph Kastner and Nazi leader Adolph Eichman. Under the 1944 agreement the Nazis would murder 800,000 Hungarian Jews without Zionist interference and with complete silence from the Zionist movement. In exchange, 600 prominent Jews would be freed from Hungary. The Nazis then opened up a Rescue Department in Hungary headed by Kastner. These facts were exposed by a survivor named Malchiel Greenwald who was subsequently sued by the Israeli government, sued by the same leaders that had fashioned the deal made by Kastner in the first place.

Kastner's collaboration with the Nazis was confirmed with the Israeli court stating, "The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand." (Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case
124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem; cited in Ralph Schoenman’s “Hidden History of Zionism”)

The Zionists subsequently ignored a plan drawn up by the resistance that could have saved many, if not most, of Hungary's Jews. The Zionist silence and lack of action against Nazi atrocities in fact characterizes their stance throughout the entire holocaust. A plan, complete with maps, was drawn up that would blow-up railroad tracks to the death camps and crematoria and airdropped ammunition to the 80,000 Jews in Auschwitz. Part of the plan also included the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up the Auschwitz facility that was murdering 13,000 people a day. Had the Zionist movement not been so intent on fighting the Arabs, rather than the real anti-Semite butchers of Europe, they could have gathered the resources to carry out such operations. Likewise, Great Britain and the United States could have carried out the proposed measures as well, but chose not to save the Jews, and felt no pressure from the silent Zionist movement to do so.

This caused Rabbi Weismandel, who had drawn up the plans against Auschwitz, to ask of the Zionists in July 1944, "this special message to inform you that yesterday the Germans began deportations of Jews from Hungary. … The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end: Twelve thousand Jews - men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily. And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder. Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered or waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the cold bloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour. You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane?" (Shoenman, "The Hidden History of Zionism?")

The Zionists also opposed the immigration of Jews to other countries where they could escape extermination. Explaining their policy of pressuring Great Britain and the United States not to adopt immigration policies that would have saved the lives of Jews, Zionist leader Ben Gurion stated in 1938, "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I would opt for the second option" (Brenner, "Zionism", pg. 149).

The ability of the Zionist movement to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews for the settling of Palestine had a consistent inner logic. That logic speaks volumes. While some of the first victims of these Zionist madmen were the Jewish people, the Palestinians were next. And today, the continued Zionist mistreatment of the Palestinian people is one of the biggest threats to the lives of Jewish people because some of the Arab victims of Zionism now do not differentiate between the crimes of Zionism and the Jewish people. In addition, the Israeli government aided in the formation of the anti-Semitic organization Hamas, and today uses their suicide bombings against civilians as a way to gain sympathy and support in the Zionist war against the Palestinian people (more on this later). Objectively, the Zionist capitalist state is, in fact, the common enemy of both Jews and Arabs.

In the 1940s Jews were only one third of the population of Palestine. The Arab majority had not yet been driven from their land. The British, in considering their entire imperial interests in the Middle East and their need for good relations with Arabs had backtracked from their original support of a Jewish state in Palestine. Thus the Zionist minority carried out a war of independence against Britain in order to set up the Jewish state. The Palestinian people, the majority of the population, were not consulted by the Zionists on what kind of future they would like to have for their homeland and had little involvement in the war, although a few did side with British forces.

After independence from the Britain in 1948, the Zionist state began a massive expropriation of Palestinian land that has not ended. Becky Johnson's claim that, "the Arabs and Muslims who did not flee in 1948, but stayed in Israel have full citizenship, have freedom to practice their religion, own property, vote, have representation in the Knesset, and compose 18% of the population" is so utterly untrue as to defy common sense. Besides defying the facts, which we shall establish, I ask why most of an entire people would voluntarily flee the land in which they had built flourishing towns, a rich agriculture, and a vibrant cultural life with nowhere else to go? The short answer is that they did not flee voluntarily. They had met the "Jewish bayonets" of Zionist Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall". To deny this fact comes in on the same level as those who deny the Holocaust of Europe.

The humiliating conditions of the Palestinian people were recently observed by former anti-Apartheid fighter Archbishop Desmond Tutu who wrote:

"I have been very deeply distressed by my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young police officers prevented us from moving about.

"On my visit to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

"I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: 'Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.'

"My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?"

Although the Israeli government claims that Palestinians have the right to own property, this is a lie. Ever since 1948, Palestinians in Israel do not have the right to own land, because their land is often confiscated by force for Hebrew speaking settlement and agriculture. Water rights have been systematically cut off and diverted away from Palestinian lands and given to stolen Hebrew owned lands. Palestinian laborers are then denied by law the right to work the Hebrew owned agricultural lands, although they are sometimes illegally employed as cheap labor with no labor rights.

Palestinians do not have the right to freely travel. Reminiscent of chattel slavery, Palestinian families are often separated by Israeli officials who commonly do not grant necessary permits for Palestinians to enter neighborhoods or towns where wives, husbands, or children live. In contrast, the Hebrew speaking population has full rights to travel.

Palestinians often do not have the right to keep their own homes, which are often confiscated or bulldozed. The bulldozing of houses is a common punishment of families whose children are accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Recently, in Jenin, houses were bulldozed with people inside, an act that besides killing people, also made an estimated 4,000 people homeless.

Palestinians do not have the right to freedom of speech and regularly face arrest, torture, and even death for their political views. Even Hebrew speakers who support rights for Palestinians, or an end to Israeli wars, have, at times, had their press shut down by the Israeli government, or had their demonstrations attacked and beaten by Israeli soldiers.

Palestinians do not have the same right to an education as Hebrew speaking people, based on the fact that higher education is paid for through the forced military inscription of Hebrew speakers, while Palestinians are generally excluded from the military. While most Palestinians can’t serve, so-called “Israeli Arabs” have the choice of serving, but it would, in fact, make no sense for Palestinians to serve their military, since humiliation, brutality, and outright terror against Palestinians is a part of every day duty for an Israeli soldier. Likewise, few blacks served in the Apartheid military of South Africa. In Israel, this is used to deny Palestinians their right to education.

Those Palestinians who are then driven out of what was once Palestine usually are not allowed to return, while Jews who have never set foot in Israel are granted automatic citizenship, with the exception of two Jewish supporters of Palestinians named Ralph Shoenman and Mya Shone, who have the honor of not being allowed into Israel because of their excellent writings. Those Palestinians who are forced from Israel are often bombed by Israel in their refugee camps or massacred in other ways. In the 1982 case of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, Palestinians were rounded up and systematically slaughtered in the thousands by Israeli troops and their Phalangist Militia allies.

As survivor Mrs. Sersawi testified in a Belgium appeals court on the Israeli governments war crimes:

"The Lebanese forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance of the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children climbed over bodies to get to this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on a loudspeaker shouting, 'give us your men.' We thought, 'thank God, they will save us.'

"We were told to walk up the road to the Kuwaiti Embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist Militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan (her husband with whom she was 3 months pregnant) and Faraj (her brother-in-law). It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to Cite Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went around saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11 AM. An hour later we were told to leave. But we stood outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men.

"Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4 PM an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you waiting for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again."

Sabra and Shatila are only one of the massacres of people done by the Israeli government in the past 54 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Today, all of the Palestinian towns of historic Palestine are either occupied by Israeli troops who are killing people, or surrounded by Israeli troops and tanks who are poised to attack. While Israeli troops are claiming that they are only killing combatants, Human Rights Watch has documented the following crimes in Jenin alone: murders of civilians including children, the old, and the disabled; summary executions; the bulldozing of houses with people in them; and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The cities of Ramallah and Jenin have been laid to waste by the Zionists just as the Nazis smashed the towns of Guarnica and Lidice in the name of collective punishment. Likewise, the heroic resistance of Palestinian fighters in the face of superior military force is reminiscent of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto and Vilna.

The Israeli offensive will not stop those willing to do suicide missions against civilians, attacks that are futile attempts to combat the genocide Palestinians face. The Israeli offensive does the opposite, in deepening the conditions that created suicide bombers in the first place. The anger created is by escalated Israeli murder is actually more likely to increase the number of tragic attacks on Hebrew speaking civilians. At the same time, Israel has not targeted the main base of the suicide bombers, Gaza, where Hamas is heavily organized. In fact, the murderous Israeli repression really isn't meant to stop attacks on Hebrew speaking civilians because these bombings by Hamas actually play right into the Zionist government's aims and objectives in dividing Arab and Hebrew speaking peoples, diverting international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and potentially pushing for a “final solution” against the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian Authority, who the Israeli government consistently blame for the attacks by Hamas.

Hamas is an anti-Semitic fundamentalist religious organization that killed 150 Israeli civilians through suicide bombings between 1994 and 1998 alone. From its beginnings as the Mujama in the 1970s to this day, Hamas does not face the same kind of repression as any other Palestinian group. In addition, Hamas reportedly receives $28 million dollars a year from another key U.S. ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. and the Saudi Arabian monarchy work together closely to systematically loot Saudi Arabia's oil resources for the profits of U.S. oil monopolies, while the vast majority of the Saudi people live in poverty. In addition, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Hamas worked together closely in the U.S. war drive to destroy the left progressive PDPA government that held power in Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992. This was a war where the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia gave billions of dollars of military aid to Osama Bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists of the Mujahedin who were waging a holy war against the advances in women's rights, including women's literacy, that were occurring under the PDPA government. Tactics of the Mujahedin included throwing acid in the faces of women liberated from the veil and murdering women for teaching little girls how to read and write. Fearing a Mujahedin government right on its border, and defending the PDPA government from U.S. aggression, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979. Although these Soviet troops were invited by the Afghan PDPA, U.S. propaganda called this a “Soviet invasion”.

An estimated 100,000 of the Islamic fundamentalists who fought in Afghanistan were recruited by the CIA outside of Afghanistan. Hamas participated in this activity. As John Cooley from ABC news pointed out on March 13th, 1996 in the International Herald Tribune:

"A key Hamas organizer was Abdallah Azzam. He was a tough, brilliant and charismatic Palestinian from Jordan. He supervised training for the CIA's Afghan guerrillas in Peshawar, Pakistan, where a car bomb killed him in 1989. In the earlier 1980s he toured the United States, recruiting Arab-Americans for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan."

Just as the United States used Hamas against the Afghani people and the leftist PDPA government, Israel has used the religious fundamentalists of Hamas as a club against the socialist and secular nationalist movements in Palestine that Hamas has violently opposed. It is those secular and socialist movements that Israel has seen as more of a threat in terms of winning the masses of people, including Hebrew speakers, over to positions of sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinians. Hamas's suicide bombers against civilians instead serve Zionist interests in driving a larger wedge between Palestinians and Hebrew speakers, people who will need to unite against their common oppressor and killer, the Israeli Zionist government.

Early Israeli support for Hamas included in 1978 the granting of Mujama charitable status in Gaza while other organizations, especially political organizations as Mujama was, could not get such status. In 1979, Israeli collusion with the Mujama movement set up the Islamic University of Gaza, whose anti-PLO and anti-socialist slogan was: "How can uncovered women and men with Beatle haircuts liberate our holy places?" Students who did not tow the Islamic line were disciplined through brutal beatings and sometimes had acid thrown in their faces. In addition, Mujama mobs were allowed to violently attack and burn down PLO controlled institutions at a time when other street demonstrations were not allowed or tightly controlled by the Israeli authorities.

In 1979 the Mujama movement burned the Palestinian Red Crescent Society's (PRC) building to the ground. In response, the PRC issued the following statement, "The tacit approval of the authorities, if not their actual connivance in what happened, was displayed in their attitude of non-interference. While they usually display great alertness to combating even peaceful demonstrations of young students within schools, here they stood indifferently watching a violently destructive demonstration march to its objectives."

In 1988 Hamas was formed out of Mujama. While PLO supporters were organizing mass demonstrations in the streets, Hamas was instead focusing on shooting Israeli soldiers. Despite this fact, Hamas had top-level meetings with the Israeli government while that same government would not even meet with the PLO. Milton Edwards in "Islamic Politics In Palestine" noted the relationship:

"The relationship between Hamas and the Israeli authorities was, however, at the strongest during the second year of the Intifada. The Israelis had been quick to extend legitimacy status to Hamas in an attempt to marginalize the PLO. Leaders of Hamas were regularly filmed at meetings with top-level Israeli officials and the message the Israelis were sending out was that they regarded Hamas as the type of people with whom they could work…

"In addition the Israelis continued turning a blind eye to large amounts of money coming into the country destined for Hamas coffers, while at the same time stopping the flow of PLO funds in support of the
Intifada."

In 1994, Hamas began its indiscriminate attacks on Hebrew speaking people through suicide bombings. Those suicide bombings had been stepped up by Hamas in the beginnings of the Intifada 2 uprising in September 2000, but then ended due to an agreement between Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Hamas. While this agreement was in effect world attention became focused on the gunning down of Palestinian children by Israeli sharp shooters on the West Bank. For the Zionist government this was becoming a public relations disaster.

Israeli Prime Minister Sharon needed a new provocation he could use as propaganda to escalate the war against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). To create this provocation he took action to end the truce between the P.A. and Hamas on ending the suicide bombings of civilians. On November 23rd Israeli security forces assassinated Hamas leader Mahmud Abu Hunud. On November 25th, 2001 right-wing Israeli journalist Alex Fishman accurately observed in the "Yediot Achronot", "Whoever gave the green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line."

Of course no one but Sharon could have given the green light for such an important operation. Sharon's provocation against the Hamas anti-Semites had its intended affect. Within days Hamas resumed attacks against Israeli civilians. In March a Hamas bomber killed 25 civilians in the Passover attack that was then used by Sharon as his excuse to attack the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority while leaving the Hamas stronghold of Gaza untouched.

The U.S. government's massive military support to the Zionist State and, to a lesser extent to the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchy, is responsible for the bloodshed in Palestine. The racist state of Israel currently receives 300,000 dollars per hour in U.S. military and economic aid. The F-16 bombers and Apache and Cobra helicopters used in the latest attacks are just some of the weapons used to kill Palestinians that are made in the United States.

Socialists stand for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and all of the crowned princes, sheiks, emirs, and Islamic fanatics of the Middle East. We understand that these U.S. policies are the policies of both the Democrat and Republican Parties. Imperialist policy isn't the result of some misunderstanding by these parties of the wealthy. Instead, the repressive and genocidal policies of U.S. imperialism flow from the drive for profits by the rapacious U.S. capitalists that rule America and much of the world. From this understanding, socialists know that the only way we will get a just foreign policy, fair treatment of workers and the poor, and sound ecological policies, is through a socialist revolution in the United States.

---Steve Argue, for Liberation News

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No to Rightist Ron Paul, How We Can Really End the War

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:31:45 GMT

"I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it." Socialist Anti-war Candidate Eugene Debs (who garnered nearly a million votes while he sat in prison for opposition to U.S. involvement in World War One).

"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action" wrote Ron Paul, who voted against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in Congress, the act that gave Blacks the right to vote, quote from his “Ron Paul Newsletter”.

No to NYC Indymedia Censorship, How We Can Really End the War

By STEVEN ARGUE

Claiming that only an alliance with Ron Paul conservatives can end the war, New York City Indymedia volunteers have allowed blatant slander against Liberation News and have censored attempts to respond to those lies. Among the slanders posted were accusations that Liberation News is opposed to Ron Paul because we support Hillary Clinton and her healthcare program. I tried posting the following response, but it was censored on the site:

Ron Paul supporter: “it's pointed out that yes Ron Paul is a racist but Stevies candidate Hillary is even worse.”

Steven Argue: “I don’t support Hillary Clinton. Never have, but you don’t listen. This is pure slander.”

They then repeat their slander that I support Hillary Clinton for her healthcare plan saying, “It's pointed out that Stevie is willing to sacrifice liberty for a bogus health care plan”

Steven Argue: “Hillary Clinton opposes both socialized medicine and single payer healthcare. She supports insurance company healthcare, the kind that is killing untold millions in the United States. This is one of many reasons I oppose her.”

“And no, I don't see Clinton as a first step towards socialized medicine. Her promise to force people to buy insurance has nothing in common with socialized medicine, nor partially socialized medicine (i.e. single payer). I’m clear about this in my article:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It, By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

“As for Ron Paul, he wants to privatize everything, including public education, Social Security, and Medicare, eliminate the Voting Rights Act and Roe V Wade in the name of "states rights", signed on to the "Marriage Protection Act", would eliminate every environmental and labor protection, etc. etc. etc. This is a prescription for the slavery of the majority to protect the “liberty” of a tiny handful of capitalists to exploit.

“I oppose both Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul. But I’ve already made that clear as being my position. These accusations are slanderous.”

Ron Paul supporter: “Then Stevie moves the goal posts again. Waaa. He's being censored.”

Steven Argue: “I repeatedly posted a response to the slander that I support Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, and the response is censored every time. I have no motive to make that up. I mentioned it because I wanted people to see my response. Frankly, I’m quite surprised it is happening. Let’s see if this one goes up.”

That response, as I feared, was also censored. Revealing the reasons behind the Ron Paul censorship at the site, the Ron Paul backers posted the following:

“Get off your sectarianism.

“What you don’t get is that there are only two ways we're going to end the occupation of Iraq:

“1.) A recession, and a bad one.

“2.) Convincing the vast majority of conservative Americans it's wrong. Ron Paul reaches these people. The guy with the Free Mumia shirt selling the "Socialist Worker" doesn't.

“To get anything done in a democracy you're going to have to work with people you don't agree with and people you might not even like. People in grown up countries do this all the time. They're called "coalitions".

“The Labor Party in Israel, for example, makes alliances with the ultra orthodox. The Liberal Democrats have made common cause with the Tories in the UK. The left made common cause with Vicente Fox to get the PRI out of power in Mexico.

“It's only in the puritan USA where everybody thinks you have to like all your political allies and agree with them on everything.”

Besides the fact that the majority of Americans already oppose the war; and besides the fact that these points show a total lack of understanding of the bourgeois nature of the coalitions in the countries mentioned; and besides showing a total lack of understanding of what it will take to end the war (I discuss this at the end of the article); New York City Indymedia’s lack of confidence in the ability of people to change has caused them to build a coalition with a capitalist politician who is a racist, homophobic, anti-worker, anti-environmental, bible thumping, sexist, anti-labor, anti-poor, free-market privatization fanatic. On top of that, they censor the left in order to achieve that coalition.

While a Ron Paul presidency would likely end the war, at what price would this come?

Ron Paul uses the term liberty a lot, so let’s take a look at what he means by liberty.

The liberty Ron Paul demands is:

The liberty of the capitalists to exploit without labor laws and environmental protections;

The "state’s right” to prevent Blacks from voting without the interference of the Voting Rights Act (voted against its renewal in Congress);

The "states right" to ban abortions without the interference of Roe v Wade;

The freedom of the government to deny same-sex rights (was an original sponsor of the "Marriage Protection Act");

The freedom of children not to attend schools (would abolish public education);

The freedom of the elderly and disabled to starve (would abolish Social Security);

The freedom of the sick to die (would abolish Medicare);

The freedom of the U.S. to destroy the planet without even the most basic limits on carbon emissions (opposes signing on to Kyoto and all other carbon limitations);

This is, in short, the liberty of a wealthy minority to make their money from the exploitation of labor and the environment with zero interference from labor laws, environmental laws, and the IRS. While his program is liberty for a minority of rich white heterosexual males, it is slavery for the majority.

Simply put, Ron Paul’s promises to end the war are not enough when one looks at the fact that he would eliminate two centuries of hard fought social progress in the United States.

Some of the anti-war backers of Ron Paul argue that we don’t have to worry about these things because Ron Paul will never be elected. They think that backing his campaign is a way to win over his supporters. What is clear is that such arguments could only come from people who are utterly lost and rudderless, which leaves unclear the question of what they are winning Ron Paul supporters over to. They are supporting a candidate whose program is George Wallace on crack cocaine! Yet, the ultimate absurdity is the fact that they are backing a candidate whose most reassuring feature is that he won’t get elected! Is this point lost on these people? And is the chance that their support may help him get elected a chance they really want to take? Nobody thought that third party candidate Jesse (the body) Ventura would get elected in Minnesota either, but he was, and as soon as he was elected he discarded his libertarian values on drug legalization and prostitution and instead proceeded to carrying out attacks on labor and carrying out disastrous cuts in education and other social spending.

Others argue that if Ron Paul is elected, he will easily be able to pull the troops out of Iraq, but congress will block him on the other issues. There is no doubt that they would block parts of Ron Paul’s program in order to prevent the social unrest such measures would cause, but with the ruling class’s desire to step up the exploitation of labor and the environment through eliminating regulation and through privatization, there can be little doubt that if he is able to maintain his presidency without being shot, aspects of Ron Paul’s domestic program would be implemented.

Today, in the United States we have two rightwing capitalist parties that rule. The activists who run New York Indymedia are floating around utterly lost and rudderless. On the one hand, their anarchist philosophy prohibits them from putting forward their own leadership or supporting socialist candidates; and on the other hand, they are stuck in the “real politic” of supporting “lesser evil” capitalist politicians. It is these characteristics that made them susceptible to being swept up on the Ron Paul band wagon. Despite their “libertarian” values of “freedom”, they have now taken this to the point where they are even willing to censor critics of Ron Paul on their website.

While Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate opposed to the war, is not worth supporting, the front running Democrats are also very bad. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, are all pro-war. Both Edwards and Clinton voted for the war. Obama supporters claim that Obama never supported the war. While Obama was not yet in the Senate at the time of the Iraq war vote, Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all voted for war appropriations. This puts them all in the position of having supported the war. Over a million Iraqis are dead due to the U.S. invasion and occupation, and billions of dollars have been squandered. Obama, by helping pay for the war, has his hands in this mass murder just as Clinton and Edwards do.

Obama’s Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007 supposedly would have begun troop withdrawal in May 2007. Yet, it didn't call for full nor immediate withdrawal. In addition, under the bill, the withdrawal could be halted if the Iraqi government met a number of criteria laid out by the Bush administration. These included a broad number of things such as changes in the use of oil revenue, government reforms, an end to sectarian violence, and other economic and reconstruction criteria. In Obama’s bill we have a crystal ball into the future. The excuses laid out in the bill will be heard once again as Obama, Clinton, or Edwards explain why they are keeping the troops in Iraq for their entire presidency; that is unless other actions are taken by the people to stop the war.

This brings us to the fundamental question of how to stop the war. If we are to listen to the Ron Paul censors / supporters at NYC Indymedia the only thing we can do to stop the war is support Ron Paul or hope for (pray for?) economic collapse. Yet, this ignores other less damaging possibilities. These include the troops refusing to fight, a general strike, strikes against the movement of war materials, or socialist revolution.

1. The troops refusing to fight. This worked in the struggle to end the U.S. aggression against Vietnam. It was the socialist movement who were the primary organizers of the anti-Vietnam War movement. That movement, immediately after the government’s murders at Kent State in May 1970 had 8 million students out on strike, and some Universities, such a Berkley, were taken over by students and faculty as anti-war universities. After May 1970, the majority of those drafted were already opposed to the war before they got to Vietnam. Refusal to fight was widespread, and the fragging of pro-war officers was common. Nixon could not continue to wage a war with soldiers who refused to fight. This, along with the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese, brought an end to the war in Vietnam.

Troops refusing to fight also helped bring an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, and helped bring down two pro-war governments in 1917.

2. A general strike or strikes against the movement of war materials. Strikes with such political demands have a long history of success. France has many good social programs because the workers there were willing to shut down their country to achieve them; and they are still willing to do the same to protect those hard fought gains.

3. Socialist revolution. The October Russian Revolution achieved an end to Russian involvement in the First World War. This was a good thing, despite the undemocratic nature of the revolution. Learning from those lessons, Liberation News opposes the dictatorial system of one party rule and raises the banner of revolutionary democratic socialism, while at the same time learning from many of the revolutionary strategies of Lenin and Trotsky.

Protests, pickets, information distribution, building a socialist movement, and answering pro-Ron Paul and pro-Obama-Clinton-Edwards propaganda all help towards building the momentum needed in achieving the kinds of actions that can end the war. Putting support behind Ron Paul only helps an extreme rightwing movement achieve the mantel of leadership for an anti-war sentiment that already represents majority public opinion. In addition, backing a guy like Ron Paul who just crossed a picket line to appear on Jay Lenno’s “Tonight Show” destroys the anti-war strategy of reaching out to the working class, as does backing a racist candidate like Ron Paul hurt the ability to reach out to the multi-racial working class.

No to the Democrats and Republicans!

U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

No to Insurance Company Healthcare, For Socialized Medicine!

Save the Planet, Curb Carbon Emissions Now!

Vote Socialist, Build the Labor Movement, Build the Anti-War Movement, Build the Socialist Movement.

[Note, small changes were made to the response that was censored at NYC Indymedia to make it more readable within the format of this article. Those wishing to see the original version will be given it upon request. Likewise, anyone wishing further sources will be provided them upon request]

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posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

The Ron Paul “Revolution”, an Extreme Rightwing Threat

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:35:14 GMT

The Ron Paul “Revolution”, an Extreme Rightwing Threat

By STEVEN ARGUE

For the most part the Iowa caucuses were business as usual for the Democrat and Republican Parties. Among the Democrats, “Anti-war” and “pro-single payer health care” Democrat Dennis Kucinich put his support behind pro-war anti--single payer health care, Barrack Obama. Yet on the far right, anti-war Libertarian and Republican Ron Paul gained a stunning 10% of the vote.

Seeing the failure of the Democrats to deliver a candidate worth supporting; some left leaning individuals have been suggesting support to Ron Paul. One is anti-war Vietnam veteran Stan Goff, who suggested in his January 4, 2008 article ”Monkey Wrenching the System, Ron Paul’s Revolution” that people vote in the primaries for Ron Paul, switching party registration right away if they live in a state where such a move is necessary to vote in the Republican primaries.

At the root of the Ron Paul "revolution" is the dismantling of Social Security and the Department of Education as well as other basic social programs, and the elimination of worker and environmental protections. Advances like single payer health care? No way. Ron Paul's message is that you need to take care of yourself, and that there shouldn't be such government programs, nor such interference with private profit. While he puts forward reasons for not supporting going to war abroad, his domestic policies would ignite civil war at home.

In addition to pretending he's against all government, he's for outlawing abortion and supports the continued ban on same-sex marriage. He was one of the original co-sponsors of the "Marriage Protection Act".

He's also a religious extremist who thinks that creationism should be taught in the schools.

On race, Ron Paul was one of 33 Congress members to vote against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, an act that was first passed to give Blacks in the south the right to vote. On a similar note, he says the Civil Rights Act violates the Constitution and impedes on individual liberties. Speaking of Blacks in Washington DC he states in campaign literature, "95 percent of African Americans in are semi-criminal or entirely criminal".

No wonder the American Nazi Party has close relations with him (see letter from Nazi Commander Bill White below). In addition, Ron Paul has the support of other white supremacists such as David Duke, and has knowingly taken donations from former KKK Grand Wizard Don Black.

Hell would freeze over before I'd support Ron Paul. And being an atheist; that will be a long time.

There are plenty of candidates to the left of the Democrats worth considering supporting who oppose the war, would preserve public education and Social Security, who would provide single payer or socialized medicine, and who aren’t raving racist, homophobic, and sexist “Libertarian” fanatics. Why not look at them rather than someone from the loony right?

I discuss some of the campaigns that may be worth supporting in the following article:

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States,
And the Struggle to Achieve It
By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/02/18469739.php

Or here is a different version of the same article:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2008/01/93820.html

*****************
American Nazi Party Chief says Ron Paul is one of us

Bill White, commander of the American National Socialist Worker’s Party, aka The American Nazi Party, wrote the following on the Nazi Vanguard News Network:

Comrades:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn’t see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul’s extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a “small ideology” and claim white activists are “wasting their money” trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don’t know that it is necessarily good for Paul to “expose” this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous — and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

*********
Poor Bill White. He’s having trouble with his brand of racism, anti-Semitism, mass extermination, and genocide not being "in fashion". But hey, you've got to thank the knuckleheaded Nazi for confirming our suspicions on Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan! -Steven Argue

Liberation News
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posted in Communist Left - 3 replies

When they push you, YOU PUSH BACK.

Poster_Boy — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:44:44 GMT

Hi, this is a cross-post from the Politics tribe. I thought it would be relevant here.

<<I was kind of negatively surprised to hear Ron Pauls statements on evolution..

Another reason i would not vote for this guy..

Ron Paul: I don't believe in evolution >>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw

What a freaking headcase!

Actually, we had some political candidates in Canada who believed in Creationism...and that man walked with the dinosaurs. These politicians were mocked and jeered by everyone who came in contact with them. The head of the Conservative Party Stockwell Day for instance has his campaign bus nicknamed 'Prayer Force one', and the MEDIA (cameramen, anchormen, soundmen) used to mock him by whistling the 'Flintstones' theme out loud whenever they were in his presence. Imagine this for a moment. A reporter asks you a question and your answer is drowned out by twenty people whistling simultaneously as the reporter just grins. Not just any twenty people, but the very same News crew covering your election campaign. This was broadcast live! No one lost their jobs over it either. Since most people who saw the news live thought that this was hilarious, the opposition quickly scored points with the voters when they brought in little Fred and Barney dolls to cabinet meetings with them.

Seriously, if Americans see no problem with a President who thinks that humans walked with dinosaurs and that the planet is only ten thousand years old, then all I can say is good luck with your Science programs and welcome to the new middle ages. The twenty-first century is starting to look more like the twelfth century than the twentieth!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'd like to see more Americans doing this in their own country. Whistling the theme to the Flintstones that is.

Whenever someone mentions that they believe in 'Creationism' or 'Intelligent design', start whistling the theme to the Flintstones very loudly until they shut up and leave.

If you see any Presidential candidate on TV saying that he doesn't believe in evolution, start whistling the theme to the Flintstones.

Tell all your friends to do the same thing as well. Go to a bar and do this publicly. They don't listen to you, so why should you listen to them?

DROWN THEM OUT! !

'Intelligent design' is not a Theory, it's an ideology. it wasn't developed by observation and experimentation, but by a group of people with an agenda cherry-picking things that suit them. What is their agenda? To win the battle for your mind. YOUR MIND is all you really have. Don't let these people try and take it from you, or take it from anyone else.

When they push you, YOU PUSH BACK.

After all, when the Creationists are attacking the Theory of Evolution, they are in essence attacking Science itself! Does one really need to re-enact the Scopes trial of 1925 every time some dim-wit tries to shove a Bible down everyone's throats? It's not open to debate! Ever wonder why there are so many foreign scientists working in the United States right now? It's because society is being dumbed down, and replacing the Theory of Evolution with Creationism in public schools and high schools is not only a violation of the First Amendment, it's the virtual equivalent to a national lobotomy. How can one expect American students to possibly excel in Science and technology when they reject the very basis of what has influenced the field of biology, turning the clock back to 1859?

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States, and the Struggle to Achieve It

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:37:42 GMT

The Case for Socialized Medicine in the United States,
and the Struggle to Achieve It

By Steven Argue

As someone without healthcare, I support the idea of socialized medicine for the United States. Socialized medicine will bring healthcare to everyone. Besides legitimate self-interest, my personal position comes from being an advocate for social justice with a vision of an egalitarian society. As such, I not only see universal access to healthcare as a basic human right, I also see that socialized healthcare will mitigate some of the racial and class inequalities in our society. In addition, socialized medicine is cheaper than the costs of current system of for-profit capitalist healthcare. It also looses the profit motive of insurance companies to deny needed procedures. From this knowledge, and these personal convictions, I am strongly in favor of socialized healthcare in the United States like that established in Europe as well as established in Cuba with the 1959 revolution. Short of a fully socialized healthcare system I see that the single payer system (i.e. socialized health insurance run by the government), like in Canada, would be a significant step forward for the United States.

In the United States there’s a lot of confusion on terminology. With a system of socialized medicine hospitals are directly owned by the government and doctors are government employees. It’s a universal system where everyone is covered and all health care is paid for by the government. Under a single payer health care plan, health care is universal and paid for by the government, but it is a system still largely based on private hospitals and private physicians.

Two main arguments are encountered when discussing socialized medicine. One argument is that it will cost too much. The second argument is that socialized medicine doesn’t work to provide adequate healthcare. Neither argument stands up to scrutiny.
Socialized medicine and single payer medicine actually cost less than the United State’s current for profit capitalist health care system. Both statistics and common sense back this up.

According to statistics from 2003, the United States spends $5,711 per capita per year for health care while Canada spends about half of that, $2,998 per capita per year (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007). In fact, the costs per capita are much cheaper in every other developed country with some form of socialized healthcare. In other examples Sweden spends $2,745, Germany $2,983, and the United Kingdom $2,317 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007). In addition, Cuba , with their well known socialized healthcare system, spent only $251 per capita on healthcare in 2006 (United Nations World Health Organization, 2006).

The reason socialized insurance is much cheaper and more efficient than private health insurance is because single payer eliminates the health insurance racket with all of its waste in capitalist profits, paperwork, and overpaid CEOs. In addition, such insurance practices as routinely denying needed medical procedures to keep profits up are eliminated, thus reducing capitalism as being the cause of death.

Socialized healthcare does work. It is working very well in Cuba. Cuban life expectancy in 2006 was 77.6 years, while the life expectancy of the United States for that same year was slightly less, 77.5 years (United Nations Development Program, 2006). It is interesting that poor Cuba with a history of poverty before their 1959 socialist revolution, and a devastating U.S. imposed economic blockade since, is able to provide good healthcare for everyone through socialized medicine. Cuba, unlike the United States, does not let people die in the emergency rooms without treatment, turn sick people away from receiving healthcare because they lack insurance, or allow insurance companies to decide, based on profit motive, whether the insured actually receive the care they paid for and need. The Cubans have done this by taking the profit out of illness and injury and providing healthcare as a basic human right.

Canada, like Cuba, has a higher life expectancy than the United States. In 2004 the life expectancy of Canada hit 80.2 years (Statistics Canada, 2004). With Canada’s socialized health insurance system, like Cuba’s socialized medical system, every single person is covered. In the United States 45.8 million Americans do not have health insurance (U.S. Department of Health and human Services, 2005).

On another key indicator of health, infant mortality, the United States is also nearly the worst in the developed world, only worse than the recently turned capitalist country of Latvia (Green, 2006). The infant mortality rate in the United States in 2002 was 7.0 deaths before the age of one per every 1,000 live births (Center for Disease Control, 2005). In comparison, other advanced countries with forms of socialized medicine and socialized health insurance have lower infant mortality. This includes rates per thousand births in Japan of 3.2, Germany with 4.4, Italy with 4.5, France with 4.6, and the United Kingdom with 5.6 (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003).

Cuba, with their system of socialized medicine has an infant mortality rate of 6.2 per thousand live births, a rate much lower the United States rate of 7.0 per every thousand live births (BBC News, 2002). This is also lower than every other Latin American country (BBC News, 2002).

The only other country in the Americas with an infant mortality lower than Cuba is Canada with their system of socialized health insurance. The Canadian infant mortality rate in the year 2000 was 5.3 (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003).

In addition, a United Nations report on the status of Native Americans in Canada has credited Canada’s relatively recently established socialized health insurance system with drastically reducing an extremely high infant mortality among Native Americans (United Nations, 1993). In 1979, that death rate for Canadian Native Americans was 27.6 per thousand live births, but by 1999 it had dropped to 8.0 deaths per thousand live births (Treasury Board of Canada, 2003). These improvements coincide with Canada’s passage of the Canada Health Act in 1984 that brought their socialized insurance system to the entire country at that time (Health Canada, 2002).

For Blacks in the United States between 1995 and 2002, the infant mortality rate was 13.9, more than double the rate of 5.9 for whites in the same time period (Center for Disease Control, 2005). Canadian statistics are a strong indication that a socialized insurance system in the United States could both decrease the infant mortality rate of the general population and dramatically decrease the infant mortality of oppressed and impoverished minorities such as Blacks, as it did for Canadian Native Americans.

The statistics show that socialized medicine is cheaper, saves lives, and helps alleviate class and racial inequalities in healthcare.

Prospects for Socialized and Single Payer Medicine

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has declared, "It's time to provide quality affordable health care for every American, and I intend to be the president who accomplishes that goal finally for our country" (CNN.com). This is the same promise that Bill Clinton made when he ran for office in 1992.

