People Before Profit blog

Marx, Markets and Meatgrinders: An Interview with Bertell Ollman

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 08:51:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Bertell Ollman is a professor of political science at New York University. He worked in the middle 1960s as an adviser to the Michael Manly government in Jamaica. He invented the board game Class Struggle. He is the author of numerous books on Marxism, most recently, How to Take and Exam…and Remake the World, Ballbuster?: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, and Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marxist Methods.

PA: What was your motivation for writing the book How to Take an Exam...and Remake the World?

BO: I am very much the teacher, which means that I’m always looking for new ways to present my ideas in a clear and convincing manner. Also, along with other radicals, I’ve long been bothered by the fact that too few people come looking for radical teachers or ideas. We need to do more to attract them. In this book, I give students a lot of tips that will help them on exams – hoping in this way to satisfy a strongly felt need – but I exact something in turn. That something is that they also listen to my simple explanation of what capitalism is, how it works, for whom it works better, for whom worse, how it originated and where it seems to be heading. The humor is there to make the whole thing more fun, and therefore, more attractive than such accounts usually are.

PA: How do you compare teachers and students on the left today to those of the past?

BO: I’ve lived through many different periods. My first political experiences were in the mid-fifties at the University of Wisconsin. There was little interest in socialist ideas at the time. That changed, and very quickly, in the 1960s. During most of the 1960s, however, I was out of the country - in England, Jamaica and France. When I came back in 1967, much to my delight, I found many thousands of radicals, of all sorts, throughout the academy. This bullish situation peaked by the early 1970s. Since then we have been through several dips and rises, as a result of developments in the world beyond the university. Since the late 1990s, there has been a very sharp rise, so that today we find almost as much interest in radical ideas of one sort or another (though not - maybe I should say “not yet” – of our sort) as there was in the l960s. I’m speaking of students here, and not of faculty, who remain on the whole a pretty moderate if not conservative lot. Oddly enough, I’ve been in a position to track some of these changes through a course called “Socialist Theory” that I have been giving at NYU for the last 35 years. It’s an elective, so students take the course because they want to learn more about socialism. The number who sign up for it has varied a lot but always in strict alignment with what is happening elsewhere, at other universities, in the country and in the world. Readers of this journal will be interested to learn, then, that in the last few years the enrollment in this course has been higher, far higher, than it was even in the late 1960s.

PA: In the late 1970s there was a controversy between you and the University of Maryland. The question of academic freedom came up in this battle, which you describe in your recently republished autobiography, Ballbuster? What was the reason for the fight, and how did it get resolved? BO: Ballbuster? is mainly about what happened when this Marxist professor became a businessman to market his board game, Class Struggle, but, as you note, the book also deals with my own class struggle with the University of Maryland. The two events are intertwined in the book because they were intertwined in my life – both began in the Spring of 1978. None of the faculty in the Department of Government at Maryland at that time were Marxists, though a few of them were on the left. These radicals knew of my work, and they convinced a majority of their colleagues to offer me the job as chairman of the department. Surprisingly, particularly to me, the top administrators of the College Park campus of the university went along. There had never been a Marxist chairman of a major political science department in the country, so their offer was very tempting.

But as soon as I accepted, the roof fell in. When the word got out that a Marxist was going to become chair of a political science department in the Washington, DC area, the press - with a few honorable exceptions - put all their worse prejudices on display. Ten nationally syndicated columnists wrote columns violently attacking me and the university for this unprecedented assault on American values. The governor of Maryland, at three different press conferences, denounced the university for giving me the job as did as did the university’s own Board of Regents, led by Samuel Hoover, J. Edgar’s younger brother. Several state legislators even threatened the university with budget cuts if something was not done immediately to bring this madness to a halt.

Maryland, like most universities at that time, had a few Marxist professors. So it wasn’t just a matter of my being added to the teaching staff. What really bothered my opponents was that I would have a little bit of power over jobs and the kind of courses that were taught. Some of them, of course, went further. As one corporation president put it in a letter to the university president, “We can’t let a Marxist get a hold of a department of government so close to the White House.” I guess he had an image of me putting cannon on the roof of the political science building and aiming them down Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, a mere twenty miles away. The pressure wasn’t all one way – the students, most of the faculty, a few of the lower administrators, and even some of the press, including the New York Times in an editorial, were on my side. After a few months of noisy pushing and shoving, the president reversed the decision, but refused to tell anyone why he had done so. I sued, but “justice” being what it is in our courts, I lost.

PA: Related to this is the trend initiated by right-wing think tanks like Lynne Cheney’s American Council of Trustees and Alumni of attacking college professors and pressuring administrators who don’t support their views on the war or on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. What is your comment on this new trend?

BO: It isn’t new; it’s been going on over 100 years. It’s the current form of an old trend. McCarthyism also wasn’t new. That was also part of this trend, which – in the universities – goes back to the early years of the 20th century. Scott Nearing is probably the first American radical who lost his job because of his political views. That occurred in 1915 when he taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote an article criticizing the use of child labor in the mines. One of the coal barons was on the board of trustees of his university, and Nearing was forced out. He got another job at the University of Toledo but lost that in 1917 for opposing America’s entry into World War I. So this has been going on for a long time.

What was new in the 1960s and 1970s is that a lot more radicals came into teaching positions. This created a special problem for those who ran the universities. They had good reasons, good “class” reasons, for not wanting radical ideas to gain a wider hearing. At the same time, they had to be concerned with the image of the university as a place where real learning goes on, and this means, among other things, where different explanations and visions – including Marxism – can contest over which is better. If people, and particularly students don’t think of the university in this way, that is once a college is viewed as a bible college, all its efforts to pass the ruling ideology off as “truth” will meet with widespread skepticism. I think it is chiefly this contradiction that gives radical professors like me the little space we have in which to move and do our work.

PA: How do you compare the policies and goals of the Bush administration to past presidencies?

BO: It’s the most conservative and indeed reactionary administration we’ve had, maybe ever. If this crowd were in power during the Cold War, we might have easily slipped over into a hot war with the Soviet Union. Why it’s so reactionary is difficult to say. There are factions of the Republican Party that have never been as dominant – even under Reagan – as now. This includes the Christian majority, the neo-cons and also the right-wing Zionists. The latter cannot be left out, especially for all issues relating to the Middle East. They play a crucial role – how crucial is something we still don’t know – in making this administration the unmitigated disaster that it is.

PA: In, Market Socialism, your critique centers around the ideology that rises from market relations. You argue that this ideology is totally at odds with socialist values and ways of thinking regardless of who controls the market mechanism, the tool or whatever we call it.

BO: It’s important to see that I arrive at this conclusion by laying out what goes on in market exchanges of all sorts. Given how often those exchanges occur and how early they begin, I try to show that what we actually experience here leads to certain ideas about oneself, money, products, social relations, and the nature of the society. These ideas, which have to do with individualism, freedom to choose, the power of money, greed, competition, and mutual indifference form the core of bourgeois ideology. On the whole, radicals have given too much attention to what Marcuse called the “consciousness industry” – schools, media, church, etc. – where we passively imbibe these ideas, and too little to those activities, like buying and selling, where we can be said to live them and where these ideas get confirmed on a daily basis. These ideas as well as, their accompanying emotions are the exact opposite of those - like cooperation, solidarity, and mutual concern - that are required by life in socialism, that is, if such a society is to work.

There are some things, in other words, that mix and can be mixed easily. Salt and pepper are two; there is no problem mixing salt and pepper. But there are other things that don’t mix - for example, fire and water. If you try to mix them, either the fire is going to cause the water to become steam or the water is going to put out the fire. I believe mixing the market, any kind of market, with socialist institutions is a mixture more like fire and water than it is like salt and pepper. They are simply not going to be able to maintain the durable equilibrium that market socialists want and believe possible.

You referred to it as a “tool or whatever we call it.” It’s terribly important what you call it, just because most people do think of the market as a tool. Tools generally function as they do because of who is holding them and how he or she chooses to use them. Basing themselves on this metaphor, many on the left think of the market as a kind of can opener. It’s in our hands and we can use it to open cans if we want. However, if we change the metaphor from can opener to meat grinder and instead of seeing ourselves holding it we view ourselves as being inside it, all of a sudden the market appears to be doing something quite different. Rather than moving in ways we direct, it is us that gets moved about according to its rhythm, and it will eventually turn us into ground meat. This is a really the best metaphor with which to think of the market. The market is not an instrument in our hands like a can opener. It’s more like a meat grinder and we’re inside it.

It doesn’t follow that we should try to abolish the market over night. I think we should make serious inroads on the market as soon as we have the chance to do so, expanding public ownership and creating a democratic central plan for producing and distributing our most important goods. That wouldn’t include everything. It is terribly important, however, that we keep clearly in mind the ultimate goal of doing away with private ownership and market exchanges completely, that public education for it – particularly as the crucial step in overcoming alienation – never falters, and that the pace toward attaining this goal remains steady.

PA: What are the most pressing questions in Marxist theory?

BO: There are many, but here’s my short list, and therefore, too questions that I have tried and am still trying to address. First, state theory. Marx wanted to do a systematic study of the state, particularly of the capitalist state, but, as with so much else, didn’t get around to it. There’s a lot in his writings that gives us an idea of what he thought, but the systematic theory of the state - something comparable to what he gave us on value - is still to be done. My own work in this area has been mainly on the role of dialectics in constructing the changing boundaries of the state and the part played by alienation and ideology in state functioning. My main writings on these topics appear in Dialectical Investigations and, my most recent book, Dance of the Dialectic.