After being elected, in Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union address, he said, “And on any given day, over 37 million Americans -- most of them working people and their little children -- have no health insurance at all.” Yet, despite Bill Clinton’s campaign promise of universal health care, his defeated proposal to congress would not have provided health care to every American, nor did it address the other fundamental problems of private health insurance. After his health care proposal was defeated, Clinton dropped the issue. In fact, the Bill Clinton administration was opposed to a bill for single payer health care introduced by Wellstone, Conyers, and Mcdermott that actually would have provided universal health care. By the time Bill Clinton left office, an additional three million more Americans were uninsured.

Today Republican candidate Mitt Romney has declared of Hillary Clinton’s promised health care plan, “It’s a European-style socialized medicine plan, that’s where it leads–and that’s the wrong direction for America” (Shulte).

Yet, unfortunately, Clinton’s plan has nothing in common with socialized medicine, neither of the European variety, nor the Canadian single payer. Her plan is to keep the broken and expensive capitalist system of health care, a system that keeps the insurance industry in charge of life and death questions of whether or not we receive health care when we need it.

In addition, the Clinton plan would make the purchase of health insurance by America’s uninsured mandatory for those who do not get insurance from their employer and who do not qualify for government assistance. Yet, the problem for America’s nearly 50 million uninsured is not that we don’t want to have insurance, the problem is that we can’t afford it. Clinton’s plan of making us criminals for not purchasing health insurance will not resolve this fundamental problem.

By making the purchase of health insurance mandatory Clinton makes the false claim that hers is a plan for universal health insurance as compared to the plan of Obama. Neither would provide universal health care. John Edwards has taken the absurdity of forced insurance purchases one step further, detailing a plan that would include the necessity of showing proof of health insurance at the time of paying taxes, with penalties for those who do not provide that proof.

In a similar fashion as Mitt Romney, Republican contender Rudolph Giuliani has extended false accusations of socialized medicine to other Democratic hopefuls stating, “Whether it’s HillaryCare or ObamaCare or EdwardsCare, the idea that it’s not socialized medicine is a trick. It’s a massive growth of government control of medicine” (Rovner).

The truth, however, is that the only presidential candidates of the Democrat and Republican Party that are for single payer health care are Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and none are for full socialized medicine. The other major candidates, who oppose single payer, enjoy massive contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

In addition to being excluded from money, the Kucinich and Gravel campaigns have also been excluded from debates. Most recently, for the 2008 election, CNN and the Des Moines Register made the decision to exclude both Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel from a key debate in Iowa. Yet Biden and Dodd, who are behind Kucinich in the national polls, but who reject single payer health care, were allowed into the debate. This kind of undemocratic shenanigan is to be expected of CNN, a corporate media source that was forced to publicly apologize for a number of lies they told about Michael Moore’s pro-socialized medicine film “Sicko”.

While Kucinich has alienated the corporate power structure with his stand for single payer health care, he has also alienated much of his natural base by voting for Bush’s “War on Terror”, voting for the U.S. travel ban against Cuba, and by voting against Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In 2001 Kucinich voted in favor of the US travel ban against Cuba. The travel ban does not allow U.S. citizens to spend any money in Cuba, basically making travel to Cuba illegal. It is under the travel ban that Michael Moore has been harassed by the U.S. government for bringing sick 9/11 rescue workers, who were unable to receive medical treatment in the United States, for medical treatment in Cuba. The United States has had hostile relations with Cuba ever since the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship, nationalized the United Fruit Company owned by the Rockefeller family, ended Jim Crow style racist segregation, and began providing free socialized health care and education.

In contrast to Kucinich’s support for U.S. measures against Cuba, Mumia Abu-Jamal recognizes the gains Cuba has made in areas such as health care. Of the U.S. and Cuban health care systems, Mumia Abu-Jamal stated May 2nd, 2003:

“What about the human right to health care? In the US, you can obtain excellent health care if you can afford it. Cuba, meanwhile, boasts the largest number of doctors per capita on earth. They provide medical care to people all around the world. Indeed, there are more Cuban doctors working in other countries than the UN’s World Heath Organization. Millions of men, women and children in this country have no medical insurance and no real prospect for decent medical care.” (Abu-Jamal 5/2/03)

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States whose trial, according to Amnesty International, was not fair and “did not comply with international justice standards” (Amnesty International). Yet, in 2006 Kucinich voted to condemn the French City of St. Denis for naming a street after Mumia. The resolution boldly proclaimed Mumia’s guilt, despite international recognition of the injustice dished out to Mumia, and despite the fact that the courts are still reviewing the case. Despite the injustice represented by this resolution and despite 31 members of Congress voting against it, Kucinich voted for it.

Showing a similar lack of support for the needs of the people, Kucinich voted for Bush’s so-called “War on Terror”. This was a vote that effectively gave Bush the power to invade any country at any time. That vote could have been used for anything, and was used by Bush to invade Afghanistan. Likewise, despite pretending to be a peace candidate, Kucinich’s calls for a strong and efficient military do not address the fact that the United States is the most aggressive and dangerous nation in the world.

The tremendous lack of judgment on these three votes alone, along with Kucinich’s promotion of the pro-war, anti-single payer health care, and corporate controlled Democrat Party, have alienated the left from Kucinich’s campaign.

Presidential candidate Mike Gravel doesn’t have a recent voting record, but was actively opposed to the Vietnam War in Congress, voting to cut off funding for the war, and helping to release the Pentagon Papers that exposed many wrong doings by the U.S. government in Vietnam. On the issue of health care, Gravel states on his website that he proposes “a universal healthcare system that provides equal medical services to all citizens, paid for by a retail sales tax (a portion of the Progressive Fair tax)” (Gravel website). Yet, sales taxes are not fair taxes. They are regressive taxes that charge the poor a much higher percentage of their income than they charge the rich. While it is true that the rich are not paying their fair share under the current tax system, Gravel’s proposal is even worse.

Sadly for those who think solutions could come from the Democrat Party, Kucinich and Gravel are the best the Democrat Party could produce.

While the mainstream of the American political establishment rejects any form of socialized medicine, all political parties to the left of the Democrats and Republicans support some form of socialized medicine. This is true from the Green Party and Reconstruction Party to the various socialist parties who run candidates, including the Peace and Freedom Party, Socialist Action, Socialist Party, Workers World Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, and Socialist Equality Party.

Breaking from the pro-war anti-health care Democrat Party is former Georgia Democratic Congressperson Cynthia McKinney. In a video news release declaring her candidacy for president she says, “The Democrat is no different from their Republican counterparts, eat out of the hands of corrupt lobbyists and feed at the same corporate tough” (McKinney). McKinney is running for president on the Reconstruction Party ticket as well as in the Green Party primaries.

On health care McKinney states, "I've supported every universal single payer health care plan. She goes on to state, “People who rail against `socialized medicine' in Canada and the UK have to explain why life expectancy is longer in Canada and the UK, why infant mortality is lower in Canada and the UK" (Deeth). McKinney further denounces the war in Iraq stating that the money being squandered could be better used on social programs such as rebuilding New Orleans, child nutrition, and health care, stating in part, “one billion dollars a day can provide medical care for the 47 million Americans who don’t have health insurance” (McKinney).

Another Green Party candidate, Kent Mesplay, declares on his website:

“Medical attention is a human right not yet recognized by the United States government. Nearly every other industrialized country on the planet has National Health Care. We are tied with South Africa for last place. In the same manner that we have a socialized military that at best provides for some aspects of our physical security, single payer health insurance is necessary to ensure that all people within our borders receive at least a basic level of medical and dental care.” (Mesplay).

While this may be a good position on single payer health care, it ignores the fact that the U.S. military does not provide physical security to the people of the United States, but is instead used to kill and terrorize the people of the world for the security of the profits of American corporations.

Also supporting single payer health care, Green Party candidate Kat Swift states:

“Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and other prominent Democrats are the greatest obstacle to universal health coverage. Except for a few mavericks like Rep. John Conyers [D-Mich.], who has regularly introduced single-payer bills, Democrats have joined Republicans in favoring HMO and insurance corporations over guaranteed publicly-financed quality health care for every American. It's a safe bet that the 2008 Democratic nominee will -- like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry before them -- follow the same pattern.”

Likewise, Green Party candidate Jared Ball, a Black free-lance journalist and college professor who calls for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and all political prisoners states, “Medicine for profit cannot be sustained as a model of managing health care for any progressive society” (Ball).

To the left of the Green Party is Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther Party member and activist for social programs for the poor and for prison reform. On health care she declares herself for, “Full and free health care for everyone, as exists in most civilized countries.”

Elaine Brown was a candidate for nomination as Green Party candidate for president until, on December 28, 2007, she broke with the Green Party, pointing out it was a capitalist Party and accusing the Green Party of racism. In her public statement Brown declared, "In effect, the present Green Party leadership promotes a kinder, gentler capitalism, a moderated racism, an environmentally-sustainable globalism, which I cannot support." On racism in the party she declared she intended to use her campaign “to bring large numbers of blacks and browns into the Party, particularly from the hood and the barrio” but that the Green Party “hierarchy seemed utterly fearful of the prospect of a massive influx of blacks and browns into the Green Party". Brown has given no indication that she now intends to continue her run as a candidate to the left of the Greens.

To the left of the Green Party are socialist candidates that call for full socialized medicine, like in Europe and Cuba, but who also see that single payer health care would be a step forward. These include likely Socialist Equality Party candidate Bill Van Auken, who calls for full socialized medicine, and says of the Canadian Single Payer system as an imperfect form of “socialized medicine”.

Likewise Peace and Freedom Party candidate and Socialist Party USA nominee for vice president, Stewart Alexander states,

“I favor a fully socialized medical care system, with as a first step a single-payer system similar to Medicare, but covering people of all ages. I favor eliminating the "co-pays" that are such a burden, and keep people from seeking needed care. We should take the profit out of the health-care system, and fully fund it. (The money now spent on health care in the USA is about twice as much per person as is spent in Western Europe, with less effective delivery of care. No additional money would actually be needed, but taxes on the wealthy few should be used initially to help fund improvements.) Eventually, I favor a fully-socialized system, funded from the surplus of the socialized economy, with an emphasis on prevention and public health.” (Alexander)

Also advocating full socialized medicine is Socialist Party USA nominee and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Brian Moore. In the California Voters Guide he states that he would, “establish guaranteed minimum income, housing and socialized healthcare for all”.

Not mentioning socialized medicine, but supporting single payer, Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Gloria La Riva states, “The three main focuses of my campaign will be to oppose the racist attacks on immigrants; to propose a massive jobs program and increased social spending as an alternative to anti-crime hysteria and new prisons; and to give strong support for Single Payer Healthcare” (La Riva).

While generally being a good activist party, a strong concern among many on the left towards the Party for Socialism and Liberation is their uncritical support for undemocratic communist models, a problem that will cause many to instead vote for non-Stalinist candidates such as Stewart Alexander or Brian Moore in the Peace and Freedom Party primaries, or for other anti-Stalinist socialist parties that may run candidates such as the Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Action, or the Freedom Socialist Party.

In contrast to some of the anti-democratic positions of Gloria La Riva’s party, presidential candidate Stewart Alexander states,

“Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production, but I like to be more specific. There are, have been, and can be many forms of socialism, but I believe that the best, strongest and most beneficial form of socialism, the kind of socialism I personally work for, is common ownership of the economy coupled with its democratic control by working people.” (Alexander)

Obviously, there are clear alternatives to the capitalist Democrat and Republican Parties that are working hard to promote a workers agenda that includes either fully socialized medicine or single payer healthcare. Yet, almost all of the unions of the United States remain committed to endorsing and financing Democrats and only Democrats in elections. A good number of unions, such as the SEIU, even endorse Democrats that are opposed to single payer health care and help fund the same campaigns that are being funded by the big insurance companies. These endorsements of the anti-worker politicians of the Democrat Party are a blatant violation of the interests of the membership. Such endorsements hurt attempts at building alternative parties that represent workers interests, and hurt the ability of workers to protest and strike against such politicians that are not representing our interests. Some other unions, such as the California Nurses Association, take the stand of only endorsing candidates who support single payer health care. This is a step forward, but many on the left see that a full break by labor from the corporate controlled Democrat Party will be necessary.

Ultimately, what is needed is the building of a spirit of resistance among workers, the unemployed, and students, where we no longer passively agree to politicians and union leaders who pretend to be lesser evils, but are rarely even that. We must challenge and change the organizations we are part of, and when that fails, break away and build new ones. Most importantly, we must fully resurrect the use of political strikes and demonstrations to force the bosses and government to give us what we need, as is often done in countries with socialized medicine such as France. It is this kind of resistance that won socialized healthcare in Europe after the Second World War, and it will be this that will bring socialized medicine to the United States.

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
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References:

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. "Mumia 5/2/03 Taped Commentary on Cuba." Radio4all and Prisonradio.org. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.iacenter.org/polprisoners/maj_cuba03.htm. Internet.

Alexander, Stewart. “Presidential Candidate Questionnaire” Socialist National Committee, Socialist Party. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://vote-socialist.org/p08/questionnaires/alexander.html. Internet.

Ball, Jared. “Healthcare.” Jared Ball for President Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.jaredball.com/?cat=12. Internet.

“Clinton Unveils Mandatory Health Insurance Program” CNN.com. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/17/health.care/index.html. Internet.

“Concluding observations of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Canada”. 6 March, 1993. United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Jt9OTyVZWTYJ:www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/280a3783f5a26d09c12563e80058b47e%3FOpendocument+infant+mortality+ canada +%22united+nations%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=16&gl=us. Internet.

“Cuba Records Lowest Infant Mortality Rate”. BBC News. 3 January, 2002. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1739773.stm. Internet.

Deeth, John. "Cynthia McKinney Brings Green Campaign to Iowa City." Iowa Independent. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.iowaindependent.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=3D80FCACF0E1EC162CC087F14BCF9BC5?diaryId=1610. Internet.

Green, Jeff. “U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says”. 10 May, 2006. CNN.Com. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/parenting/05/08/mothers.index/index.html. Internet.

Health Canada, Government of Canada. 25 November, 2002. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/nr-cp/2002/2002_care-soinsbk4_e.html. Internet.

“How Mike Stands on the Issues.” Mike Gravel ’08 Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.gravel2008.us/issues. Internet.

“Human Development Report”. 2006. United Nations World Health Organization. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/52.html. Internet.

La Riva, Gloria. “Gloria La Riva for Governor”. California Online Voting Guide. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://calvoter.org/archive/94general/cand/governor/lari/larispeech3.html. Internet.

Mesplay, Kent. “Healthcare”. Kent Mesplay for President. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.mesplay.org/healthcare.html. Internet.

McKinney, Cynthia. “Cynthia McKinney Announces Campaign for Presidency” McKinney for President 2008 Website. Accessed 2 January, 2008. Available from: http://www.runcynthiarun.org/node/25. Internet.

“Overview of the Uninsured in The United States, An Analysis of the 2005 Current Population Survey”. 22 September 2005. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/05/uninsured-cps/index.htm. Internet.

“Presidents Report, Canada’s Performance 2003”. 2003. Treasury Board of Canada. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/report/govrev/03/cp-rc-PR_e.asp?printable=True. Internet.

“Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Infant Mortality --- United States, 1995-2002”. 10 June 2005. MMWR Weekly. Center for Disease Control. Accessed 26 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5422a1.htm. Internet.

Rovner, Julie. “Socialized Medicine Belittled on Campaign Trail.” 6 December, 2007. NPR Morning Edition. Available from Physicians for a National Health Program: http://www.pnhp.org/news/2007/december/socialized_medicine_.php. Internet.

Shulte, Elizabeth. "Hillary Clinton’s First Health Care Non-Reform." 27 September, 2007. Dissident Voice. Available from: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/09/hillary-clintons-first-health-care-non-reform/. Internet.

“Snapshots: Healthcare Costs”. Kaiser Family Foundation. January 2007. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm. Internet.

“Statistics Canada”. 20 December, 2006. The Daily. Accessed 23 September, 2007. Available from: http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061220/d061220b.htm. Internet.

“USA: Mumia Abu-Jamal -- Overturning of death sentence falls short of full justice” 19 December, 2001. Amnesty International. Available from: http://www.amnesty.org/en/alfresco_asset/9e6893af-a3f9-11dc-9d08-f145a8145d2b/amr511832001en.html. Internet.

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posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

U.S. Backed Turkish Government Bombing Iraqi Kurds

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:55:02 GMT

With the genocidal U.S. backed Turkish government now bombing Iraqi Kurds, I thought it would be a good idea to repost my following article. -Steven Argue

Kurdish Culture, Repression, Women’s Rights, and Resistance

By Steven Argue

The Kurdish people number at an estimated at 25-30 million people. They live in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwest of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, and in Armenia. They also have a large émigré population in Western Europe. With 4-5 million people and 15-20% of the population the Kurds are the largest non-Arab minority in Iraq (CIA Iraq, 2007). They are also the largest non-Turkish minority in Turkey comprising 20% of the population (CIA Turkey, 2007). The Kurdish speaking people are 9% of the Iranian population (CIA Iran, 2007). In Syria, the Kurds are the largest minority with about 1.75 million people comprising about 10% of the population (Lowe 2006). The rise of nationalist xenophobia and war in Armenia after the fall of the Soviet Union has pushed most Kurds out of Armenia, but around 30,000 Yezidi Kurds remain comprising about 1% of the population (CIA Armenia, 2007).

The language of the Kurds, called Kurdish, is distinct from the Persian of Iran, the Arabic of Iraq and Syria, and the Turkish of Turkey. Thus the common language of the Kurds both separates them from the dominant cultures in the nation-states where they live and unites the Kurdish people as a nationality without a nation-state.

While being distinct the Kurdish language is most closely related to Persian, yet the origins of the varied Kurdish culture is partially influenced by the absorption of characteristics of the differing nationalities and cultures that have historically surrounded them.

In terms of religion the Kurdish people are mostly Muslim with both Shia (primarily of the Alevi sect), Sunni (primarily Shafi’i). There is also a large Sufi influence among many Kurdish Muslims, often cited as a moderating influence on Islamic fundamentalism. A small number of Kurds are also Yezidi Muslims and Christians. The Kurds also have a history that has included secular and atheist political leaderships.

The differing Kurdish religious identities have, at times, been a political factor both in divisions among the Kurdish people and in divisions, which distinguish them from the dominant nationalities. The strong Kurdish national identity is based on mutual language and a history of oppression. These factors hold the Kurds together as a people.

For the Kurdish people outrageous acts of oppression in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, and Syria have included mass murder, suppression of language rights, exploitation of Kurdish resources with nothing but poverty given in return, deprivations of national citizenships, and the brutal suppression of political representation.

Despite the oppression the Kurdish people have faced, they continue to speak their language and organize politically and, at times, militarily to fight back everywhere they continue to live as a native population.

The Kurdish people are, in fact, the largest national minority in the world that has no homeland. Yet, it is largely their mutual language as well as their mutual oppression and a large amount of mutual poverty (despite some class differences) that continues to unite the Kurdish people. They desire borders that would change the map of the Near East. A better understanding of the Kurdish people is a key to understanding the entire region.

Kurdish Language and Literature

While being most closely related to Persian; the language of the Kurds, called Kurdish, is distinct from the Persian of Iran, the Arabic of Iraq and Syria, and the Turkish of Turkey. Historically many Kurdish intellectuals have written both in Kurdish in as well as in the languages of the dominating cultures (Blau 2007).

Despite a long history of oppression that includes the banning of the written and spoken Kurdish word, the Kurdish people have a rich literary history. Ell Herirl (1425-1495) is the first well-known Kurdish poet (Blau 2007). He, like the many patriotic Kurdish poets that followed, wrote of his love of Kurdish lands and its women (Blau 2007).

Up until very recently the Kurdish language was brutally suppressed everywhere in its native range except the Soviet Republic of Armenia. Armenian Kurds enjoyed special status as an ethnic minority in the Soviet Union including special programs for economic development. The Kurdish language, far from being banned, enjoyed sponsorship through state-sponsored Kurdish radio, a Kurdish newspaper, and Kurdish cultural events. After the fall of the Soviet Union Armenian Kurds lost language rights and other protections and most Kurds have been forcefully deported or have fled to Germany and other west European countries as well as to Russia (Mehrdad [date?]).

In Turkey, the Kurdish language was illegal up until 1991 when political and armed struggle forced the Turkish government to recognize some Kurdish language rights. Kurds and international human rights organizations, however, still complain of an oppressive situation imposed by the Turkish government (Human Rights Watch 2006).

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, as a U.S. backed ally at the time, is famous for committing mass murder against the Kurdish speaking population. Today Kurdish literature is still repressed with a number of Kurdish journalists jailed by what the Kurdish leftist opposition considers to be a puppet government of the United States and central government.

Iranian policy forbids the Kurdish language and has attempted to assimilate the Kurds into the dominant Persian culture. Besides the state of war between Iraq and the Kurds in the Iran-Iraq war, there was also a state of war between the Iranian government and Iranian Kurds at that same time. More recently in 2005 the Iranian government opened fire on Kurdish protesters with attack helicopters killing 20 and wounding 200 (Amnesty International 2005). Despite the attempts by the Iranian government to stomp out Kurdish culture, Kurdish literature and histories are available in Iran in both Kurdish and Persian (Blau 2007).

In Syria, the written Kurdish language has been banned since 1958. In 1987 that ban was extended to Kurdish music and Kurdish videos (Amnesty International 2005). Hundreds of thousands of native Syrian Kurds have no citizenship rights, the Kurdish flag is illegal (but still flown), and numerous acts of repression have been documented.

Due to the fact that Kurdish culture is horribly repressed in all of their native lands, today it is the Kurdish Diaspora living in Europe, the United States, and Australia that create most of the new Kurdish literature. This includes poetry, children’s books, newspapers, and magazines. Sweden, with a very enlightened policy towards immigrant populations, encourages Kurds and other groups to continue their languages and cultures and allocates a large amount of money to the relatively small Kurdish population for Kurdish language publications (Blau 2007). In addition works in the Kurdish language are being produced in other countries where funding is harder to come by.

The tenacity of Kurdish culture owes much to its extensive historic roots, pride of its people in their literature and language, and refusal to die in the face of attempts at forced assimilation and brutal repression.

Kurdish Modes of Production and Their Development

Kurdish lands are rich and productive, and they sustain the Kurdish people both through pastoral activity as well as through agriculture (Izady 1992). The gathering of wild nuts, berries, and truffles are also important sources of food and income for the Kurdish people, especially in forested regions (Izady 1992). In addition some of the Kurdish lands are rich in oil resources, but the Kurds have been denied access to this oil wealth.

It is established that a number of domestic animals as well as cereal crops used around the world were first domesticated in Kurdish lands (Izady 1992).

Kurdish pastoralism takes place primarily in areas not suitable for agriculture because they are too high in elevation, to steep, or too low in precipitation (Izady 1992). Pastoral activities were once nomadic, but now encompass only lands within a few days of permanent dwellings. As a result some lands that were traditionally grazed are no longer used (Izady 1992).

Kurdish lands grow large amounts of wheat, barley, rice, cotton, tobacco, sugar beets, olives, corn, sunflowers, soybeans, fruits, and nuts. Many of these are cash crops sold to other areas of the Near East where there is far less arable land (Izady 1992).

In many areas of Kurdistan agriculture is still practiced with ox, mule, or donkey drawn wooden ploughs (Jaff 2007).

A merchant class of Kurds has arisen since the 1950s making a living off of capitalist exchanges (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 2007).

While participating in the broader economy, household families are the most basic economic unit for rural Kurds. Such households are patrilocal containing the first son and his wife and their children. Households participate in reciprocal non-capitalist labor exchanges and share what the household earns. Urban Kurds often continue this family communal structure, but it sometimes falls apart in the face of wage earners no longer wishing to share their income (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 2007).

Many rural Kurds also seasonally participate in construction labor in the cities, bringing additional income back to their families (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 2007).

Reciprocal exchanges are not just confined to households. They also take place between neighbors and kin in a village, and are expected. These communal exchanges also take place among urban Kurds (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 2007).

In addition tribal Kurds are expected to work for landlords and tribal leaders, with durations of labor not clearly defined (Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 2007).

The labor structure in Kurdish villages reflects the labor-intensive, technologically primitive, agriculture forced on them by the neglect of the oil rich nations many Kurds are part of. Meanwhile, due to discrimination, the petroleum and mining operations in Kurdish areas rarely hire Kurds (Jaff 2007). This contributes to Kurdish poverty in regions that are rich in natural resources; fueling resentment and separatist desires.

Kurdish Sexuality, Birth, Domestic Life, Descent, and Kinship

The Kurdish people are organized in patrilineal clans (Refugee Health 2007). As such there is patriarchal control of marriage and property, with women treated in many ways like property. In addition, political status is often the product of patrilineal descent (Refugee Health 2007). It is a male dominated culture where female sexuality is repressed and women are oppressed.

Rural Kurdish women are allowed to mingle with males, but they are not allowed to make their own decisions regarding sexuality or husbands (Hassanpour 2001). Marriage for Kurdish women is a form of bondage traditionally decided upon by the male members of her family (Hassanpour 2001). These decisions have often been made in the girl’s childhood, and sometimes even before she is born (Hassanpour 2001). In Kurdish Iraq such practices of arranged marriage have been on the wane for a number of years, but family permission and payments for brides are still the rule (Refugee Health 2007).

Rural Kurdish marriages are patrilocal (Hassanpour 2001). The family receiving the bride pays the family she came from (Hassanpour 2001). This price is seen as payment for the labor that will be lost when she moves to live with the groom’s family (Hassanpour 2001). To hold onto the wealth of the village marriages within the village are preferred and marriages between first cousins are often arranged (Refugee Health 2007). Families also sometimes exchange sons and daughters with the same family to save on expenses (Refugee Health 2007).

The male families of urban Kurds do not pay a bride price at the time of marriage. Yet if the male decides to divorce the woman, his family is contractually obliged to pay her family. Urban Kurdish women are also not permitted to ask for a man’s hand in marriage, nor decide to divorce. Divorced women do not have a right to custody of the children (Hassanpour 2001).

Polygamy also sometimes occurs amongst Kurds. In such cases the wives are ranked in status by their age (Hassanpour 2001). While polygamy is not the norm, up to four wives are allowed (Refugee Health 2007).

Like marriage, men hold women’s sexuality under a strict ideal of shame and constraint, including virginity before marriage (Hassanpour 2001). This “ideal” is upheld under the threat, and use of, male violence against women. Such violence includes beatings, pouring acid on faces, shaving heads, and even “honor” killings where women are murdered to by family members to bring back the family’s good name (Kurdish Women’s Rights Watch 2007).

While Kurdish women may be murdered for adultery, no similar treatment is dished out to Kurdish men for the same act (Hassanpour 2001).

Kurds tend to see having large families as the ideal. This grows out of the material need for more laboring hands in the rural areas where most Kurds live, as well as from religious beliefs that consider birth control immoral by Islamic law. Yet there are growing numbers of young couples that ask aid workers for birth control. The birth of a child is celebrated with a feast. (Refugee Health 2007)

While the Kurdish people are oppressed and denied many fundamental rights, Kurdish women are doubly oppressed. While some Kurds have claimed better treatment of women than most of the Islamic world, treatment of Kurdish women does appear to have many similarities to those of the dominating cultures. One difference with Iranian treatment is that Kurdish women are not forced to wear the veil and are generally allowed freer movement than in many traditionally Muslim societies including Iran (Refugee Health 2007).

In Iraq, however, Kurdish women are not historically better off. Currently the Kurdish nationalist parties in power, working with the U.S. occupation, have done much to undermine the gains made for women’s rights during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Under Saddam Hussein’s secular government, Iraqi women had many rights found nowhere else in the historically Islamic world except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors were women. Iraqi women were allowed to walk unescorted in the streets, to drive, to freely criticize men, and the right to work and control their own funds. Today the Kurdish parties that the U.S. has put in control of Iraqi Kurdistan are working towards adding brutally anti-woman Sharia (Islamic Law) to the constitution that would strip women of more rights. Similar moves are being made by the U.S. imposed central government in Iraq.

In Turkey, it is well documented that the Turkish government has routinely used rape as a weapon in the their counter-insurgency measures against Kurdish separatists (Hilton 2002).

There are many historical examples of Kurdish nationalists and communists speaking out for women’s rights (Hassanpour 2001). Additionally Kurdish parties in Iraq that advocate women’s rights, such as the Worker’s Communist Party of Iraq, have been excluded by the U.S. occupation from participation in elections. Besides in Iraq, the use by the United States of rightwing misogynist Islamic forces against socialists and nationalists with progressive stands on women is well established, with the U.S. bankrolling of the Mujahideen holy war against women’s rights in Afghanistan in the 1980’s being another well known example.

Kurdish women, with the exception of those that lived in Soviet Armenia, have not had the benefit of the feminist movements of the west nor the social revolutions of the Soviet Union and China that greatly advanced women’s rights in those societies. While not achieving perfection, the Chinese and Soviet revolutions outlawed forced marriages and made other giant strides towards women’s equality including in the areas of women’s education, employment, and reproductive rights.

While outsiders may find it easy to judge Kurdish treatment of women, it is worth noting that up until now the Kurdish nation has been denied the right to make any fundamental decisions regarding any policies in their land without outside control. Given the record of the dominating countries, including the United States, it appears that it is only within the context of Kurdish self-determination that the problems of women’s oppression can be solved by the Kurdish people themselves.

Kurdish Political Organization

The Kurdish people have organized themselves into many political organizations that advocate language rights, freedom from the social chauvinism and violence of the dominant cultures, Kurdish independence, and in many cases socialism. These Kurdish political organizations often exist in direct contradiction to widespread feudal village structures and the oppression of women.

The Kurdish Worker’s Party (KKP), one of the main Kurdish resistance groups in Turkey, sees the continuation of feudal political structures on the village level as being the result of oppression and exploitation from the Turkish State. The following emic from the program of the KKP spells out this point of view:
"National oppression exercised by Turkish state through massacres, compulsory resettlement and forced immigration goes on brutally. This oppression manifests itself economically in the fact that Kurdistan is a domestic market for Turkey, plundered and destroyed; politically in the fact that the Kurds are under the oppression of a foreign state, and denied of national sovereignty; and socially and culturally in the national humiliation and cultural backwardness created by continuing tribalism, widespread ignorance and forced assimilation." (The Kurdish Worker’s Party Programme)

The KKP is one of nineteen different Kurdish parties in Turkey (Turkey 2004). Of these thirteen have been declared illegal by the central government, including the KKP (Turkey 2004). On the other hand the Democratic People’s Party, one of the few legal Kurdish parties, does participate in Turkish elections (Turkey 2004). They are a member of the reformist and generally pro-capitalist Socialist International. Parties with stronger political programs for Kurdish independence and for socialism are banned and communities identified with them have faced brutal counter-insurgency methods that have included massacres, the raping of women, and execution of leaders.

In Iraq, two Kurdish parties, working with the U.S. occupation, rule Iraqi Kurdistan. These are the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and three minor Kurdish parties that have participated in an electoral alliance with the PUK and KDP called National Democratic Kurdish List. In the Kurdish area the National Democratic Kurdish List received 89.55% of the vote in the 2005 elections (Iraq 2005).

While the 2005 vote may appear to show widespread support among Iraqi Kurds for the KDP – PUK –USA government, other reports contradict this. Mass protests have erupted in Kurdish areas against the occupation-imposed lack of electricity and water (Worker-Communist Party of Iraq 2007). In response the KDP – PUK –USA government has used violence against protesters and arrested a number of journalists (Worker-Communist Party of Iraq 2007). Involved in these protests is the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, a political party with members across Iraq of all ethnicities that supports Kurdish rights. In Kurdistan the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq has protested U.S. policy on Kurdistan where they point out that although the Kurdish people in Iraq had gained a high level of economic independence in the last two decades, U.S. policy has in effect annexed Iraqi Kurdistan back into the central government (Worker-Communist Party of Iraq 2007).

Unlike the KDP and PUK, the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They did this while also opposing the government of Saddam Hussein. In addition the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, at great risk to their lives, is carrying out a campaign in Kurdistan against the imposition of Sharia (Islamic Law) through the constitution of the puppet KDP and PUK government. They see this as horribly anti-woman and also argue that it will also further increase sectarian violence (Worker-Communist Party of Iraq 2007).

Syria has fourteen different Kurdish political parties (Syria 2004). These organizations are banned in a country where it is illegal to even raise the flag of Kurdistan, yet Syrian Kurds continue to struggle for a homeland.

Iran has five different Kurdish political parties (Iran 2004). These have been involved in a number of uprisings against the central government in the last few years that have faced brutal repression (Kamala 2004). One of these organizations leading the uprisings is the Kamala (Revolutionary Organisation of Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan), a socialist grouping that has been organizing armed struggle against the central Islamic regime. As strong advocates of women’s rights the Kamala were the first Kurdish organization to integrate women into their armed forces (Kamala 2004).

Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution the Kamala was also one of many leftist and pro-woman organizations struggling against the brutal U.S. imposed monarchy of the Shah of Iran, but in a great tragedy for women and for Kurds, it was chauvinistic Islamists that got the upper hand (Kamala 2004). In their assessment of the Islamic regime the Kamala states, “The Iranian regime has imposed the a series of discriminative policies in Kurdistan, which has ultimately resulted in the military occupation of Kurdistan, widespread poverty amongst this massive population, the suppression of Kurdish culture, drug addiction (especially amongst youth), religious suppression, forced migration, imprisonment, terror, torture, and the Killing of whoever opposing these tyrannical policies."

Armenian Kurds have suffered as well. While Kurds were given special language rights in Soviet Armenia, after the capitalist counter-revolution Kurds in Armenia faced mass violence and forced deportations. I have found no evidence Kurdish political organization in Armenia today.

The fate of Armenia’s largely ethnically cleansed Kurds is what has been attempted by all other countries that dominate the Kurds, elimination of the Kurdish question through violence and forced assimilation. Yet there is stubborn resistance in the will of the Kurdish people that refuses to give up. Instead many Kurds become resistance fighters that are bold enough to see a redrawn map where Kurdistan gains its independence from Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. In addition many are also bold enough to see that future as one that ends feudal backwardness, promotes education, builds socialism, and brings equality for women.

The Socialization of Kurdish Children in Language and Culture

The defining trait of Kurdish culture is their language. The education of Kurdish youth in their native tongue is an essential component, not only in the preservation of Kurdish culture, but also simply in giving the best education to young Kurds. The reason for this is that young people often have many difficulties learning when they are taught in a foreign tongue.

In the early part of the 20th century British colonial authorities in charge of education in Iraq referred to the Kurdish language as “vernacular”. Their educational model was one of teaching in the Kurdish language only at the primary school level, with all higher education in Arabic (The Education of Kurdish Language, 1995-2003).

In 1926 the famous Kurdish nationalist Huzni Mukriyani suggested in a fictional conversation between a Kurdish father and son that ignorance was better than being taught in a foreign tongue. The father states, “My dear son, I like education and I am not an enemy of knowledge and enlightenment, but it is better for you to remain ignorant than to be unaware of your identity, not to study in your language and to serve the strangers...” (The Education of Kurdish Language, 1995-2003).

This emic view of Huzni Mukriyani’s of the over riding importance of children learning in Kurdish wasn’t just based on a nationalistic or romantic desire for cultural preservation, but also grew out of the practical desire of having Kurdish children be able to understand the language they were being taught in. This point was driven home in another line of the fictional conversation where the father states to his son, “You had better become a shepherd, [Or] do ploughing for me. These are better than taking lessons and not understanding them” (The Education of Kurdish Language, 1995-2003).

In the 1950’s, in Iraqi Kurdistan, demands by the Kurdish community for more education in Kurdish began to bear some fruit, but many instructors had difficulty teaching in Kurdish because they had been instructed in Arabic (The Education of Kurdish Language, 1995-2003).

In Turkey, Iran, and Syria education in the Kurdish language has been even more wanting. The Kurdish language was illegal in Turkey up until 1991 and education in the Kurdish language is still lacking (Human Rights Watch 2006).