Another important set of questions relate to the communist future. Again, Marx didn’t give us a detailed picture of what socialism and communism would be like, but there’s not work of any size that doesn’t offer some information on this subject. In my book, Social and Sexual Revolution, I try to bring most of Marx’s comments on socialism and communism together to get an idea how full and detailed his views in this area were. I am currently working on a book on communism, the main aim of which is to lay out the elements of the dialectical method that Marx used to study the socialist and communist future inside the capitalist present. In spelling all this out, I not only want to show what Marx did and how he did it, but to help us to do it – and to do it more often and more effectively – with the capitalism of our day.

Understandably perhaps, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many on the left – including a lot of people who had always been critical of the USSR – have been struck with a kind a shyness when it comes to discussing to the kind of society that we want. Yet, criticisms of capitalism, no matter how apt, have never been enough. If people are to get involved in the terribly difficult work of overturning capitalism, they need to know, at least in a general way, what will replace it. And this is probably more true now than ever, when Margaret Thatcher’s infamous mantra – “There is no alternative” – bombards us from all sides. And the chief place to look for the evidence and signs of this alternative society is in the unrealized potential (what Marx referred to as the “germs”) of our own capitalist society, and not – as so many communists did earlier – in the model of socialism born in altogether different conditions on the other end of the planet. The whole debate on market socialism, whatever position one takes on it – and you’ve heard mine, is at least right on target in focusing on what we can build using what we’ve got here, in capitalism, rather than trying to draw on less than relevant experiences elsewhere.

Still another pressing question in Marxist theory has to do with class interests and their role in the development of class consciousness and in the kind of political activities people engage in. Again, despite its importance, this is a subject about which Marx said very little. People’s motivation is obviously very complex, but, for the big questions and over the long and even the middle term, the pressures coming from our class interests determine what most of us want and do – for the price of ignoring them is a much lowered quality of life that can even threaten our survival both as individuals and as a class. It is not surprising, therefore, that in all class societies, the ruling economic class does its best to construct relations in every sphere of life that serves its class interests, whatever that happens to be. Better than anything else, this explains the past (at least in broad outline), our present (again, in broad outline – even taking account of all the differences between capitalist countries), and our likely future.

As regards the future, the question is often asked – would workers make the kind of changes in a socialist society that we Marxists expect them to? My answer is that the workers would act no differently than have earlier ruling classes, which is to say that they would do whatever is necessary to serve their class interests. And I think, in this period, their main interest as a class would be to do away with the conditions that underlay their common exploitation as workers. Besides taking over the means of production, this could only be done by developing democracy to the point where no group – even among the workers – would be in a position to establish a new form of exploitation. This move toward a thoroughgoing democracy would coincide with a rapidly growing equality, in large part because equality is necessary for democracy to work. Taken together – perfecting democracy and expanding equality because this is in the interest of the entire working class – is the best answer to the criticism we often hear that a socialist society will only replace one form of exploitation with another.

Today, unfortunately, many otherwise committed Marxists do not give class interests the attention that it deserves. Partly, this is a result of accepting a overly narrow definition of “workers” that places most of the people who work for a living under other labels (rather than seeing that most Blacks, women, Moslems, gays, etc. are still – and also – workers); and partly it is a result of the real but explainable difficulties most workers in the advanced capitalist countries have had in becoming class conscious. Thus, for example, while some of the most creative work by Marxists in recent years has been in the area of ecology, most of these scholars seriously underplay the role of class interests, both in studying who suffers most from the destruction of the environment and in developing an effective political strategy to stop it. This neglect usually follows from prioritizing human interests over class interests. Clearly, capitalists and other non-workers are human beings and have the same human interests that workers do. But it is not human interests that are decisive in determining how most people act economically and politically, at least as regards to the most pressing questions in their lives. And in any clash between human interests and class interests, it is almost always class interests that win out. Just examine how the great majority of capitalists act whenever their class interests are at stake, no matter the cost to their human interests. And I think this is the case with workers as well, even though the gap between class and human interests is not as great here. But if this is so, then Marxists must put class interests back into the center of their analysis, and not just for the problems of the ecology.

Finally – and this is only on my short list – there is dialectics. The political disappointments of the last two decades have driven a small but growing number of Marxist scholars to reexamine dialectics not just as a worldview but as a method for doing research. In the mid-1980s, I co-edited a three volume work called Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, in which Marxist professors in twenty three different disciplines reported on the Marxist work going on in their areas. While much of this work was extremely impressive, the understanding of dialectics in the American academy was shown to be very limited. But it is only with dialectics that one can achieve an adequate grasp of the complex interactions in society, as they have evolved, are even now evolving and are likely to evolve in the future. Therefore, only dialectics can consistently avoid the one-sided and static caricatures of reality that constitute such a large part of bourgeois ideology. I would go so far as to say that most of the shortcomings found in Marxist analysis today - a few of which I’ve noted above - can be traced to the neglect or misuse of dialectics. In short, a lot rides on getting dialectics right, but we must also be able to explain this difficult subject in ways that most people can understand, something that may be even harder to do than getting it right. Most of my theoretical writings, including Alienation, Dialectical Investigations, and – most recently – Dance Of The Dialectic: Steps In Marx’s Method have been shaped by these dual aims.

The Education Scam

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 08:23:00 +0000

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It is the Bush administration’s education reform plan. The NCLB mandates that school districts eliminate the gaps in education between poor students and wealthy students, Black and white students, special education students and regular students, and students with limited English and those fluent in English. The stated goal is to provide for those students who historically were denied an opportunity to a quality education. To close the gap it requires that all students make adequate yearly progress and be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. Congress passed this law was with the support of the majority of both parties. With such lofty expectations and goals, why is NCLB being criticized and labeled a set-up for vouchers and privatization?

There are several reasons: NCLB raises standards without supplying the states with adequate resources to meet the needs of their students. Even the funds originally promised for NCLB face cuts due to the wars on terrorism and Iraq. All 50 states now face a cumulative deficit of $68 billion. The NCLB requires each state to submit a plan with yearly goals showing how all of its students will become 100 percent proficient in reading and math by 2014. Yearly standardized testing is the means of assessment. Student attendance and the rate of high school graduation are also part of the assessment. By 2005 there must be a qualified, certified teacher in every classroom. Each year there are escalating sanctions for all schools and districts that do not meet their state goals for making “Adequate Yearly Progress,” (AYP). Schools that don’t make it are listed in several failing categories. Schools that have reported violent incidents are labeled “dangerous schools.” Parents of children in these failing and/or dangerous schools must be notified and offered a transfer for their child to a “successful school.” In many districts there are few or perhaps no successful schools with spaces for those asking for transfers. The Department of Education says that lack of space or overcrowding is not a valid excuse for denying transfers to these students. Does this make sense? The NCLB does not provide funding to build new schools and classrooms. Students in failing schools must also be offered tutoring paid by the state.

Our suspicion should have been aroused when proven methods of raising student achievement such as small class size, early childhood education and improved teacher training etc. were not mandated by or mentioned in NCLB. We should have been suspicious when Bush appointed Rod Paige, an African American educator from Texas, to be secretary of the Department of Education and Eugene Hickok from Pennsylvania to be undersecretary. When Bush was governor of Texas, he opposed lowering class size and students’ test scores improved because teachers taught the test. Recently Texas has been criticized for falsifying dropout rates to avoid federal sanctions and reducing the number of questions that students have to answer to pass the tests. Hickok headed the Pennsylvania Department of Education under former Governor Tom Ridge, who tried unsuccessfully to pass a voucher bill in the legislature. But Ridge was successful in the illegal state takeover of Philadelphia’s schools and partially successful in his scheme to privatize them under the management of Edison Schools Inc.
The school district of Philadelphia became an experiment for the NCLB when it was subject to state take-over at the end of 2001. The reason for the take-over was a $250,000 deficit. The reason for the deficit was that Pennsylvania would not provide adequate equitable funding for its schools. African American students in Philadelphia never received a quality education. In 1970 the Commonwealth Court ordered that racial segregation be eliminated by 1975. Magnet schools and a voluntary desegregation plan were instituted. Some Black students were bussed to white schools. But schools in Black neighborhoods were allowed to deteriorate just like the communities they served. In 1994 Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith ordered the state to correct the problems her education team found and to immediately upgrade schools in racially isolated neighborhoods. Ridge and the state legislature refused to obey the order. Ridge had other plans for Philadelphia, namely – privatization. Education in Philadelphia is now a cottage industry: charter schools, for-profit privatized schools, non-profit privatized schools and reconstituted schools. At the top is CEO, Paul Vallas.

Many students can’t keep up and must stay after school for mandatory tutoring. Philadelphia has 40 percent of the state’s impoverished families. Black unemployment in the city is twice the national rate. But the Department of Education does not want excuses for failing the tests. Meanwhile the Republican-dominated legislature is six months late passing a budget. Schools had to borrow money from banks to keep their doors open. Governor Rendell, a Democrat, asked for $650 million in additional funds to improve the schools. The legislature came up with only $258 million of new money after months of debate and a promise of more funds next year. The Republican-led legislature is not nor was it ever committed to quality education for all its students. Wealthy school districts can afford good schools by funding them through property taxes. Urban and rural districts cannot. As we observe the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a quality public education is still not attainable for all students in the United States.

The National Conference of State Legislators estimates that 70 percent of the nation’s schools will be subjected to sanctions before the end of the decade. Florida reported that 87 percent of its schools and all of its districts failed to meet adequate yearly progress in the 2002-03 school year. In Pennsylvania half of the schools failed to make adequate yearly progress. Said Jack Jennings from the Center on Education Policy in Washington, DC, “There is no set of national standards. You can have schools of the same quality in two different states ranked far differently”. Some suburban schools where test scores were in the top portion of the state were shocked to find that their schools did not make adequate yearly progress goals because special education students did not make the required goals. School staffs, students and parents in schools where great effort and cooperation has taken place over the past two years to improve the quality of education are demoralized when their schools are labeled as failing.

Quietly, dissatisfied parents, especially African American parents, are being told that what they need is “choice.” If their child’s school is failing, the state should give them a voucher so they can send their child to a private or parochial school. Organizations such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) are organizing Black parents around the concept of choice. Right-wing foundations such as the Bradley Foundation, which also funded David Horowitz’s ad campaign against reparations, support BAEO. The philosophy of the NCLB is anchored to the market-place concept where competition is supposed to force bad schools to shape up or go out of business and where good schools thrive. Parents are viewed as consumers and the commodity they are shopping for is a quality education for their children. A few years ago parents were told that charter schools were the answer to their children’s needs, but charter schools have not raised student achievement any more than public schools. Privatized schools have not worked any better than the struggling public schools. Private schools do the choosing not parents and students. So “choice” is just a distracting myth. It distracts parents, educators, students and the entire community from organizing for real education reform – adequate equitable funding, small class size, smaller well equipped schools, qualified certified teachers and administrators, comprehensive early childhood education and parent involvement.

Meanwhile, labor and civil rights organizations remain committed to defending public education. The NAACP remains committed to quality public education and opposes vouchers and privatization. Reg Weaver, President of the National Education Association, calls NCLB the “granddaddy of all under-funded federal mandates.” Sandra Feldman, President of the American Federation of Teachers, believes that people in high places hostile to public education and supporters of vouchers see NCLB as an opportunity. Teachers are under pressure to move students at a rapid pace through a basic skills reading and math curriculum, and students are pressured to pass reading and math tests.

The NCLB will not close the educational gap between the haves and the have-nots. It will destroy the concept of public education as an entitlement and the basis for political democracy. The fight for public education must be part of the 2004 election campaign. The NCLB must be repealed or changed.

--Rosita Johnson is a public education activist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Reversing the 'Gender Gap'

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 08:12:00 +0000

“Boys are becoming the second sex” proclaimed Business Week last May in a cover story titled “The New Gender Gap.” Business Week’s article appeared as part of a spate of articles and television news segments on the subject of increased educational opportunities for women. The basics of the story are that in the education system, teachers have become so conscious of catering to the needs of girls and young women that boys are being left behind. Boys, they say, are being punished for “boyish” behavior. They are being put more often into special education programs or disciplinary classes, and the outcome is that boys have a negative educational experience. This trend translates into poorer high school performances and perhaps college as well.

According to statistics offered by Business Week, 57 percent of all new bachelor’s degrees and 58 percent of master’s degrees are awarded to women. This “education grab,” according to the article, was the source of the “new gender gap.” Though, the article did hint that even with the new trend in the numbers, women still had some ways to go in order to catch up after 350 years of being almost entirely excluded from the university.
Most observers of this situation will find such an article perplexing. Certainly most women will likely be skeptical of its major argument. That this “reverse gender gap” argument exists, however, is not surprising. Like its cousins in other areas of social life (reverse discrimination or reverse class warfare), it is being generated primarily by the ultra-right. The purpose is to stifle the struggle for equality by implying (or stating directly) that the gains made by women through struggle over the last 40 years have gone too far and have detrimentally affected society.

Some in this camp go so far as to suggest that women who demand equality are out to hurt men. At worst, it demonstrates that the right wants to twist the outcome of social progress to divide us. They say that a struggle between men and women for social goods is the fundamental source of social conflict and that women are winning – a situation that, for some, means reversed gender inequality and for others goes against natural laws of male supremacy invoked by God. Any way you look at it, however, this picture is a distortion of reality.

So what does the real gender gap look like? Barbara Gault, director of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, recently told Women’sWallStreet.com that there are several explanations for and holes in the current data on the educational experiences of men and women. First, high-paying occupations that do not require college degrees, such as skilled trades, are still male dominated. Second, women need a college degree in order to earn roughly hat men do with only high school diplomas, giving them stronger motives to make a special effort to obtain financial security. Third, among African Americans, where the difference between women and men earning college degrees is the widest among all racial or ethnic groups, it is clear that institutional racism directed at African American men plays a large role in keeping them out of college. Fourth, in the crucial field of information technology, women continue to earn only about one-third of the degrees awarded and get only about one-third of the jobs available. Finally, men continue to outpace women in completing doctoral and professional degrees (81 women for every 100 men), resulting in continued male dominance in corporate board rooms, the seats of political power, the highest positions in universities, etc.

The successes of the women’s equality movement, progressive changes in attitudes about roles women can have and the implementation of affirmative action policies (which benefited women as a whole most) have had a tremendous positive impact on the access women have had in education. Just 30 years ago, women earned advanced or professional degrees at a rate of only 23 women per 100 men. In other arenas, such as the workforce or the political field, the gender gap, in sheer numbers, has largely narrowed.

But the numbers still don’t paint the whole picture. While higher education is a major factor in gaining financial security, it is something that is only available to about one-fifth of the adult population. So for the vast majority of women, this supposed “new gender gap” means absolutely nothing. Other data on the condition of women’s economic security paint another picture altogether. About eight of ten retired women are not eligible for pension benefits. When retired women do get a pension, it is typically far less than retired men get. Fifty percent of women who receive pension benefits get only about 60 cents for every dollar of male pensioners. On the average, retired women depend on Social Security for 71 percent of their income, and about 25 percent of retired women rely solely on Social Security for their income. In the work force, women’s pay averages only 76 percent of men’s pay (at a cost of about $200 billion for working families annually). A report produced by the General Accounting Office last October shows that since 1983, the wage differential has actually increased. 60 percent of all women earn less than $25,000 annually. Women are one-third more likely to live below the poverty level. Black women and Latinas are between two and three times more likely to live below the poverty line than men are. For women of color, facing the double oppression of racism and sexism, pay losses are even greater: 64 cents on the dollar at a loss of about $210 a week. The average woman, according to the AFL-CIO, will lose $523,000 in her lifetime due to unequal pay.

Even more costly to women, is the “price of motherhood,” as journalist Ann Crittenden argues in her recent book of that title. In almost every case, women lose income, jobs, job experience and retirement income (while work hours increase) when they decide to have children. With some slight improvements, women remain the primary caregiver in nearly every family.

For many mothers, single or married, the economic inequalities described above are exacerbated. For married women, dependence on men is heightened and the threat of economic hardship enforces interpersonal inequality and conflict. Divorced mothers and their children have among the highest rates of poverty of any demographic.

Crittenden argues that unless other sources of financial support for motherhood are made available institutionalized inequality will persist. She suggests retirement benefits for mothers, public funding for day care and health care for children and their caregivers, salaries for primary caregivers, expanded public education for pre-school children, equalized social security for spouses, increased financial contributions from husbands and fathers, increased educational and support resources for parents and equalization of living standards for divorced parents.

As for the fallacy of female supremacy, the gains made by women through struggle and implementation of policies such as affirmative action point to the necessity of broader systematic change. But if female supremacy is a fallacy, does this mean that men go unhurt by gender inequalities? No. Men and boys are hurt when their families suffer because pay inequity causes their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts to lose income, get fired, face hiring discrimination, are refused pensions, don’t have equal Social Security benefits, lose out on promotions or have limited access to higher education. Additionally, if the average woman loses $523,000 in income in her life, does this mean that the average man is enriched by $523,000 in his lifetime? If pay inequity costs women $200 billion yearly, does this mean that men are enriched by $200 billion? The answer is no. These billions are savings in labor costs to employers. Employers enjoy the profits of male supremacy and gendered divisions among working people. So it makes sense that the right tries to portray the benefits of progressive social change toward equality as bad. It cuts into their bottom line.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs.

Telling it From the Mountain Top

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 08:03:00 +0000

If she had been a partisan of capitalism, Louise Thompson Patterson would have been a Horatio Alger heroine, lionized today as a pioneering woman of the Harlem Renaissance and a role model for both African Americans and women. Instead she chose to put the skills and education that she fought for and won in a racist society to work for the liberation of her oppressed people, the US working class, and the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world.