Yet, as an oppressed people without many educational opportunities, Kurdish children continue to learn their language from their families and communities even when formal education is lacking. Thus, the Kurdish language continues to be passed on to the children, partly out of necessity, partly out of a nationalistic pride and refuses to die or be forcefully assimilated.

Religion In Kurdistan, Belief and Disbelief

Kurds practice a variety of monotheist religions including a number of varieties of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In addition some Kurdish nationalist movements led by socialists have a strong history of atheism and secularism.

The wide variety of Kurdish religions is due, in part, to the absorption of differing religions from surrounding nationalities. These religions have moved through the region over differing historical times. The predominance of Islam began in the seventh century when most Kurds were converted (Encyclopedia Britannica 2007).

Most religious Kurds are Muslim of the Sunni denomination (Encyclopedia Britannica 2007). Kurdish Sunnis predominantly belong to the Shafi’I sect. Another Islamic denomination found among the beliefs of the Kurdish people is the Shia, primarily of the Alevi sect. A small number of Kurds are also Yezidi Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

There is also a large Sufi influence among many Kurdish Muslims, often cited as a moderating influence on Islamic fundamentalism in many areas, including the oppression of women. Others see that religious moderation; to the point it does exist among the Kurds, is the result of heavy influences from atheistic socialist forces leading many of the struggles against Kurdish national oppression.

While information on the rarest and most obscure religions is often very easy to come by, demographic assessments of atheism are difficult to nearly impossible to obtain for much of the world. This lack of important anthropological data is due, in part, to the fact that atheists are oppressed in much of the world and afraid to identify themselves when attempts are made at collecting such data. But, in addition, there is a glaring shortage of writings that attempt to look at the role of atheism on individual cultures. Perhaps this is due, in part, to the universality of atheism and its lack of quaint provincial deities, sects, or rituals as are found in the thousands of religions of the world.

A look at the political programs the socialists that are playing a leading role in the nationalist liberation movements of Kurdistan does, however, reveal a strong influence of atheism and secularism in their advocacy of women’s rights and opposition to Islamic Law.

It is a tendency found in many mainstream anthropological writings to play up the role of various religions in different societies while ignoring the influences of atheism. Yet it has been atheistic leadership that has led major advances in women’s rights for much of the world’s population. Well known examples are the Chinese and Russian revolutions that outlawed forced marriages, bride prices, and other manifestations of female slavery still suffered by most Kurdistani women.

Likewise it is popular groups with atheistic programs, such as the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey, that advocate full emancipation for women. As the PKK states in their program:

“All laws reflecting male domination should be annulled. Violence against women, all forms of control on women’s bodies and lives resulting from outdated custom and traditional habits, and bride’s price should be forbidden.” (KKP Program, 2003)

This program of the PKK is in stark contrast to the harsh anti-woman positions of the Islamic capitalist governments of Iran, Turkey, and Iraq.

While there is good reason to study the role of religions in various societies, anthropological studies are often incomplete if they ignore the role atheism. Kurdish society is no exception where religious belief is mixed with a strong peppering of disbelief.

U.S. Imperialism and the Kurdish Question

While the regime of Saddam Hussein was no friend to the Iraqi Kurdish people, this of course has nothing to do with why the United States government hated Saddam Hussein. This hatred by the U.S. capitalist government is not based on humanitarian concerns. They hated Saddam Hussein for the good things he did, such as the nationalization of Iraqi oil that benefited the people of Iraq by keeping oil wealth in the country for social programs and benefited of the Iraqi economy.

America’s so-called concern for human rights can be seen in the past US interventions in Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party first came to power in 1963. Immediately after taking power, based on lists provided by the CIA, they rounded up 5,000 leftists and trade-union leaders and murdered them. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait we were shown pictures of Iraqi Kurds killed by poison gas in the U.S. media. What we were not told is why the US was silent when this was happening and the fact that the US supplied the gas to kill the Kurds and to kill Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war. While we are now told of the Iraqi repression of the Kurdish people we are not told of how the Turkish government is carrying out the same policies of genocide against the Turkish Kurds, and doing it with U.S. weaponry.

In addition to these proxy genocides by the U.S. government on the Kurdish people the U.S. government has participated directly in the war on Kurds. This occurred on February 15, 1999 when U.S. forces kidnapped Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan and turned him over to the genocidal Turkish government. Subsequently Abdullah Ocalan was sentenced to death for his role in defending Kurdish territory in Turkey from the murderous Turkish military. This U.S. kidnapping was admitted on CNN TV by former Turkish President and ethnic cleanser Suleyman Demiral.

Today, in Iraq, the basic question of Kurds getting a piece of the oil wealth is not on the imperialist agenda. Instead they are pushing through their puppet governments and outside pressure for the oil wealth to be privatized and turned over to U.S. corporations.

Many of the Kurds know that their national interests will never be served by the “liberating” forces of Turkey and Iran or British and American imperialism. This will only be established by the Kurds themselves and by the alliances they build with other anti-imperialist forces. British imperialism divided Kurdistan, a country with its own unique language and culture, into a minority inside the nations of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Today the Kurds are the largest nation without a homeland in the world. Imperialism, with its motto of divide and conquer, never has and never will solve the Kurdish question. A free and united Kurdistan will only be born through a sweeping socialist revolution that overthrows the capitalist regimes of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria while challenging the military dictates of the United States.

The mutual language and oppression shared by the Kurdish people has solidified the Kurdish identity, even though they have differing religions, and even though they are spread out into five different countries of origin where they are an ethnic minority in each.

Facing violence and attempts at forced assimilation there is stubborn resistance in the will of the Kurdish people that refuses to give up. Instead many Kurds become resistance fighters that are bold enough to see a redrawn map where Kurdistan gains its independence from Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. In addition, many Kurds are also bold enough to see that future as one that ends feudal backwardness, promotes education, builds socialism, and brings equality for women.

This is an article of Liberation News, Subscribe Free:
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References:

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Chivers, C. J.. Hundreds Disappear Into the Black Hole of the Kurdish Prison System in Iraq. New York Times, 12/26/2006, Vol. 156 Issue 53805, pA12-A12

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Iran: Amnesty International calls for an urgent investigation into the killing of demonstrators. 5 August 2005. Amnesty International. Accessed 3 March 2007. Available from: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGMDE130432005. Internet.

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posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

Dictators in the Empire's Employ by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:27:00 GMT

Dictators in the Empire's Employ
[col. writ. 11/18/07] (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal

With the teeth of the Pakistani dictatorship now bared, we are beginning to see a mirror image of most of U.S. history throughout the last century.

Although perhaps best seen in the vicious wars of Latin America, it is a fact that the U.S. government supported brutal, violent dictatorships on every continent, almost always against popular, and especially workers movements.

Although most Americans would be hard pressed to actually recall the names of 4 U.S. backed dictators of the 20th century, it is a safe bet that the people who tried to survive in those countries will remember them for the rest of their lives.

From Haiti's infamous Duvaliers, to Cuba's Batista, there were no dictators too wretched, too violent, too vicious for the U.S. to support.

There's a good reason why when President Lyndon B. Johnson took the Oval Office after John Kennedy's assassination, he told one of his aides, "We've been running a damned branch of Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."*

That's because Washington was essentially internationalizing its program of repression and McCarthyism, according to at least one Latin American country. Scholar (and former diplomat) Clara Nieto wrote, in her remarkable 2003 work, Masters of War, the story of how the U.S. got almost the entire continent to go its way:

At the Tenth Inter-American Conference requested by {former State Dept. chief John} Dulles and held in Caracas in 1954, he easily persuaded the meeting to adopt a declaration condemning international communism and advocating hemispheric solidarity and mutual defense against "Communist aggression." The chancellor of Guatemala, Guillermo Toriella, warned that on "the pretext of combating Communism, fundamental principles of democracy can be contravened, violations of human rights justified, and the principle of non-intervention infringed upon." The declaration, he argued was "the internationalization of McCarthyism." The majority - all dictatorships - supported it; Argentina (under Peron) voted against it and Mexico abstained. Costa Rica did not attend the meeting, since Jose Figueres refused to participate in this "assembly of dictators in a country governed by the most brutal and corrupt of them all, General Perez Jimenez" {C. Nieto, pp.138-139}.

Thus, generations were subjected to the terrorism of their own governments, their own armies, paid, and trained by the Americans. These U.S. trained terrorists launched wars against their own people; students, teachers, trade unionists, writers, intellectuals, priests, Indians, and beyond.

Yet, that was then. What now?

Despite all the gas and rap about "freedom", "democracy", and the like, the U.S. is, once again, depending on a dictator who has essentially shut down the Supreme Court, whipped lawyers in the streets, waged fraudulent elections, exiled his political opponents, and ruled with an iron fist. The differences between Burma and Pakistan could be measured in inches.

Yet, none of this really matters to the White House. What matters is what has always mattered. That the dictator do the bidding of his imperial masters - the people be damned.

There's a reason why Latin America has elected predominantly anti American governments in the past decade, and it had nothing to do with the easy media fiction that Hugo Chavez made them do it. For millions of people, they remember the so called 'secret wars' waged by armed puppets of the Americans-and they want no more of it.

Dictatorship 2 -- Democracy 0.

--(c) '07 maj

*[Source: Nieto, Clara, Masters of War: Latin America and the U.S. Aggression (From the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years) {New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003} ]

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States, framed and in prison, with what could be the final decision on his legal appeals possibly coming down soon. That decision could give Mumia his freedom, a new trial, life in prison, or execution. It is time to turn up the heat against this injustice.

Free Mumia!

For more on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal read:

Top Ten “Fry Mumia” Myths Debunked
(Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”
http://indybay.org/newsitems/2007/07/19/18436405.php

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posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

General Strike on 9/11

Robert — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:26:51 GMT

spread the word, people!

http://www.strike911.org/

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Look out for “Efrit Mbotu”

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:05:55 GMT

Look out for “Efrit Mbotu”

I see we have “Efrit Mbotu” in our Tribe.

Earlier on the Marxism site "Efrit" claimed:

"I am son of the late former Minister of Finance for Nigeria. I have need to move large sums out of the country due to recent events and am looking for a reliable and trustworthy overseas business partner."

OK, "son of the late finance minister with money to transfer out of the country."

These scam operations have been well publicized. He is trying to rob people.

These guys are constantly spamming me. Here's a variation I just got today:

FROM: BEATRICE AND PRINCE AKA
DEAR ONE,
WITHOUT ANY DOUBT I KNOW THAT THIS MAIL MAY COME TO YOU AS A SURPRISE BUT IT IS BORNE OUT OF GENUIE NEED FOR URGENT ASSISTANCE.
I AM MISS BEATRICE AKA THE DAUGHTER OF FORMER FINANCE DIRECTOR OF SIERRA LEONE GOLD AND DIAMOND CORPORATION MR MARCUS AKA WHO WAS ASSASINATED BY THE REBEL FORCES LOYAL TO MR FORDAY SANKOH DURING THE PEAK OF THE CIVIL WAR IN OUR COUNTRY SIERRA LEONE. BEFORE MY FATHER DIED,HE GAVE OUR MOTHER A DEPOSIT CRTIFICATE OF DEPOSIT MEANT FOR A SECRET DEPOSIT FOR THE SUM OF USD15,000,000.00 MILLION.
MY MOTHER WHO LATER DIED OF HYPERTENSION SIX MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH OF MY FATHER,ON HER SICK BED TOLD ME TO COLLECT THE DOCUMENTS AND PRESENT THEM TO THE FIRM IF SHE EVENTUALLY DIES AND ENSURE THAT I SOURCE FOR A TRUSTED AND RELIABLE FOREIGNER PARTNER TO ASSIST US RETRIVE THE MONEY FROM FIRM TO HIS OR HER COUNTRY ABROAD AFTER WHICH I AND MY YOUNGER BROTHER PRINCE WILL JOIN THE PERSON FOR THE INVESTMENT OF THE MONEY IN GOOD BUSINESS AND FOR MY YOUNGER BROTHER TO CONTINUE HIS EDUCATION.
THIS WAS THE INTENTION OF MY FATHER BEFORE HE DIED. I HAVE PRESENTED THE DOCUMENTS TO THE FIRM AND THEY ARE AWAITING FOR THE FOREIGN PARTNER OF OUR LATE FATHER DETAILS ADDRRESS.THIS IS ALSO IN LINE WITH THE AGREEMENT MY LATE FATHER ENTERED INTO WITH THE FIRM AT THE TIME OF DEPOSIT THAT THE DEPOSIT WILL BE TRANSFERRED TO ADDRESS OF THE BENEFICIARY WHOSE NAME HE DID NOT DISCLOSE TO THE FIRM. YOU ARE REQUIRED TO PROVIDE AN CONTACT DETAILS WHERE WE WILL SUBMIT TO THEM.
YOU WILL ALSO BE IN CUSTODY OF THE MONEY PENDING WHEN I AND MY BROTHER PRINCE WILL JOIN FOR THE INVESTMENT IN GOOD BUSINESS AND FOR PRINCE TO CONTINUE HIS EDUCATION.
YOU WILL HAVE 10% OF THE TOTAL AMOUNT AND ALSO 40% SHARE OF THE BUSINESS WILL BE YOUR OWN.
PLEASE DO NOT EXPOSE THIS TRANSACTION AS THERE ARE A LOT OF BAD THINGS HAPPENNING IN THE WORLD NOW.WE TRUST AND HOPE THAT YOU WILL NOT SIZE THE MONEY WHEN IT IS TRANSFERRED TO YOUR COUNTRY BEFORE WE JOIN YOU IN YOUR COUNTRY.
GOD WILL BLESS YOU FOR ASSISTING US.
BEST REGARDS
BEATRICE AND PRINCE AKA

"Efrit Mbotu", like “Prince Aka”, is a scamming thieving spammer.

I guarantee you that "sons of late former ministers", or other "government officials" and their "relatives", that randomly need your help to move large sums of money out of the country are always thieves and scammers.

posted in Communist Left - 3 replies

Top Ten “Fry Mumia” Myths Debunked (Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 04:26:31 GMT

Top Ten “Fry Mumia” Myths Debunked
(Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”

By Steven Argue

The following is the first in a series of ten articles I have written answering the top ten myths being circulated by those who advocate execution or continued prison for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

(Myth #1) “Five eyewitnesses saw Mumia shoot officer Faulkner.”

In the preliminary hearings, Mumia made requests for a line-up. This is not the kind of move one does if they are guilty. Part of Mumia’s reasoning was that eyewitnesses that were lying would have a harder time with their conscience if they actually saw him in the flesh.

Interestingly enough, the prosecution didn’t want a line-up and argued their point saying that none of the witnesses had actually seen Mumia shoot Faulkner. Judge Sabo denied the line-ups on these grounds. Yet two “eyewitnesses”, Cynthia White and Robert Chobert, did claim they saw Mumia shoot Faulkner, so Mumia was unfairly denied a line-up.

Supposed Witness To Mumia Shooting Faulkner Number One…
Prosecution Star Witness Cynthia White

Despite the false claims by the prosecution used to deny a line-up, Cynthia White did testify that she saw Mumia with a gun in his hand, that she saw him shoot Faulkner twice in the back, and that she saw Mumia standing over Faulkner as shots were being fired. Overwhelming physical and eyewitness evidence proves that this was perjured testimony.

The prosecution’s version of events, largely dependent on White’s testimony, claims that Mumia stood over Faulkner repeatedly shooting and missing until he hit Faulkner’s head. Yet the physical evidence says this is not true. No divots or marks were left on the sidewalk from these missed shots. Later articles will explore this and other physical evidence further.

As a prosecution witness, Cynthia White gave two extremely different versions of events at two different trials. One version was given at William Cook’s trial, and a differing version at Mumia’s trial. At Cook’s trial she said there was a passenger in Cook’s VW. At Mumia’s trial she claimed there was no passenger.

In the case of Mumia, eyewitnesses have said that the passenger in Cook’s VW was one of the actual killers. Yet Mumia was not riding in the VW and the prosecution claims that Mumia was the lone killer. So in Mumia’s trial, it was useful for the prosecution to disappear the passenger from the testimony, despite White’s other testimony that there was a passenger. These two differing versions, obviously including perjured testimony, were cynically used by prosecutors to fit differing prosecutions.

There is also physical evidence of a passenger in the VW, evidence that was illegally suppressed by the prosecution for 13 years. That evidence was an ID found on the body of Officer Faulkner. It was in the name of Arnold Howard. As a result of this evidence, Arnold Howard was arrested by the police and tested to see if he had fired a gun the night of the shooting. Arnold Howard told the police that he had loaned his ID to Kenneth Freeman. (Transcript for August 11, 1995, pp. 130-131.)

In addition, Arnold Howard testified at that post conviction hearing that Kenneth Freeman was also arrested that night, and that Howard personally witnessed a woman picking Freeman out of a line-up. Like Arnold Howard’s ID, police reports of this arrest and line-up of Kenneth Freeman have also apparently been suppressed, but in this case have never been released.

The VW driver, William Cook, also placed Kenneth Freeman as the passenger in the VW. In Cook’s signed declaration of what happened he also says Freeman was carrying a .38 that night. Cook went on to say, in that declaration, that after the shooting,

“Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] talked about a plan to kill Faulkner. He told me that he was armed on that night and participated in the shooting. He was connected and knew all kinds of people. I used to ask him about it but he talked but never said much. He wasn't a talker. I didn't see Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] for a while after that. Poppi [Kenneth Freeman] had been in Germany in the army. That night he was wearing his green army jacket.”

Eyewitness William Singletary says that a man in a green army jacket got out of the VW, shot Faulkner, and ran. Mumia Abu-Jamal was not wearing an army jacket that night and not riding in the VW. Nor did Mumia run away, he was shot and ran nowhere. The jacket Mumia was wearing is in evidence and it is a red quilted ski jacket with a couple blue stripes. Nor was William Cook, the driver of the VW, wearing a green army jacket.

The prosecution’s version of events denies anyone on the scene wearing a green army jacket. Besides Singletary and Cook, five other eyewitnesses also put a man in a green army jacket on the scene. These were stake out Officer Forbes (the putative first officer to arrive), Officer Stephen Trembetta, Robert Magiltan, Michael Scanlan, and Arnold Beverly, who has confessed to being one of two people that killed Faulkner. Beverly states in his confession that he was also wearing a green army jacket that night as well.

In addition, the prosecution’s version of events denies anyone running from the scene.
Six eyewitnesses contradict this by saying they saw men running from the scene. These would have been the real shooter or shooters. Those eyewitnesses are Dessie Hightower, William Singletary, Veronica Jones, Robert Chobert, Arnold Beverly, and William Cook.

So the prosecution’s star witness testified for the prosecution that there was a passenger at Cook’s trial, and said there was no passenger at Mumia’s trial. Eyewitness testimony and physical evidence suppressed by the prosecution shows there was a passenger wearing a green army jacket that shot Faulkner and ran. That passenger, Kenneth Freeman, murdered Officer Faulkner either by himself or with the help of Arnold Beverly. On May 14, 1985, according to the testimony of Arnold Howard, Kenneth Freeman’s naked corpse was found outside in the cold handcuffed. No investigation was carried out on Freeman’s death and the coroner reported the cause of death to be a heart attack.

So it is established, with her contradictory stories, that Cynthia White was not telling the truth. This would be bad enough. But, in fact, none of the nine eyewitnesses that testified at the trial and subsequent hearings can remember seeing Cynthia White at the immediate scene at all. None, this includes the other prosecution witnesses.

William Singletary states that he saw her earlier down the street. When he saw her she said, “Hey, how you doing? It's cold out here.” Then noticing his car she said “a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado, 1982 model, wow, that's a great car! You ain't that bad-looking either. But I don't date black guys.” To which Singletary says he responded, “And I don't date prostitutes.” Singletary says that she then walked down the street and didn’t actually see the shooting. ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

In fact, Cynthia White confessed to both Pamela Jenkins and Yvette Williams that she did not see the shooting and that the police put the screws to her to lie. In addition, a mountain of testimony shows a clear pattern by the police to try to get similar perjured testimony from other people.

In a hearing after the trial Pamela Jenkins testified, “I know that Cynthia White worked as a prostitute in the Center City area, specifically at Locust and 13th Street, during 1980 and 1981, and that she was a prostitute, police informant, and turned tricks for the police officers in the district.”

If in fact Cynthia White was a police informant, and this information was withheld from the defense by the prosecution, that alone would be legal grounds for a new trial, but it gets much worse.

Jenkins testified at hearings in 1997 that Police Officer Thomas Ryan tried to make her testify that she saw Mumia shoot Officer Faulkner at the original trial, even though she was not at the scene of the shooting. Jenkins, 15 and a prostitute, was the girlfriend of Officer Ryan at that time. She also testified that she worked both as a prostitute for police and as a police informant for the corrupt Center City Police.

Jenkins also testified that Cynthia White told her in late 1981 that she was also being pressured to testify against Mumia, and that White was afraid for her life.

In a signed affidavit Jenkins states,

“Tom Ryan, Richard Ryan and other police officers pressured me and asked me if I had seen the shooting of the police officer and whether I had been in the area of the shooting that night. When I said 'no' they pressured (me) some more and asked me was I really sure that I hadn't been on the street that night and seen the shooting. It was clear to me that Tom Ryan and Richard Ryan wanted me to perjure myself and say that I had seen Jamal shoot the police officer."

Despite showing a clear intention by the police to frame Mumia, no jury has been allowed to hear Jenkins’ testimony in Mumia’s case. Not only is Pamela Jenkin's testimony essential evidence of a deliberate police conspiracy to frame Mumia by manufacturing perjured evidence, it also helps to destroy the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, Cynthia White.

Jenkins' credibility has, however, been bolstered by the fact that she was a key witness used to unravel the massive police corruption in Center City District. Her testimony was instrumental in reversing the decisions of hundreds of cases and helped lead to the removal of the entire team of cops that led the “investigation” of Mumia’s case due to their corruption and mob connections.

Other eyewitnesses have said the same thing as Jenkins. In a signed affidavit Yvette Williams has stated,

“I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it.”

Later in the Affidavit Yvette Williams states,

“When Lucky [Cynthia White] told me she didn’t even see who shot Officer Faulkner, I asked her why she was “lying on that man” [Mumia Abu-Jamal]. She told me it was because for the police and vice threatened her life. Additionally, the police were giving her money for tricks. “The way she talked, we were talking “G’s” [$1,000.00]. She also said she was terrified of what the police would do to her if she didn’t say that Mumia shot Officer Faulkner. According to Lucky, the police told her they would consolidate all her cases and send her “up” (Muncy), a women’s prison, for a long time if she didn’t testify to what they told her to say. Lucky told me she had a lot of open cases and out-of-state warrants and was scared of going to Muncy. She was scared that her pimp “would get pissed off” at all the money he was losing when she was locked up, and off the street. She was afraid that when she got out he would beat her up or kill her.”

According to legal papers filed by the defense,

“in the days after the shooting, [White] was arrested at least twice for prostitution. Her picture was posted in the 6th District with instructions for arresting officers to 'Contact Homicide'. Each time police picked White up and took her statement, she revised her story [on Faulkner's shooting]. Without explanation, bench warrants against her were not prosecuted.”

Pamela Jenkins has publicly asked Cynthia White to tell the truth stating:

“We know we can bring this down to a nutshell if you just come forward. We've all lost a lot by coming forward, I've lost somebody I love dearly... Just do it this one time, one favor, that's not asking a lot. Then maybe you can clean up your past, like the rest of us are doing.”

The prosecution does seem to be afraid of Cynthia White coming forward to tell the truth, and have presented false testimony of evidence that she is dead. In a hearing in Judge Sabo’s court, a Philadelphia police detective testified that the FBI had "authenticated" that a corpse had the same fingerprints as White. Yet the fingerprints the DA withheld at that time, and later finally produced for the now cremated corpse, don’t match the fingerprints of Cynthia White.

Cynthia White’s own mother stated that the same corpse was not Cynthia White. Other eyewitnesses, that the defense attempted to have testify, testimony denied by Sabo, had seen Cynthia White alive and walking around during the time she was supposed to be dead. Yet instead of hearing defense witnesses that stated that Cynthia White was alive, the only testimony Sabo would allow was the false testimony of the Philadelphia detective claiming “authenticated” fingerprints. Sabo snapped, “As far as I’m concerned she’s dead. I’m making a ruling. We’re finished.” Evidence has never meant much in Judge Sabo’s court, if the prosecution says she’s dead, she’s dead.

So the evidence on Cynthia White shows that she could not have seen the shooting; that Mumia was wrongly denied his right to a line-up; that the police intimidated White and others to testify against Mumia; that the police that “investigated” Mumia have been kicked off the force for corruption; that Cynthia White had a motive to lie; that the police possibly withheld information that Cynthia White was a police informant; that the DA illegally withheld physical evidence for 13 years that showed that White’s testimony was perjured and that showed that Mumia did not commit the crime; that the DA knowingly used testimony from White that was perjured; and that claims of the prosecution and police were accepted without evidence or witness rebuttal in Judge Sabo’s court.

Essential Eyewitnesses Ignored By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number One, Pamela Jenkins

I include Pamela Jenkins in this list, not because the “fry Mumia” camp includes her among the eyewitnesses that supposedly saw Mumia kill Faulkner, but because they don’t, and why they don’t. As was shown in the section on Cynthia White, the police tried to pressure here into testifying that she saw Mumia kill Faulkner, even though Jenkins was not at the scene of the shooting, but Jenkins refused to do it. The honesty of Jenkins is the only reason why the prosecution did not use her, and this also why she is not mentioned in the “fry Mumia” literature as seeing Mumia shoot Faulkner.

Essential Eyewitnesses Ignored By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number Two, Veronica Jones

Veronica Jones also is not mentioned in the fry Mumia literature, but she is also a very important eyewitness. Jones, while being called by the defense in 1982, testified for the police and prosecution.

Before the trial, Veronica Jones gave a completely different version of events than was contained in an earlier police report. In her original version of events, contained in a report she gave to police, Veronica Jones said she saw two men running from the scene. Yet at the trial the two men running were missing from her testimony. This came as a complete surprise to the defense because Mumia’s supposed attorney, Anthony Jackson, did not even bother to interview witnesses before the trial. Earlier in the trial Mumia was denied his legal rights when his attempt to fire Anthony Jackson was denied by Judge Sabo.

Jones retracted her 1982 court testimony in 1996, saying that her original police report was the truth, and that she was coerced by the police into saying she didn’t see anybody running from the scene. She gave this testimony despite being forcefully reminded by Judge Sabo that her testimony could be seen as an admission of perjury and could land her seven years in prison. She was in fact arrested from the witness stand, but for a bounced check from a different state, being served with an insufficient warrant by out of state New Jersey State Troopers.

Despite the police harassment, and a review of her entire criminal history on the witness stand, including her life as a prostitute, Jones brought her children to court to learn from her mistakes. She explained that she was relieved to be setting things straight because what she did to Mumia with her false testimony had been eating her up inside over all those years.

On the stand, admitting to perjury, Jones explained that she was awaiting trial for an unrelated robbery charge in 1982 when police detectives approached her in her cell offering to give her a deal by changing her story as a witness in Mumia’s case. She had originally stated that she heard two shots, looked around the corner, and saw two men running from the scene. The two men running fit the version of William Singletary where he saw someone else shoot Mumia and run, but it didn’t fit the police/prosecution story being woven against Mumia. Mumia was unable to run because he was shot.

She explained that the deal offered by the police was that she could go to prison for five to ten years and loose custody of her two young children or she could get out of the predicament by lying for the police saying that nobody was running from the scene.

Despite the importance of the testimony of Veronica Jones in Mumia’s case, both in corroborating eyewitnesses that say the actual killer or killers ran from the scene, and as another witness testifying to a clear pattern of police intimidation to acquire falsified testimony, Sabo ruled in 1996 against her testimony being heard by a new jury trial.

Likewise, in the original trial, Sabo ruled in favor of prosecution objections when Veronica Jones was already admitting to being the target of the police in their attempts at gaining false testimony:

"I had got locked up [together with other prostitutes] I think it was in January [1982]. […] I think sometime after that incident. They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it, intentionally. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that."

As Jackson continued this questioning Veronica Jones said, “we had brought up Cynthia [White]’s name and they told us we can work the area [as prostitutes] if we tell them [what the police wanted to hear].” At this point Judge Sabo ruled in favor of prosecutor McGill’s objections and would only allow further questions of Veronica Jones on what she saw the night of the shooting. As from the beginning of the trial, ruling after ruling has declared, police misconduct is not open to scrutiny and a court of law is no place for evidence of Mumia’s innocence.

Supposed Witness To Mumia Shooting Faulkner Number Two, Michael Scanlon

The use of Michael Scanlon’s name in “fry Mumia” literature as a witness to Mumia committing the murder is nothing but the purest cynicism. Michael Scanlon did not identify Mumia as the person who shot Faulkner, and could not say that the person he saw shoot Faulkner was Mumia. At the trial, when asked by prosecutor Mcgill, “Are you able to identify anybody, either the driver, or the man who ran over and shot the police officer?” Scanlon replied, “No, sir.” (trial transcript, 6/25/82).

Michael Scanlon’s testimony actually puts further holes in the prosecution’s story by placing someone in a green army jacket in the immediate scene of the shooting around the VW. According to the prosecution only Mumia, Cook, and Faulkner were present at this location, but the evidence shows that one or two people were present wearing green army jackets that killed Faulkner before Mumia arrived. The jackets Mumia and Cook were wearing are in evidence and they do not resemble green army jackets.

Supposed Witness To Mumia Shooting Faulkner Number Three, Albert Magiltan

Like Scanlon, Magiltan is used in the “fry Mumia” literature as a witness to Mumia committing the murder, and like Scanlan, Magilton did not identify Mumia as the person who shot Faulkner. When Magiltan was asked at the trial, "you don't know who fired the shot at him, do you?" Albert Magiltan responded, "I never said I did, no." (trial transcript, 6/25/82). Magiltan didn’t even see the shooting.

Magilton did, however, report to defense investigators that he saw a person run from the parking lot wearing a green army jacket. This fits the confession of Arnold Beverly, who says he ran out from the parking lot, wearing a green army jacket, to shoot Faulkner.

Essential Eyewitness Ignored By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number Three, Police Officer Stephen Trombetta

Police Officer Stephen Trombetta reported that the suspect was wearing a green army jacket as opposed to Mumia’s red and blue ski jacket.

In addition, Trombetta rode with Mumia in the van to the hospital. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer on the scene in charge of the Mumia “investigation”, reported that on that van ride Mumia had confessed to shooting Faulkner. Giordano was removed from the Philadelphia Police and prosecuted for corruption immediately after Mumia’s trial. P.O. Trembetta was with Mumia during that entire van ride and, in direct contradiction to Giordano’s claim of a confession, reported that Mumia made no comment.

Essential Eyewitness Despised By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number Four, William Singletary

While William Singletary did sign a statement saying that Mumia did it, he later stated that he signed that statement under the duress of police threats. Of that statement he says, “That's what they made me say, I stayed in there [in a police interrogation room] from 4:30 to 9:30 a.m. and when I left, I felt like I had been raped.”

William Singletary has since stated, "Mumia Abu-Jamal didn't shoot Daniel Faulkner. The passenger in the right-hand side of the Volkswagen got out of the car and shot him [Faulkner]. When Mumia came on the scene, we [Singletary and another man] were on the police radio trying to radio for help." ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

Despite signing the statement, Singletary refused to lie for the police during the trial. Yet the “fry Mumia” camp often cite Singletary as an eyewitness against Mumia stating that his statement (that he says the police typed up and told him to sign) was so similar to those of the other “eyewitnesses” that his first signed statement had to be the truth and that what Singletary has been insisting for the past 25 years is a lie.

Singletary says that he is willing to take a lie detector test, but he is afraid of coming to Philadelphia. He says the Philadelphia police harassed his business to the point that it went under while also threatening him and warning him to get out of town. He did eventually move to North Carolina and says, “I'm not coming to Philadelphia unless y'all got Wells Fargo and Lords of London" for protection.

Supposed Witness To Mumia Shooting Faulkner Number Four, Robert Chobert

In his initial report taken by Inspector Alfonzo Giordono, five minutes after the shooting, Robert Chobert stated that the man that shot Mumia ran away. Mumia, who was shot at the scene, never did any running.

Later, Robert Chobert changed his story to that of the prosecution. The shooter no longer was running away and the jury was never allowed to hear Chobert’s original report.

Robert Chobert, a convicted arsonist that was driving on a suspended license and was on felony probation at the time of the shooting, has also recanted his testimony according to a sworn statement by Mark Newman.

At the time of Mumia’s trial, Chobert was on felony probation for the firebombing of a school. Revocation of that probation could have meant over 20 years in prison. Chobert was in fact violating that probation by unlawfully driving his taxi on a suspended license that night. Thus, Chobert would have been easily manipulated by the police and/or by the prosecution.

Under penalty of perjury, Mark Newman stated in a signed affidavit that, “Chobert told me that he did not see anyone standing over a prone Officer Faulkner, firing shots at the officer. Chobert said that what actually happened was that he was sitting in his taxi when he heard gunfire.” And that he did not actually see the shooting.

According to that signed affidavit of Mark Newman, Chobert didn't see Mumia shoot Faulkner, wasn't parked behind Faulkner as he said he was at the trial, and that Chobert gave the police that false testimony they wanted to avoid having his parole revoked.

Physical evidence, as well as eyewitness testimony, proves that Chobert's cab was not parked behind Faulkner's as Chobert claimed in court. This evidence includes 31 recently released photos taken by photojournalist Pedro Polakoff just minutes after the shooting. These photos clearly show that Chobert's cab was not parked behind Faulkner’s police car as Chobert had claimed in court.

This corroborates the testimony of Mark Newman when he states, "Chobert told me that on December 9, 1981, he had actually been parked, in his taxi, on 13th Street, north of Locust (contradicting his trial testimony that he was parked behind Officer Faulkner's police car on Locust St., east of 13th Street.)" This is also relevant to Chobert not having the vantage for seeing the shooting.

Newman’s testimony is also corroborated by Chobert’s legal troubles and a clear pattern by the police to offer similar deals to other witnesses including three eyewitnesses, Pamela Jenkins, William Singletary, and Veronica Jones, stating publicly, and Cynthia White also stating privately, that they were coerced, threatened, or otherwise offered deals by the cops to give false testimony.

The police officer that got the “identification” of Mumia from Robert Chobert was Alfonzo Giordano. In the original police report that has the shooter running from the scene, Robert Chobert is said by Giordano to say it was the guy from MOVE that did it. Giordano was removed from the force and prosecuted for corruption related to the mob, a corruption probe that turned over many other police/prosecution convictions. In addition, Giordano had been involved in political operations against Philadelphia MOVE and the Black Panther Party. As such, Giordano would have instantly recognized Mumia, a former Black Panther and an independent journalist that had exposed police wrong doing against MOVE.

In a revealing set of moves Giordano was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. This despite Giordano providing testimony at Mumia’s preliminary hearing of a “confession” in the van, despite his being the senior officer at the scene, despite his supposed firsthand identification of a witness, and despite his testimony of finding the “murder weapon”. During the trial Giordano was removed from active duty and assigned to a desk. The first working day after the trial was over Giordano resigned from the Philadelphia police force. In 1986 Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs during the 1979-80 period but didn’t spend any time in jail.

In addition to Giordono’s corruption, under racist Police Chief Frank Rizzo, Giordono was in charge of the Stake Out Unit of the Philadelphia Police that carried out repression against the Black Panther Party from 1968 –1970. Giordono also played a supervisory role in the 1977-78 police barricade and attack on the MOVE organization under Mayor Frank Rizzo. That police attack had followed earlier murders by the Philadelphia police of MOVE members and followed a long starvation blockade by the Philadelphia Police against the MOVE headquarters. In the police attack two MOVE members were shot, nine MOVE members were framed by the Philadelphia Police, MOVE children were stolen, and, as film footage shows, Delbert Africa was kicked and stomped by the police as he lay on the ground. In addition, Officer Ramp was shot and killed.

While nine MOVE members were railroaded to prison for the death of Officer Ramp, the evidence does not fit. The one bullet that killed Ramp came from behind and had a downward trajectory. Yet Ramp was facing the MOVE headquarters where MOVE members were in the basement and any bullets would have had an upward trajectory and hit him from in front.