Born in Chicago in 1901, as Louise Toles, Louise Patterson moved West with her mother at the age of five after her parents had separated. She grew up in Western towns where she was often the only Black child in the community, fighting back against racist taunts and ostracism by excelling in school. After her mother settled in Berkeley and married a handyman, whose name she took, Louise became the first African American woman to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where she received a degree with honors in economics in 1923. It was here that she heard W.E.B. Du Bois speak and as she was to remember, “for the first time in my life I was proud to be Black.”
In spite of her achievements, professional jobs were not plentiful for Black people (as they had not been for Du Bois a generation earlier, even with his Harvard PhD). After a humiliating stint in a secretarial job Louise returned with her mother to Chicago, to pursue graduate work at the University of Chicago. Although her situation improved markedly, she abandoned this career to become, with the encouragement of Du Bois, a teacher in Black colleges. Forced to resign from Hampton Institute because of her support of striking students, she came to New York to study at the New York School for Social Work on an Urban League Fellowship in 1927.

Soon she began to involve herself in both community activism and the cultural life of the Harlem Renaissance. Doing editorial work for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, briefly marrying novelist Wallace Thurman, she turned her large Harlem apartment into a meeting place for African American writers, poets and fine artists.

As the Depression devastated Harlem, Thompson joined with the African American sculptor, Augusta Savage, to form the Vanguard, a radical artists group in opposition to those within the Harlem Renaissance who continued to seek the traditional path of finding wealthy patrons and gaining entry into establishment institutions. Attracted also to both the committed anti-racism and socialism of the Soviet revolution, she organized the Harlem branch of the American Friends of the Soviet Union and began to study Marxism at the CPUSA’s Workers’ School.

In 1932, she organized and led a group of Black artists, including Langston Hughes and her former husband, Wallace Thurman, to the Soviet Union to produce a film about African American life and struggles for liberation. Although the film was not made, the excursion was viewed positively by Thompson and most of the other artists. “For all of us who experienced discrimination based on color in our own land,” Louise was to remember, “it was strange to find our color a badge of honor.”

Thompson returned to New York with stronger commitments to mass struggle and socialism as indispensable for Black liberation. Now called “Madame Moscow” by many of her more establishment-oriented Harlem friends, she joined the CPUSA in 1933 and became an organizer for the International Workers’ Order (IWO) composed of many nationality groups. Her talents as an organizer were seen as she led a march in Washington for the Scottsboro prisoners in 1933.

With the rise of the federal arts projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 and the creation of the National Negro Congress, (1936) she worked tirelessly in a politicized Harlem in campaigns against all forms of racism, for advancing and radicalizing New Deal social programs, and for building a united front against fascist aggression in Africa and Europe. Two years later, she joined her friend Langston Hughes in Spain in solidarity with the anti-fascist fighters of the Spanish Republic.

Through the IWO she organized with Langston Hughes in 1938, the “Harlem Suitcase Theater,” which provided a venue for young Black playwrights. Robert Earl Jones, father of the distinguished African American actor, James Earl Jones, began his career in the Harlem Suitcase theater in Langston Hughes’ Don’t You Want to Be Free?

In 1940, Thompson married her longtime friend and fellow CPUSA activist, William Patterson. With Patterson she returned to Chicago and became active in the Civil Rights Congress and the IWO and played a leading role in the establishment of an African American Cultural Center on the South Side of Chicago. Along with her husband, she helped found the Abraham Lincoln Workers’ School in Chicago, using her prestige in cultural circles to recruit Lena Horne to sing at a fund-raiser for the school at the Chicago Opera House.

In the Cold War era, she and her husband stayed left. In 1949, she was a major organizer of Paul Robeson’s Peekskill concerts and later helped to organize Robeson’s tour of African American communities against the savage campaign of the FBI to deny him access to concert halls and theaters.

Louise also worked through the 1950s with other prominent African American women, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Charlotta Bass, among others, in resistance to McCarthyism, racism and colonialism. With her husband, she sought to provide support and guidance to a new generation of African American activists whom the FBI and all of the institutions of political repression in operation sought to isolate from the “old left.”

In the 1960s, as some of the more brutal manifestations of McCarthyism began to recede, Louise joined with Marxist historian and CPUSA leader Herbert Aptheker to establish the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS). Contrary to the new establishment view that the “old left” disappeared after 1956, William and Louise Patterson continued to play an important role for a new generation of New York political and cultural activists, who flocked to their Harlem apartment in the 1960s just as Harlem Renaissance figures had in the 1920s.

In the early 1970s, she led the New York Committee to Free Angela Davis. After her husband’s death in 1980, she established the William L. Patterson Foundation to continue her and her husband’s work. Louise Patterson Thompson died in 1999 at the age of 98. For nearly 80 years she was an organizer in the finest sense. Marx and Lenin would have been proud to have known her, as were her legions of friends and comrades.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor for Political Affairs.

Fear and Loathing at the Movies - Oscars 2004

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 07:02:00 +0000

Resentment, anger and loss are emotions that fuel performances in many of the Oscar-nominated films of 2003.

From Mystic River (parent attempts to revenge murdered child) to 21 Grams (parent attempts to revenge murdered family) to House of Sand and Fog (woman seeks to regain house at all costs) these films, dramatic and powerful, stir emotions that have no form of release. Lacking the stature of tragedy, they also sidestep social issues. Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, director), for instance, is a story driven by the specter and consequences of child molestation, yet the people involved are blue collar men and women who have been forced into leading marginal lives in a country gutted by corporate greed. The prison sub-culture, which has become America’s largest growth industry, has also served to blight the lives of many of the film’s characters. However these issues were addressed only obliquely. (Note: Be on the lookout for Eli Wallach in a five minute bit as a garrulous owner of a liquor store in Mystic River. He’s the one bright note in the film.)

The shadow of the penitentiary also hangs over 21 Grams (A.G. Inarritu, director). The hit-and-run driver played by Benecio del Toro is also an ex-convict. House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman, director) pits Americans against an Iranian. Ben Kingsley plays a refugee and former military man under the Shah. He buys a house at auction, seeing it as his chance to begin the difficult climb out of the pit of low-paying jobs life in America has brought him. His antagonist played by Jennifer Connolly, is a careless, former coke addict who could have prevented tragedy by reading her mail (a clerical error begins the nightmare). Aided by a smitten cop and fuelled by the escalating violence, which seems to have become America’s simplest solution to any problem, no one wins and none are spared.

Beyond these films, we have the “shock and awe” special effects of Return of the King (Peter Jackson, director), the concluding film in the Tolkien trilogy. This is the sort of pre-sold film critics call “magical” and “fun for the whole family.” Noisy, violent and bombastic, presenting a simplistic battle between good and evil, this should be a big Oscar winner in a year when Hollywood, in line with advice from the Bush administration “watches what it says.”

Peter Weir’s seasick-making Master and Commander continues an odd trend back toward “pirate pictures” (a return to the 1950s when Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler swashed buckles). This one has Russell Crowe battling Napoleon and this reviewer recommends Dramamine.

Cold Mountain (Anthony Minghella, director) chooses to fight the Civil War in Romania (where the extras come cheaper) and ignores the causes of the war. Once again, as in the other films, we are asked to look at the story as an unconnected “tragedy” or “triumph” in which confused individuals struggle alone. A de-glamorized Rene Zellweger could win best-supporting actress for her role as the farm hand who saves Nicole Kidman’s bacon. The efforts of Kidman and Zellweger do represent a positive collective response to the social breakdown which surrounds them and the scenes with the “Home Guard” provide chilling parallels with the sinister motives of today’s “Homeland Security.”

Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, writer/director) is funny and entertaining. It breaks with a Hollywood taboo, dealing with love between a mature couple. Jack Nicholson does his “Jack” shtick, allowing us a few glimmers of his old powers, while Diane Keaton is radiant in her best role in years. One beef against the film: like too many films (comedies in particular) the protagonists are almost invariably wealthy, usually with more than one residence, and able to self-prescribe recuperative trips to the Caribbean or to Paris when life doesn’t go their way. The film is also marred by blatant advertising for Mac PCs.

Although the switch in emphasis in Seabiscuit (Gary Ross, director) from Seabiscuit to the people surrounding him hurt the story, this was still a relief from the general hopelessness. Seabiscuit, the dark horse, was an inspiration to the people of Depression America. The great success of Laura Hillenbrand’s book was, I believe, fuelled by our wish for a similar inspiration in the very different depression of today. Chris Cooper is outstanding as Seabiscuit’s trainer.

Hopefully some of the smaller films won’t be overlooked: Dirty Pretty Things is a thriller by Stephen Frears starring Audrey Tatou and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a pair of illegal immigrants working in a seamy London hotel. The story revolves around their discovery of criminal activity going on in the hotel. Their wish to set things right is weighed against the threat of deportation and death. Both actors are brilliant as is Frears’ depiction of the underside of London. This is the best kind of filmmaking, with story and “message” serving one another, drawing the viewer into the immigrants’ world.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation depicts Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two strangers in Japan who are able to connect with one another without the films taking the usually inevitable romantic plunge. A slight story and a very gentle comedy.

Gregor Jordan’s Buffalo Soldiers is a film shot in Germany prior to 9/11 which nearly failed to find release. The film isn’t great, but one can see why there was pressure to suppress it as it portrays life in the military in less than idealistic colors. Joaquin Phoenix is good as the enlisted man/black-marketeer but beyond the introductory half hour the film can’t go the distance.

In the way of documentaries recommended are: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Irish documentarians Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Brian capture the struggle of President Chávez and his reformist government to survive a US-backed coup. It was filmed inside the presidential palace, as the events unfolded. An Injury to One: Travis Wilkerson’s film that documents the battle between miners and the Anaconda Mining Company in Butte, Montana during the early years of the 20th century. Needless to say, theatrical showings of the two documentaries are not easy to find.

Oscar Bets (Not necessarily choices) Best Picture: The Return of the King Best Director: Peter Jackson (The Return of the King) Best Actor: Sean Penn (Mystic River) Best Actress: Diane Keaton (Something’s Gotta Give) Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins (Mystic River) Best Supporting Actress: Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River)

Oscar Choices Best Picture: Dirty Pretty Things Best Director: Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things) Best Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) Best Actress: Audrey Tatou (Dirty Pretty Things) Best Supporting Actor: Chris Cooper (Seabiscuit) Best Supporting Actress: Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River)

--Michael Shepler is poetry editor for Political Affairs.

Book Review - Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 06:45:00 +0000

While the US prison population has surpassed 2 million people, this figure is more than 20 percent of the entire global imprisoned population combined. Angela Y. Davis shows, in her most recent book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, that this alarming situation isn’t as old as one might think.

Just a little over 30 years ago the entire prison population stood at 200,000 in the US; that is a tenfold jump in just one generation. In California alone, 3 prisons were built between 1852 and 1952; from 1984 to the present, over 80 facilities were constructed that now house almost 160,000 people. While being jailed or imprisoned has become “an ordinary dimension of community life,” according to Davis, for men in working-class Black, Latino, Native American and some Asian American communities, it is also increasingly an issue women of these communities have come to face.

Davis points to the increased involvement of corporations in prison construction, security, health care delivery, food programs and commodity production using prison labor as the main source of the growth of the prison-industrial complex. As prisons became a new source of profits, it became clear to prison corporations that more facilities and prisoners were needed to increase income. It is evident that increased crime is not the cause of the prison boom. Davis writes “that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profits helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling.”

Corporations such as Westinghouse, Minnesota Mining and Manufacture, General Dynamics and Alliant Techsystems push their “crime fighting” equipment for consumption by state and local governments. Board members at Hospital Corporation of America helped to found Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), now the largest private prison corporation in the country. By 2000 there were 26 for-profit prison corporations that operated 150 prisons across the country. Additionally, billions in profits come from using prisons as exclusive markets for selling such products as Dial soap, AT&T calling cards and many other items. Some corporations have come to rely on contracted prison labor, a modern version of slave labor.

Institutionalized racism and racial scapegoating for economic decline since the 1970s have fueled much of the justification for the prison boom. Davis points out that “criminals and evildoers” (using language made vogue by Bush) “are fantasized as people of color,” and their subsequent incarceration seems natural. Incarceration is used to steal civil rights (such as voting rights) and to ensure continued social marginalization for millions of people of color.

Davis also focuses on what she describes as how “gender structures the prison system.” This is not simply a way of discussing women in the system or to add women to the conversation. It is a way, in Davis’ view, to show how the ruling class uses ideas about what men and women are supposed to be like and what they are supposed to do to perpetuate current incarceration practices.

Additionally, “women remain today the fastest-growing sector of the US prison population.” Davis directly links this development to the rise of the prison industrial complex in the last two decades and the rapidly changing economic context that saw the end of good jobs, dismantling of the welfare safety net and globalization. Women who have been labeled criminals face difficulties that make their incarceration experience different from men. They are more likely to be placed in mental institutions, receive psychiatric drugs and experience sexual assault. Indeed, views of gender suggest that criminalized men still operate within the confines of “normal” male behavior, while “the fallen woman” is beyond moral recuperation and can be treated accordingly.

Davis’ central point is worth studying and bringing to the foreground in the prison reform movement. She argues that prisons do not solve crime. Within the last two decades the prison boom simply has intensified the criminalization of certain types of behavior, rather than having brought official crime rates down. So prison reformers have to think about whether or not prisons are obsolete. Davis believes they are. This book is well worth reading for understanding this radically important new perspective.

Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Y. Davis New York, Seven Stories Press, 2003.

March for Women's Lives

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 05:58:00 +0000

I think I was about 17 when I found out that my mom had had an abortion. She had just recovered from tuberculosis and was still taking massive doses of antibiotics to fight off the chronic bronchitis that had sprung up in its wake. She had been seriously dating somebody for the first time since her divorce. Despite protection, she got pregnant.

I must have been about five at the time. I have vague memories of accompanying her to the Ob/Gyn, not knowing what that was but being amazed at how many pregnant women there were in the waiting room.

It never occurred to me that if the same situation had arisen about 10 years earlier, my mom would have been facing a much more terrifying prospect. Being born after 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, I’ve always had a certain set of reproductive rights. I’ve always had to take a side in the debate in which you’re either “pro-choice” or “pro-life,” but I always got to be on the winning side, fighting for the status quo. Growing up, it never occurred to me that if it were the other way around, if as pro-choice I was fighting against the status quo, my mom might very well have died when I was five. She would have been left with the choices of an illegal abortion or a pregnancy that she wouldn’t have been healthy enough to survive.

My mom was nothing special in what she went through. There are thousands upon thousands of women who have been in similar situations. Some went through it before Roe, others after; some made it out alive, others didn’t.

Last November, the same year Roe v. Wade turned 30, Congress and George W. Bush made the first legal ban against an abortion procedure. The blow against reproductive rights, called the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban,” makes it illegal for doctors to perform, and therefore for women to undergo, a medical procedure, whether in the best interest of the woman’s health or not. For me, this is the first time in my life I’m coming face to face with the fear of generations before me.
For some who will be in Washington, DC April 25 at the March for Women’s Lives, it will be out of fear that this bill is just the first erosion of reproductive rights as a whole. For some it will be a fear that it signals the impending return of the bad old days. For everyone there, though, it will be a stand against such erosion of rights. Coming a few months before the November elections, the march will also serve as a reminder of exactly whose side George W. Bush is on.

The seven groups calling the march – the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women (NOW), NARAL Pro-Choice America, Black Women's Health Imperative, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the American Civil Libewrties Union and Planned Parenthood Federation of America – and the many others that have signed on as co-sponsors are organizing a demonstration that will draw people from all walks of life and more than just one gender. The people at the march will be there to support reproductive rights, but they will also be there to support other rights. In asking around about whether people will be at the march or not, it seemed that for everyone I talked to it was about far more than one issue. Stripping away a woman’s right to choose is one of many heinous actions of an unrestrained Bush administration. Destroying the environment, giving tax cuts to the rich, embarking on an unjust war – these are all issues of the same ilk.

Not all of those I spoke to easily identify themselves as “pro-choice.” For some, religion or other factors make them staunchly anti-abortion. But they support the right to choose. Though it might not be a choice they would make, they understand that if this right gets taken away, they will be quick to go after another one.

When I was out holiday shopping, I was taking a bus up Madison Avenue in New York City. A delivery-type truck pulled up next to the bus. On the sides of the truck were graphic photos of aborted fetuses, with dimes next to them to show scale. It was the second time I had seen this truck while riding the bus. Like it did the first time, the images turned my stomach.

I’ve never had an abortion, nor have I been faced with the decision, and I honestly don’t know how easily I’d be able to make it if I were. I’m not “anti-life,” even though I oppose what the “pro-life” drivers of that truck were trying to achieve.

In some ways, though, I’ll be in DC April 25 for the drivers of that truck, for their sisters and mothers and daughters. I’ll be there for the right of the debate to continue, for the disagreement to continue. I’ll be there to stand up for more than just reproductive rights, because there are more rights than that on the line.

--Jen Barnett is circulation manager for the People's Weekly World.

The Great Medicare Robbery

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 05:47:00 +0000

Private insurance and pharmaceutical companies 1, seniors 0. Yes, the medical/health monopolistic private sector has prevailed once again. The major focus of the Medicare prescription drug bill has been on the prescription drugs-for-seniors component. An evaluation of this legislation triumphantly signed by Bush last December, shows that its major beneficiaries will be the medical/health monopolies. It does little or nothing for seniors.

In the next two to three years we will witness an astronomical rise in the cost of prescription drugs. Nothing in this legislation prevents it. As new drugs enter the market and with increases in the volume of sales of these drugs, the rise in drug costs will be dramatic. Wall Street is already predicting that higher costs could amount to a windfall of approximately $13 billion annually.
Lobbyists for the medical/health monopolies assured this condition of price gouging by pushing for a provision in the law that prevents the federal government from bargaining for lower cost prescription drugs. The law also limits the re-importing of cheaper drugs from Canada. Approval for drug re-importation from Canada or other countries will require the signature of the secretary of Health and Human Services. The secretary will determine if the drug in question is safe and costs less. The current secretary has expressed in various ways that we shouldn’t expect such certification. This will be a serious blow to seniors who have come to rely on cheaper drugs from Canada.

This legislation is also designed to force seniors into privately managed health care plans. At the same time, the law provides the private insurance industry with incentives to go “cherry picking,” that is only enrolling the youngest and healthiest seniors. There are no mechanisms in this legislation to prevent this.