Presiding over the kangaroo court that convicted the MOVE 9 was Judge Malmed. Shortly after the trial and conviction of the MOVE 9, Mumia, as an independent journalist, called in to a talk radio show where he asked Judge Malmed, “Who shot James Ramp?” Judge Malmed honestly answered, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

In the attack on MOVE the police and Mayor Rizzo claimed that the first shots came from the MOVE headquarters, but the independent eyewitnesses including a number of journalists present, confirm what MOVE members and the physical evidence says, that the first shot came from across the street and not from the MOVE headquarters.

At Mayor Frank Rizzo’s victory press conference on the 1978 police attack, Frank Rizzo directly threatened Mumia Abu-Jamal when Mumia asked him a question. Mumia was present as a freelance journalist and asked the gloating Rizzo, “What about the brutality?” Instead of answering Mumia’s question Rizzo responded angrily with a threat: “They believe what you write, and what you say, and it's got to stop. And one day, and I hope it's in my career, that you're going to have to be held responsible and accountable for what you do.”

In addition to commanding this attack against MOVE, Giordono, earlier, then under Police Chief Rizzo, carried out surveillance of leftists including the Black Panther Party.

With Mumia having been a former member of the Black Panther Party and a high profile critic of police actions against MOVE, there is no question that officer Giordono would have instantly recognized Mumia at the crime scene. This would be one of the motives for Giordono to want to falsify testimony and other evidence to pin the murder on Mumia.

A number of other well-known political frame-ups have occurred in the United States. The prosecution of Mumia fits the pattern of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program against the Black Panther Party, where local law enforcement worked with the FBI in murdering some BPP leaders in cold blood, such as Fred Hampton in Chicago, and knowingly framed and prosecuted other innocent BPP members, such as Geronimo ji Jagga in LA who spent 30 years in prison before he was exonerated of the false charges against him and freed.

A possible additional motive for framing Mumia can be found in the confession of Arnold Beverly. Beverly stated, “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.”

Things that Beverly said are corroborated by, among other things, police corruption, three separate FBI investigations of police corruption in the Center City area at the time, evidence of fear that Faulkner was an FBI informant, evidence that Faulkner was an FBI informant, and the murder of other witnesses involved in cases against the Center City Police at that time. One of those murders was of Bertram Schlein, an eyewitness that testified against Central Division Chief John DeBenedetto. A suspect in that murder was Kenneth Schwartz, a former police officer and reported associate of Inspector Alfonzo Giordono.

A former Philadelphia Police Officer turned mob hit man, Ronald Previte, has testified as government informant on mob killings. Previte stated that during his ten years as a Philadelphia cop he “learned more about being a crook” than any other time in his life.

If the police were in fact involved in the murder of Police Officer Faulkner, this would mean that they would not be interested in finding the actual killer. They would want to pin the murder on someone else, and who better in the eyes of Giordano than his journalistic critic, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Whatever the exact motive or motives, the mountain of police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct in this case proves that the criminal “justice” system both had (and has) no interest in finding the real killer or killers while at the same time desiring to execute an innocent man.

It is funny that when presented with this evidence, “fry Mumia” fanatics counter that if it was indeed a frame-up, why was it so sloppy. Why would Giordano have included that the shooter was running away in his original report? The irony is that if the frame-up wasn’t so sloppy we’d be asked why the case is so airtight. Yet I think that answers to the question of why there are so many loose ends lies in the fact that the police were accustomed to being sloppy and getting away with it. Even though the truth of the shooter running away was included in the original report, this was no problem for the police or prosecution, since the judge did not allow the original report into court anyway. All that was allowed was the lie that Chobert saw the shooting and that it was Mumia that did it.

The deeper irony is that when the “fry Mumia” fanatics admit that there are so many loose ends, they are admitting that Mumia is innocent by the essential legal standard of “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Essential Eyewitness Despised By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number Five, Dessie Hightower

College student Dessie Hightower saw someone running from the scene. This is what Hightower told police 80 minutes after the shooting, and Dessie Hightower has never changed his story. Hightower’s report of one or more people running is the same as eyewitnesses William Singletary, Veronica Jones, Robert Chobert, Arnold Beverly, and William Cook. This corroborates William Cook when he said, “Freeman ran from the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot”. It also corroborates William Singletary when he says, “The passenger [Freeman] in the right-hand side of the Volkswagen got out of the car and shot him [Faulkner]” and ran. Hightower also said that he saw no gun in Mumia’s hand.

Supposed Witness To Mumia Shooting Faulkner Number Five, Robert Harkins

Harkins was not seen as a credible witness by the prosecution at the trial. Harkins was never called to testify at the trial against Mumia by the prosecution. Yet in “fry Mumia” literature the name of Robert Harkins has begun to occasionally pop up as an additional supposed eyewitness to Mumia shooting Faulkner. Like other supposed eyewitnesses of the “fry Mumia” crowd that “saw Mumia shoot Faulkner”, Harkins did not identify Mumia as the shooter.

The Harkins testimony is at odds with the physical evidence and that of all of the other eyewitnesses, including prosecution witnesses. Harkins, a known child molester, could have easily been manipulated by the police and prosecution, as was done with other eyewitnesses. If so, the police and prosecution succeeded in destroying a potential defense witness, but did not produce a useful witness for their frame-up.

Essential Eyewitness Despised By “Fry Mumia” Fanatics Number Six, Terri Maurer-Carter

Terri Maurer-Carter, an official court stenographer in the courts where Mumia was framed, has come forward stating in a signed affidavit,

“Judge Sabo and another person were engaged in conversation. Judge Sabo was discussing the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. During the course of that conversation, I heard Judge Sabo say, ‘Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the nigger.’ There were three people present when Judge Sabo made that remark, including myself.”

These words Maurer-Carter heard from Sabo sum up the blatant nature of the racist and political crime carried out by Sabo, the prosecution, and the police against Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Conclusion

There are a large number of other important eyewitnesses that will be looked at in future articles, but let us review a few key points of what has already been established.

“Fry Mumia” fanatics claim that Mumia shot Faulkner. Yet, not a single eyewitness saw Mumia shoot Faulkner. Cynthia White and Robert Chobert claimed they saw Mumia shoot Faulkner, but neither saw the shooting. Michael Scanlon, Robert Harkins, and Robert Magiltan, despite “fry Mumia” lies, never claimed they saw Mumia shoot Faulkner.

Four eyewitnesses say in no uncertain terms that Mumia did not shoot Faulkner. These are William Singletary, William Cook, Arnold Beverly, and Mumia Abu Jamal.

Five eyewitnesses contradict the prosecution’s version of events by saying they saw men running from the scene. These would have been the real shooters or shooter. Those eyewitnesses are Dessie Hightower, William Singletary, Veronica Jones, Robert Chobert, and William Cook. The prosecution version of events denies anyone running from the scene.

Five eyewitnesses have stated that they were threatened, coerced, or otherwise offered favors for testimony against Mumia. These are Veronica Jones, William Singletary, Pamela Jenkins, Cynthia White, and Robert Chobert.

The prosecution’s version of events denies anyone on the scene wearing a green army jacket. Yet all evidence points to one or two men on the scene wearing green army jackets shooting Faulkner. Seven eyewitnesses saw a green army jacket. Those that saw green army-jackets were William Singletary, William Cook, stake out Officer Forbes (the putative first officer to arrive), Officer Stephen Trembetta, Michael Scanlan, Robert Magiltan, and Arnold Beverly.

Kenneth Freeman, the real killer, or one of the real killers, was linked to the crime scene by physical evidence that was illegally suppressed by the prosecution for 13 years.

Not only did nobody see Mumia shoot Faulkner, the body of evidence shows overwhelming prosecutorial, police, and judicial misconduct pointing to a clear frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and backing Mumia’s claim that he is innocent.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States, with what could be the final decision on his legal appeals possibly coming down this summer. That decision could give Mumia his freedom, life in prison, or execution. It is time to turn up the heat against this injustice. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

This is the first in a series of ten articles on the top ten “fry Mumia” myths that will be published at Liberation News.

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The Fight For Single Payer and National Healthcare

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:58:43 GMT

The Fight For Single Payer and National Healthcare

By Steven Argue

As an advocate for social justice and someone with no healthcare, I am strongly in favor of national healthcare like in Cuba, and short of that a single payer system would be a significant step forward.

National healthcare does work. It is working very well in Cuba. It is interesting that tiny poor Cuba under a U.S. economic blockade is able to provide good healthcare for everyone. Cuba, unlike the United States, does not let people die in the emergency rooms without treatment or turn sick people away from receiving healthcare because they lack insurance. Cuba has taken the profit out of illness and injury and provide healthcare as a human right.

Likewise, while the United States is sending military troops to set up death squad governments in Iraq and Haiti and to intervene in Afghanistan, the Phillipines, and prop up the death squad government of Colombia, Cuba instead sends doctors. Cuban doctors save lives. They are on the ground in a number of countries providing regular care, and they are also sent to countries in emergencies. A few years back Cuba sent doctors to Central America after a bad hurricane and saved many lives. Likewise they offered to send doctors to New Orleans immediately after Katrina, they were well trained in dealing with that type of situation and would have saved lives, but Bush refused to let them in. A similar thing happened with the Nicaraguan government refusing entry, but that government let the Cuban doctors in due to protests.

And Canada, also unlike the United States, has better healthcare where everyone is covered. Lately the NAFTA agreement has unfortunately been intervening against the Canadian single payer system, but it is still a much better system of healthcare than in the United States. Single payer is much cheaper and more efficient than the health insurance racket. Unfortunately the Democrats and Republicans are subservient to the insurance, pharmaceutical, and for-profit hospital industries. Single payer eliminates the health insurance racket with all of its waste in profits, paperwork, and overpaid CEOs. And despite the cries of the extreme right neo-cons and libertarians, none of the major candidates have any plans to make any significant change to the healthcare racket in America.

It will take a major struggle against the corporate power structure to gain single payer healthcare. The main force that has the potential strength to do so is organized labor, a force that could shut down production to make our demands.

Unfortunately many of the unions that are supposed to represent labor are in the back pockets of the corporations and the Democrat Party. Instead of fighting for single payer healthcare the SEIU recently held rallies for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota). None of these corporate politicians support single payer healthcare.

This is bad enough, but Dawn Lee, spokesperson for the SEIU, says the SEIU takes no position on HR 676, a single payer bill introduced by Conyers.

There are unions, such as the California Nurses Association (CNA), that support single payer. But until the labor movement breaks its love affair with the corporate Democrat Party, and begins to once again rely on the militant action of the rank and file, as it did in the 1930’s, we will not only not gain single payer healthcare, our standard of living will continue to decline by every other indicator as well, while massive corporate profits soar.

Pass HR 676, single payer for the United States!

Pass SB 840, single payer in California!

Put union dues into strike funds instead of the Democrat Party!

For mass action and a general strike for single payer healthcare!

End the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba!

Preserve Canadian Single Payer, Repeal NAFTA!

Steven Argue for Liberation News:
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Lesbians sentenced for self-defense. FREE THEM NOW!

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 18:25:55 GMT

FREE THEM NOW!
Lesbians sentenced for self-defense
All-white jury convicts Black women

By Imani Henry
New York

Published Jun 21, 2007 2:58 AM
On June 14, four African-American women—Venice Brown (19), Terrain Dandridge (20), Patreese Johnson (20) and Renata Hill (24)—received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years in prison. None of them had previous criminal records. Two of them are parents of small children.

Their crime? Defending themselves from a physical attack by a man who held them down and choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, spat on them, and threatened to sexually assault them—all because they are lesbians.

The mere fact that any victim of a bigoted attack would be arrested, jailed and then convicted for self-defense is an outrage. But the length of prison time given further demonstrates the highly political nature of this case and just how racist, misogynistic, anti-gay, anti-youth and anti-worker the so-called U.S. justice system truly is.

The description of the events, reported below, is based on written statements by a community organization (FIERCE) that has made a call to action to defend the four women, verbal accounts from court observers and evidence from a surveillance camera.

The attack

On Aug. 16, 2006, seven young, African-American, lesbian-identified friends were walking in the West Village. The Village is a historic center for lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) communities, and is seen as a safe haven for working-class LGBT youth, especially youth of color.

As they passed the Independent Film Cinema, 29-year-old Dwayne Buckle, an African-American vendor selling DVDs, sexually propositioned one of the women. They rebuffed his advances and kept walking.

“I’ll f— you straight, sweetheart!” Buckle shouted. A video camera from a nearby store shows the women walking away. He followed them, all the while hurling anti-lesbian slurs, grabbing his genitals and making explicitly obscene remarks. The women finally stopped and confronted him. A heated argument ensued. Buckle spat in the face of one of the women and threw his lit cigarette at them, escalating the verbal attack into a physical one.

Buckle is seen on the video grabbing and pulling out large patches of hair from one of the young women. When Buckle ended up on top of one of the women, choking her, Johnson pulled a small steak knife out of her purse. She aimed for his arm to stop him from killing her friend.

The video captures two men finally running over to help the women and beating Buckle. At some point he was stabbed in the abdomen. The women were already walking away across the street by the time the police arrived.

Buckle was hospitalized for five days after surgery for a lacerated liver and stomach. When asked at the hospital, he responded at least twice that men had attacked him.

There was no evidence that Johnson’s kitchen knife was the weapon that penetrated his abdomen, nor was there any blood visible on it. In fact, there was never any forensics testing done on her knife. On the night they were arrested, the police told the women that there would be a search by the New York Police Department for the two men—which to date has not happened.

After almost a year of trial, four of the seven were convicted in April. Johnson was sentenced to 11 years on June 14.

Even with Buckle’s admission and the video footage proving that he instigated this anti-gay attack, the women were relentlessly demonized in the press, had trumped-up felony charges levied against them, and were subsequently given long sentences in order to send a clear resounding message—that self-defense is a crime and no one should dare to fight back.

Political backdrop of the case

Why were these young women used as an example? At stake are the billions of dollars in tourism and real estate development involved in the continued gentrification of the West Village. This particular incident happened near the Washington Square area—home of New York University, one of most expensive private colleges in the country and one of the biggest employers and landlords in New York City. The New York Times reported that Justice Edward J. McLaughlin used his sentencing speech to comment on “how New York welcomes tourists.” (June 17)

The Village is also the home of the Stonewall Rebellion, the three-day street battle against the NYPD that, along with the Compton Cafeteria “Riots” in California, helped launch the modern-day LGBT liberation movement in 1969. The Manhattan LGBT Pride march, one of the biggest demonstrations of LGBT peoples in the world, ends near the Christopher Street Piers in the Village, which have been the historical “hangout” and home for working-class trans and LGBT youth in New York City for decades.

Because of growing gentrification in recent years, young people of color, homeless and transgender communities, LGBT and straight, have faced curfews and brutality by police sanctioned by the West Village community board and politicians. On Oct. 31, 2006, police officers from the NYPD’s 6th Precinct indiscriminately beat and arrested several people of color in sweeps on Christopher Street after the Halloween parade.

Since the 1980s there has been a steady increase in anti-LGBT violence in the area, with bashers going there with that purpose in mind.

For trans people and LGBT youth of color, who statistically experience higher amounts of bigoted violence, the impact of the gentrification has been severe. As their once-safe haven is encroached on by real estate developers, the new white and majority heterosexual residents of the West Village then call in the state to brutalize them.

For the last six years the political LGBT youth group FIERCE has been at the forefront of mobilizing young people “to counter the displacement and criminalization of LGBTSTQ [lesbian, gay, bi, two spirit, trans, and queer] youth of color and homeless youth at the Christopher Street Pier and in Manhattan’s West Village.” (www.fiercenyc.org) FIERCE has also been the lead organization supporting the Jersey Seven and their families.

The trial and the media

Deemed a so-called “hate crime” against a straight man, every possible racist, anti-woman, anti-LGBT and anti-youth tactic was used by the entire state apparatus and media. Everything from the fact that they lived outside of New York, in the working-class majority Black city of Newark, N.J., to their gender expressions and body structures were twisted and dehumanized in the public eye and to the jury.

According to court observers, McLaughlin stated throughout the trial that he had no sympathy for these women. The jury, although they were all women, were all white. All witnesses for the district attorney were white men, except for one Black male who had several felony charges.

Court observers report that the defense attorneys had to put enormous effort into simply convincing the jury that they were “average women” who had planned to just hang out together that night. Some jurists asked why they were in the Village if they were from New Jersey. The DA brought up whether they could afford to hang out there—raising the issue of who has the right to be there in the first place.

The Daily News reporting was relentless in its racist anti-lesbian misogyny, portraying Buckle as a “filmmaker” and “sound engineer” preyed upon by a “lesbian wolf pack” (April 19) and a “gang of angry lesbians.” (April 13)

Everyone has been socialized by cultural archetypes of what it means to be a “man” or “masculine” and “woman” or “feminine.” Gender identity/expression is the way each indivdual chooses or not to express gender in their everyday lives, including how they dress, walk, talk, etc. Transgender people and other gender non-conforming people face oppression based on their gender expression/identity.

The only pictures shown in the Daily News were of the more masculine-appearing women. One of the most despiciable headlines in the Daily News, “‘I’m a man!’ lesbian growled during fight,” (April 13) was targeted against Renata Hill, who was taunted by Buckle because of her masculinity.

Ironically, Johnson, who was singled out by the judge as the “ringleader,” is the more feminine of the four. According to the New York Times, in his sentencing remarks, “Justice McLaughlin scoffed at the assertion made by ... Johnson, that she carried a knife because she was just 4-foot-11 and 95 pounds, worked nights and lived in a dangerous neighborhood.” He quoted the nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” (June 15)

All of the seven women knew and went to school with Sakia Gunn, a 19-year-old butch lesbian who was stabbed to death in Newark, N.J., in May 2003. Paralleling the present case, Gunn was out with three of her friends when a man made sexual advances to one of the women. When she replied that she was a lesbian and not interested, he attacked them. Gunn fought back and was stabbed to death.

“You can’t help but wonder that if Sakia Gunn had a weapon, would she be in jail right now?” Bran Fenner, a founding member and co-executive director of FIERCE, told Workers World. “If we don’t have the right to self-defense, how are we supposed to survive?”

National call to action

While racist killer cops continue to go without indictment and anti-immigrant paramilitary groups like the Minutemen are on the rise in the U.S., The Jersey Four sit behind bars for simply defending themselves against a bigot who attacked them in the Village.

Capitalism at its very core is a racist, sexist, anti-LGBT system, sanctioning state violence through cops, courts and its so-called laws. The case of the Jersey Four gives more legal precedence for bigoted violence to go unchallenged. The ruling class saw this case as a political one; FIERCE and other groups believe the entire progressive movement should as well.

Fenner said, “We are organizing in the hope that this wakes up all oppressed people and sparks a huge, broad campaign to demand freedom for the Jersey Four.”

FIERCE is asking for assistance for these young women, including pro-bono legal support, media contacts and writers, pen pals, financial support, and diverse organizational support. For details, visit www.fiercenyc.org.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Distributed by Steven Argue of Liberation News (not affiliated with Workers World):
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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Pro-War Democrats Battle for the Presidency

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 13:33:44 GMT

Pro-War Democrats Battle for the Presidency

By Steven Argue

Every four years the American people are subjected to the farce of bourgeois democracy, a “democracy” where only the candidates chosen by the very wealthy have any chance of being elected. That season of nicely dressed pathological liars and false hopes is now upon us.

Since the corporate media of the United States has long ago abandoned any semblance of reporting on anything of substance about candidates such as voting records and actual political views, it is up to the journalists of the left press and Indy-media to do so.

A front-runner in the race is pro-war Democrat Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has voted for every war the United States has carried out since she came into office in 2000. Those pro-war votes include the Iraq war. She also voted to take away our civil liberties by supporting the “Patriot Act” and its renewal. Hillary Clinton, like many Democrats, pounds the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. In addition she voted for the anti-immigrant wall.

In her recent successful run for Senate Hillary Clinton amassed more than 22 million dollars, making her the biggest campaign finance recipient running for Senate in the country. Her money came from such corporate interests as drug and hospital conglomerates, Wall Street finance interests, real estate developers, and rightwing corporate media mogul, Rupert Murdoch.

Barack Obama

Another front-runner and “rising star” of the Democrat Party is Barack Obama. Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has voted for the Patriot Act by voting to renew it in 2006. He also voted for the racist anti-immigrant wall as well as the “guest worker” program that denies immigrants rights, but allows them to come to this country to be exploited and under-paid. Obama also voted for the so-called “Class Action Fairness Act” that makes it harder for the people to sue corporations.

One might think that Obama, as a black man in racist America, might have something to offer on issues dealing with the suffering caused by the racist police state, mass incarceration of the poor, lack of healthcare, and dramatic drop in the standard of living of the multi-racial working class and poor. Instead Barack Obama plays into racist stereotypes, blaming the victims of racist America rather than the corporate criminals, stating:

"Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the basis of a renewed effort to tackle the problem of inner-city poverty. We could begin by acknowledging that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock. . ." Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pps. 255-256

The inner cities of America have, by and large, been abandoned by the same capitalists that got rich off of the jobs they have now exported, just as the victims of hurricane Katrina were left to die by this same racist system. Yet the best thing to do according to Barack Obama is for black girls to stop having children out of wedlock.

In his book Uncle Obama not only lets this racist system off the hook, but he praises one of the worst anti-working class reforms of the Clinton administration stating, "we should also acknowledge that conservatives-and Bill Clinton-were right about welfare as it was previously structured." Bill Clinton’s welfare reform has caused homelessness, hunger, and less access to other basic necessities for the poor in America, but Barack Obama says Bill Clinton and the conservatives were right.

Both Obama and Clinton have voted for war appropriations. The fact that they both decided at the last minute to vote against war appropriations in the most recent vote on supplemental war appropriations is a symptom of the fact that the war has not gone as planned. The war has not gained the desired oil loot for U.S. corporations and has caused a number of growing problems for U.S. imperialism including internal dissent in the United States. And while Clinton and Obama have finally voted against war appropriations this time, their pro-war Democrat Party garnered plenty of other votes to keep the imperialist war going.

In his book, Barack Obama makes clear his support for the billions being squandered on lining the pockets of the military contractors stating, “given the depletion of our [military] forces after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher [Pentagon] budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and replace equipment.” (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p 307).

Joe Biden

Another Democrat candidate is Joe Biden. Unlike many Democrat presidential candidates that have tried to distance themselves from the war that they voted for to begin with, in the most recent vote on war appropriations Joe Biden voted with the majority of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate putting billions of dollars towards the continued U.S. imperialist slaughter of the Iraqi people.

John Edwards

Another presidential candidate with a pro-war record is John Edwards. Edwards voted for the war against Iraq and campaigned as a vice presidential candidate on the pro-war John Kerry ticket. At that time both candidates defended their votes for the war. John Edwards has since apologized for his vote for unprovoked military aggression and mass murder (without using that wording and without recognizing that his vote for war was a criminal act).

Yet when Edwards was running for the position of vice president in 2004 this what he had to say on his pro-war vote:

“We need to stick to this [defending their Iraq war votes]. We should stand by our votes, say we would vote that way again. If you admit a mistake, it shows weakness in time of war. That's what the Republicans want us to do.” (John Edwards's changing tune on the Iraq vote, Scot Lehigh, The Globe, April 17, 2007)

Bill Richardson

Another candidate trying to paint himself as an antiwar candidate of the people is presidential candidate and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. Richardson doesn’t call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, but instead calls for a slow withdrawal. In the early 1990s he did vote against the U.S. war to reinstate the anti-woman pro-U.S. corporate oil monarchy in Kuwait, but later said he regretted that vote. In addition Richardson is a strong supporter the pro-corporate anti-worker NAFTA, GATT, and WTO.

As U.N. Ambassador under Clinton, Richardson enthusiastically endorsed and continued the brutal sanctions against Iraq. When asked in a recent interview on KUNM (a Santa Fe public radio station) as to whether or not the deaths of half a million Iraqi children due to the sanctions was worth it he answered "yes".

On the death penalty Richardson, like many Democrats, says it is a good thing. Hundreds of inmates in the United States have had their convictions overturned as a result of new DNA evidence being brought to light, with some of these being death penalty cases. Still prosecutors have fought against the use of DNA evidence to overturn old convictions, even when the lives of innocent people are on the line. In racist America, death penalty juries are always more likely to convict because all who oppose the death penalty are excluded from these juries, making them juries that are more biased towards supporting the prosecution. Blacks often face all or mostly white death penalty juries. These are juries likely to contain a number of people who think that all Black people are criminals, making these jurors incapable of weighing the evidence and understanding the concept of reasonable doubt even in those rare circumstances when the evidence is fairly presented.

Why would anybody support the death penalty being carried out by a system that has been proven to make so many mistakes? The answer lies in the fact that the death penalty is an instrument of terror used by the American ruling class against the working class, poor, and people of color. On the one hand when such innocent people are executed it has no importance to the likes of Joe Biden because to them the lives of the poor and people of color are cheap. But for the ruling class, the added bonus of the death penalty is when it is used in political cases to silence dissent such as with the executions of Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, the Haymarket martyrs, and the threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. As governor, the fact that Bill Richardson has no problem with the death penalty means that he already has blood on his hands.

Dennis Kucinich

Likewise Dennis Kucinich is portraying himself as the standard bearer of peace, love, and liberalism, but has voted in favor of the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution Kucinich voted for falsely claims, “Mumia Abu-Jamal stood over Officer Faulkner and shot him in the face, mortally wounding him…” Yet this is not what the eyewitnesses said. For instance eyewitness William Singletary says, "Mumia Abu-Jamal didn't shoot Daniel Faulkner. The passenger in the right-hand side of the Volkswagen [that Faulkner had stopped] got out of the car and shot him. When Mumia came on the scene, we [Singletary and another man] were on the police radio trying to radio for help." ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

In the last presidential election Dennis Kucinich portrayed himself up as an anti-war candidate of the Democrat Party. Yet on his web site the Kucinich campaign stated that Kucinich, “Supports a strong and efficient military. He believes that the current practice of procuring ever more costly weapons has the effect of weakening military readiness. As the cost of new weapons systems rise, the cost of merely replacing aging weapons with new ones becomes prohibitively expensive. As a result, U.S. military forces shrink, while they become at the same time more expensive to maintain and more prone to failure.”

So Kucinich advocates more frugal and efficient spending on imperialist terror and murder.

This is the same position taken by two U.S. generals waging the war in Iraq. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq General Stanley McCrystal complained, "It was enough for the enemy to show a little resistance and some creative thinking as our technological superiority begun to quickly lose all its meaning. Our expenses are not justified by the obtained results. The enemy is using an order of magnitude cheaper weapons to reach the same goals for which we spend billions on technological whims of the defense industry!"

Similarly General Richard Mayers commented on precision-guided munitions, "The rate of their use is incompatible with the obtained results. We are literally dropping gold into the mud!"

The contradiction here was purely limited to the difference between the pure profiteering of the military industrial complex and the desire for actual cost effective results for imperialist victory on the battlefield.

Dennis Kucinich spoke to a gathering of the Southern California Americans for Democratic Action claiming, "We [he and the congress] did not authorize an eye for an eye. Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan. We did not authorize the Administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases. We did not authorize war without end. We did not authorize a permanent war economy. Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy."

Yet that is exactly what Kucinich and the rest of the congress, with the exception of California Democrat Barbara Lee, agreed to with their votes authorizing Bush’s endless war on the world. The entire Democrat Party in both the Senate and Congress, with only one exception, voted for Bush's war.

Since a different vote was later taken authorizing the US war in Iraq, the most practical application of this vote by Kucinich was to authorize the US war in Afghanistan.

In stark contrast to Kucinich’s vote for war Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote on March 2002:

“When U.S. President George W. Bush spoke about an "endless war," some took it as mere political speech, or rhetoric designed to gain the top spot on the evening network news. I did not. "W" is an agent of his class, the wealthy oil merchants of the land, and his intentions are to press for an ever-wider war in all corners of the earth, to make the world safe for capital exploitation and unbridled commerce. This will eventually become a war that reaches into a slew of countries in the Middle East, on behalf of the rich and powerful elites who rule. Make no mistake: this is a war that has nothing to do with democracy. The U.S. enters the region, armed to the gills, not to defend democracies, but to defend theocracies; to defend kings, princes and sultanates; to defend U.S. access to vast oil resources in the region.” Mumia Abu-Jamal

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has in fact killed tens of thousands of civilians and brought the Afghan nation back to the chaos of fragmented warlord rule last seen after the various U.S. trained and financed Mujahideen forces defeated the Soviet backed PDPA government.

The day after the September 11 attack this author wrote:

“Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. The CIA put them in power with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. This massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to the revolutionary PDPA government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women’s rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.

“Foreign religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen (from which the Taliban were later formed). With billions of dollars in assistance from the U.S. [starting under the Jimmy Carter presidency] these fanatical cutthroats waged a holy war that included killing woman for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. The Taliban came to power as a result of this U.S. intervention.

“Will a U.S. war now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama Bin Laden set things straight? No. It will be the people of Afghanistan who suffer death and destruction from war as the U.S. attempts to install a puppet government friendly to U.S. corporate (oil) interests” Steven Argue, Liberation News, September 12, 2002

Kucinich, the “peace candidate”, as much as he may now want to deny it, voted for the war in Afghanistan and played his part in making it happen.

On the war in Iraq Kucinich now states, "There is only one way in which the United States will withdraw from Iraq, prior to the end of President Bush's term: Congress must vote to cut off funds." (Rep. Kucinich, The Huffington Report) This position not only ignores the role of the people of the United States, Britain, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere rising up and resisting the war and imperialist occupations, but it is also is being put forward by a politician that voted for the war in Afghanistan, wants a leaner meaner imperialist military, voted for the racist legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and who has worked hard to bring the anti-war movement back into the pro-war Democrat Party.

Some may argue that Kucinich is not perfect, but he’d make a better president than Bush. Yet it is unlikely that Kucinich has any intention of winning the presidency. His role is one of bringing the anti-war movement and others who are breaking from the establishment and the twin parties of war and racism back into the fold of the pro-war Democrat Party. Kucinich makes this point clear when he states, "The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I'm trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy" (Counter Punch, April 2003).

Yet that tent Kucinich speaks of is one that, despite its name, is not democratic. It is a tent dominated by big capital and the politicians subservient to it. It is under this tent that the ruling class would like to swallow up the legitimate opposition of the people towards war and turn us into the water boys for the “responsible” politicians of the Democrat Party.

It is such "responsible" politicians, including Kucinich, that voted in their vast majority to back the racist legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal. It is outrageous that that the Democrat party would vote in its House majority to condemn a French city for daring to make an issue of this racist legal lynching, while at the same time doing nothing about the liar and killer, Bush. But then again that should be no surprise either since the Democrat Party voted in its majority for the war in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton

In a press conference on August 21, 2006 George Bush Jr. finally admitted what Liberation News has been pointing out since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Yet Bush had used a supposed connection as a pretext for the U.S.’s unprovoked aggression against Iraq. In addition, Bush Jr. also admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Most of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Hillary Clinton included, supported going to war with Iraq. Today Hillary Clinton has no remorse for that murderous decision stating, "Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since. No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." Hillary Clinton: No regret on Iraq Vote, CNN.Com

In trying to let themselves off the hook many Democrats claim that Bush “did not fairly represent intelligence”. Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren’t their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make them look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Clinton, however, is worse in not even distancing herself from this “justified invasion” and “weapons of mass destruction” lies.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they might not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for Bush Jr. and Hillary Clinton Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats to try to rethink, or at least distance themselves from, the Bush policies they have supported.

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Bill Clinton administration. That blockade, partially due to the capitalist nature of the Iraqi economy under Saddam Hussein, cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Bill Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered well over 655,000 people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq had the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial, and execute him, for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980’s the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was being used as an asset of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise the CIA helped Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party come to power, supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba’athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

“In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein’s capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

“While defending Iraq against imperialist attack and supporting their right to defend themselves socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal...”

“U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women’s liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

“The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead.” -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were not from a crystal ball. They were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. Today in Iraq the U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops and troops of the puppet Iraqi government. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women’s rights and women’s rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn’t completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq’s resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and billions in dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need. Just as the new imperialist masters of Iraq have shown a criminal lack of interest in the rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, so too they left the people of New Orleans.

Yet for the ruling class their failure in Iraq is not in the murderous, undemocratic, and anti-woman puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

The words of Hillary Clinton, an icon of Democratic Party liberalism, makes abundantly clear that what she opposes is not the oil war itself, but the fact that Bush is not winning it:

“Let us not confuse the leadership’s failures with either the remaining mission in Iraq or the war on terrorism or with our support for our troops. What we have here is a failure of leadership to accomplish that mission. What was hailed as our shortest war has now become one of our longest. What was hailed as a model of democracy teeters on the brink of complete anarchy. What was the leadership that quickly claimed credit for success has been lethargic in the face of misjudgments and setbacks.” Hillary Clinton

As a result of imperialism’s failure in Iraq some Democrats that voted for the war like John Kerry have called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Yet the Kerry-Feingold plan actually calls for keeping troops in Iraq that are "critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces." The Kerry-Feingold plan also calls for "an over-the-horizon" troop presence in the region that could come to the aid of a failing puppet government in Iraq as well as intervene elsewhere in the so-called war on terror. (Lawmakers begin Bitter Debate on U.S. Troop Withdrawal Plan for Iraq, FOXNews, online report, June 2, 2006)

Hillary Clinton even opposed the Kerry-Feingold plan and voted against it arguing against any withdrawal timeline.

Unlike Hillary Clinton and the leading Democrats, Liberation News sees nothing good that can come from the continuation of the U.S. war against Iraq. The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We call for no support to the Democrats and we demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now!

Liberation News calls for ending the war through building the mass movement in the streets; striking against arms producers; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz that have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for building the socialist movement to end imperialism through socialist revolution.

The Role of Peace Action (Formerly Sane / Freeze)

Hillary Clinton’s record is clearly pro-imperialist war. Yet the group “Peace Action” gives Hillary Clinton the passing grade of voting for peace 89% of the time. Other Democrats are given similar scores by these political hacks.

“Peace Action” is deceiving the anti-war vote. Why? Because Peace Action is a pillar of the status quo that sees no alternative to delivering votes to what they see as the “lesser evil” Democrat Party, even when the Democrats are equally pro-war. This strategy has made “Peace Action” an obstacle to peace and a pillar of the status quo of war.

Every few years the ruling class of the United States parades its selected representatives in front of the American people to give us the chance to vote for their so-called “lesser” and “greater evil” representatives in the Democrat and Republican Parties. The corporate media and liberal pro-war groups like “Peace Action” ignore the real anti-war candidates and back pro-war Democrats by misrepresenting their records to the people.

Liberation News urges all of the super-exploited workers that go door to door raising money for the Peace Action bureaucracy to quit your meaningless jobs and look for better work while looking for ways to hook up with the real anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that is marching in the streets. Likewise we urge all of the liberal and leftist minded people that give money to Peace Action to stop doing so and instead participate in the mass anti-war movement in the streets with your bodies, minds, and your money if you can afford it.

No to the twin parties of war and oppression! Yes to the independent organization and mobilization of working people!

Obama, Clinton, and Richardson, Supporters of Racist Israel

Hillary Clinton, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. The U.S. gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every year and Senator Clinton’s vote backs that money for death. Israel is a racist settler state established in 1949 that has denied the original inhabitants, the Palestinians, many basic rights, often including the basic right to live. Besides denying Palestinians the same rights to travel, jobs, housing, and education as allowed Jews, the racist and religious Zionist State has used massacres and other forms of terror, wars, and torture to drive out the original Palestinian inhabitants.

Likewise Israel is always at war with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s recent attack against Lebanon where their aerial bombardment of the civilian population murdered 1,150 people and destroyed vital infrastructure is only the latest such terrorism by Israel. Yet Hillary Clinton recently told a pro-Israel rally “We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing up for American values as well as Israeli ones.”

She’s got it wrong, the mass murder and racism of Israel are in league with the values of American ruling class, as has been seen in Iraq, but these are not the values of the American people.

Claims of Israel being the victim, bombing and invading Lebanon on the pretext of two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner do not hold water in light of the fact that Israel is holding 2,000 Lebanese prisoners in their torture chamber dungeons from their previous invasion of Lebanon. In addition numerous reports say those two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, not in Israel. Those reports are from such sources as AP, Hindustan Times, and AFP.