Another major flaw in the legislation is commonly referred to as the “donut hole.” It works like this: estimate the premium that a senior pays currently at $35 a month. (By time the drug benefit begins in 2006 it will probably be higher.) But, let’s say it is $35 a month or $420 annually. In addition, the senior will pay an annual deductible of $250 ($420 + $250 = $670). Now, the drug plan will pay 75 percent of the drug costs, leaving the senior 25 percent until the total drug costs for the senior reach $2,250. After the senior reaches the $2,250 in drug expenses in a given year the coverage stops. The senior now pays the next $2,850 in all drug expenses ($5,100 - $2,250 = $2,850). This amount can have a very negative impact on a senior on a fixed low income. $5,100 is the amount the senior has to reach before the coverage starts again. This gap in coverage is the “doughnut hole.” In the course of a year a senior could pay as much as $250 + $420 + $ 2,850 = $3,520 until coverage kicks in again. Once it reaches $5,100 the senior qualifies for catastrophic insurance. For the rest of the year the senior pays a $2 co-payment for every generic drug or $5 for every brand-name drug (estimated by some to be as high as five percent of costs above $5,100). It is obvious that the deductible and even the premiums may grow each year depending on the anticipated increases in drug expenses.

Economists have shown that drug prices increase significantly faster than inflation. Also, one can anticipate that the amount a senior will pay will grow faster than his/her income.

The major threat to Medicare will come from the so-called demonstration projects. Demonstration projects are being designed for six areas of the country (not yet selected) beginning in 2010. They will have the private insurance plans and the traditional Medicare plans operating side by side to determine which plan is most effective and efficient in providing drug coverage. The demonstration projects are a process for “fixing” the outcome and have been designed to ensure that the Medicare program ends up in the greedy hands of the private insurance companies. During the demonstration projects the traditional fee-for-service component will compete with the private insurance plans. Traditional Medicare has and will continue to serve the most vulnerable and expensive population of recipients, those with more severe health problems. It is obvious that the cost will be higher among this population. Bush’s bill calls for the extra costs to be passed on to this very vulnerable population of enrollees.

This extra cost is expected to force seniors to opt for the private plans in their efforts to survive financially. In the end what will the demonstration projects tell us? They will say that it is time to privatize Medicare because privatization is more economical and efficient. This legislation is as “fixed” as the Florida elections.

The main result of the Medicare prescription drug bill is that the private insurance and drug companies have gained a significant foothold in this cost efficient government program. The goal of the Bush administration and the medical/health monopolies is the privatization of Medicare. Privatization, they claim, is necessary to save on administrative costs of the program. What they don’t say is that the administrative costs of Medicare are far lower than the private insurance carriers. In fact, the General Accounting Office (GAO) a few years back projected that the difference between the high administrative cost of the private insurance sector in the US and the relatively lower administrative costs of the Canadian Health System could be used to cover the 40 million uninsured people in the US.

So, with billions of dollars at stake, the medical/health monopolies have little or no interest in the right of seniors to prescription drugs and good quality of life. With this political momentum under the direction and leadership of the White House the question is what’s next for health care legislation? One can only wonder or imagine what the future holds for Social Security, national health insurance, and other health and welfare policies.

--Edwar A. McKinney is a senior advocate in Cleveland, Ohio.

Speak Easy, Speak Free: Sonia Sanchez Talks about Language

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 05:02:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: The following article is excerpted from a conversation with publisher Joe Sims.

We writers have a passionate love affair with words – words that quite often don’t just get on the page but [actually] jump out at you. Many of us learn to take these words and examine them. We toss them up and throw them out at the populace with what I call great humility. The more education and political information we’ve acquired causes people sometimes to tend to be arrogant with their words and with the language, assuming sometimes that “the people” will not understand, when the reason “the people” have survived is because they indeed do understand language. They understand both the language given them and the language they’ve survived with and by.

Once I heard a person speak who said, “bring it down to the people.” I disagree with that. We need to go back and remember how we spoke growing up – how our parents spoke, how preachers spoke, how people spoke period. We need to remember that the language we communicated with each other with was rich and fascinatingly rough but at the same time had so much meaning. One must have an appreciation of what language says and does. Sometimes we have to rearrange it to make it much more interesting and if we have a passion for it, we’ll make people have a passion for it also.

When I first started to write poetry, I was also learning how to read it aloud in order to get an audience. Initially some of us would use curse words to get people to listen. After they started listening we never used another curse. One of the things I have understood is that people are not hypocritical about language. When you come to them with language that is rough, they retain a memory of it. Once, when reading a poem to homeless women about a mother who takes her child into a crack house, one of the sisters said, “Hey Maria, that’s just like Jean, ain’t it?”

I wanted to break down and cry. But writing makes me strong: it keeps me grounded and rooted. The thing about reading to people is that we meet in an arena that says, “Yes, people have conspired to make us less than human, but let us continue to be human.”

When you identify inhumanity and the causes that lie between the spaces – I don’t have to spell it out – but if you look between the spaces and the silences, you will understand the reasons why that woman did that. I said to them, “Let us lean back reflect, and say, This is something I cannot do to my children. Let us learn from this kind of inhumanity how the world is made inhumane and how to always stay on that road toward humanity, to always walk upright.”

In a way, you touch people and heal them with your words: these words we use do heal. I get letters from people who say, “I am alive today because I found your book at a time when I needed to.” Then you look up and realize why you are doing this.

In the 1970s, the New York Times asked James Baldwin if there was any such thing as a Black language. Baldwin replied, “Of course there is.” He said, “Now that we have to speak it, you are angry and want to denigrate it.” He continued, “But you taught it to us incorrectly, and we had to survive. We did the best we could by taking this language and twisting and turning and pulling it and coming out with a language all our own. Your language would be dead, if it were not for this Black English.”

It’s always amazing to me that to this day people don’t really believe we have the ability to even write, to even deal with language properly. I remember I had written something once and in the course of the question and answer period someone said, “Did you know…?” I said, “Yeah, but I wrote it in this fashion because that’s the language of the person who was speaking.” She said, “Oh, oh.”

It’s always, “Let me correct your language.” I said to her, “We don’t need correction. We need you to listen and understand the beauty of this language.”

Sometimes I see writers speaking down to people. They think because people are working class, because people are from the streets that they need to keep using only their language. I think that the true writer – the true political writer – understands that you might need to do some of that, but you also at some point need to take people to another place. It is incumbent on us to say, “I acknowledge that, but I also acknowledge other words.”

I’m speaking about this in terms of my own experience. I did a book called A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women. It’s a long semi-autobiographical poem. It was a lyrical poem. Before reading it I prepared the audience. I began to talk. I said, “I’m going to need 20 minutes. I’m going to ask for your undivided attention. I’m going to come with language, and I chose some words that you might not know. Let me translate the words for you.” I continued, “I am going to tell you that this section is about the following. And I want you just to listen to the language. And if need be, if a word hits you that’s beautiful, write it down.”

I was teaching from a platform, teaching people how to listen to this thing called poetry. But this poem, this book, took me to another place, but it also took my audience with me. [I said to them], “let’s listen to the story because we might have a similar story.” It was about this person who had moved from the South, and the movement into high schools and universities and politics. As I was doing this, I was tuning their ears.

I might be somewhere doing a reading, and see people just change. Quite often it’s understood it is theater. You comprehend how much Bertolt Brecht really understood about the theater. How, when artists are up at the podium, an audience can be made to understand the possibilities about themselves.

If you have a vision about work or about the world, it is incumbent upon you as a writer to say, “[We’ve done this for awhile]. Now we must turn a corner and go some place else.”

Someone said to me in an interview, “You don’t write the way you used to.” I said, “You’re right. I shouldn’t write the way I used to. If I did, then I would show no growth.” I said, “We have great people like the W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois who showed us that as you get more information, you change and evolve.”

This country would have you believe that if you change there’s something wrong. I say, you change you stay alive; you evolve you stay alive. You’re saying to the world, “I have more information now.” It’s not that I’m dissatisfied or that I refute what I did before, because I think that what you do is part of who you are as you advance, and people need to see that.

You started there and now you here. You don’t have to apologize for who you are – your history and herstory.

I remember the first time I talked about going to Cuba there was a tension in the audience. [In this situation] what I try to do is a poem where you just leave it in: it’s natural. They might ask in the question and answer session about it. But the point is to use language in such a way that you are bring people into your arena. You also bring the humanity of people into the arena who have been presented as not being human: people like Fidel or Lumumba.

When you see the movie Lumumba now, you reflect on how back then we said the CIA had killed Lumumba. But when you said this before people just stared at you. However, once you put it out there, people remember. I have had people say to me, “I’ve seen the movie Lumumba and I remember what you and others were saying 30 years ago.” When this happens you don’t say, “I told you so.” Rather you reply, “Yeah, isn’t that something,” and allow them to bask in their discovery.

Writers and activists must understand that you have to wait for people sometimes. One has to have an enormous patience because the people are so bombarded and what you are saying is always limited. You don’t get the press you should with the consequence that it takes people time to catch up. It’s the same with language.

I remember [an occasion] when some people wanted to organize an event and put out a leaflet full of the language of revolution. I told them, “Don’t do that. No one will want to come.” I said, “You have to use a different language” They said, “No, no, no.” And no one came because people preserve themselves. However if you have something very human on stage, people will come.

I tell political people and myself that we must use human language. We also must be human. Once I did a reading in Philadelphia and people came from the community who had never before been at that site. One of the things I like to do when I finish reading is to join hands. Well, the people who had invited me were too “hip,” too “political.” One white man present literally dropped his hands and the people from the community saw that. I wanted to say, “You’re so dumb. You don’t understand. You don’t get it, because the people do see.”

What I’m trying to say to an audience in my work is we become human by understanding that if someone comes to us in a wrong fashion, we’ve got to be able to say, “Excuse me. What did I do to harm you? Help me with this.” At one time a young brother told me, “You can do that because you’re older.” I said, “Yes, but people my age talk about people – it’s not an age thing.” He replied, “What if they think I’m a punk?” I said, “My brother if someone thinks you’re a punk, they’ll think you’re a punk anyway. Do not talk against each other. Do not gossip against each other. Do not take your tongue and curl it against anybody.” He then said, “That’s too hard to do.” I answered, “The easiest thing to do is to destroy someone. If you have a toxic tongue, then you have toxins in your body. It means that if you destroy with your tongue, you can kill somebody.” I told him, “We already have toxins coming out of the White House and the Middle East with people saying, ‘I’m correct or my God is correct.’” A judge in Alabama insists, “I’ve got a right to bring religion into this courtroom.”

You have to ask why are we not really discussing this? You go into a Black church and someone is talking against gays and we sit there and not say a word. I can’t do that. I’ve been not invited to some churches, because I will say, “I thought this was a holy place.” You have to keep people correct: ministers, pastors, teachers of children.

Coming full circle about language, what I’ve learned is that there’s no easy language. There’s no easy way to look at language because language is very complex and seductive. It will seduce you if you’re always writing in the same fashion. People will seduce you too and make you repeat yourself and repeat yourself. I always tell young people they have to be willing to break with applause and not allow it to tell you what you should or should not write.

The same thing is true regarding life: be willing to come with explanations people don’t want to hear in the same way you come with language they really don’t want to hear. What you’ve got to do is say, “I’m coming up with something new, I’m playing with this now. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it, but I’ve been thinking about this. Let us speak about this together.” In this way people are brought into a conversation.

I’m presently writing an essay on memory. I’ve noticed some of us African Americans are so at peace with the memory of slavery, being disenfranchised and all the pain this country has caused us. It’s familiar, so in a sense, it’s comforting.

What I’m trying to say in this essay is how do I finally say good bye to that memory? How do I stop and say, “OK, that really did happen. How can I get to this 21st century and just acknowledge it without going back and wallowing in it and staying there?” This [problem of staying in the past] means in a sense we are not dealing with what is going on in the continent of Africa; or New York City and the difficulty for some people to even find a place to live. We’re not dealing with what’s going on in the churches; we’re not dealing with our children. While we are dealing with advancing our careers, we’re not dealing with the fact that an entire generation might be lost. We cannot afford to lose an entire generation: Black, white, Asian, Brown, whatever.

You can’t deal with that if you have people constantly in the past because there’s a present and a future. What we need right now are people who use language that talks about the future with a vision. Someone said to me, “You’re being so optimistic.” It has nothing to do with optimism. It has to do with being able to see a way. It’s a long laborious path but I can see people finally with a way – with a way!

We have some of the most advanced people who can see things. I’m not talking about intellectuals only seeing the truth. I’m talking about people who have experienced things in this country. Younger people are putting it together and looking at what is going on. That’s finally what I’m talking about. And to make use of words to do all that is a joy. I couldn’t figure out how to do it any other way. We all need words, but I’m saying you should be able to pull up language sometimes that will say it in the way that other people see exactly how to get to it, or how to see a way, or how to see the beauty in themselves.

I think it is important for a lot of political people to understand – I said this once at a poetry reading and people looked at me – if you only deal with ideology you will die. If you only deal with ideology your organization will die. If you only deal with ideology then at some point you will not understand things and begin to fight and destroy yourselves. Grenada was a fine example of taking hard lines on ideology and not understanding that if you don’t have the art that comes along with, if you don’t have the cultural things, you will kill each other. And lo and behold it happened.

[Regarding culture] the left and even a lot of Black groups will say, “Let’s have a culture night.” And that would be it and most of the people who were political wouldn’t even come. They left it to the people to go and be happy at culture night. They didn’t even understand what was going on there. They didn’t know how to weave it in and make people understand that this culture is the thing that keeps us human as we do this work. We’d sit there for so long and when you got up to read the political people would walk out. I’d say, “Where are you going? Don’t you understand how closely we are connected at this point? Your speech and this poem are connected.” People would turn around and say, “What is she talking about?”

Imagine all the songs we sing that inspire people to continue, but we push it to the side. It’s as if it’s thought, “We’ll entertain the people and then give them the real thing.”

[On the other hand,] this country has learned how to strip culture, take it and use it. It doesn’t stay in power by being dumb. We can call Bush dumb, but he’s not running the bloody thing at all. I used to say, “Culture is the consciousness of the people.” They have taken over our culture and made the people unconscious.

Look at what they used culture for the Iraq war; look at the artists who sang those supposedly patriotic songs. Look at how they tried to use poets too. But they couldn’t use the political ones wise enough to say no to an easy patriotism We know that patriotism is finer and has a deeper resonance than that.

Book Review - Policing the National Body, eds. Anannya Bhattacharjee and Jael Silliman

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 05:49:00 +0000

For some, the curbing of civil liberties started with September 11th. For others, the struggle had been going on long before. There are many complex details to understanding the US government’s record on human rights. Along with the complex details, there are many layers – from the legislation that exists, to the welfare system and the masculine “macho” police culture – everything has to be taken into account. Policing the National Body does exactly that. It takes the reader through the inside scenes of what really happens in the INS and other prison facilities. From the psychological point of view to the physical treatment and the human rights abuses – depending on whether it is a person of color, a woman, a working poor or simply undocumented – there is a system for everyone. And that system profits from all. Policing the National Body, edited by Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, is a must-have reference text and mind-opener for every student of women’s studies, law and human rights. The book, published by South End Press last year also points out that all kinds of activists from all movements need to unite and start a dialogue with each other. Police brutality is connected to human rights abuses to welfare to poverty and so on. Issues inside the prison are linked directly to the issues outside. And they make up the whole Prison Industrial Complex, an industry that from on the various concepts and culture on the outside. The paperback is available at .

Book Review - Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 05:38:00 +0000

It seems that most people who have reviewed Stupid White Men from a left perspective have focused mostly on the last few chapters that are embroiled in the controversy over the Greens and the Democrats. What is missing is praise for Michael Moore’s biting sarcasm, his well-researched criticism and his plucky humor that enable the reader to get through the book psychologically intact. Who could read about the dismantling of democratic rights, the outrageously corrupt Bush Administration, racist violence, economic recession, corporate corruption, male supremacy and so on and feel good about the possibility of democracy? Moore gets you angry, but his humor allows the reader to learn something and keep a stable point of view.

In addition to the Green/Democrat controversy, Moore’s book provides investigative analysis of the 2000 election theft by Bush and digs into Bush’s background as “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.” Moore exposes the wave of corporate corruption before it hit the press. He alerts us to the fact that almost 1300 corporations with assets of $250 million or more simply pay no taxes. Zero. One of these companies was Cheney’s own Halliburton, which moved a subsidiary to the Cayman Islands to avoid US taxes. Not only was this illegal, but it is the norm. Cheney is now the President of the Senate. If only we could all get high-paying jobs for avoiding our taxes.

Moore also takes on the issue of racism. He gets his white readers to rethink their own warped views of their experience with racist stereotypes. He basically asks, why do white people believe that all the bad people in their world are Black? White people’s own experiences should tell them otherwise. He lists the people who have done him harm. Yes, as I look back on my life, a strange but unmistakable pattern seems to emerge. Every person who has ever harmed me in my lifetime – the boss who fired me, the teacher who flunked me, the principal who punished me, the kid who hit me in the eye with the rock, the other kid who shot me with his BB gun, the executive who didn’t renew TV Nation, the guy who was stalking me for three years, the accountant who double-paid my taxes, the drunk who smashed into me, the burglar who stole my stereo, the contractor who overcharged me, the girlfriend who left me, the next girlfriend who left even sooner – every one of these individuals has been a white person! Coincidence? I think not! How much longer could a list like this be for most people? Readers can look to his book to find out more on his views about how to create racial justice.

He takes on male supremacy. From the masculine culture of domination to personal inequalities between men and women to the structural inequality that provides unequal economic power for men, Moore has some interesting advice. Some of his advice to men for achieving equality: “Bathe Daily. Tone it down.” Don’t pretend to be “sensitive.” In other words, actually take steps in your personal life to adjust to the needs of women and to listen. He also asks men to participate in activities that bring attention to the economic inequalities between men and women.

The idea that people ought to get involved and make real changes persists throughout the book. Everywhere you turn in this book, Moore asks you to work with organizations, to get involved in the political process, to call or write to representatives, to take personal steps that just might change the entire world. This book is certainly worth reading. And its radically democratic reforms are certainly worth including in any progressive agenda. Its call for full participation by the people makes it clear why the right-wing-dominated corporate media refused to acknowledge this book.

Stupid White Men...and Other Sorry excuses for the State of the Union By Michael Moore New York, HarperCollins, 2001.