On Israel “anti-war” Richardson shares Hillary Clinton’s views stating, “I am firmly committed to one of the United States' closest and most important allies - the State of Israel. Throughout my career, I've steadfastly supported Israel, obtaining a consistently pro-Israel voting record in Congress and defending Israeli interests as Ambassador to the United Nations.”

Barack Obama also backs racist Israel stating, “The United States and Israel share important interests - promoting a peaceful Middle East, combating terrorism, and encouraging reform in the Arab and Muslim world.” Likewise as a senator he has backed the massive military aid the United States gives Israel every year and says he will continue this policy as president stating he will, “insist on fully funding military assistance to Israel”.

For Socialist Democracy!

Let me be clear on this point, Obama and Clinton, and the rest of the pack will not betray us. They cannot betray us because they were never with us. Under the current politics most Americans would never have heard their names if they were on our side.

A truly democratic society would eliminate corporate control of the elections by nationalizing the corporate media and allowing all candidates equal access to the airwaves, cable, and print. Likewise a truly democratic society would carry out a sweeping “campaign finance reform” through the nationalization of the means of production (using that wealth for human and environmental needs rather than decadence and deception).

Up against the likes of Hillary Clinton, with her millions of dollars in corporate bribes, a sympathetic corporate media, growing police state, and increasing electoral fraud, it will take a socialist revolution to bring democracy to the United States.

How we can all resist:

Tell the truth!

Build the mass movement in the streets!

Strike against arms producers!

Become ungovernable!

Hot cargo war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks!

Build towards a general strike against the war!

Support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war!

Drive military recruiters off campus!

No tolerance or excuses for the pro-war, racist, and capitalist Democrat Party!

Build the socialist movement to end imperialism, racism, environmental destruction, and capitalism!

End U.S. imperialism through socialist revolution!

Subscribe to Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

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Czech Republic Outlaws Advocacy of Socialism

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:07:54 GMT

Czech Republic Outlaws Advocacy of Socialism

Liberation News strongly condemns the outlawing of the advocacy of socialism in the Czech Republic. From the outlawing of abortion in Poland to the genocide that was carried out in Croatia under the newly resurrected flag of Nazi occupation, to a dramatic drop in the life expectancy in the former Soviet Union, the lie of democracy and a better life under capitalism is being exposed. While Eastern Europe’s bureaucratic command socialism had many flaws, capitalism is much worse. The struggle today is to learn from the mistakes of the past and struggle forward for a democratic socialism to end the dictatorial power of the wealthy, for a redistribution of the wealth, and for a planned economy run to meet human needs, end wars for vulgar profit, and save the planet from looming environmental catastrophe. The fact that saying such things in the “democratic” Czech republic is now illegal flows from the fact that capitalism has always been the dictatorship of the extremely wealthy and the big imperial powers. Forward to democracy and socialism!

Steven Argue for Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

International Appeal

(Please fill out endorsement coupon below, and please help us circulate this appeal widely)

Against the Banning of the 'KSM' Youth Organisation (Czech Republic)

On October 12, 2006, the Home Office of the Czech Republic decided to dissolve a Czech communist youth organisation called the 'KSM'.

And what crime had it committed? Its statutes are in favour of "collective ownership of the means of production". In the text announcing and explaining this decision, the Home Office declares:

"Paragraph 2 of the KSM's program declares: "The KSM declares it is in favour of going beyond capitalism in a revolutionary way and replacing it by collective ownership and social conditions that could bring about social democracy" ...

"The above statements found in the KSM's program involve the KSM in activities that are not compatible with the protection of every individual, which can be read in article 11, § 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Liberties. To attempt to deny the right to private ownership of the means of production is incompatible with elementary democratic principles. It ensues from paragraph 2 of article 9 of the Czech Republic's Constitution that it is unacceptable to change the democratic foundations of the legal democratic state. It is thus necessary to reject any attempt that could bring about the violation of the Constitutional decisions recalled above and which ensue from principles also asserted in the European Convention for the protection of human rights and
fundamental liberties."

The Home Office has rejected the KSM's argument that it does not intend to achieve its aim by any means that are undemocratic or illegal. The Home Office goes on to state:

"The KSM answers that it is only aiming at the ownership of means of production and not at ownership in general. Š That argument cannot be taken into account, because the law, as it is expressed in article 11, § 1 of the Charter, concerns all types of ownership, without distinction, whether such private property be intended for production or not. There can thus be no question of accepting 'the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and replacing it by collective ownership'."

So it is that the Home Office of the Czech Republic, a member country of the European Union, reinforced by a European Convention, purely and simply outlaws all idea of collective property of the means of production. And it puts forward this European Convention to justify its decision to ban an organisation that has not been found guilty of any action whatsoever, but simply advocates in its program the future perspective of collective ownership of the means of production.

There is no mention of any political activity the KSM might be engaged in that could provide the grounds for justifying the Home Office's decision. The outlawing of the KSM flouts even the most elementary democratic rights; such a decision would simply cross out more 150 years of the history of the labour movement.

This decision is an attack on democracy by forbidding an organisation, whatever that organisation may be, from putting forward a political program and attempting to win over a majority of the population to its goal of collective ownership of the means of production.

This decision, with the simple stroke of a pen, would seek to deny 150 years of the history of the labour movement, and even of democracy itself -- because ever since 1848, the labour movement and the various supporters of socialism have made obtaining collective ownership of the means of production an essential part of their analyses and program.

Following this decision, the Home Secretary of the Czech Republic is thus forbidding, in the name of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Liberties, any organisation whatsoever from having the right to adhere to Marx and Engel's Communist Party Manifesto, which asserts: "communists can summarize their theory in one single formula: abolition of private property; the property that exploits working for a salary".

The Home Secretary is thus forbidding any organisation whatsoever to claim to have its roots in the Socialist Encyclopaedia written before the First World War by socialists such as Compère-Morel, Bracke, Pierre Brizon, Hubert-Rouher, Jean Longuet, Paul Louis, Charles Rappoport, Sixte-Quenin, Jean-Baptiste Séverac, the future deputy general secretary of the French Socialist Party, the SFIO, that, summarizing half a century of socialist ideas and action in various
countries throughout the world, declared the "necessity for collective ownership", explaining that: "Individual ownership was defendable when the instrument of labour was personal, it must become collective when production also becomes collective. It is only in its collective form that ownership can become something that is universal and become for each individual not a theoretic right, but something certain, a reality."

The Home Secretary is thus forbidding any organisation whatsoever to claim to have its roots in the literature of Jules Guesde, Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, Léon Blum, the founders of Czech Social-Democracy, members up to 1918 of the Austro-Hungarian Social-Democratic Party, who declared the necessity for collective ownership.

The French Workers' Party founded by Jules Guesde asserted right away in its founding congress in October 1879: "The Congress declares that all possible means must continue to be used, so as to obtain collective ownership of all labour instruments and all the production workforce. It insists on the necessity for the proletariat to form its own class political party and to break away completely from the bourgeoisie." (Paul Louis, Le Parti socialiste en France, Encyclopédie socialiste, pp 11-12 (The Socialist Party in France,
Socialist Encyclopaedia).

Jean Jaurès demanded "the coming of a new order in which ownership, ceasing to be individual and private, will become social" (26th November 1900). As for Léon Blum, he declared: "Socialism is a movement of ideas and action that leads to a complete transformation of the regime of ownership, the transformation of an economic regime founded on private ownership into a regime founded on collective or common ownership" (27th December 1920). On September 1st 1946, he still asserted: "We are the Socialist Party and our aim is to achieve revolutionary transformation of the social structure, i.e. of the production and ownership regime."

Otto Bauer, one of the founders of the Austro-Hungarian Social-Democratic Party, of which the Czech Social-Democracy was also a part until 1918, declared in a text about "the slow revolution": "Collectivisation of the State economy starts with large industries collectivisation starts with expropriation: the State brings in a law by which it declares that the current owners of large industries are no longer the owners. Collectivisation has a dual aim: on the one hand, improvement of the situation of the blue-collar and white-collar workers in the collectivised branch of industry and on the other hand, making available for the community the revenues that until then had been going to the capitalists" (1919).

The Home Secretary is forbidding any organisation whatsoever to even make reference to nationalisation decrees voted, for example, just after the Second World War by the British Labour Party government, by various coalition governments such as the French government, in which there was even a Christian-Democratic Party (the MRP), or by various Social-Democratic or Labour governments.

The collective form of ownership has indeed appeared, from time to time throughout history, as being a necessity, and not only within the trend of socialist ideas. So it was that in 1894, the writer Leo Tolstoy in his "Advice to those receiving orders" proposed to bring up in Russia "the question of expropriation of land, with or without compensation, so as to nationalise the land thereafter". Would the Czech Home Secretary ban the distribution of such works in the name of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Liberties?

The Czech Home Secretary has made this decision at the same time as directors of large companies are massively cutting back on jobs throughout the world, thereby threatening the very lives of the laid-off workers, with scorn for the interest of society in general, simply in the name of the private financial interests of the owners and of the dividends for the large shareholders.

The Czech Home Secretary has made this decision at the same time as a policy of privatisation and dismantling of State services and of nationalised companies is being implemented, resulting in the suppression of tens of thousands of jobs in all countries that are members of the European Union, in the name of "free and un-tampered competition", as demanded in the Maastricht Treaty.

- We, the undersigned, remark that this banning is a first application, detrimental to fundamental liberties, of the Council of Europe's resolution 1481 condemning "communism".

- We, the undersigned, denounce the ban against including the call for collective ownership of means of production in the program of a political organisation, in the name of a Convention supposedly defending human rights and fundamental liberties, and we denounce the dissolution of the KSM which the Czech Home Secretary has deduced is thus necessary.

- We, the undersigned, denounce this measure, which is in response only to the demands of those who own capital, but is hypocritically masked as being in defence of individual liberties -- for it is an intolerable attack on political democracy, on freedom of opinion, of thought, of expression and of organisation, and we demand that it this ban be annulled.

First Endorsers

ALLAIN Auguste (France); ANTONINI Daniel, international secretary of the 'Pole of Communist Renaissance in France' (France); AUDEJAN Noëlle, author (France); BARDIN Georges, internationalist militant, former French Resistance fighter (France); BARROIS Jean-Pierre, Senior lecturer at Paris-XII University, anti-war activist (France); BEDÖ János (Hungary); BELISSA Marc, University Lecturer (France); BLANCHARD Daniel, former member of 'Socialism or Barbarity' (France); BLANCHARD Arnold, former member of 'Socialism or Barbarity' (France); BLANCHARD Helen, former member of 'Socialism or Barbarity' (France); BODIN Martine teacher-trade-unionist (France); BOMBARDIERI Bernadette, 'Free-Thinker' (France); BORISOV Todor, president of the Bulgarian Workers' and Peasants' Party (Bulgaria); BOURHIS Gilles, CNRS-trade-unionist (T.N.: Scientific research) (France); BREITBACH Ulrich, member of the Union of German writers and of the Union of German journalists, Ver.di Trade Union (Germany); BREMOND Hansi, 'Free-Thinker' and political militant (France); BRICMONT Jean, University Lecturer (Belgium); CANALI José, working-class militant, communist, trade-unionist (France); CAUMIERES Philippe, teacher qualified in philosophy (France); CHABERT Raymond, pensioner (France); CHALLIER Alain, sculptor (France); CHENET Jacques, 'Free-Thinker' (France); CHUBERRE Hervé (France); CLESSE Pascal, 'Free-Thinker' (France); CUENCA Jean (France); DE MONTLIBERT Jean, emeritus professor of sociology (France); DERUETTE Serge, Lecturer in political science at Mons University (UMH), (Belgium); DOUJON Jean-Pierre, University Lecturer (France); DOUPSIS Georges, 'Free-Thinker'; DUBOIS Françoise, retired teacher; DUBOIS Pierre, visual artist (France); ELIARD Michel, Sociologist, University Lecturer (France); EXCOFFON Sylvain, University Lecturer in history (France); FABRE Marguerite, working-class militant, 'Free-Thinker' (France); FABROL Emile, 'Prométhée', communist site, militant in Vitry (France); FAYET Jean-François, PhD (France); FERNANDES Grégory, student in Lyon, RYA militant (France); FERRAT Jacques, teacher (France); FLAMMANT Thierry , history teacher (France); FOGLER Tibor (Hungary); FRATANOLO Janos, president of the Hungarian Workers' Party 2006 (Hungary); GAVOIS Marc-Olivier, history and geography teacher (France); GIRAUDON Liliane, author (France); GLEIZAL Jean-Jacques, University Lecturer in Grenoble (France); GÔME Gérard, trade-unionist (France); GOTLIB Igor, regional coordinator of Alternatives - St-Petersburg (Russia); GROS Dominique, retired law teacher (France); GUERRIEN Bernard, Lecturer in economy at Paris-I University (France); GUITTON Michel, 'Free-Thinker' (France); HEBERT Alexandre, anarchist-trade-unionist (France) ; IMSIROVIC Pavlusko, militant of the Labour Political Alliance, former political prisoner, condemned in the "Trial of six people" (ex-Yugoslavia); JAKOCS Dániel (Hungary); JEKOV Todor, president of the Labour-Peasant Party (Bulgaria); JOBIC Christian (France); JOHNSTONE Diana, journalist, author (USA); JONY Iván (Hungary); JULIEN Stéphane trade-unionist (France); KASTLER Claude, emeritus professor of Stendhal University in Grenoble (France); KOSTIOUK Rouslan, doctor of history, Saint-Petersburg (Russia); LABRASCA Frank, University Lecturer, trade-unionist (France); LACROIX-RIZ Annie, historian (France); LARUE LANGLOIS François, author (France); LAVALLEE Ivan, State Doctorate in Science (France); LEFEBVRE Michel, trade-unionist SNES (France); LEMASLE Arnaud (France); Françoise LONDON-DAIX (France); LOSURDO Domenico, Lecturer in History and Philosophy at the University of Urbino (Italy); MAITTE Hervé, CGT trade-unionist (France); MARCELE Philippe (France); MARIE Jean-Jacques, historian, responsible from 1976 to 1980 for the French edition of 'Listy', the newspaper of the Czech Socialist Opposition, founded by Jiri Pelikan (France); MARTIN Roger, author, French Communist Party militant (France); MATHIEU Olivier, teacher and trade-unionist (France); MOLENAT Jean-Pierre emeritus director of research at the CNRS (France); MOQUETTE Yvan, trade-unionist (France); MORELLI Anne, university lecturer (Belgium); NOEL Bernard, author (France); O'CONNOR Emmet, (Ireland); PAPP Julien, historian (France); PATRIZIO Marie-Ange, psychologist (France); PAUWELS Dirk, ergonomist, manual therapist, physiotherapist (Belgium); PESTIEAU Jean, Lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium); PLANTIVEAU Gérard, trade-unionist (France); POINTCHEVAL Jacques, 'Free-Thinker' (France); POULAIN Philippe, visual artist (France); PASLAR Vitaly, member of the Komsomol (Moldavian Republic); POLIANSKI Mikhail, member of the Komsomol (Moldavian Republic); POULAIN Philippe, visual artist (France); POUPKINE Vassia, (Russia); PRAT Didier, author, compositor, musician (France); PRENEAU François, trade-unionist (France); PROST Laurent (France); QUENTIN Bernadette, employee of PTT-FT (France); REMBOTTE Gilles, trade-union militant (France); REZNIK Aleksandr, of the "Student Solidarity" Union, State University of Perm (Russia); RIVAL Michel, retired primary school teacher, French Communist Party militant (France); ROBINET Marie-Line, DDA Val de Marne (France); ROCHEFORT Jacques, assistant (France); ROQUES Monique, teacher (France); ROUET Jean-Jacques, municipal councillor in Fondettes (37) (France); ROY Pierre, historian, 'Free-Thinker' (France); RYJKINE Mikhaïl Ivanovitch, assistant of the Elected Member of the Douma of the Russian Federation of Kibirev (Russia); SANTOLINI Arnaud, teacher, researcher, trade-unionist (France); SEPPECHER Pascal, teacher, (France); SEREZAT André, (France); SERGERE Julien, education assistant (France); SERNICLAY Clément, French Assistant in Zurich (Switzerland); SAVASTIN Liudmyla member of the Komsomol (Moldavian Republic); SERGERE Julien, education assistant (France); SYBELIN Yannick, hospital trade-unionist (France); VERCRUYSSE Pierre, CGT trade-unionist (France); VAN CAMPEN Marc, early-retired steel worker, Charleroi (Belgium); VIARD Jean, retired CGT trade-unionist (France); WEBER Michel, Doctor in Philosophy (Belgium); WEINSTEIN Max, pensioner, former French Resistance fighter (France); WHITEHEAD Fred, historian and 'Free-Thinker', Kansas (USA); ARGUE Steven, Liberation News (USA).

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Long Live Communism

Shoaib — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:49:48 GMT

hi i'm a new comer in this forum.

i think communism is the best way to control a country.
i love communism.
withour communism the world can't get proper peace.

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Antiwar Protests Against Obama, Clinton, McCain, Farr, and Others

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 18:24:24 GMT

In this mailing:
1. Santa Cruz California action against Sam Farr
2. Antiwar Protests Against Obama, Clinton, McCain and Others

Protest To Bring The Troops Home Now!

Friday Feb. 16,
Santa Cruz County Building, 701 Ocean Street

Sit in at Representative Sam Farr’s Office to Demand:

Cut Off The War Funds!

Sam Farr has voted a number of times for the billions of dollars that have been used to wage war and murder hundreds of thousands in Iraq. He has promised to vote against the $93 billion emergency war appropriations bill that Bush has forwarded to congress, but Farr still consistently supports and votes for massive general appropriations for the military budget. These are votes for war.

The People of Santa Cruz Demand No Money For War!

This protest is part of the growing national movement demanding that representatives, like Sam Farr, that claim to oppose the war stop funding it.

Money For Jobs, Healthcare, Housing, and Education! Not a cent for war!

People holding all political philosophies in opposition to the war are welcome. This includes those that think that Democrats like Sam Farr can be persuaded or pressured into opposing the war as well as others that want to expose the Democrats as useless and put forward mass action, strike action, direct action, green, anarchist, and socialist alternatives towards ending the war.

This is being organized as a nonviolent event, but we cannot guarantee the conduct of the Santa Cruz Police.

Friday Feb. 16, Santa Cruz
Meet 1:00 PM on the front steps of the county building, 701 Ocean Street.

Sponsored by Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

******
Project Occupation has been staging protests/sit-ins/demonstrations nationwide targeting the offices congresspersons that support the Iraq war by funding it.

In addition the Troops Out Now Coalition will be marching on the offices of Hillary Clinton on March 17 starting at Times Square (43rd and Broadway) at 1 PM. For more on Hillary Clinton's pro-war record see: Pro-War Hillary Clinton, What Are The Alternatives?
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/10/77262.html
Here are some actions that have already happened or are underway:

St. Louis has an feature about an action at Rep Russ Carnahan's office:
http://www.stlimc.org/newswire/display/2840/index.php

Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) DC Offices
http://wmass.indymedia.org/newswire/display/1711/index.php

Barrak Obama’s and Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) offices in Chicago
(which resulted in 8 arrests)
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/02/82702.shtml

The San Francisco offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA). For more on Senator Diane Feinstein's pro-war record read: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/08/28/18302034.php

The Portland office of Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). More actions are planned (or underway)
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/02/353477.shtml

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Seattle, WA
http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2007/02/257544.shtml

Rep. Mike Honda in the South Bay (by Raging Grannies!)
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/02/08/18359668.php

Rep Matsui in Sacramento, CA
http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2007-01-28-22-10-01-news.php

De Moines, IA
http://www.kcci.com/news/10965748/detail.html (very brief)

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Congress Votes 368-31 to Back Mumia’s Racist Frame-up

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:36:08 GMT

Congress Votes 368-31 to Back Mumia’s Racist Frame-up

By Steven Argue

On December 6th Congress voted 368 to 31 to back the racist frame-up of Mumia Abu Jamal by condemning the decision of the French city of St. Denis to name a street after the innocent death row inmate. This anti-Mumia resolution, HR 1082 (also called HR 407), asks the French government to intervene against the city.

Voting against the resolution were members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Congressperson Robert Scott. He argued that the case was still being decided in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and that it was inappropriate for Congress to take a position.

In reality Mumia’s case is such a blatant and outrageous frame-up that it should be considered the responsibility of Congress to intervene on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal in particular and against the racist death penalty in general. Yet under the current racist government of Democrats and Republicans Robert Scott is correct in opposing Congress’s intervention. As Pam Africa, chair of the International Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, has pointed out, “the House action is designed to weigh in on and promote an atmosphere in the U.S. judiciary that is prejudicial to Mumia's receiving any form of justice today.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals will be hearing arguments in January. This is Mumia’s final appeal. It will decide if Mumia is set free, given a new trial, held in prison for life, or executed.

The resolution falsely claims, “Mumia Abu-Jamal stood over Officer Faulkner and shot him in the face, mortally wounding him…” Yet this is not what the eyewitnesses said. For instance William Singletary says, "Mumia Abu-Jamal didn't shoot Daniel Faulkner. The passenger in the right-hand side of the Volkswagen [that Faulkner had stopped] got out of the car and shot him. When Mumia came on the scene, we [Singletary and another man] were on the police radio trying to radio for help." ("Witness: Abu-Jamal didn't do it" Philadelphia Daily News Dec. 8, 2006)

31 Democrats in Congress voted nay while 151 voted for the resolution. All Republicans voted for the resolution as did fake Vermont “socialist” Bernard Sanders (really just a rightwing social democrat).

Those voting against were Abercrombie, Clay, Cleaver, Conyers, Cooper, Davis (IL), Grijalva, Hinchey, Honda, Jackson (IL), Johnson, E. B., Kilpatrick (MI), Lee, McKinney, Meeks (NY), Nadler, Oberstar, Owens, Pastor, Payne, Rangel, Rush, Scott (VA), Serrano, Stark, Towns, Udall (NM), Velázquez, Waters, Weiner, and Woolsey.

Joining in the racist lynch mob voting for the blood of an innocent black man was Democrat House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. She has also announced that she and the other Democrats will continue funding the war in Iraq. In voting against Mumia Abu-Jamal Nancy Pelosi has voted for the death of an actual anti-war and anti-racist leader of the people, while her career has been firmly planted atop the corpses of over 650,000 dead Iraqis by her continuation of the slaughter.

It is outrageous that that the Democrat party would vote in its House majority to condemn a French city for daring to make an issue of a racist legal lynching, while doing nothing about the liar and killer, Bush. But then again that should be no surprise either since the Democrat Party voted in its majority for the war in Iraq.

The Democrat Party was also involved in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal from the beginning. Democrat Ed Rendell was the Philadelphia district attorney that successfully worked to frame Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1982. Later, with a lynch mob attitude created by the lies of the corporate press, he successfully ran for mayor of Philadelphia on a platform that included promoting the murder of Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was Mayor from 1992-1999. Bill Clinton then helped get him the position of chair of the National Democratic Committee. Since 2003 he has been the Governor of Pennsylvania. In addition Ed Rendell is a member of the Fraternal Order of Police that is calling for Mumia’s blood while his wife is an appellate judge on the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals that is going to hear Mumia's appeal. Besides framing Mumia, Rendell also presided over the police bombing of the MOVE home in Philadelphia in 1984, resulting in 11 deaths and 65 homes destroyed.

California representative Sam Farr [D] was among the eight that voted “Present”, choosing not to vote for or against the resolution. This despite Sam Farr sending this author a letter promising to back the Congressional Black Caucus’s position, that having been a position in support of framed political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Sam Farr also sent a copy of a letter that he sent to the Congressional Black Caucus with the same promise. These promises, as it turns out, were nothing but lies.

This vote by the racist US Congress was also an affront to the people of St. Denis that have chosen to support and honor Mumia. Would Sam Farr stand aside in a similar way if a resolution came before him that called for action against his constituents in the City of Santa Cruz, where the city has also passed resolutions in favor of Mumia Abu-Jamal?

Mumia is innocent, and much of the world knows it.

Here is the response the City of St. Denis had to earlier attempts to coerce them into ending their support for Mumia Abu-Jamal:

“The city hall of Saint Denis denounces the manipulations of certain ultra-conservative pressure groups, and reasserts its commitment in favor of Mumia Abu-Jamal

“The city hall of Saint Denis re-affirms yet again its support to the women and men who are demanding Mumia Abu-Jamal be treated with fairness and justice. The picket this 30th day of November 2006 has been organized to protest against the pressure brought to bear on the city of Saint Denis by members of the American extreme right in order to bring about the cancellation of our decision to name one of our streets after an African American militant who has been unfairly incarcerated and sentenced to the death penalty.

“This ultra conservative pressure group, based in Philadelphia, has not hesitated to make use of the grossest manipulations. Thus, the widely disseminated information according to which the city of Philadelphia is suing the cities of Saint Denis and Paris, because of their commitment in favor of Mumia Abu-Jamal - is nothing but a lie. The Mayor of Philadelphia, as well as the president of its city council, informed the city of Saint Denis that they never intended to file any kind of suit, and have absolutely nothing to do with this campaign.

“This manipulation was unmasked, and it should be know that the Philadelphia politician who initiated it, though a member of George Bush's party, was defeated during the recent American elections.

“Whatever the case may be, the city hall of Saint Denis is proud to have named a street of this city in honor of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has become one of the symbols, of the struggle for justice and the abolition of the death penalty in the US and throughout the world.

“It is not the first time that an international mobilization has taken place in favor of American citizens who are unfairly sentenced in their own country. Such was the case for Nicola Sacco, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, between 1920 and 1927, for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who died on the electric chair in 1953, and subsequently in 1972 for Angela Davis initially sentenced [sic, she was actually never sentenced] for murder, before being acquitted of all charges.

“The city hall of Saint Denis will steadfastly pursue the struggle to save Mumia Abu-Jamal, so that this man incarcerated for a quarter of a century for a crime he has always claimed he did not commit - be reinstated in his human rights.

“Saint Denis 30th of November 2006”

The people of the world should not forget this hypocritical act of the US Congress, a governing body of a nation that falsely claims to uphold the values of human rights on a world scale. Likewise this once again exposes the need for the American people to build a socialist alternative to racist and repressive Democrat and Republican Parties.

As Mumia Abu-Jamal says, “Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires. But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit...”

Mumia stands up for unions, against war, against racism, equality for gays and lesbians, for the poor, and against the many injustices of the so-called criminal justice system. Mumia speaks up on many of the issues ignored, lied about, or glossed over by the corporate media and the corporate politicians. We need Mumia, yes we need him alive, but we also need him free. Yet all of the evidence shows that Mumia won't get justice in America unless we turn up the heat.

********************
For a complete listing of individual votes see: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll527.xml

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner in the United States on death row. For more information on Mumia's case and how to get involved, check out the following web sites:

Yet Another Witness Comes Forward and Refutes The Frame-Up Of Mumia
Abu-Jamal! By Steven Argue
http://www.freemumia.com/policecoercion.html

Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.laboractionmumia.org/

International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.mumia.org/freedom.now/

Free Mumia Coalition, NYC
http://www.freemumia.com/

San Francisco Free Mumia Site
http://www.freemumia.org

Chicago Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.chicagofreemumia.org/

This is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

I need photos songs and documents about the working class struggle in us in the 30's

Jakkred — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:01:12 GMT

I'm from greece and we want to make a presentation of a book about the class stuggle in the us. we have gathered a lot of stuff from that time but i need more.
most of all i'm interested in "almanac singers" songs and photos from miners strikes.
please help me if you have any or you know where i can find them.

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Pro-War Diane Feinstein, What Are The Alternatives?

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 05:48:55 GMT

Pro-War Diane Feinstein, What Are The Alternatives?

By Steven Argue

In California pro-war incumbent Democrat Diane Feinstein has a lead of around 20% over Republican challenger Richard Mountjoy. There are also three socialist candidates running in California for the Senatorial seat now held by Feinstein. Of these, the two that Liberation News is giving critical support are Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action and Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party. In addition International Socialist Organization (ISO) member, Todd Chretien, is running as a Green Party candidate.

Feinstein has voted for every war the United States has carried out since she came into office in 1992. Diane Feinstein also voted to take away our civil liberties by supporting the “Patriot Act” and its renewal. She voted for the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act speeding up the government’s ability to carry out the racist death penalty and ignore evidence of innocence. And she has supported expanded wire tapping as well as a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.

Feinstein is a capitalist politician, representing a capitalist party. She also has a personal net worth of 50 million dollars, so she benefited directly when she voted to eliminate the estate tax. Ironically Feinstein has also stated, “Food stamps for the poor are cut ... so that millionaires can have a tax cut.'' Indeed, while this statement was directed at the Republicans, it also applies to her. (Feinstein Urges Regime Change, San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2006)

Diane Feinstein, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum of the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans.

And just as she is no defender of human rights in the United States she has voted for continued military support to the right wing death squad government of Colombia.

Diane Feinstein: Supporter of Imperialist War

In a press conference on August 21, 2006 George Bush Jr. finally admitted what Liberation News has been pointing out since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Yet Bush had used a supposed connection as a pretext for the U.S.’s unprovoked aggression against Iraq. In addition, Bush Jr. also admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Most of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Diane Feinstein included, supported going to war with Iraq. As anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has pointed out, “She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops." (Cindy Sheehan May Challenge California Senator AP, Jan. 26, 2006) Cindy Sheehan’s son was a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

In trying to let herself of the hook Diane Feinstein claims that Bush “did not fairly represent intelligence”. Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren’t their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make Feinstein look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they may not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for Bush and Feinstein Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats and Republicans to try to rethink, or at least distance themselves from, the Bush policies they have supported.

Feinstein herself has directly profiteered from the U.S. imposed misery in Iraq. Her husband, Richard Blum, is a billionaire investor that together with CEO Ronald Tutor own investment companies that hold 75% of the voting stock in a company called Perini. On March 12, 2004 Perini was awarded a $500,000,000 contract for rebuilding the electrical infrastructure of southern Iraq. So Feinstein is profiting from the U.S. bombing of the Iraqi infrastructure as well as its inefficient rebuilding by private U.S. contractors. Perini also received the contract for the construction of facilities to support the First Brigade of the Afghan National Army. These include barracks, dining facilities, a power plant, a water treatment facility and a wastewater treatment plant. Diane Feinstein not only voted for the wars and occupations that made these contracts possible, she also sits on the Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. (Perini Corporation, The Center For Public Integrity)

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Clinton administration. That blockade, due to the capitalist nature of the Iraqi economy under Saddam Hussein, cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered over 100,000 people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq have the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980’s the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was used as an ally of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise the CIA helped Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party come to power supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba’athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

“In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein’s capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

“While defending Iraq against imperialist attack and supporting their right to defend themselves socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal...”

“U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women’s liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

“The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead.” -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women’s rights and women’s rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn’t completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq’s resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and billions in dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need.

Yet for the ruling class their failure in Iraq is not in the undemocratic and anti-woman nature of the puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

As a result some Democrats that voted for the war like John Kerry have called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Yet the Kerry-Feingold plan actually calls for keeping troops in Iraq that are "critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces." The Kerry-Feingold plan also calls for "an over-the-horizon" troop presence in the region that could come to the aid of a failing puppet government in Iraq as well as intervene elsewhere in the so-called war on terror. (Lawmakers begin Bitter Debate on U.S. Troop Withdrawal Plan for Iraq, FOXNews, online report, June 2, 2006)

Senators Harry Reid and Carl Levin have put forward a similar proposal, rendered meaningless with similar loopholes to Kerry-Feingold’s, but their proposal calls for the [partial] withdrawal of troops by the end of 1997.

Diane Feinstein supported the Levin-Reid proposal. Defending the proposal Feinstein said, “Our amendment is not about cutting and running. Rather, our amendment acknowledges that staying the course is a strategy that shows no promise of success, and it is time to change that strategy.” (Video clip shown on CNN’s O’brien Show, online transcript, June 23, 2006)

Unlike Feinstein, Liberation News sees nothing good that can come from the Levin-Reid proposal of staying at full war with the Iraqi people for another year and then carrying out a possible partial Iraqification of the war the year after. We disagree with Feinstein when she says, "We all know we can't cut and run, what I'm talking about is changing the nature of this mission. We have to say to Iraq that it's time for your soldiers and police forces to take over.'' (Feinstein Urges Regime Change, San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2006)

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now! On this issue we agree with the campaigns of Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action, Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party, and Todd Chretien of the Green Party that are all calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq:

“More than 2,250 young American troops and over 100,000 Iraqis have died with no end in sight. If we want to stop the dying and respect the Iraqi people's right to run their own country, then we must immediately withdraw all American military forces from Iraq and the surrounding countries.” -Todd Chretien, California Senate candidate of the Green Party

“Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East!”
Marsha Feinland, California Senate candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party

"Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq! War is an inherent part of capitalism and the ultimate solution to the internal contradictions of the profit-driven and competition-driven system. The U.S. military-industrial complex is organized and designed to maximize profit rates for the corporate few and to serve the imperial economic and political interests of the war-making class—regardless of the capitalist party in power. Socialists acknowledge our fundamental obligation to challenge the U.S. war-makers and their twin parties and to defend the rights and struggles of all those who resist imperialist domination and oppression.” -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

Liberation news agrees with these calls for U.S. troops out now. In addition we call for the labor movement to break from the Democrat Party of war and exploitation and to end the war through building the mass movement in the streets; striking against arms producers; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz that have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for building the socialist movement to end imperialism through socialist revolution.

The Role of Peace Action (Formerly Sane / Freeze)

Diane Feinstein has never seen a pending imperialist war she didn’t like. In her entire time in office she has voted for them all. Likewise Feinstein voted for the “Missile Defense System” and other “defense” boondoggles meant to line the pockets of the military industrial capitalists. Yet the group “Peace Action” gives Feinstein the passing grade of voting for peace 89% of the time.

“Peace Action” is deceiving the anti-war vote. Why? Because Peace Action is a pillar of the status quo that sees no alternative to delivering votes to what they see as the “lesser evil” Democrat Party, even when the Democrats are equally pro-war. This strategy has made “Peace Action” an obstacle to peace and a pillar of the status quo.

Every few years the ruling class of the United States parades its selected representatives in front of the American people to give us the chance to vote for their so-called “lesser” and “greater evil” representatives in the Democrat and Republican Parties. The corporate media and liberal pro-war groups like “Peace Action” ignore the anti-war candidates and back pro-war Democrats by misrepresenting their records to the people.

Liberation News urges all of the super-exploited workers that go door to door raising money for the Peace Action bureaucracy to quit your meaningless jobs and look for better work while looking for ways to hook up with the real anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that is marching in the streets. Likewise we urge all of the liberal and leftist minded people that give money to Peace Action to stop doing so and instead participate in the mass anti-war movement in the streets with your bodies, minds, and your money if you can afford it.

In response to the reformist call of, "Anybody But Bush," Socialist Action candidate Jeff Mackler aptly replied, "No to the twin parties of war and oppression!" and "Yes to the independent organization and mobilization of working people!"

Feinstein, Supporter of Racist Israel

Diane Feinstein, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. The U.S. gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every year and Senator Feinstein’s vote backs that money for death. Israel is a racist settler state established in 1949 that has denied the original inhabitants, the Palestinians, all basic rights. Besides denying Palestinians the same rights to travel, jobs, housing, and education as allowed Jews, the racist Zionist State has used massacres and other forms of terror, wars, and torture to drive out the original Palestinian inhabitants.

Likewise Israel is always at war with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s recent attack against Lebanon where their aerial bombardment of the civilian population murdered 1,150 people and destroyed vital infrastructure is only the latest such terrorism by Israel. Yet when Senator Bill Frist introduced a bill backing Israeli / U.S. aggression in Lebanon Diane Feinstein voted for it along with Senate Democrat colleagues John Kerry (Mass.), Barack Obama (Ill.), Harry Reid (Nevada), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), and Edward Kennedy (Mass.).

Claims of Israel being the victim, bombing and invading Lebanon on the pretext of two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner do not hold water in light of the fact that Israel is holding 2,000 Lebanese prisoners in their torture chamber dungeons from their previous invasion of Lebanon. In addition numerous reports say those two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, not in Israel. Those reports are from such sources as AP, Hindustan Times, and AFP.

In contrast to Diane Feinstein and her pro-war Democrat colleagues, here is what the candidates to the left of her have to say:

“Israel is a racist state. It has separate laws for Arabs and Jews. The leader of the South African trade union COSATU recently stated that he thinks that the Palestinians face worse conditions than Blacks faced during South African Apartheid. There will never be peace in the Middle East as long as the Zionist state is given a blank check from the United States to treat the Palestinian people as less than human. Israel is part of the American empire and is key to US plans for permanent domination of the Middle East. If we ever want to see our troops come home from Iraq, then the anti-war movement must fight to cut off all American aid to Israel.” -Todd Chretien, California Senate candidate of the Green Party

“As a Jewish American, I chose to run for U.S. Senate partly as an act of conscience in support of the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. The wall which impedes people from conducting a normal life must come down. Israel should abandon the settlements and retreat to its pre-1967 borders. I do not condone any violence against civilians, and favor full rights for all people in any state…End U.S. aid to Israel until it withdraws to its 1967 borders.” -Marsha Feinland, California Senate candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party

“For a democratic and secular Palestine! End all U.S. aid to apartheid Israel! Stop the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza! For a united socialist federation of the Middle East! Socialists reject the legitimacy of the Zionist colonial settler state of Israel, just as we do all colonial settler states. We see no difference between the imperialist colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East of yesteryear and today’s U.S.-backed Zionist conquest and occupation of Palestine. Israel today serves as the chief U.S. instrument for the imperialist domination and exploitation of the Middle East”. -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

All three candidates of the left take the correct and most important position of ending U.S. aid to Israel, but there are important differences in building an international movement.

While Todd Chretien holds a good position on Israel, the Israeli Green Party is a Zionist capitalist party that holds the position of deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. In a recent letter to the Green Party of the United States by Green Party chairman and deputy mayor, Pe’er Visner, the closest he got to recognizing any crimes by the Israeli government was saying, “We are “sorry” that the Israeli army prevents Palestinian suicide bombers from “expressing” their “human rights” to bomb themselves among Israeli citizens.” This racist response to the suffering of the Palestinian people should serve as a warning to Green Party members in the United States of what happens to parties that fail to put forward a revolutionary program for the overthrow of capitalism as well as fail to be a tribune for all of the most oppressed and exploited in society.

Unlike Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party, Liberation News does not call for a withdrawal of Israel to its conquered borders of 1967. We instead call for pushing Israel back to its 1948 borders for a democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine within the 1948 borders with a separation of religion and state and equal rights for Palestinians and Jews including the Palestinian right to return, a society to be formed by the multi-ethnic working class through socialist revolution.

This is our context of demanding an end to U.S. military aid to racist Israel as well as to the repressive capitalist governments of Egypt and Jordan. Such a cut off is not intended to pressure Israel into a better two state “solution” as Marsha Feinland asks the U.S. government to do, but to allow the people of the Near East self-determination and revolution without the interference of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to murderous regimes.

Jeff Mackler, in seeing Socialist Action as part of an international socialist movement with an international revolutionary program, has proposed a similar revolutionary program to that of Liberation News, but missing a key ingredient:

“Zionism is an ideology of racism and apartheid segregation. It is a deathtrap for the Jewish people, a central source of almost 60 years of war and oppression of the Palestinians. Socialist Action supports the creation of a democratic and secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs can live together as equals in a new society, a society predicated on the immediate right of return of all dispossessed Palestinians. In this society, revolutionaries will fight for the construction of an egalitarian socialist state.” -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

Missing from this formula is the understanding that only socialist revolution, led by (a) secular multi-ethnic socialist party or parties will be capable of solving the national and democratic questions of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. The capitalists and their parties, be they Kadima, Likud, Labour, Shas, Hamas, Fatah, or the Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan base their rule on capitalist exploitation and are incapable of providing any real solutions. Liberation News disagrees with the idea that democratic secular revolution should occur now and provide the basis for a later struggle for socialism, pointing out that this is the essence of Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory of Revolution when we instead hold high the banner of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

It was this Stalinist Two-Stage Theory that provided the political basis for the Communist Party of South Africa putting all of their resources into building the African National Congress (ANC) as the democratic alternative to the racist apartheid government of South Africa. Yet by building a political party and movement that supported the continuation of the capitalist system they created a new capitalist party that now rules South Africa for the rich white capitalists at the continued expense of the super-exploited and poor black majority workers, minus overt racist laws. Strikes for healthcare and other workers’ demands have been broken by the ANC for the capitalists, HIV-AIDS goes untreated, and the massive mineral wealth of South Africa continues to go into the pockets of the capitalists instead of their potential of benefiting the workers, environment, and world revolution.

So when is the Communist Party of South Africa going to set about fighting for the next stage of the revolution? The answer is never. They are now part of the capitalist apparatus and part of the problem. It will take the other socialist parties of South Africa, the Trotskyist parties, to lead the socialist revolution.

While Stalinism has done much to stifle workers’ democracy in the deformed workers states under Stalinist control, it has also greatly sabotaged the world socialist revolution through Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory. Socialist Action is not a Stalinist organization, but they appear to have adopted part of their program.

So what would be Socialist Action’s ANC for Palestine? Fatah? They’ve already discredited themselves. They’ve sold the Palestinian people out with the Oslo Accords placing the Palestinian people on tiny Bantustan’s without a real basis for an economy. Would their ANC be Hamas? The imposition of Islamic law could hardly be considered a democratic secular revolution. Would they then suggest that Palestinian and Israeli socialists build a party with a purely democratic secular program, abandoning the socialist program as the Communist Party of South Africa did? Let’s drop the nonsense, build for the socialist revolution! For a democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine!

Liberation News rejects Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory of Revolution. We instead hold up the banner of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. It was through this theory that Trotsky explained that the democratic and the socialist revolutions are inseparably linked.

Yet the differences between Liberation News and Socialist Action as well as our differences with the Peace and Freedom Party on these questions do not prevent us from giving critical support to both in this election.

The Role of the Green Party

While Todd Cretien of the Green Party has good immediate positions on the war, Liberation News does not support Green Party candidates because the Green Party is a capitalist party. In Santa Cruz, where the Green Party has elected their party member Tim Fitzemaurice to office, Tim Fitzemaurice has backed the fears of local shop owners by voting for anti-homeless laws such as the law that makes it illegal for the homeless to sleep at night. While criminalizing those who cannot pay the high rent Fitzemaurice refuses to take a stand for rent control. Likewise Tim Fitzemaurice has refused to take any stand against police violence used against anti-war protesters in 1999 and other repressive measures against activists including my arrest and beating for distributing literature and the police murder of homeless activist John Dine. Recently Fitzemaurice did take a stand against police infiltration of the organizers of a Santa Cruz anti-war parade, but his stated reason for doing so was an attempt to maintain the credibility of the Santa Cruz police.

Tim Fitzemaurice is not a leader for change in Santa Cruz. He is instead a pillar of the status quo. This is the future of all political parties and politicians that do not have a clear program for the overthrow of the capitalist system.

The Green Party is clear in their program. They state that they are for a system of small capitalism. Yet the small capitalists commonly have a smaller profit margin and often exploit workers worse than the big capitalists. In opposition to such a vision of small and inefficient capitalist exploiters, Liberation News looks to labor struggle and the nationalization of industry under workers’ control as the way to fight and neutralize the corporate exploiters and bring justice for the working class.

On a national level the Green Party generally is not even seeking power, but pressure and reform of the Democrat Party. Yet the policy of many Greens in promoting votes for Democrats when the vote between the Democrat and Republican is close only promotes further illusions in the Democrats. Likewise promising votes to Democrats when it looks close does nothing to pressure the Democrats and their super rich backers to move to the left.

It was a massive and fighting labor movement led to large extent by socialists that forced the American ruling class and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms in the 1930’s. This was out of fear of further unrest and potential revolution. It is the position of Liberation News that the most meaningful reforms do not come from reformism, such as that of the Green Party, but from revolutionary and working class struggle.

While making these criticisms Liberation News does recognize that there are differences between the program of Todd Chretien and that of the Green Party. If Todd Chretien was also speaking out for the Green Party to adopt a socialist program we could possibly give him support, but he is not. By running as a candidate and being a spokesperson for a party with a capitalist program Todd Chretien is helping build that capitalist party and program, so we must respectfully withhold our support.

Critical Support To The Socialist Candidates

Liberation News is giving critical support to Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action and Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party. These are two socialist parties that hold socialist programs (for the most part) and are also active in the anti-war, free Mumia, and labor movements. To a large degree they represent the kind of political alternative that Liberation News promotes in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans.

Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action

Jeff Mackler is a long time socialist that has done much in organizing protests against imperialist wars, for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, for socialism, and other leftist causes.

Jeff Mackler and other expelled members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) were part of establishing new groups that continued on in some of the better traditions of the SWP, a party that led the 1934 Teamster’s Strike (a turning point in U.S. labor history), a party that was a major leader in the anti-war movement of the 1970’s and 1960’s, and a party that helped establish the world Trotskyist movement and expose the crimes of Stalinism.

Yet Jeff Mackler’s group, Socialist Action, was also born with a few programmatical errors. One was their abandonment of Trotsky’s concept of Political Revolution. The call for political revolution in the deformed workers states, such as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, was a call for overthrowing the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and institutionalizing workers’ democracy without overthrowing the nationalized planned economy itself. While Trotskyists call for political revolution in the deformed workers’ states, we also defend those socialist economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution. The failure of Socialist Action to understand the true nature of the counter revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan led to important mistakes.

In supporting Solidarnosc in Poland Socialist Action backed a political movement that had a clear program for capitalist counter revolution and joined ranks with the CIA, the Pope, and Ronald Reagan in backing Solidarnosc’s rise to power. After taking power Solidarnosc’s program became even clearer with the outlawing of abortion (that used to be free on demand) and privatizations of the economy that led to 50% unemployment. Yet despite how clear it is today that Solidarnosc led a capitalist counter-revolution as opposed to a socialist political revolution (that would maintain the socialist economy, but oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and institute workers’ democracy) Socialist Action has not changed their position on Solidarnosc.

On Black liberation we at Liberation News advocate Richard Fraser’s Theory of Revolutionary Integrationism as opposed to the Black Nationalism promoted by Socialist Action. Socialist Action’s advocacy of Black Nationalism has brought them to the point of even promoting the religious and pro-capitalist Nation of Islam of Louis Farrakhan. Liberation News sees the promotion of Black Nationalism as a dead end. There is no geographical area that we can point to on a map and say by its demographics that it would make sense to set up Black nation there. Even if it were possible or desirable to set up a separate Black Nation in the United States the pain and suffering such an adventure would cause in terms of dislocations of the working class would not be worth the price. Liberation News, in contrast, calls for the overthrow of the racist capitalist system and the building of an egalitarian socialist society that guarantees racial equality, full employment, and access to health care for all.

Liberation News does, however, see Socialist Action’s campaign for Senate as a supportable campaign that, despite its mistakes, is promoting socialism as the alternative to the capitalist Democrats, Republicans, and Greens.

Here are some of the demands that Mackler is putting forward with his campaign:

1) Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq! No U.S. aid to Israel! Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza! Shut down Guantanamo! U.S. hands off Cuba and Venezuela! End the Cuba blockade!
2) Tax the rich, not working people! Jobs at top union wages for all! Shorten the work-week with no cut in pay! For a revitalized and fighting labor movement! For a Labor Party!
3) Human needs before capitalist profits! Nationalize so-called bankrupt corporations under workers’ control.
4) Free quality health care and education for people of all ages! Build schools not jails! Quality affordable housing for all!
5) An emergency program to combat global warming! End our dependency on fossil fuels! No to nuclear power and weapons!
6) Stop the attacks on civil liberties! Repeal the Patriot Act! End police brutality! Support the right of marriage for same sex couples!
7) Defend a woman’s right to control her own body! Ready access to abortion is a fundamental right!
8) Immediate amnesty, legalization, and equal rights for all immigrants! No to La Migra! Demilitarize and open the border! Self-determination for oppressed nationalities! Affirmative action with quotas to remedy past discrimination! Support to Black and Latino independent political action!
9) For a government of, by, and for working people and the oppressed! For socialism!

While Liberation News agrees with many of these slogans we see a couple as too transitional. We do not see any good reason for limiting calls for nationalization to so-called “bankrupt corporations”. Perhaps this is in imitation of the economic crisis of Argentina and the many “bankrupt corporations” that have been taken over and run by workers as part of a miniature workers’ economy that employs about 10,000 Argentinean workers.

Liberation News sees no reason for limiting the nationalization of companies to those that the capitalists don’t want anymore, companies that the capitalists are no longer making super profits from. The exploitation of workers’ and the environment have produced all wealth, and the revolutionary movement of the working class wants it all back! We want the railroads, the banks, the health care industry, and of course oil! Only a society with a planned economy can meet the needs of the working class, can end war for capitalist profit, and can begin to save the environment. Revolution takes bold vision; we want it all; leave the conservatism to the Democrats and Republicans!

Imperialism has caused the poverty of Mexico, and an open border is the only right thing to do. Yet an open border would be coupled with a massive influx of immigrants and should be combined with the call for a socialist economy that guarantees jobs for all. Only socialism can solve the national question.

Jeff Mackler’s campaign for senate, despite its errors, does help show the way forward by pointing to socialist demands and solutions.

Due to the undemocratic laws of the state of California making it very difficult for third parties to gain ballot access Jeff Mackler will not be on the ballot so if you choose to vote for him you will have to write in his name.

Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) is the only socialist party in California that does have ballot status. Liberation News is also extending critical support to the PFP candidacy of Marsha Feinland. Here are key points of Marsha Feinland’s campaign:

1) Withdraw troops and advisors from Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and Colombia
2) End aid to Israel until it withdraws to its pre-1967 borders
3) Raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour
4) Create universal health care with a "single payer" (Canadian type) system- no insurance company profits
5) Shorten the work week with no loss in pay and guarantee paid vacation time for all workers
6) Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act - restore the right to strike and end "right to work" laws
7) Abolish the death penalty
8) End the phony "war on drugs" - legalize marijuana and decriminalize drug use
9) Fully fund the U.S. government share of education costs, particularly special education
10) End the war on children - stop the government mandated testing craze in public schools
11) Protect the National Forests and other public and native lands from corporate exploitation
12) Abolish the Senate and the Electoral College - one person, one vote

In this platform Marsha Feinland raises a number of good points, including opposing the undemocratic nature of the Senate itself stating, "Abolish the Senate and the Electoral College - one person, one vote." This is in reference to the way that the senate has equal numbers of representatives from each state, regardless of that state’s population. On a similar issue Diane Feinstein has been criticized by activists in Washington D.C., a district where the people do not get representation in the Senate, for supporting Washington D.C. school vouchers that were undemocratically crammed down their throats.

In the United States more than 45 million Americans have no health coverage. These include 9 million children. Millions of others have inadequate coverage. It is a crime that the richest nation (rich due to imperialist exploitation of the world) leads in medical technology, but has the worst access to healthcare of any developed nation. Marsha Feinland’s call for single payer healthcare of the Canadian model, covering everyone and getting rid of the insurance industry middlemen would be a welcome change. And yes, despite the propaganda, government programs are always more efficient than private profiteering with its stockholders, overpaid CEOs, and advertising. But the Cuban model with nationalized healthcare and no private hospitals or pharmaceutical companies profiteering from illness works even better. It is this healthcare model that Liberation News advocates.

In fact Marsha Feinland’s platform is not just missing a full socialized medicine program, it is missing another key ingredient. Besides calling for eliminating the private insurance industry through single payer, nowhere in her platform or other materials does she call for the nationalization of the capitalist economy. She has no reference to the expropriation of big oil, industry, and finance capital or even any calls for the nationalization or municipalization of the generation, distribution and sales of electric power. Without such a socialist program it will be impossible to neutralize the power of the capitalist class and meet the needs of the working class.

Liberation News also strongly disagrees with the Peace and Freedom Party’s practice of endorsing Democrats in city elections. In Santa Cruz this has meant that the Peace and Freedom Party has helped elect some of the most anti-worker, anti-homeless, and pro-police oppression Democrats such as Mike Rotkin. Rotten Rotkin publicly opposed the bus drivers when they went on strike, is currently campaigning against a city initiative to raise the minimum wage, has voted for and supported every anti-homeless law in Santa Cruz, and has backed the police in every act of repression, violence, and spying that they have carried out against the left in the city. The local PFP may not support Rotkin anymore, but they did help get him elected, and they continue to help elect other Democrats and Greens in Santa Cruz that have virtually identical programs to that of Rotkin. Liberation News says: No to support for Democrats or Greens in local or national elections! Yes to the socialist candidates!

It will take a massive working class movement for good socialist candidates to actually win elections. An important element of this will be breaking the labor movement from the Democrat Party. By backing the candidates worth voting for today we at Liberation News feel that we are helping build the foundations of that movement today and into the future as people get more and more fed up with capitalist exploitation and wars. Ultimately the ruling class will use ever more violence to try to maintain their grip on power and a revolution will be necessary for the working class to actually seize power and transform society.

Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Marsha Feinland, California Peace and Freedom Party Candidate for Senate:
http://feinlandforsenate.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Jeff Mackler, California Socialist Action Candidate for Senate:
http://www.socialistaction.org/macklerforsenate/index.html

Todd Cretien, Green Party Candidate for Senate:
http://www.todd4senate.org/

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

Cuba's Progresses towards Ending Maternal Deaths

ModottiManifesto — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 05:50:36 GMT

I manage a woman's forum (militant so if you go out there, its not sugar coated) and I do alot of critique, research, etc on the forum which is being updated, eventually working to get it onto a web page, with several translations. Though I'm anarcho-communist the forum is called WomensVanguardofLeft,

the Vanguard term was sarcastic in a sense...long story and it would probably bore you...

but anyhow, one of the organizations I refer to often is gendercide.org

and I was browsing the site for updates and was reading case studies and found this:

http://gendercide.org/case_maternal.html

Cuba though with the poverty has made great strides in ending Maternal Deaths which are extremely high btw around the world in developing (and some not so developing, US doesn't have that great of a health care rate for either maternal deaths or infant deaths, etc...premature births, so forth among developed nations, fact, our stats are somewhat pathetic...)

but the case study was on the gendercide aspect (you will need to read through the site to learn what is considered gendercide, etc),

and the case study on Cuba was quite encouraging. The Soviet example and Russian example on maternal care is sad really (there are studies on this too, I can list some variables here if interested). One day when I have time I would like to do some diagrams and sort through the whys, etc...a comparative analysis of sorts.

But regarding womyn's issues and Especially the low regard for mothers in this nation, I found this case study to be very inspiring and a good one to educate people with in regards to the benefits of socialism, though I'll be very upfront and tell you that there still needs to be far more improvement in regards to womyn's issues in applied left policy (and it needs to be womyn including mothers who make those policies, not men...meaning there needs to be more womyn in high office, etc).

Anyhow some good news for a change!

Modotti

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Women’s Rights Under Assault, Abortion Outlawed In South Dakota

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:27:52 GMT

Women’s Rights Under Assault, Abortion Outlawed In South Dakota

By STEVEN ARGUE

On March 6, 2006 South Dakota’s Republican governor, Mike Rounds, signed into law a bill banning almost all abortions in the state. The bill makes it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion under any circumstance other than to save the life of a woman.

The right to abortion was won in the United States in 1973 through a mass struggle in the streets that culminated in the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. A radicalized movement for women’s rights, born out of the movement against the Vietnam War and other struggles for social justice at home, was sickened by the injustice of women being butchered in illegal back alley abortions and saw the right of women to control their own bodies as fundamental in the struggle for women’s equality.

Today the bill passed in South Dakota is a blatant violation of the law under Roe v. Wade meant to force the issue back onto the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. In response National Lawyers Guild (NLG) President Michael Avery said, "The legislators and the governor of South Dakota have violated their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Local officials are obliged to follow the law as declared by the Supreme Court and are not entitled to repeatedly violate the law in the hope that the Court may change its rulings." The 6,000-member NLG is calling for the impeachment Governor Mike Rounds.

Outraged Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Souix Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has voiced her defiance saying, "To me, it is now a question of sovereignty, I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

Women in sparsely populated South Dakota currently obtain about 800 abortions a year. Under the new law women will be forced to take time off of school and work and spend money traveling out of state (or to Pine Ridge). These expenses and hardships are added to the price of abortion in the United States, putting the ability women to control their own bodies and their own lives further out of reach for many poor women.

While abortion is a free on demand health service in revolutionary Cuba, public funding for abortion in the United States was eliminated in 1977 when Democrat Jimmy Carter signed into law the Hyde Amendment that cut off Medicaid funding to 23 million poor women in the US. In response to critics Carter, a millionaire peanut farmer, replied, “There are many things in life that are not fair.”

In the 1980’s, under the Republican regime of Ronald Reagan, the right to abortion was widely seen as under attack. In response mass mobilizations for women’s rights continued to apply the kind of pressure that made the government fearful of inspiring deeper radicalizations by overturning the law. Internationally, however, the Reagan administration engineered major setbacks for women’s rights. In Afghanistan the U.S. gave billions of dollars of military support to the misogynistic Mujahideen that threw acid into the faces of women liberated from the veil and murdered teachers for teaching little girls how to read in write. US intervention brought to power the most rabidly anti-woman government in the world. In Poland the US helped organize and fund the rightwing Catholic Solidarnosc movement that upon taking power made abortion illegal and instated capitalist economic policies that brought about 50% unemployment. In El Salvador and Guatemala Reagan funded and trained rightwing death squad governments that routinely used the rape, torture, and murder of women in an attempt to silence the population.

On all of these international attacks on women’s rights by Reagan’s Republican administration the Democrats of Congress were willing partners.

While Clinton continued the Reagan Bush policy of not touching the formal legality abortion he took no real action to preserve the right either. In fact abortion rights suffered more under Clinton than under the previous two Republican administrations as the pro-choice movement became largely demobilized and wrongly saw “effective” and “responsible” political organizing as support for the Democrat Party. Parental consent laws aimed against the rights of teenagers were passed all across the country and between 1992 and 1996 the number of abortion providers plummeted by 14%. While abortion was being chipped away at Clinton carried out a frontal assault on gay rights with his homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy” and the poor were driven down even further into desperation with his promise to “end to welfare as we knew it” made reality with his signing of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Responsibility Act”. Not coincidentally this was accompanied by his delivered promise of 100,000 more cops on the streets and an ever-increasing mass incarceration of millions of the poor.

Today in Iraq Bush Jr. has followed in Reagan’s Afghanistan footsteps by destroying another secular government where women’s rights were a priority and replacing it with a murderous anti-woman Islamic government friendly to U.S. imperialist interests. In the United States Bush’s religious anti-woman and anti-sex crusade has gone so far as to oppose letting girls be inoculated by the new Papillomavirus vaccine. The virus is known to be a cause of cervical cancer and the vaccine will save lives. In an article on the subject the New Yorker stated March 13, “The Bush Administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex.”

With its nine lifetime appointees the U.S. Supreme Court will review the law passed this month in South Dakota. If upheld the legal right to abortion will be overturned in the United States. Sitting on that court will be two new openly reactionary judges appointed by the Bush administration, John Roberts and Samual Alito. Their decisions, however, will potentially be swayed by mass movements just as in 1973 the opinions nine reactionary judges were ultimately decided by the power of a mass movement that demanded nothing less than full rights for women.

Socialists stand unapologetically in full support of all women’s reproductive rights including access to RU 486, other birth control, and the right to free abortion on demand as an essential component to the liberation of women and the entire working class. To win and maintain these rights we see the necessity of building mass movements as well as the need to build a socialist movement independent and opposed to the Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media with the ultimate goal of establishing a democratic and egalitarian socialist society.

Women’s Liberation Through Mass Action and Socialist Revolution!
All Power To The People!

Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

New Witness Confirms Existence of Chinese Concentration Camp, Says Organs Removed from Live Prisoners

mentalfreedomne1 — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 04:29:33 GMT

Please help to end this horrible persectuion. knowledge is our greatest weapon, please share this information. together in peace we can make a difference. Falun Dafa is a peaceful meditation practice that teaches putting others before yourself, kindness, always telling the truth and being tolerant of others. We are literally being killed for being good people. The national media has done very little to help us because of trade issues with China. It is up to us to let the world know. Please help us.

By Ji Da
The Epoch Times Mar 17, 2006
www.theepochtimes.com

The witness, a former employee at the Liaoning Thrombosis Treatment Center of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, and says the bodies of Falun Gong practitioners are cremated immediately after the organs are removed. (The Epoch Times)
[High-resolution image ] A former employee of Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine told The Epoch Times during a recent interview that the Sujiatun Concentration Camp in China was actually a part of a hospital. The concentration camp has engaged in taking organs from Falun Gong practitioners when they were still alive and selling the organs. Since 2001, the concentration camp has secretly detained approximately 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners, none of whom have been able to leave the camp alive. The hospital removed many kidneys, livers, and corneas from the practitioners. After the organ removal, the practitioners were thrown into an incinerator, which was converted from a boiler. Their ashes were dumped together with burned charcoal.

Organs from Three Quarters of the 6,000 People Were Removed
Those whose organs were removed were in various states of health. Because many of the victims were illegally detained, there was neither an arrest warrant nor identification as to who these people actually were. Often after their organs were removed, nobody claimed the bodies. Sometimes their bodies were picked up by crooks who pretended to be their family members.

About three-quarters of the 6,000 people died after their hearts, kidneys, corneas, or skin was removed; their bodies were then burned. This witness, whose family member participated in the removal of Falun Gong practitioners' organs, said that approximately 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners remain in the hospital. She was afraid that the authorities would kill all of them to destroy evidence.

The Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine is located at 49 Xuesong Road, Sujiatun, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China. It was the first hospital in China to specialize in the heart, the brain, and surrounding blood vessels. The hospital is composed of several organizations, including the Liaoning Traditional Chinese Medicine College Teaching Hospital and the Shenyang Thrombosis Treatment Center.

Concentration Camp Details
The hospital site is 21,087 square meters, with 17,564 square meters of building area. It employs 460 people in 24 departments and 20 specialized offices. Information from the Chinese government shows that the hospital was established in December 1988, and was formerly named the Shenyang Research Institute of Thrombosis and Liaoning Province Thrombosis Treatment Center of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. In June 1998, it was renamed China Traditional Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center.

The Chinese Business Morning View said in a story on July 4, 2004, that a farm worker died of abnormal causes in Sujiatun, Shenyang and was later cremated. The death certificate was provided by the Chinese Medicine Thrombosis Treatment Center in Sujiatun. The news caused a stir in China.

Epoch Times: Did the hospital's medical staff inside the concentration camp know about this?

Answer: This hospital has a small number of officials and some doctors involved secretively in the operation of organ harvesting. Some other staff in the hospital knew about this, but this is absolutely a taboo [to talk about]. They all are afraid of being killed or courting trouble, so they all avoid the issue. Only those highly trusted doctors could be chosen to be the surgeons for organ harvesting operations.

ET: Were Falun Gong practitioners alive when their organs were harvested? Did their families know about this?

Answer: Falun Gong practitioners who were imprisoned there came mostly from Dabei Prison, Masanjia Labor Camp, and other prisons in Shenyang, or they were Falun Gong practitioners arrested in parks or residential homes. Because they refused to denounce Falun Gong, they were arrested without formal warrants, and their families did not know their situation. Many did not even have their names [recorded]. In addition, since the Chinese authority exercises a policy of "not being responsible" for killing Falun Gong practitioners, the death of Falun Gong practitioners is not a very big issue for prisons. The Chinese Communist Party persecutes Falun Gong, [but] these medical personnel were told Falun Gong practitioners were facing death because they killed people, or they were sentenced to death because of crimes, or they had become insane from practicing Falun Gong.

Those Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were harvested came from several types.

Organs harvested from live bodies are worth far more than organs taken from dead bodies. Many Falun Gong practitioners were still alive when their organs were taken. After their organs were cut out, some of these people were thrown directly into the crematorium to be burnt, thus leaving no evidence. For some others, after their organs were stolen, the doctor sewed up the wound and asked the family or family representative to give a signature for cremation. Family members did not know at all that the dead had their organs taken out.

Furthermore, there were some healthy Falun Gong practitioners in prisons in other areas who were injected—without their knowledge—with psychoactive drugs that made their minds confused. They then were transferred to Sujiantun concentration camp to suffer further torture, till in the end their organs were harvested and their bodies were cremated in secret.

Among the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were harvested, some were weak and some were healthy. Since most of them were illegally arrested, there were no arrest warrants or identification cards. After their organs were taken out while they were still alive, no one came to claim their bodies; or [sometimes] people using fake identities claimed their bodies.

None of these people have come out [of the concentration camp] alive; three-quarters of these 6,000 people have died, having their hearts, kidneys, retinas, and skins harvested and their bodies disposed of. I think now about 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners are still in this hospital, and I am afraid now that the authority will destroy all evidence and kill them.

Question: How did you know these things? Were you yourself a doctor involved in organ harvesting?

Answer: I worked at the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, Shenyang. This is exactly where this concentration camp is located. One of my family members was involved in the operation to harvest Falun Gong practitioners' organs. This has brought great pain to our family.

Question: Please tell us what you knew about.

Answer: From 2001, our hospital started to detain Falun Gong practitioners. At the beginning, these people were detained in the single-storey houses in the back yard of the hospital. Later, the hospital authorities demolished the single-storey houses, and it was unknown where in the hospital the Falun Gong practitioners were transferred. Many staff of the hospital discussed in private that these Falun Gong practitioners had been secretly transferred to the underground chambers of the hospital. According to some people working inside the hospital, the hospital has a huge system of secret underground chambers.

At the time when we went to work there, the person in charge of logistics and purchasing in the hospital said that the quantity of disposable sterile gloves used for operations and daily supplies that the hospital authorities asked to be purchased had increased dramatically. The logistics people estimated based on the scale of purchases at that time that there were at least 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners detained in this hospital.

These Falun Gong practitioners were not detained in the 4-story building under the in-patient department and administration at the front of the hospital, in order to keep the hospital staff from seeing them at all. We only occasionally saw Falun Gong practitioners being sent on a mobile intensive care bed to the first floor for physical examinations. These people were very weak. For the majority of the Falun Gong practitioners, nobody knew where they were being secretly kept. While they still did not know where these people were kept, some staff inquired to the hospital authorities about why so much food and so many sterile gloves and daily supplies were purchased. The hospital authorities said, "You only need to do your job well. There is no need for you to ask any other questions."

Starting in 2001, a family member of mine participated in organ-harvesting operations. My family member tried to keep me from knowing about this at the beginning. The hospital authorities selected doctors they trust in different aspects to perform the secretive operations. After a period of time, I found that my family member was in a lot pain, often had nightmares, and appeared panic-stricken. After repeated inquiries, this family member told me the truth. The leader of the hospital had asked my family member to participate in the organ harvesting operations on Falun Gong practitioners as early as 2001. It was 2003 when my family member confessed. A few years after, my family member felt so much pain from participating in this incident that it was impossible to continue with the evildoing. My family member decided to go abroad to get away from this matter.

My family member also told me: "you don't understand my suffering; those Falun Gong practitioners were alive. It might be easier for me if they were dead, but they were alive."

Question: Were there any other doctors from the hospital taking part in the operations of cutting out Falun Gong practitioners' organs?

Answer: I know there were some. All these things have been carried out secretly. Many doctors at our hospital involved were practicum doctors transferred from other hospitals. Because the government does not want to be responsible for Falun Gong practitioners' bodies and lives, their lives are treated as garbage by the regime, and their bodies were used in experiments by new doctors doing their practitcums.

Many doctors came and left the hospital because they suffered a lot after having been involved in these kinds of things. They either requested to be transferred to other places, or changed their names. Some might have been killed to eliminate the evidence, their identity files were taken out from the hospital's filing system, or their names were changed. Nobody knows where the doctors have gone.

The hospital staff all know that the rear part of the hospital is forbidden. It is always watched. The staff avoids talking about the place.

Question: It is said the hospital is equipped with an incinerator. The person whose organs were removed will be burned when he or she is still alive. Is that true?

Answer: The employees in our hospital call this place "the incinerator." Actually, it is a boiler room. Some poor farmers from nearby places were hired to work in the boiler room. They were penniless when they first came here. But they could scrape up some watches, finger rings, necklaces, and so on. The amount is not small. It is said by the employees in the hospital these jewelry and watches were collected from the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs had been removed when they were about to be thrown in the boiler to be burned. It is also said by the employees in the hospital, some were still alive when being thrown into the boiler.

Question: Do they get injection of anesthetic when in surgery?

Answer: Yes. There is a cap to the anesthetic quantity used in mainland China's hospitals. Generally, the supply of anesthetic was determined according to the accommodation of the hospital. To the public, the number of patients in our care appears to be very small, and publicly reported number of surgical procedures performed is quite low. But the equipment and articles used in surgery are abundant. Because the amount of anesthetic is limited, these secret surgeries could not use the normal anesthetic doses. In order to save anesthetic, they economized on the anesthetic used in surgeries on these Falun Gong practitioners. The amount of anesthetic used was very small. However, many whose organs were removed were still alive. You can imagine the pain suffered by the Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were removed.

Question: Are there any survivors among the 6,000 people detained since 2001?

Answer: Nobody has come out alive. The number of them gets smaller and smaller. The Falun Gong practitioners detained at Sujiatun are fewer now than before. But I believe that the sin of removing the organs of the Falun Gong practitioners is still continuing.

Question: Where are these organs usually sold to? Do the higher authorities in the government know about this?

Answer: They are mainly sold to Thailand, but I believe they are also sold to other regions of the world. Nowadays, there are many patients in China who need human skin, corneas, and kidneys for organ transplant surgeries. Many patients have to wait in line to purchase organs. Currently, a kidney can be sold up to the price of 30,000 to 100,000 U.S. dollars. The profit from selling organs is simply too great. The people who benefit from this are not only the top leaders of hospital and the officials of the Chinese Communist Party's Heath Department. This is a crime present across the entire nation. People ranging from government officials to doctors to organ sellers are all involved in this and are profiting greatly.

Question: Why did they target Falun Gong practitioners as the source of organs?

Answer: Because relatives of many Falun Gong practitioners don't even know that their family members were arrested. So if the Falun Gong practitioners are killed, there will be no one to come and claim their dead bodies.

Question: Why did you want to expose this? This may bring great danger to you.

Answer: I know that there are many Falun Gong practitioners who are currently detained at the hospital. I would like to expose this to the international community, so those who are not yet killed can be saved. Also, I would like to expose this as an atonement for my family.

I am not a Falun Gong practitioner. But as a former staff member of the hospital, I have the responsibility to expose the truth, and let the world to save those Falun Gong practitioners who are still alive. Organs of some Falun Gong practitioners are still living on patients' bodies. I would like to call on all society to pay attention to this issue and stop this shocking crime.

you can find out how you can help at www.fofg.org

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

Sweat Shops

Herman — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 21:26:03 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I just saw a documentary on Link Tv about sweat shops in Saipan and wanted to share what I saw.

I had no idea that Saipan is a U.S. territory and as such is exempt from trade tarriffs. This special status also allows companies to place the made in the U.S.A label on their clothing. Unfortunately the labor laws that have been so hard fought here in the U.S. were not being practiced or honored in any way in Saipan. Until a recent lawsuit, this island was operating with little oversite from OSHA and was in effect a collection of dehumanizing work camps that created conditons of indentured servitude and slavery for thousands of immigrant workers. Ironically enough, many of these workers came from China and they thought that being on a U.S. territory would grant them more freedom than they had in China...they were wrong about Saipan. Apparently freedom is not a word that exists in the corporate lexicon.

Many of these workers actually paid a recruitment fee for the "priviledge" of working for american sub-contractors on american soil. Then the reality set in that they were in a prison like environment that, exept during the few and announced visits from OSHA and the labor department, cared little for their well being. Quotas were more important than the workers rights. Attempts to unionize and organize were strongly opposed.

After a strike failed (the company closed the factory and moved) some very intrepid workers and activists sued not just that factories but the American retailers that used their labor. Among them were GAP, SEARS, STRUCTURE, POLO and others. Gap was the last to hold out on a settlement deal but eventually they capitulated. There are indipendent monitoring groups on the island now according to the documentary. There are times when it is so easy to really hate capitalism!

Check it out for yourself :

"Behind the Labels"
http://www.witness.org/

posted in Communist Left - 3 replies

marx, greatest thinker?

Dakota — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:41:15 GMT

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1528137,00.html

Comment

Kapital gain

Karl Marx is now the Home Counties' favourite

Mark Seddon
Thursday July 14, 2005
Guardian

Karl Marx is the nation's most revered philosopher. No, this isn't old Soviet agitprop, but the result of a Radio 4 listeners' poll organised by the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg for his series In Our Time. The veteran Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, thinks he knows why. His reasoning is as contemporary as Marx's was visionary. "The Communist Manifesto," he says, "contains a stunning prediction of the nature and effects of globalisation."

Taking 28% of the votes cast, the former down-at-heel Victorian gent, who suffered appalling outbreaks of boils, beat the Economist magazine's trumpeted candidate, David Hume, hands down. So with even the communist daily Morning Star keeping tight-lipped, the strange exhumation of Marx can only be attributed to thousands of Radio 4 listeners in the Home Counties. This is clearly a very real middle-class conspiracy, designed to give those ex-Marxists in the cabinet - John Reid and Charles Clarke among them - sleepless nights.

But should we really be so surprised? Marx, now freed from his flawed pupils, is as liberating as he was when he published the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago. Re-visiting Marx's theories on historical and dialectical materialism, it is possible to see a genius at work because, as Bragg would have it, "everything can be explained".

But then, as the self deprecating Marx once argued: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Marx reaches through the centuries not only because he understood how modern capitalism would exacerbate the divide between rich and poor, but because he could see that, left to its own devices, it would create monopoly and exploitation.

He could have left it there, but of course he believed that there had to be an alternative. And in these dumbed down times where Lord Birt's blue-sky thinking and management consultancy gobbledegook has our technocratic political class in a vice-like grip, it is refreshing to discover that thousands of Britons must believe that real change is possible. Amazingly for the slayers of social democracy in New Labour, as many of these people probably live in places like Esher and Surbiton as they do in Oxford and Cambridge.

Market fundamentalism has now replaced Marxism and its many derivatives in the west, as it has done in the east. Elsewhere, nationalism and religious fundamentalism vie to fill a dangerous, illiberal void. It is as if the age of enlightenment, of the Renaissance, had never happened. Marx spawned some horrors, and the flight from him by the political class has been so total that the gentler tradition of democratic socialism has been all but lost.

Marx's mother despaired at the futility of it all. "I wish you could make some capital rather than just writing about it," she once remonstrated. Well, maybe his old bankroller, Friedrich Engels, might have agreed, but Marx has left a rich intellectual inheritance. Before Gordon Brown has another chance to say "No return to boom and bust", I heartily recommend to him a few hours spent perusing Das Kapital.

· Mark Seddon is a member of Labour's national executive committee

seddonzq1@aol.com

felt this needed to be posted!
-Dakota

posted in Communist Left - 8 replies

Iraqi resistance

flaminghakama — Wed, 18 May 2005 18:05:21 GMT

Just curious what folks
here think about this
topic.

Should we support the
Iraqi resistance?

I bring this up because
there was some debate
within another thread about
internationalism and
support for revolutionary
movements.

Beyond a yes-or-no
answer, I was hoping
you could clarify the
basis upon which you
would support such a
struggle.

That is, does the struggle
need to conform to any
particular ideology or
form of organization? (And
if it doesn't, let it get
pounded into the ground
by the US?)

Also, what do you think
of the notion of
"unconditional but
critical" support?

That is, a position of
supporting a peoples'
struggle against US
Imperialism (without
reservation), regardless
of the nature of how they
carry out that struggle.
Yet, at the same time,
offering criticism that
you think would help
their struggle be more
effective, or to have a
better politial basis, and
clarifying that your
support for their success
in battle is not the same
as endorsing the whole
of their political
program.

posted in Communist Left - 9 replies

government

jesse — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 03:45:00 GMT

i have a vague concept of communism. i'm familiar with the general economic ideals. i haven't read the manifesto or anything, or much on the subject (a few articles and essays) i'm just interested in alternatives to capitalism. it is, however, my understanding that centralized government is part of the package.. is this accurate and if so, why is it necessary for communism to function?

posted in Communist Left - 13 replies

sf communists/activists!!

Dakota — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 18:53:51 GMT

come to this-
Stan Tookie Williams -- subject of the film Redemption (starring Jamie Foxx) -- faces execution this year

- despite his nine Nobel Prize nominations

- despite his redemption while in prison, writing a
series of books keeping kids off drugs and out of
gangs

- despite a racist prosecutor who barred all blacks
from his jury, to create an all-white jury

- despite a trial littered with contradictions,
including the heavy use of jailhouse snitches

Help us stop this madness!

Come hear the story -- straight from Tookie, speaking to us LIVE from death row -- of how he has gone from founder of the Crips gang to respected children's writer.

Hear from journalist Barbara Becnel about the legal injustices he has faced, up to an including the recent ruling from the federal Ninth Circuit Court that the execution can go forward.

Hear why Tookie's life proves the death penalty should be abolished.

And help us make a step in that direction by saving Tookie's life!

Thursday April 7th, 4:00pm
Cesar Chavez Student Center, Room C-116
San Francisco State University

Sponsored by:
Campaign to End the Death Penalty at SFSU
International Socialist Organization at SFSU
Students Against War at SFSU

For more information or to help out, call (650)771-3537, or visit
http://www.nodeathpenalty.org/
http://savetookie.com/

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

lovely quote

Dakota — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:59:11 GMT

“That’s why I feel that the responsible thing to do is to withdraw the troops. That’s not abandoning the Iraqi people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t give them anything. I’m saying we should give them what they need--aid and assistance--but not in a military form. Many people feel that the Iraqi people would go crazy without us, and not be able to function. But Iraq is the cradle of civilization. They’re educated people just like us, and they’re capable if given the opportunity and the resources.”
this is a direct quote from U.S. veteran of this Iraqi war, Kelly Dougherty.
he said this at the protest that took place on March 19th 2005 at Fayetteville, N.C.--home of Fort Bragg, one of the U.S. Army’s biggest bases

be still my beating heart...

also I'm new, hi!

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Link to Subversion site

Shibek — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 02:32:08 GMT

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8195/index.html

posted in Communist Left - 2 replies

Revolution in South Asia

Mittwoch — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:40:46 GMT

Imperialists target Nepal
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!

Pressure against the people’s war in Nepal has escalated with a recent
incursion into the country by Indian forces who burned and looted homes
of suspected Maoists. This confrontation is a direct result of the
frequent attacks against the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA), including:

• 1 December in Kailali, 15 RNA soldiers killed in a lengthy battle
• 4 December in Morand, four mercenaries killed
• 13 December in the western region, 10 RNA soldiers killed by mines
• 14 December, 14 members of the Armed Police Force ambushed and killed
in the Mahottari district and ten security personnel killed in the
Kapilvastu district.

The list goes on. Up to the middle of December a total of 287 security
personnel, including the army and armed police, have died since the
breakdown of the ceasefire on 27 August 2003.

In addition to the continuing clashes with the army, there has also
been a rise in strike action. On 3 January a strike called by ANNISU, the
student wing of the Maoist rebels, brought life in the Mechi and Koshi
zones to a standstill, causing major disruption to travel and closure
of shops in the major cities, affecting nearly 1.6 million students.
ANNISU announced the strike to demand that the government make public the
whereabouts of some of their comrades who have gone missing. To
coincide with this, the banned All Nepal Women’s Organisation (ANWO) has
called a countrywide general strike on 8 March, International Women’s Day.
ANWO’s chair emphasised the building of ‘model villages free of the
oppression of women in the liberated areas’, where women have equal rights
in property, politics and every sphere of society, and called for
greater participation by women in the local revolutionary people’s
governments.

The feudal government continues to act with indecision in dealing with
the deepening crisis. On the one hand they have extended their assaults
by continuing their brutal policy of collective punishment: RNA
soldiers are told to kill 10 Maoists to every soldier/policeman killed. The
reality is that the majority of those killed are not Maoist guerrillas
but non-combatant peasants who refuse to give information about the
Maoists.

However, because of increasing desperation the government has
introduced a ‘surrender and amnesty’ policy, assuring security, jobs, and other
offers to those who surrender. Communications Minister Kamal Thapa
stated that ‘the government will provide certain “financial aid” to those
who will help seize weapons, explosives and other sensitive materials’,
adding that ‘their identities will be kept secret’. Free medical
treatment, education, employment and loans to start businesses were also
offered. The government also claimed it will later on grant full freedom to
them, allowing them to follow any political ideology they believe in’!

In the absence of a bourgeois parliament the monarchy has had to openly
resort to such direct tactics to split the movement. They will be
unlikely to fool the majority of the Nepalese people who have experienced
the naked brutality of the King’s army and police. The reality has been
the opposite – increased desertion from the police and army to the
People’s Liberation Army.

In response to these events Christina Rocca, the US Assistant Secretary
of State for South Asia, went to Nepal on 16 December 2003 for a
four-day visit where she met with both the King and Prime Minister to discuss
‘security issues’. Rocca, who reports directly to Colin Powell the US
Secretary of State, arrived with pledges of continued US assistance to
fight the Maoist insurgency. She arrived amid a huge cross-party
counter-demonstration outside the Royal Palace. It was her first visit to
Nepal since Washington decided to freeze Maoist assets in the US after
declaring the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) a terrorist organisation.

The British Labour government has also intensified its pressure by
approving ‘big increases in the sales of arms to Nepal where security
forces are fighting Maoists,’ The Guardian said. ‘Last year, Britain
provided Nepal with two military helicopters with funds from its “conflict
prevention” fund,’ the paper added. The British government has also agreed
to provide two STOL (Short Take-off and Landing) aircraft to the RNA as
a grant assistance under its Global Conflict Prevention Pool. Israel
has also managed to get itself a slice of the pie. They have sold the RNA
high-tech infra-red surveillance devices which have been fitted to
their helicopters and will considerably help monitor Maoist activity on the
ground.

Despite the recent incursion India claims that it has a
‘non-interference policy’. The Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha recently said
‘we never impose our views on Nepal. India and Nepal are two of the
closest neighbours and we give friendly advice to Nepal only when we are
asked or if it is very essential.’ Well, we can determine then that Delhi
considers the situation as critical, for he went on to state ‘we feel
concerned about Nepal’s Maoist problem, if we encourage Nepali Maoists,
then we would be encouraging Maoist Communist Centre and People’s War
Group (the two main Maoist organisations in India). It’s not in India’s
interests...we need energy and Nepal can produce energy.’

The Indian government continues to incarcerate Chandra Prakash Gajurel,
a political bureau member of the CPN, on trumped up charges of having
insufficient travel documents. Furthermore, India has been continuing
its military support to the Nepalese government with a supply of over 1
million 5.56 calibre bullets for modern rifles to Nepal. Indian Special
Forces have also arrived in Nepal with military supplies to provide
counter-insurgency training to the RNA.

This intensification of the war against the Nepalese people is being
continued by the imperialist countries. Yet despite this joint
aggression, the rebels are still making steady gains.

Victory to the Nepalese
revolution!

Andrew Alexander

Sources and quotes used in this article were taken from the Maoist
Information Bulletin, Nepal News, A World to Win News Service, the BBC
World Service and The Himalayan Times.

Here's a link to a BBC story on the attack in Beni: http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/39955000/rm/_39955061_nepal13_bryant_vi.ram

Koraput Campaign in Orissa is a Milestone in the Annals of Indian Agrarian Revolution !

To Arm the People with State Arms to Defeat its Offensive War !

(Report received at the office on Feb. 29, 2004. Given its significance we are printing it in full — Editor)

At the time of colonial rule revolutionaries of India attacked the Chittagong police head quarters in East Bengal in 1930. Again almost 75 years later Maoist revolutionaries attacked Orissa’s Koraput district police Head Quarters (HQ) in India, with a different aim. At the time of the Chittagang attack they had the task to overthrow colonialism. This time around Maoists had the task to arm their Peoples Guerrilla Army (PGA) to transform it into Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) and to establish liberated areas, where the neo-colonial type of exploitation in the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system will be overthrown.

Koraput, an oldest district HQ, in Orissa has seen many a people’s movement. Since two decades back the CPI(ML)[PW] has been active in large parts of the district. It has been mobilizing the tribal people in various revolutionary movements. The 9th Congress of the CPI(ML)[PW], which was held in 2001, had taken a task to transform the Andhra-Orissa border region (AOB) as Liberated Zone. It has been putting in its efforts in a consolidated manner in that area to achieve its task. After the Party Congress the PW Party took the "Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign" (TCOC) to arm its PGA and to destroy the morale and advancement of state Special Forces and Para-Military forces in 8 Guerrilla Zones spread across AP, Chattisghar, Maharastra, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar. In its TCOC a good number of attacks on police and paramilitary forces were conducted in the entire above Zone in the last 3 years. But the attack which they executed on 6th February was a well-planned and meticulously executed one by mobilizing various PGA units, which was the first of its nature and type in the last 3 decades old revolutionary movement or to say second in the last 75 years history of the Indian new democratic revolution, which has given a nerve-breaking jolt to the entire ruling classes of the country, irrespective of their political identities.

Koraput A Seized City by People’s Guerrillas:

The massive attack took place on the night of 6th Feb. synchronising with similar attacks on various targets in the city. To excute their well-calculated plan Naxalites made reconnaissance (recce) for several days and assessed the police HQ’s weaknesses and strong points to virtually seize the armoury. Their target was to sieze the weaponry with minimum human loss and bloodshed, to arm the people to strengthen the PGA fighters. The national and regional news papers which started to write on the attack from 7 Feb. onwards to the end of this month accept two things in general i.e. the morale of the police is almost lost and Naxalites put the state on tenter hooks, which now needs a fresh look into the security of police HQs in all most all the 12 states in the country.

According to the newspapers 200-armed Naxalites were engaged in the well-executed plan to overpower the targets. On the Friday night (quoted by the state as black Friday and a good revolutionary Friday Naxalites) systematically occupied all the vital points in the city to seize the Armoury of police HQ. It seems that they planned to neutralise all the armed forces present in the city and in the vicinity of the city. For this they struck on the District Superintendent’s office, two police stations (rural and urban), district Jail, Treasury office and their main target i.e. police HQ and its Armoury.

To keep engaged other forces, which were camping near the city such as 3rd battalion of the Orissa Special Armed Police (OSAP), Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) including CRPF contingents in housed OSAP and IRB head quarters they had planned a mock attack on the 3rd BN, HQ of the OSAP and engaged the force in a gun battle to stop their advancement to help the forces of the district HQ. Apart from this they laid powerful land mines at various points to stop new deployment, which could cordon off the combatants of the PGA of the PW party. According to media reports, to avoid such a trap or encounter with extra new forces the PGA took all the precautions. Apart from this they seized all the main roads, which lead to Koraput town.

Without any significant resistance one after another target surrendered to the Naxalites. A Jawan guarding the district armoury N.Nayak was shot dead first to seize the Armoury. Another assault batch, which attacked the jail premises, faced some mild resistance, according to the news reaching till now, in which the Jail Superintendent and a few constables were injured and 20 rifles captured by the Naxalites from the Jail police. The Jawans in the two police stations surrendered and handed over their weapons. And at the SP office also there was no resistance, and the Naxalites did not give any scope for the demoralised forces to regroup. Not only this, the news items that appeared so far in the media have written in black and white that all the higher officialdom of the administration was so much panicked by the stunning attack that they went underground till the fresh battalions of CRPF arrived and positioned themselves in the city. Every corrupt official waited with abated breath apprehending that Naxals might target him or her. Actually Naxals targeted particularly the HQ Armoury. When they attacked the SBI’s ATM counter and the district treasury, they did not touch the lockers, but picked the weapons in the persons of the guards on duty. This shows the commitment of the guerrillas to stick to the task.

According to government reports, weapons, ammunition, grenades valued at Rs. 50 crore were seized by the Naxalites of the People’s War. Among them there were 500 sophisticated weapons of different types (.303, LMG, SLR, Mortars, Stens, Revolvers, Pistols), along with more than 30,000 rounds of ammunition, number of Mortar shells and Grenades. Whatever be the exact number, the PGA has achieved its task for the time being. To carry all this huge quantity of arms and ammunition to the jungles the PGA guerrillas picked some vehicles of govts, health department and others.

To avoid any interception by the police, a meticulous plan was chalked out for their retreat according to news item appeared in the local media.. On their retreat the daredevil guerrillas attacked 3 police stations at Laxmipur, Narayanpatna and Kakiriguma and a Dy. Superintendent of Police’s office at Laxmipur. In order to pre-empt retaliation from these police stations, separate assault batches were deployed and they took control immediately after the temporary seizure of Koraput.

The five police stations, jail and the district HQ of the police are the centres and edifices for the loot of the people’s wealth and repression on Adivasies of this ancient land, where from colonial rulers to the current rulers rule with the symbol of khaki power. To avenge the centuries old draconian repression, the police buildings were exploded, their vehicles burnt and weapons seized by the peoples’ guerrillas to arm the people, who were in acute need of them to resist the repression of the state.

The three roads which lead to Koraput were also blockaded by other guerrilla units to challenge the central forces which could have been rushed from Rayagada, Vijayanagaram or from nearby IRB HQ, Kolab, where IRB and CRPF forces were stationed. The anticipation of the guerrillas proved correct. A truckload of CRPF and IRB forces were rushed from Kolab, which were ambushed at Dhadapadar village off Koraput at 11:30 PM. In retaliation 3 CRPF jawans died and half a dozen were injured. Altogether 4 jawans died and 10 were injured in the total operation and there were no losses from the side of the PGA. Finally the PGA guerrillas torched 7-8 vehicles at Balipeta on their retreat, apart from ½ a dozen police vehicles damaged by them at various spots.

Aftermath of the Attack

The shuddering dimension of the lightning attacks threw the entire state administration in to a state of helplessness. After hearing the news of the attacks state and central governments gradually tried to rush the extra forces. But they were stunned after hearing the news of attacks on 3 PSs and land mine blasts near Koraput. All these forestalled deployment of the forces at night. On the 7th morning the DGP N.C.Padli,, Home Secretary Santosh Kumar, Director of Intelligence Man Mohan Praharaj, IG (Intelligence) R.P. Singh dashed to Koraput and appealed to the Centre to send extra forces within hours to cordon off the forests to trace out the guerrillas and their seized weapons. A good number of para-military companies were rushed from different points of the para-military battalion HQs. Apart from this, the Eastern Naval Command which is based in Vishakapatnam was also pressed into service particularly its helicopters to coordinate the ground forces in the border region of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa spanning the districts of Koraput, Malkangiri, Rayagada, Gajapathi and Ganjam of Orissa and East Godavary, Vishakapatnam, Vijayanagaram and Srikakulam districts of Andhra Pradesh i.e. Eastern Ghats as a whole due to its topography.

Greyhounds of Andhra under air cover too were deployed in large numbers to track down the guerrillas. A Red alert was sounded in Andhra, Orissa and Chattisghar. Even the Jharkhand and West Bengal governments were alerted and asked to mobilise their forces in its borders with Orissa. The Koraput SP Arun Kumar Bothra and collector Usha Padhee and other officials and political leaders started to issue different statements, which never matched with the ground realities. For example, on 8th February the CM of Orissa Naveen Patnaik said he was prepared for talks; the DGP Padhi said that all police stations would be given more security cover to combat Naxalites. Koraput collector Usha Padhee suggested a compact package of welfare work in all Naxal influenced areas. Congress President J.B. Patnaik demanded president rule and another Congress leader Dilip Roy demanded Army deployment to check the Naxalite violence.

When these statements came pouring in, the regional press and news, the country-wide electronic and print media almost blacked out the news of such monumental dimensions and did not dare to put the details of the massive and stunning Naxalite campaigns where 13 targets were attacked simultaneously and some more daring ambushes were successfully laid. The stirring military campaign by the Maoists in India has boosted the morale of the oppressed masses of these areas. This unprecedented attack on the states armed HQ sent cheers to the revolutionary camp of India and the world. When one after another news item came pouring out from the battlefront the entire revolutionary camp acknowledged Koraput as a model to arm the people and to resist the offensive of the state and central governments.

Other guerrilla units in AOB and Dandakaranya, initiated counter attacks on some police stations throwing the concerned state government strategists into a tizzy. The guerrillas who planted some more mines on the way among which one mine was exploded on 13 February around noon. One IAS probationer, incharge of Narayanpatna Block was hit badly and 13 jawans of the CRPF and OSAP were too critically injured at Dandabati village near Narayanpatna. The Andhra-Orissa Border Special Zonal Committee (AOBSZC), a provincial level committee of the CPI(ML)[PW] which is the leading committee of the AOB peoples’ movement owned responsibility in a press release and at the time of laying seize to the Koraput armed head quarters, loud speakers were used to openly thunder out threats to the armed forces, for surrender as well as to declare to the people the objective of the CPI(ML)[PW] and the need for such campaigns. Wall posters were scribbled out to educate and convince the masses to support their act. This massive campaign was never possible without the enthusiastic support of the masses of the population.

Why this Attack:

The Orissa government is a member state in the Joint Operational Command (JOC), which was formed a few years back under the leadership of the central Home Ministry, to curb Naxal activities in 12 states of India. In summer 2003 a joint operation led by para Military, OSAP and Greyhounds forces were conducted in Malkangiri, Koraput and Rayagada districts. Hundreds of supporters and members of the revolutionary mass organisations were picked up and numberless false cases were filed against them. At the time of the operation some encounters took place. Due to the white terror let loose in a large scale some surrendered to the police. In Rayagada district the government pitted Dalits and other castes against the Adivasis and tried to capitalise on the contradictions among the masses. The State government stepped up repression in Malkangiri in a planned manner since the last two years. The state governments deliberately spread the news that the backbone of the Naxalite movement was broken in the joint combing operations of 2003. Actually the Andhra Pradesh government is also part and parcel in the operations from the very beginning to the end, because it also needed the repression campaigns to gain the upper hand against the movements of North Andhra. To concentrate its greyhound forces in the AOB region the AP state govt. sanctioned Rs. 100 crore to establish a Greyhounds HQ, on warpath at Vishakapatnam, to supervise and coordinate its North Andhra deployment.

In the AOB region the revolutionary movement is advancing by leaps and bounds in the midst of the severe state repression earlier by the AP state — which is still continuing in large scale — and later by the Orissa government. The CPI(ML)[PW] is spearheading the movement by mobilising the masses the in political, military fronts including the day to day partial struggles in which people were consolidated. In some selected pockets of the AOB zone the PW Party has been establishing guerrilla bases (GB) as part of the liberated zones. To build the GB or Liberated area the destruction of the enemy’s political power is a vital aspect. Already in large pockets feudal and tribal chiefs’ power has been smashed. The sate administration is defunct in these areas, especially where the revolutionary peoples’ committees were established. An alternative people’s political power in its embryonic form is formed and the political, military consciousness of the people keeps developing at a certain level. In the cooperation and participation by the masses in the Koraput attack such new-elevated consciousness is visible. This stupendous achievement is a befitting homage to the sacrifices of innumerable party cadres, guerrilla fighters including the vast masses. The JOC wants to curb this people’s power, by liquidating the Maoist vanguard party of the movement i.e. CPI(ML)[PW] by hook or by crook. So, all the democratic rights of the masses were curbed and a police raj established

So to counter the state violence and the role of the state armed forces the CPI(ML)[PW] is initiating tactical offensive on the military front. If the state offensive is unchecked militarily, peoples’ movements can never advance in history. To wield political power people need their own armed forces and the destruction of enemy power is imperative to achieve the goal. So, the Koraput campaign was led by the military commission of the CPI(ML)[PW].

Arming the Masses is the Historic Need:

Generally, all the Maoists accept the adages of Mao such as, "political power flows from the barrel of the gun", "without a peoples’ Army people have nothing", "arm the masses" etc. Apart from this, every Maoist party accepts that to lead the revolution for victory three magic weapons are needed. They are: 1. Party, 2. Army, 3. United Front. Accepting the theory is one thing, to put it in practice is another. But to judge any group/party one has to observe their theory and practice on these questions to decide which camp they belong.

In India after the setback of Naxalbari many ML groups accept Maoism in general but when it to transformed it into practice numerous webs of arguments will be woven from a safe distance. Some may express purely left jargon without any practice; some may stick on always to their forefathers’ right opportunistic line without any review of the past or concrete application of the three magic weapons. When the question of arming the masses comes onto the agenda the leadership of the so-called ML parties will start lectures and write piles of articles to prove the time is not mature enough for taking a plunge into the real life activities challenging the enemy. It cries hoarse that people are not prepared, arming the few advanced activists is sectarianism, MCCI-PW parties are adopting sectarian, anarchic polices which Mao never said, etc., etc.

To say frankly, the party, army and UF, the three components are inseparable and will influence one another and by wielding the army and UF, Party will be made to initiate the war and if once war is initiated all the fronts will be subordinate to the advancement of the war. So, one needs the army from the very beginning of the preparation. If the peasant-agricultural labour association is formed at the village level simultaneously the village defence squad is also to be formed to protect the village masses from the landlords their henchmen and police attacks. If the associations are formed at block, tahasil or district level then military formations above the VDS is needed at the same time. In the urban revolutionary mass movement also, open and underground defence squads are needed from the very beginning in the workers, student, youth, women, slum dwellers and other fronts to face onslaught of the reactionary forces. These defence corps will become part of the people’s militia. In the history of the revolutionary movement none will win the war purely with militias. To lead the militia and to smash the state’s regular forces, a well-trained and politically steeled people’s regular army is essential. So, the PGA/PLGA needs to be transformed into a full-fledged liberation army in the course of development of the guerrilla war.

Of course, the liberal bourgeois intellectuals and the leadership of right opportunistic and revisionist ML parties never accept this. However, they will start to condemn the Koraput campaign. The leadership of the CPI(ML)[Liberation] Orissa, already took this inglorious task on their shoulders, some more may join with them by writing ‘before and after Koraput’ type articles. Kanubabu type leaders may form another ‘genuine’ ML party to purge the evils of the history of ML formation or the ghost of armed uprising of the great Naxalbari.

War is after all the continuation of politics by other means. Political, economic, social and cultural relations are interlinked with the politics and policies of war. Feudalism, capitalism, imperialism, semi-colonial, semi-feudal, whatever the system may be, to fight and overthrow it people need to arm themselves. It is a historical generalisation of law of the transformation of societies. In India after the spring thunder the onerous need came upon us as an imminent factor to transform the Maoist principles of war into practice. No doubt there are a lot of changes took place if we compare today’s India with the old china. Basically all these transformations happened in the super-structure not in the base. So, imperialism has been more nakdly issuing threats to the world people. It is an old colonialist method and an alibi to unleash wars of aggression on the masses, which we can see in Afghanistan, Iraq, and earlier Vietnam etc. To put up resistance against the rule of reactionaries and their armed units people need arms. To advance the protracted people’s war by building the People’s Army is one of the fundamental conditions.

Glimpses of the PGA

2 December 2000 witnessed a historic day in the on going people’s war in India i.e. the formation of the people’s guerrilla army (PGA) as a separate military wing under the leadership of the CPI(ML)[PW]. For almost two decades of its agrarian struggle the people’s war party organised its armed units in different names. It resisted the enemy onslaught from Andhra to Bihar and in the course of development all the guerrilla units were organised as the PGA. It had three types of forces such as the main, secondary and base forces. The Main forces were developed for mainly combatant task, secondary forces mainly for organisational task (along with combatant as secondary task) and in the base force village defence squads and other militia units were organised.

To lead the PGA, the PW party also formed separate command structures to specialise in the military front. The PGA units are spread across the country in 10 states and their experience and combatant skills are also developing. Whenever the PGA strikes on major targets – civilian or military – in and around the guerrilla zones, always it impacted the political and military scenario of the particular state or at the country level. Say for example: Last October; it punished the World Bank and imperialist pet dog Andhra Pradesh CM, Chandrababu Naidu, creating repercussion not only in AP but also in the entire country and the world, even though he survived. Enquiry commissions were formed and the security to all the ‘VVIP, VIPs’ was beefed-up in India.

When the PGA units ambush or raided state and central armed forces a major reshuffling and rearrangement of police camps, personnel and police stations were excuted. Special forces were formed, special welfare projects were announced. Modernisation of forces is continuously taking place in all the states under the strong influence of Naxalism. Till now thousands of crores of rupees was spent to crush the PGA units, which were engaged in a revolutionary war to check state violence and to push back enemy contingents falling on guerrilla bases and guerrilla units.

Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra, Madhyapradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttarpradesh and West Bengal state armed forces and para-military forces were attacked by PGA and PLGA many times in the past 3 years. Targets were selected by assessing their role against the mass movements. In 2001-2003 roughly more than 250 targets were attacked by the PGA forces, which checked the advancement of the government forces. Today the PGA is a dedicated, well disciplined, courageous daring force to checkmate enemy brutality on the oppressed masses. Tele-communication net-work, rail-roads, government buildings which house for armed forces of states and central armed forces naturally become the targets of the PGA on various occasions. All these targets are generally military targets and the destruction of these targets is justified. The struggles send warning message, particularly whenever, brave resistance is put up by the PGA/PLGA forces. It also carries a clear political message like big campaigns among the country people, where earlier they did not hear about Naxalism. There too politics of war i.e. armed agrarian revolutionary politics creates an electrifying impact.

Today in the battlefield when the main force, which may be in platoon formation or in higher forms, enters an area, there enemy Special Forces stop their movements. From the district HQ, massages will flash in VHF walkie-talkies that the PGA platoons entering in the area may strike somewhere, do not move from the barracks. Police bosses will spend sleepless nights in the area.

Action teams (a small specialised units of the main forces) are much more daredevil units, and the officials and reactionaries get nervous if they hear an AT is moving in the areas. SMS will be passed on over all the mobile phones from the SP office, regarding the AT and precautions taken for saving the supposed targeted persons or installation.

A good number of villages will inform the party committees and military commands to keep the main forces in their area, which will protect them form the attacks and the cruelty which the para-military and state special forces will unleash.

‘Gram Rakhsa Dal’, ‘Area Rakhrsa Dal’ and other formations belong to the base force as per the categorisation decided by of party. These units will work always with the main, secondary forces and keep an eye on the reactionaries and government forces. They will strike at the enemy if it is possible, or the message of enemy contingents moving to the main or secondary forces be sent out. Immediately opportunity of ambushes or other form of attacks will be planed. Now the slogan of the PGA is, "Don’t leave the enemy forces unhurt, once it enters in our area".

Enormous Effect of the Koraput Campaign on the Political Scenario of the Country

The political and military message of the Koraput Campaign has already spread and to the four corners of the country. In the annals of the undivided communist party and in today’s revolutionary history if the first time that such a major action has taken place. Since last October to the end of this February almost for five months the CPI(ML)[PW] and MCCI are in the daily news. The news has come up not only on the military strike power of these two Maoist parties but also the possible merger of there two parties into a single party. All this spreads like wildfire in the country. All such pieces of news themselves create a big political campaign among the vast majority of masses of India and abroad, which gave confidence to them to fight and resist firmly the three big mountains i.e. imperialism-comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and feudalism. And the hearts of the ruling classes shrink like a earthquake jolt on them.

In the last, quarter of 2003 the Home minister and BJP ‘lohapursh’ iron man Advani started a hulaballoh about left extremism as the main danger for the country’s security (read danger for the rule of three big mountains). Social fascist Buddha and Anil babu started whining that in comparison to the N-E rebels and the KLO the PW-MCCI combine appear to be more dangerous because they have their ideology. Yes, it is true the PW-MCCI forces have a strong ideological base i.e. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, which is etching history.

Ideology is, after all, the basis of any truely revolutionary communist party which acts as the guide to all political and military activities. The ruling classes and also some bankrupt ‘left’ groups/parties, try and poutray this as "mindless violence". These apologists of the status quo fear real revolutionary struggle more than anything else. But the freedom of our country is unthinkable without it.

Fearing the impact of such a major action the big-business/political media sought a complete blackout of this action. Though it was the biggest such action since the Chittagong Armoury raid in 1930, the news was virtually ignored by the "free Press". But truth cannot be suppressed for ever. It has already begun to filter through to the entire country and world, to enspire an entire generation to action.

Today, after the action, all the district HQ have been beefed up with additional security cover. Para-military forces have been deployed in the four southern districts of Orissa and another four districts have also been provided such forces. Seperate intelligence units under the IG level have been sanctioned. Another Indian Reserve Battalion is being sent. After the elections a major offensive is planned. But all this will come to nought due to the growing tide of the revolutionary in the region. It is time for all democrats to welcome this new awakening for a new future of the country and its oppressed masses. Let us all welcome the new dawn.

http://peoplesmarch.com/archives/2004/feb-mar2k4/koraput.htm

posted in Communist Left - 10 replies

Terrorism - Anti-Proletarian in Two Senses

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 19:45:51 GMT

Terrorism - Anti-Proletarian in Two Senses

The Iraqi working class and the various guises of its bourgeois enemy

Sixteen months ago, the United States, aided by Great Britain, invaded Iraq. Then they were joined by lesser bourgeoisies, including Italy, who though of the second, third and fourth order proved to be no less criminal, cynical and bloodthirsty. Indeed if anything their hypocrisy was even more disgusting.

The reasons given for the war were entirely spurious: the Iraqi regime was portrayed as a danger to the entire 'International community' because of its arsenal of 'weapons of mass destruction', which were later shown not to exist, and its links with, and the fact it was supposedly harbouring – again, never proved – the increasingly mysterious Al Qaeda 'terrorist' organisation.

The real reasons for the invasion lay elsewhere, in the competition between the imperialist powers: of much more importance was to occupy an area which was both of strategic importance and one of the foremost producers of oil, so that the economies of the biggest global blocs – China, Japan, India and Europe – could be put under pressure. The present oscillations in the price of crude oil show the operation to have been successful.

The entire country was occupied within the space of a few weeks, both due to the superiority of the forces deployed by the Anglo-American alliance, and – and possibly this is the main reason – because the Iraqi army, much larger though it was, deserted en masse. Quite rightly these proletarians in uniform didn't see why they should make even a minimum sacrifice in the interests of their bourgeoisie and their national State, let alone get killed: they knew then, and they know now, that they have nothing to gain from any 'victory' by their country.

For the occupiers, the trouble started after the ignominious collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. Holding on to the territory has proved to be an extremely costly exercise for the troops of the Western coalition. Even with a presence of around 200,000 men it hasn't managed to carry out its work of 'pacification'. Soon the number of Western soldiers killed by a well-equipped guerrilla force, due partly to the large quantity of easily arms left lying around after the war, would far exceed the number of military personnel killed during the invasion.

The parties of the 'left' (not just Rifondazione in Italy but everywhere, including groups which claim to be part of the communist tradition) consider the action of the armed bands sacrosanct and exalt the gesture of 'resistance' against the occupation; they incite the global proletariat to sympathise with the proletariat in Iraq and support it, in the name of Iraqi national independence, Democracy, Liberty…

Genuine communism cannot but oppose this tragically mistaken perspective.

The Iraqi proletariat – which boasts a long tradition of trade-unionism and social struggle – is certainly capable of seeing through those who talk of 'Liberty' whilst simultaneously dropping 'super-bombs' on the civilian population.

Their worst fears about the intentions of the 'liberators' have been confirmed by the first few months of occupation. The disruption caused by the war has further damaged the economy of the country, and it is the unemployed, now hugely increased in number, who are going to have to pay the cost. The dissolution of the army, and the sacking of the enormous bureaucracy linked to the old regime, has caused tens of thousands of additional families, suddenly without income, to face the prospect of poverty and starvation. The targeted devastation and looting, hitting a country impoverished by more than ten years of sanctions and by the preceding wars, is causing serious discomfort to the general population, deprived of electric power and finding it difficult to obtain water, and even petrol. On the other hand, the administration of the occupiers has spent virtually nothing on getting the basic infrastructures up and running again, still serviceable and efficient but which it means to 'reconstruct'.

As well as the armed battles between the forces of the coalition and their puppet government on the one side, and the guerrilla bands on the other, both sides are using the strategy of terrorism against the general population. As well as being subjected to searches and indiscriminate arrests it is the civilian population, the proletariat and the urban masses, which is most affected by the heavy reprisals which are the inevitable consequence of this strategy.

The denunciation of the sad effects of the military occupation on the Iraqi proletariat is naturally more than justified. The Iraqi government, a direct expression of the occupiers, headed by Allawi, the ex-CIA agent, has shown the workers that it is no better than Saddam Hussein's. And the Iraqi proletariat knows that very little will change even when the government of the country issues from a parliament which has been elected after formal, multi-party, democratic political elections.

The fact of the matter is that in Iraq a war is being fought between the various imperialist powers to divide up the loot, from theft of the petrol revenue to the 'awarding' of lucrative 'reconstruction' contracts. The cowardly and impotent Iraqi bourgeoisie gets along by supporting one imperialism here, another imperialism there, and, if possible, more than one at the same time. It is Baathist and it is anti-Baathist, it is lay and it is Islamic, it is democratic and it is fundamentalist.

What is really at issue is the 'right' to exploit the Iraqi proletariat. Therefore, for the Iraqi proletariat, the struggle against the military occupation is in itself an objective of no significance: it is a blind alley down which they want to push the proletariat to distract it from its immediate economic interests, in order to subject it, terrorise it and use it as cannon fodder in their dirty, reactionary bourgeois games.

The Iraqi State – totally bourgeois despite being an American puppet – is condemned by the oil locked within its subsoil to remain firmly in the sights of the major global capitalist powers. After the departure of British troops from the country in 1956 its independence has been merely formal, apart maybe from the brief few years in which a young nationalist bourgeoisie attempted to attain a relative autonomy by taking advantage of the divergences between the blocs in the 'Cold War' period.

The Islamic clerics are not an alternative to the bourgeois regime but rather serve as cover for it; their fiery invective serves merely to hide their collusion with the dominant economic forces and the secret chanceries of the imperialist countries.

If the proletariat in the West had been less corrupted by decades of opportunism, it would be putting the struggle against militarism, against war, and against the occupation of other countries at the top of its list of priorities and it would be denouncing the imperialist lies of its own bourgeoisie. It would be denouncing the fact that even in the aggressor, interventionist countries it is the class of workers who end up paying the material costs of the war.

Equally, the Iraqi proletariat would be steering clear of collaborating with bourgeois movements, which we won't even dignify with the name of 'nationalist' – whose anti-proletarian ferocity has been demonstrated again and again precisely in Iraq.

War between bourgeois States destroys solidarity amongst proletarians, sent to the fronts to slit each others throats, but not solidarity between the opposing bourgeoisies who will always place their common class interests, and the preservation of their domination over the working class, over the national interest.

An example of such bourgeois solidarity occurred in Iraq in 1991. Following their defeat in the war against Kuwait, thousands of Iraqi soldiers in the South and the North turned their weapons against the hated regime which had for so long been sending them off to be massacred, and they would find support for their revolt amongst the proletariat. The American battalions who were going up against Baghdad would stop their offensive, cease their bombardment of divisions of the Republican Guard, loyal to Saddam, and support the repression of the revolt. The bloodthirsty Saddam Hussein saved his position, and his skin, precisely because he was held to be indispensable to ensure both social peace in Iraq, and the interests of the western powers.

The war currently in progress is another act in this same drama with the same actors. It is why the Iraqi workers must denounce the present war as well, from both sides. The war may be happening in Iraq, but more and more it is taking on the characteristics of a preparation for a generalised third world war, that is: an imperialist, anti-proletarian conflict.

The Iraqi 'resistance' represents one of the fronts on which a part of the bourgeoisie is lined up, supported more or less explicitly by a coalition of States opposed to United States hegemony. Communists and the Iraqi and international working class shouldn't align with either one of them, but rather oppose them both.

In any case, given the instability of the current political and social situation, which is skilfully manipulated from both inside and outside the country, a sudden withdrawal of the occupying troops from Iraq wouldn't improve the situation of the impoverished masses one bit. The Americans leaving would be of no advantage to the Iraqi working class since they would find themselves being squeezed in an even worse way by an openly Islamic regime, as in Iran, or in a totally arbitrary way, as in Somalia. Behind the apparent chaos they would still both have the national bourgeoisie, in whatever guise, on their backs, and remain in the clutches of the imperialist robbers.

The outlook for the proletariat in Iraq today, same as in all other countries, has be something other than that. The Iraqi working class must defend its own interests and organise itself separately in strong trade unions, and indeed it is already fighting an extremely courageous battle to do precisely that.

On the political level it is necessary for the proletariat to reconstitute its international party on the basis of the original, unabridged Marxist communist programme. A party which will have drawn all the lessons of the Stalinist counter-revolution and its terrible effect on our movement both in the industrialised countries and in those areas which reached the stage of modern capitalism later. Only when equipped with such a party, and solidly linked to it, will it be possible for the working class to emerge victorious.

The task of the International Communist Party today, whilst remaining in a state of almost total isolation, is to firmly uphold these cardinal points of communism.

http://www.parti-communiste-international.org

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Work and Communism

Herman — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:16:07 GMT

I'm not at all a scholar on communism or socialism but from time to time I do indulge in a friendly debate with my pro-capitalist friends. Usually my debate centers on the evils of capitalism (exploitation, imperialism, alienation of the worker from his work etc.) but when it comes to some specific aspects of socialism and communism in practice, I have little to say. I'm confident that some of the very well read people in this tribe may be able to help me out.

1. Once wage labor is abolished, how is productivity measured and rewarded?

2. Excactly how do the proleteriat manage government?

3. Are communism and democracy incompatible?

4. If each gets according to their needs and provides according to their abilities, who determines what those needs are and is there a cap to how much a person might need (accumulation).

Please accept these questions in the friendly spirit of education and enlightenment. Thank you.

posted in Communist Left - 2 replies

Some new energy in the mix

eric — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 19:54:49 GMT

I notice as we get more and more specific, the numbers decrease. It's the C word.
Here are my creds:
Http://www.zearle.com/fuck_bush.html
There's serious stuff as well as "best-of" hate-bush memorabilia involved!
and those musically inclined can browse
http://www.zearle.com, the voice of the revolutionary poet online.
You're welcome,
eric

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Paramilitary group targets peace protesters

Loures — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 17:50:54 GMT

A paramiliary group in Seattle in showing up at the peace protests of a nonviolent group in the Greenlake neighborhood. The PEACEFUL protests began prior to the Iraq war and have continued non stop since. These are peaceful neighborhood protests, attended by famalies, concerned folks in various Seattle neighborhoods. A paramiliatary outfit is trying to intimidate these folks. THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS AND reminds me of 1930s Germany where the Freikorps did the EXACT same thing against the German workers parties!

posted in Communist Left - 2 replies

"COMMUNIST LEFT" No.19-20 - 2004

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 19:49:21 GMT

Now online!

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/italian.left/CommLeft/CL19_20.htm

Contains:

Iraq: War as Form of Government

The Counter-Revolution and the Spanish Imperialist War - Three articles from Bilan (1936-37)
– Foreword - Translated form Il Partito Comunista, no.148, April 1986
THE "POPULAR FRONT" TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN.
– AGAINST THE IMPERIALIST FRONT FOR THE MASSACRE OF SPANISH WORKERS
WE MUST OPPOSE THE CLASS FRONT OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT.
– THE SPANISH IMPERIALIST WAR AND THE MASSACRE OF THE ASTURIAN MINERS.

June 1944 - Manifesto of the Communist left to the proletarians of Europe

THE ITALIAN LEFT AND THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
(Part 9, Proletarian struggles betrayed by the PSI and the CGL: The political tendencies inside the PSI - The Turatian right - The Maximalists) (to be continued)

Towards the Rebirth of the Working Class trade Union (from "Il Partito Comunista", no.205, 1992)

ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH WORKERS MOVEMENT
(Part 6, Karl Marx and the Chartists: The Communist League -The last days of the Chartism)

UK - Workers frustration and Outbursts of Strikes headed off by the Union Leaders
Preparing for the 2003 Trades Union Congress - Discontent
contained at the TUC - A Late
Autumn Strike Wave - The Response of the Postal -Workers - Other Workers in Dispute

Usa - The Southern California grocery strike Portrait of amregime unionin action

Party Interventions:
- Italy: The public transport workers' strike An example for all workers
(3 December, 2003).
- Usa: Solidarity with striking and locked-out grocery workers For a class union (February 2004).
- Usa: Ignore the elections Unleash the class war.

posted in Communist Left - 2 replies

Relevent to current events

Thu, 13 May 2004 06:15:46 GMT

We must refuse to be manipulated into becoming pawns of bourgeois society's insidious game, no matter how repugnant the spectacle of war and terrorism becomes.

---------------------------

The Capitalist regime uses Terrorism and anti-terrorism
to force the Proletariat into the Third Imperialist War

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/italian.left/CommLeft/CL15_16.htm#Terrorism

posted in Communist Left - 1 reply

If Only

Ganjalicious — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:22:04 GMT

The only thing getting on the way of true communism is human nature. Our desire for power always fucks up the prosses.

posted in Communist Left - 6 replies

The Death of Che Guevara: Declassified

Ganjalicious — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 00:09:59 GMT

The Death of Che Guevara: Declassified

by Peter Kornbluh

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On October 9th, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives. His execution remains a historic and controversial event; and thirty years later, the circumstances of his guerrilla foray into Bolivia, his capture, killing, and burial are still the subject of intense public interest and discussion around the world.

As part of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project is posting a selection of key CIA, State Department, and Pentagon documentation relating to Guevara and his death. This electronic documents book is compiled from declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive, and by authors of two new books on Guevara: Jorge Castañeda's Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Knopf), and Henry Butterfield Ryan's The Fall of Che Guevara (Oxford University Press). The selected documents, presented in order of the events they depict, provide only a partial picture of U.S. intelligence and military assessments, reports and extensive operations to track and "destroy" Che Guevara's guerrillas in Bolivia; thousands of CIA and military records on Guevara remain classified. But they do offer significant and valuable information on the high-level U.S. interest in tracking his revolutionary activities, and U.S. and Bolivian actions leading up to his death.

posted in Communist Left - 0 replies

Are we but mere novelties?

David — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 07:00:04 GMT

I ask you as the very word, "Communist" in this country has been so effectively erased from our collective memory that no one really knows what it means anymore. Shit for me it's a mere interest, not even an identity I subscribe to even though for all intensive purposes I agree with a lot of what Marx penned over 100 ago....Today, Tom Morello wears a baseball cap that says "Commie" and it's pretty much a joke...knowwhatI'msayin'?

posted in Communist Left - 13 replies

REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM AND THE WAR IN THE GULF

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 02:46:46 GMT

This is an old text from 1991 discussing the first Gulf war. I think its pretty interesting so I typed it up from one of my communist left issues. Enjoy!

PS. It might have some typos

-------------

REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM AND THE WAR IN THE GULF

This text was presented at public meetings held in Italy at Turin, Genoa, Florence and Bologna in or around February 1991.

*****

From its very beginnings, Marxism has considered that war doesn't happen by chance, that it can neither be considered as a cause nor a by-product of history, especially modern history, but is instead an element integral to the capitalist mode of production. For us, 'Marxism' means the orthodox doctrine for the emancipation of the proletariat that has existed in a clear and coherent form from 1848 onwards. This doctrine is also known as left or revolutionary Marxism as well; even though we cannot talk of right-wing or reformist Marxism as today that it would be a contradiction in terms. The latest official abjurations of Marxism by various allegedly communist parties are the confirmation of this; although they haven't been Marxist for the last 70 years in any case.

Our declarations and writings do not arise as particular thoughts elaborated within a circle of fertile revolutionary minds, rather they wish only to present to the proletariat a series of historical conclusions. These, though well-known, are rejected by the majority yet have the force of objective data; as laws of social nature, as discoveries linked in a continuous way within the party. And over the almost 150 years of its existence, the party has been a working organism within which Marx, Engels and Lenin militated, as well as the anonymous and unknown, and its task is preparing the way for social destruction of capitalism.

In Marx's economic theory, we find the explanation of the causes of modern wars. These differ from the wars of the ancients which were fought to gain land, slaves or riches; and from the wars of the rising bourgeoisie, which concluded the formation of the national units of de-throning autocrats and smashing of the great union of feudal states. Never has Marxism explained wars in terms of personalities, or sought explanations in the mental health or wickedness of heads of state. All the imbecile gulf-war propaganda about the mental characteristics of 'Saddam', and formerly about Hitler, is nauseating; particularly because it serves to hide the truth from the oppressed and intoxicate the conscripts.

Modern wars, from 1914 on, have for their aim the destruction of wealth, not its re-division. Marx teaches us that capitalist production knows no bounds because it is an end in itself. The mechanism of capital and profit is arranged so that competition selects the capitalist concerns that are in a position to produce more capital; the capital which grows fastest - and most resembles a cancerous growth - survives. Around 1700, the capital in England which became established did so because it was so widely spread throughout the world, firstly in France, then Germany, then Italy, America, Japan and even in Russia. But in the last quarter of the 1800's, capital no longer had virgin land it could occupy. This triggers off that phenomenon of catastrophic proportions; the cycles of crises of overproduction. On the one hand, the capacity for the production of commodities increases, whilst on the other, the capacity to consume on the part of the masses increase only very slowly - and decreases relatively. Capitalist economy needs to force the consumption of the masses everywhere right down to the minimum level necessary for survival. From this arises, in its turn, the absolute necessity of destruction, so as to make space for a whole new cycle of capitalist accumulation, in other words, the famous 'reconstruction'. All this can be found in Marx, and Engels himself made specific reference to the inevitability of world wars.

For Marxism, the point of origin of the current war isn't the Gulf, but Wall street, London, Milan, Berlin, Moscow and Tokyo. It arises from the economic crises of over production already wreaking havoc in the U.S.A, Russia, and in Europe. Iraq is first and foremost just a provisional target for the imperialist juggernauts, who, given their current alliance, are sharing in its destruction. But the destruction of one country will not quench capitalism's thirst for new 'business', capitalism requires the generalized destruction of entire continents in order to ensure its monstrous reproduction. Not counting the uninterrupted series of regional wars, in the first half of the century there have been ten years of war; we can foresee that world capitalism, after more than 50 years of peace will need another cataclysm lasting at least ten years, involving the destructions on a continental scale. The war is not yet over.

This is the reason why the truce offered by Saddam could not be accepted; the scope of the war isn't to 'liberate Kuwait', the aim of the war is war itself. Until the arsenals are emptied of bombs, such 'liberations' are bound to continue.

As a direct consequence of the economic predictions of Marxism, which are today strikingly borne out by the recession (the newspapers would be clogged with articles about it if the columns weren't already filled with falsehoods about the war) communist revolutionaries draw the conclusion that war is an economic necessity, that capitalism and war are as inseparable as if production and destruction formed a coherent whole, as long as the capitalist mode of production exists, war is therefore inevitable. These theses were not 'invented' by us, but hammered out by Lenin when faced with the betrayal of the social-democrats in August 1914. They are rejected by every one of the countless groups of pacifists, who delude themselves with the possibility of a capitalism 'with a human face' which 'rejects war'. In the face of this endless array of political peddlers, ranging from the priests, to ever less convinced ex-communist parties, we reaffirm that the historical tendency of capitalism, which is accompanied by immense growth in the production of all those countries which have emerged from pre-capitalism (such as in Asia), does not lead to war being transcended, and to a society based on peace and world harmony, but to an ever more terrifying catastrophe. The history we are living through confirms it.

Bourgeois society is ever more permeated with militarism, and the claim that democratic society is naturally pacific, whilst dictatorships and fascisms, or the feudal pre-bourgeoisie tend towards militarism, is an opportunist deceit. Militarism dominates wherever there is arms production, wherever the 'military-industrial complex' holds sway in uncontested fashion, and particularly, therefore, in the most parliamentary, in the most democratic, and in the most liberal countries. We can see how the mobilization, and the shamelessly insinuating and incessant militaristic propaganda can attain maximum efficiency and astonishing levels of cynicism whilst all the while respecting, in the formal sense, constitutional charters, etc.

From these communist theoretical and programmatic assumptions of our party, there inevitably follow the directives which we address to the proletariat when faced with imperialist war. Their aim is to prevent the proletariat from entertaining any illusions about capitalism leading towards the land of 'milk and honey'; to prevent any euphoria and false optimism after the 'collapse' of that 'iron curtain' during the 'miracle of 1989'. The war in the Gulf is precisely a direct consequence of the most bitter inter-imperialist rivalry, and of the redundancy of the Yalta Pact.

The party makes no claim to any originality in its tactical orientation and retreads the century old path of defeatism which begins with Marx's analysis of the Paris Commune. According to Marx, all armies were by then confederated against the insurgent proletariat. The path winds on to Lenin, to Rosa Luxemburg and to the Left, which in Russia, in Germany and in Italy, strenuously fought against mobilization, and against the prostration of the ex-workers' parties before 'the country in danger'.

Point one, Communists consider that war is reactionary on both imperialist fronts; the proletariat, therefore, mustn't throw its might behind either side of the imperialist battle lines because it would fall into the bourgeois war trap intended to divert it from class struggle against the dominion of global capital. Worst still is if the proletariat becomes divided into different parts, each supporting their own national bourgeoisie, in war, against their class brothers in other countries. The first two world wars are dramatic examples of such class ruptures. Loyalty to the bourgeois nation, whether in their 'holy alliance' or as partisans is the opposite of class struggle. War is the opposite of revolution, its negation, the complete inversion of the class front.

The proletariat considers that war when declared by the world bourgeoisie is war declared against itself, and as a consequence it must react against it. It seems obvious and natural, but because of the betrayal of the socialist parties in the first world war, and the Stalinist betrayal in the second, it didn't happen; thus defeat came after the wars too. There were, of course, exceptions, namely the revolutionary attempts in Italy and Germany and our victory in Russia.

The parties which today declare themselves to be pacifist (in a very feeble way and avidly supporting their 'country') have already theorized and had plenty of practice in subordinating the proletariat to the world war.

The notion of supporting the Arabs amongst western workers, and championing the Iraqis amongst Arab workers is gaining ground in some quarters. We refute such theses as follows: Firstly, the current conflict is not an Arabic national war. The case for supporting the Iraqi side in this war by considering it as pro-Iraqi nationalism does not stand up. To support the Iraqi side is clearly to support the bourgeoisie, but, the latter cannot claim to be representing the common interests of all the Iraqi classes since these now have interests that are irreconcilable. This is shown particularly clearly by the epilogue to the Iran-Iraq war and by the defeatism practiced by the proletariat at the war front. Saddam isn't fighting to liberate Kuwait; and that is why he isn't calling on the masses of other Arab capitals to turn on their governments which, like Kuwait, are also in the pockets of the west; and which fear their own subjects more than the American marines. From Cairo to Casablanca, there has been no call for bourgeois revolution, for a holy war against the West, and we don't find this in any way “regrettable”. This is because as materialists we evaluate historical facts, their ripeness and even their rottenness, and also because we see the possibility of a proletarian revival emerging from the shameful collapse of the pan-Arab myth. Such a revival will not be Arabic alone, but will have to include, at the very least, Europe. Like Marx, when he wrote of the still feudal Poland that it would be liberated in London and not in Poland, so we maintain, at the end of the 20th century, that the Arabic proletariat will liberate itself in Berlin, as well as in Baghdad and Algeria.
The Arabic national question, in the countries of the Maghreb as in the Middle East, has been overtaken by the social question; the bourgeoisie and the Arab states are no longer really involved in the nationalism, but in anti-proletarian irredentism, as Nasser proved. However, though we reject any claim that either Bush or Saddam may make of being the more progressive, we are not indifferent since we retain that the defeat of the West, with their stronger bourgeoisies, would favor our revolution more than an Iraqi defeat which would leave things as they are.

The second point to consider is: how should the proletariat fight against war. At a certain point, the working class is compelled by sufferings of slaughter and hatred against this society, to set itself in motion to frustrate war objectives, or else, to constrain the state to declare a truce (in the event war has already started). At that time, it will have to face the fact that survival of capitalism is impossible without the carnage of war. The bourgeoisie knows that too much peace would spell its ruin, would mean renouncing profit. For big capital it is a matter of life and death and we can clearly see, at this very moment, gigantic forces pressing inexorably for war and ready to remove any obstacle that gets in their way. Even governments themselves have to act independently of their personal convictions and obey the imperative of war. When things come to such a pass only the party which doesn't shrink from the necessity of fighting capitalist society, which doesn't comprise with it, will be able to persist in its opposition to war; preventing war comes to coincide with revolution.

Given the above, we therefore declare – as did Lenin – that proletarian defeatism entails the communist revolutionary programme. Communists, therefore, are not pacifists since they consider that capitalist peace is neither lasting nor an advantage to the proletariat and its revolution. Peace is only an interval between wars and is no less inhuman. From this follows ours long-held and oft-confirmed predictions about pacifists in wartime. Pacifists, by definition neither communist nor anti-capitalist, are destined either to betray their opposition to war or else limit themselves to prayers to their god or exhortations to their governments.

Lenin moreover observed in the democratic countries, that pacifists – for instance the Red Cross – are indispensable as an auxiliary force for luring the proletariat to the front; first of all they deviate the spontaneous movement which is opposed to the carnage of war (and which has its source in the proletariat's natural tendency towards revolution) with the illusion that prayers and torchlight processions can affect the transistorized heart of big capital; but once war has well and truly arrived, and millions of call-up notices have been dispatched, the majority of pacifists then roll up their sleeves and set about demonstrating the sanctity of war in order to defend 'civilization' against the 'aggression of the enemy'. War is always fought to defend peace.

The pacifist movement is founded on the fact that not all the various components of the bourgeoisie agree on when and where to stage the massacres; until the stakes are clearly defined some would prefer to line up as part of a 'Mediterranean' or 'anti-imperialist' front, or then again some still have unconcluded business deals with the 'enemy'. In the Second World War, the declaration of war against France was delayed by a few hours so that a train load of arms which had left Turin could reach the frontier. During the first World War, Italy hedged its bets as long as possible, just as it did in the Second; in the 1st not only the Socialists were neutralist but also the catholics, Giolitti and the liberals, the Roman church, and even the crown. In the 2nd, secret diplomatic maneuvers were opted for by both the German and English states in order to win over Mussolini. For analogous reasons Gorbachev is adopting a pacifist stance.

Undisputed chief pacifist at the moment is the Pope, who is summoning us to prayer, which never does any harm; he will doubtlessly continue praying through the long years of the next war. But all the national churches, Islam included, have already sided politically with their respective states, praying under the flag as always. We can be sure it will get even worse in days to come.

As they are bourgeois, all these pacifists will close ranks as the expected general mobilization draws near. The proletariat will then find itself isolated. In fact we can say that the proletariat has already found itself alone by opposing the war by strike action, by its spontaneous mobilization; whilst the regime's unions, on the other hand, have been quick to demonstrate where they stand: on the side of the bourgeois state and the war. As in the 1st World War, the ex-working class unions have shown themselves to be indispensable instruments for actuating proletarian mobilization in the trenches and the factories; the auxiliary force of its unions is essential to the regime as the police would not be enough to keep discipline in the arms factories; and it would only take a few hours for a revolt to spread from the factories to the front. Especially social-democratic and Stalinist opportunism is the best guarantee for the maintenance of bourgeois order.

Today, it is big United States capital that wants the military occupation of the Middle East. For years it has been making preparations, right down to the minutest detail through secret diplomacy, and the occupation has been cynically timed so as to profit from the temporary weakness of its competitors. American capital's objective is to postpone the collapse caused by the over-production crises and to take possession of strategic crossroads with a view to the next world war. The war hasn't finished – it has only just begun.

At the same time, it is useful that the illusions of the international law have been unmasked – law clearly derives from violence. For revolutionaries, the might of capitalist conservation can be opposed only by world proletarian might. We don't delude ourselves that there is any other way. At present though the strength of the proletariat is sapped by division and diversions. We are reminded that Marx wrote: in this society the proletariat is either revolutionary or it is nothing. The challenge that has to be met is the same for the revolutionary bourgeoisie in one fundamental respect – that the battle will take place on a global scale; the proletariat, as in Russia, will have to conquer the bourgeoisie in its own country, and then go on to conquer the countries that still remain in bourgeois hands. For this communist party of the future, it will still be necessary to study military strategy with a view to the war which the states of the new proletarian dictatorship will have to launch against the mercenaries of capital.

There are many things to be taken into consideration: the technical equipment of modern warfare, used terroristically by the bourgeoisie, is in fact in the hands of the proletariat, especially in the most advanced countries and it will have to learn how to use it. Another factor is the possibility of fraternization between the proletarian troops which can be brought about in different ways according to whether the combatants are in the air force, navy or army. Proletarian governments installed in any of the advanced countries will certainly have greater possibilities of maneuver and mobilization than does the reactionary Iraqi state.

As matters stand at the moment we certainly don't expect any immediate conquests, and, if war broke out tomorrow we couldn't claim to be able to put a stop to it with our meager forces. But that won't lead us to hang onto the coattails of the priests and the pacifists. Rather it is because the duty of the International Communist Party today to put up a barrier against the flood of nonsense, the out and out bilgewater spread by our enemies, whether of the pacifist, interclassist or gradualist variety. Our duty is to remain aware at all times of the harsh reality of the struggle between classes and its inexorable laws.

We have already recently seen the proletariat in Italy out on strike. The right moment arrived and a spontaneous mobilization took place for its own economic defense and against submitting to the war. Our contribution is to anticipate the conditions under which the battle will be fought; to say that without trustworthy defensive organizations, without unions which are red and combative no effective defense will be possible; and to say, furthermore, that without the revolutionary party resistance to war is impossible. Most of the proletariat though, despite what we have said, will still find it necessary to experience for itself the bloody betrayal of those other organizations that claim to be workers parties and workers unions. However, a minority of the class will become conscious of communism and the party, and thereby reconstitute the bond that has been broken for more than 60 years.

Amidst this process of economic crises and the preparation for world war, our small, but nevertheless great party continues working.

Source: Communist Left No. 4 - International Communist Party

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Nature And Communist Revolution

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 02:48:50 GMT

Another great text of theses on Communism, which I recently found and typed up. Enjoy!

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Nature And Communist Revolution

1. The revolutionary communist uses the hypothesis of the revolution not the negative assumption, of which even Marx spoke, of the "ruin of all classes".

This does not mean to say that we deny such a possibility out of hand, it is just, and surely this much is obvious, we can't count on just a simple negation. This is especially so as we are in a phase of history in which bourgeois thinking does everything possible to portray reality as resolvable into 'nothingness': this negation is one of hatred towards life in general, a denigration, with nothing but the crises in life represented.

We have always refused to play the role of mere analysts, or that of aspiring grave diggers or 'decadence'. The attitude of the revolutionary is not to see things in black and white, nor indeed in black alone as occurs among the unhinged ideologies of the contemporary 'strong' and 'weak' schools of thought. The recognition of the dialectical nature of reality excludes sophistical dialectics in that the latter is openly eristic and rhetorical.

The theoreticians of Entropy like to represent natural and social reality as a closed system for conveniences sake, whilst the supporters of 'neutral' science do so supposedly unencumbered by any debt to so-called 'subjectivist intrusions'. In the present work, we still show why we are convinced that it is not a closed system, but is instead a reality which is open and infinite, before which official science is impotent because of its preference for the comfort of the secondary, artificial nature of the laboratory; in other words, nature's negation.

Regarding physiology for instance: it is hunger which sharpens the mind! The spirit depresses it. It is the hungry classes putting pressure on the well-fed which is the motor of history; though this doesn't have to mean that the hungry automatically overthrow the state of the sated ones.

The latter notion is in fact a simplification made by the priests, a banner unfurled from the exalted heights of their millenary experience aiming to put the dominant classes on their guard about the possible dangers! But, precisely because hunger does sharpen the intelligence, the latter cannot then be a natural, spontaneous product. Historical and social experience shows that intelligence, (theory), is equivalent to the mind and brain, that is, dialectically accumulated experience with all its attendant highs and lows. Such accumulation requires an explanation, and we make the assertion that this process is explained by the history of the struggle of classes as outlined by historical and dialectical materialism.

Even when bourgeois ideology, with its more passable geniuses like Nietzsche, discloses the value of physiology and the poverty of the spirit and philosophy, it never moves beyond the individual hero, thereby ending up merely providing a figure who can easily be mystified by shopkeepers unable to understand such acrobatic capers which only a dancer like Nietzche could achieve... though not without breaking his neck in the process!

Only the historical and dialectical materialism of revolutionary communism can propose the advent of a really profound physiology on a social level, that is, the unitary, non-verbal, spiritual reality which we call Gemeinwesen.1

2. The fetish character of the commodity

As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, fetishism is a neurotic pathology which derives from the child's exasperation at being attached to its mother's skirts. In that case then, in what does the fetish character of the commodity consist? To whose skirts has the bourgeoisie been over-attached since childhood? Yes, its plain! those of Mother Nature, not seen in her dialectical expression though, but in her metaphysical and abstract expression.

Thus we have the allegedly natural economic laws of the classical economists (though not the feeble economics of the epigones!) which, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees laws as fundamentally static and insuperable.

The commodity becomes a fetish because the bourgeoisie hypostatizes the "Great Mother", and every time it sees her degraded and caused offense (by its own hand) it claims that to violate her is an impossibility (the immaculate conception). It is as if to say: the commodity is sacred, there is no other alternative.

We have hinted at the pathological and unhealthily neurotic nature of such an attitude, but we must also underline the phenomenological aspects of this state of affairs: in what way exactly does the bourgeoisie hang onto the petticoats of the commodity fetish? We answer that it is in considering the market regime as the boundary and the one instrument for the stabilization of social energies: In actual fact though, because of its congenital incapacity, the market is the negation of the species economy, and the bourgeoisie is incapable of founding a truly great economy that is equivalent to arriving at a genuine physiology - a knowledge of the body - because it renounces the theory of 'corporeality' as they consider it an abstraction. The true knowledge of the body lies in resolving the interchange between mankind-nature according to a reciprocal integration that is equivalent to, in material terms, the "naturalization of man and the humanisation of nature".

3. Mystical Body

On the other hand, past prefigurations of communist societies (classist ones that is!) are ideologically inverted expressions of the need for communism. The allusion to the 'mystical body' (leaving aside the spiritist interpretations of the dominant classes) indicates the requirement, remaining ever unsatisfied, of the species to provide for itself together according to the communist formula "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities".

Only communism manages to perceive in the dialectical process of class struggle the necessary lever for the attainment of the regime of social species; a regime in which individual and society form a coherent unity without all the contradictions of bourgeois society and indeed of all class societies. In class societies, the most we can expect is a symbolic communal meal, but not a genuine physiological reality of the mystical body, meaning literally a body which sees without eyes like the Greek Mistes, the soothsayer who sees better than ordinary sighted mortals.

4. Communist mysticism

It follows from this that the one society capable of mysticism is communism.

But far from the jaded interpretation dreamed up by the schools of bourgeois analytical thought, this doesn't signify confusion or undifferentiation, but rather Gemeinwesen, namely order existing in fact (i.e. not abstract order). That is to say, the reality of the species, realised and still expanding, in which life is really capable of producing and reproducing itself according to a plan, not as and end in itself but as an actual way of living. The species is mystical because it is able to see itself without finding a contradiction between the hic et nunc, though more often than not this is taken as meaning the survival of class society and its future as the 'natural' development of its premises, rather than the sun which is yet to rise.

We have always claimed that the one reality which can live this projected kind of life (and tries it out) during the domination of class society, is the party.

Therefore it is in this sense that the party has its own "mysticism" understood in the sense of the ability to see... with closed eyes; its ability to see more than the individual eye of single militants, to live out this way of life in its internal relations.

The party has the advantage of a general and total vision, the party is communism unfolding before our eyes.

5. From the truly great economy to the truly great ecology

From the differentiation of the laws of development of bourgeois society to socialism.

Capitalist society has shown itself incapable of conceiving of a really great economy, it can neither make it happen nor can it locate its dialectical laws, and it is a blasphemy when it claims to be tracing out a plan for a large-scale ecology with the imagery of an alleged 'breath', of a great rhythmical breath that allegedly corresponds to the Sanskrit: to be = to breath = living being which breaths to its fullest extent. Only in communism does high philosophy and being converge into an organic circuit that connects eating (today considered trivial and unworthy of the spirit) with the breath of spirit, conceived sublimely as truly worth of the complete being, that is God.

It is not for nothing that the word God in Italian, 'Dio', is equivalent in etymological terms to living being or one who breathes eternally.

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Solidarity with Striking and Locked-Out Grocery Workers- For a Class Union

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 11:53:42 GMT

Solidarity with Striking and Locked-Out Grocery Workers- For a Class Union

February 2004

For a fourth month now, over 70,000 grocery workers of Krogers Co. (Ralphs), Albertsons Inc., and Safeway Inc. (Vons and Pavilion) owned supermarkets, in Southern California and beyond, are on strike against cuts to their health care. Their perseverance and the support from the working class community are an inspiration for all workers. The massive struggle of the grocery workers is a key event that marks the beginning of what will surely be many other struggles in other industries.

Unfortunately, the UFCW leadership engaged in a series of questionable tactics behind the workers ’backs- ending picket lines at Ralphs stores in October, then at distribution centers in December, and then lowering demands at the bargaining table. None of this brought any concession from the companies. Furthermore, strike benefits were slashed in half, while top union officials continued to pull in six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Teamsters union, whose transport and distribution workers had engaged in a bold solidarity strike with the grocery workers, decided that solidarity should be merely symbolic and halted the strike.

Now that the AFL-CIO has assumed control of the grocery strike, it promises to support it with nationwide protests and public relations stunts, but what is sorely needed is increased direct economic pressure- more strikes, and pickets that actually shut down stores - against the companies nationwide, who continue to turn a national profit despite the pressure on their west coast branches. Such a step is missing from the AFL-CIO ’s plan of action, which has not even reversed the retreats by the UFCW and Teamster leadership. It seems doubtful therefore that the AFL-CIO bureaucrats will do much better than those of the UFCW.

This impotence is typical of unions which are really tools of the state and the bosses, and insults the dignity and fighting spirit of the workers, who are in the midst of a life or death struggle. The AFL-CIO unions allow workers to express their class anger in strikes but cut them off before they become a real threat to the company interest, which is always directly opposed to the workers ’interests. That ’s why, to win, the grocery workers must:

- Never back down on their demand for health care, whether the union continues to support these demands or not. Refuse to end strikes or pickets until these demands are met.

- Spread the strikes nationwide. Wall Street has commanded that Safeway, Ralphs, and Albertsons ride out the strikes, assuring them victory in the end. But workers can break the will of the bosses with a national strike!

- Demand from the AFL-CIO a raise in strike benefits, and a deep cut to the outrageous salaries received by top union leaders.

- Fight back against scabs, whether the union sanctions such action or not, and ignore the legal codes of the state, which exists above all to protect the bosses ’profit. Make pickets real and not symbolic.

- Call for a resumption and extension of solidarity strikes by workers in distribution and other related industries.

- Organize among themselves and with workers in other chains, and in other industries, a network capable of defending the workers ’actual interests against the bosses, and which is prepared to do so when the official unions show their true colors and surrender. Neither AFL-CIO leaders nor Democratic politicians can do anything for the working class- only the workers themselves can fight for workers ’interests.

Attacks on health care and wages aren ’t exclusive to grocery workers; they ’re being perpetrated against workers all over the country in the midst of an international economic crisis, a crisis inevitable in a capitalist economy. To successfully combat this bosses ’offensive, workers of all industries, including immigrant workers, and workers in other countries, must unite and reject the attempts by the ruling class to play workers in different sections against one another. In time, a class union must form which acts independently against the bosses, the state, and the official unions, and which defends the interests of the working class without compromise.

Solidarity with all grocery workers on strike, against the bosses and all their collaborators!

International Communist Party [Communist Left]
Email: ic.party@wanadoo.fr Website: http://www.parti-communiste-international.org
Mailing address: I.C.P. Editions –P.O.Box 52 –Liverpool L69 7AL –United Kingdom.

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