Your Health at a Cost: The Medical Supply Industry

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 05:25:00 +0000

The world was glued to the TV screen last February as a teenager was victimized by a tragic error at a major medical institution and given a mismatched heart-lung transplant. The frenzy that followed to find yet another organ donor captured our imaginations and hopes until it came to its tragic end. It was barely mentioned, as to who was going to pay for her procedures and the use of the array of medical equipment. The public assumed both the medical center and philanthropists, via their tax-deductible donations, were bankrolling the whole venture. After all, how could money ever be an issue when the life and health of a young girl was at stake? True in theory; not so in practice. Indeed, the health-care-for-profit system generates huge returns for drug and medical equipment companies, matching those made from the latest purveyors of health care – the insurance complex that controls health care through its health maintenance organization (HMO) system.

The burgeoning medical care equipment industry grabbed a new brass ring on the merry-go-round that is US health care. Totally privatized, and rather highly specialized, it becomes almost an automatic monopoly. In just one typical example, a company in Dallas, Texas makes not the actual parts or components of medical prostheses but only materials, like the screws, bolts, and nuts that are vital to the units’ applications. This one factory is capable of handling the world’s business needs. Without any cost controls from either competition or government, it is only hoped their prices are within reason. No one is quite sure. There is no watchdog.

The pharmaceuticals, with a markup at least 40 times greater than any other industry in the world, including major industries like automobiles, appliances, computers and even some retailing, have resorted to consumer advertising in all major media to attract new customers. The drug houses are busy hiring Madison Avenue agencies and celebrity spokespersons to entice viewers to implore their doctors for this and that. It apparently helps the bottom line. We are seeing more and more such ads. The medical appliance industry is following suit, making appeals to the medical community and plying them with all sorts of enticements, from four-star restaurant dinners to weekend golfing or tennis jaunts or a cruise of your choice. Costly and exorbitant? No need to fret. The mark-up more than allows for such practices.
Obstetrics is particularly ripe for such shenanigans. Home monitoring and pre-labor documentation with paraphernalia that fill up an average-size living room all appeal especially to first-time, mothers-to-be. Besides, who can resist the smiling sales people who add, “After all, we want what’s best for your baby.” They suggest you may be an abusive parent if you refuse or even question their validity.

The consumer is not the only target. Hospital services, especially in this highly litigious era of medicine, do not want to be without the latest state-of-the-art devices. One new father visited his wife and baby son on the delivery night and looked through the windowed nursery filled with gurgling and healthy newborns. “My,” he remarked, “I didn’t know if I were in my son’s nursery or the NASA ground control center in Houston. I couldn’t see the nurses for all the stainless steel machinery.” This is more real than imagined. Many nurseries and hospital rooms are now being monitored by electronic equipment plotting vital signs and patient-attached Rube Goldberg devices rather than live nurses. I leave it to your imagination as to who is paying for all this. One noted professor of obstetrics recently published his impression of modern–day university OBGYN training in a major journal entitled The Modern Day Obstetrical Resident – A Marvel in Hi-tech Medicine.

Medical investigator Hal Strelnick pointed out in his HealthPac review some years ago, while pharmaceuticals have to undergo reasonably extensive laboratory animal and human testing for their Federal Drug Agency (FDA) approvals, despite concerns about fast-shuffle tests and inside lobbying for necessary sanctions, marketers for new medical technology have a minimum oversight. There is more and more talk on Capitol Hill of tightening regulations, but for the most part, none have been put into effect. Stay tuned. The rumbles are getting louder.

Just as major conglomerates, like Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Bristol Myers, have gotten into the drug business, their counterparts and giants in other industries have jumped on the medical machinery bandwagon. And not coincidentally, they are also major suppliers of the Pentagon’s needs. The roster coincides with the upper echelon of the Fortune 500 – McDonnell-Douglas, General Electric, General Dynamics, Lockheed Aeronautics, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, RCA and Raytheon. And like the pharmaceuticals and the HMO/insurance combines, the list is getting smaller, as one gobbles up the others. As HealthPac documented, Revlon, for example, has quite a monopoly on eye care, from mascara to intraocular lenses. McDonnell-Douglas, the Pentagon’s major supplier of F-16 jets, has now expanded into the medical supply industry, with all sorts of hospital monitoring and computer systems. This list goes on and on.

Just how big is the medical equipment industry? Interestingly, for reasons that are still unclear, those figures are somewhat vague. Standard & Poors, the New York Stock Exchange and even a variety of world almanacs report different statistics, probably because much of the equipment gets buried in other parts of the parent company or conglomerate. It is well upwards of a $45 billion business: and its gross doubles every decade. It passed the pharmaceuticals back in the mid-1970s and is still climbing rapidly. Based on HealthPac statistics, hospitals supplies and equipment hit $15,000 per bed nationwide. With a shrinking number of outlets and the acquisitions and mergers of whatever is left, the industry has been an investment banker’s dream. Like everything else in the market, capitalism’s recession hits them all, but the medical supply commercial outlets are holding on better than most others.

Yet another facet of this industry is what are considered disposables – equipment in which replacements are the mainstay of the business. Disposable needles, syringes, catheters, trocars, scoping sleeves and shields, specula and even scalpels and other surgical instruments are now produced in all forms of plastics – another boondoggle for suppliers. In this area, there are obvious kingpins. HealthPac listed Hewlett-Packard, the computer people, as the runaway producer of patient monitoring devices, from fetal to cardiac. By far, needles and syringes are the domain of Becton-Dickinson (now almost all disposable). Other industrial giants such as Boeing, Microsoft, IBM, MacDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, Exxon-Mobil, Goodyear and GM and Ford have entered the highly contested field of medical equipment and supplies. Competition, the only hope left for a needy public in a free enterprise system to keep costs at affordable levels, becomes more and more of a dinosaur. As long as the industry remains privatized, the buying public is at its mercy.

The medical supply industry is so secure that it has seemingly even survived the rule of thumb that says with volume, costs decline. That is obviously how chains and franchising have squeezed out mom and pop stores and small businesses. Fast food, office supplies and hardware/household outlets are just three obvious cases in point. The corner drug store is no more; the downtown diner has gone by the wayside; the local hardware merchant is difficult to find. The medical supply people have overcome the volume-is-cheaper adage. As hospitals merge and become medical empires as they try to stay afloat in the era of the HMO and banking takeovers that slash their reimbursements daily, the suppliers are still in charge. The costs of equipment now sold to combination buyers of merged hospitals have been nudged just a tad. The industry has held the line, knowing its product is life demanding. Hospitals, no matter how humongous their buying power, are still captured by supply and demand. Many an investigative reporter has been impressed by the nature of the medical supply industry. With its usurpation by major conglomerates, the competitive protection that mirrors the pharmaceutical industry has it going one better. The field is narrowing as we speak.

The HealthPac report also described the internationalization of production that is marking the industry. The globalization that Gus Hall described as the final stages of capitalism is marked by certain traits it calls “accomplishments.” One is that as the computer and air travel have made access all the easier. Mergers and acquisitions have made survivors all the more powerful. Factories and maquiladoras degrade wage scales and have working conditions that are near subhuman, and with general worker, exploitation that surpasses the developed world manyfold. The medical supply industry is no exception.

Domestic regulations have forced a relatively high standard for products. These have essentially kept foreign competitors from gaining access to the US market. As a side benefit, many of the world’s physicians-in-training pass through US hospitals and medical centers for specialty training. They become familiar with the hi-tech equipment, making for an added demand when they return home. Blue jeans, rock and roll and McDonald’s quarter-pounders are not the only legacies of middle America’s affluence and influence.

The medical equipment supply industry stands out from the rest of the Fortune 500 in certain aspects. It enjoys the impression of being an “ethical” industry via its association with health care, and therefore a step above the crowd. One major manufacturer of suturing materials and other surgical instrumentation took advantage of that public image and calls itself Ethicon, since snatched up by Johnson & Johnson.

An often accepted myth ballyhooed by these corporations’ PR departments is that much of the need for the high markup is the funding needed for research and development (R & D). They always remind an unaware public that for every successful medication or piece of medical equipment there are many more that took time and personnel but failed. We are not told the vast bulk of financing for such ventures was either allocated by the Congress through various governmental agency grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) on down to tax write offs. Because of this finding Wall Street has described the industry as near “recession proof,” similar to the banking and insurance enterprises. Today’s recession is an example of that very occurrence.

Then there is built-in obsolescence. Car models and household appliances usually become outmoded not so much because of vast improvement in technology but from cosmetics and bourgeois appeal. The pace of medical technology is moving along so quickly that x-ray cameras, cardiac monitors, dialysis units, CAT scans, electronic tomography devices (PET) and nuclear devices (NMR) become archaic when morbidity and mortality are improved with replacements. The public demands such updating, even when they are sometimes not real advancements, and the industry responds. But then come more R & D federal funding and more profits. Astoundingly, taxpayers shell out for failures, but when devices become successes, patents and profits are turned over to the private corporate entity lock, stock and barrel.

Part of the campaign that denies health care as a right is to continually orchestrate programs that keep it within the private sector. The industry is resisting those who are working to create a single-payer federally financed and managed health care plan. Such a plan must include a strict socialization of the nation’s pharmaceutical and medical supply industries. They must go hand in hand.

It was back in 1942, as the US was readying for a full-scale war against fascism, that the Department of Defense (then called the War Department) awarded a major contract to the Picker X-ray Corporation, the then leading manufacturer of radiological equipment. It was for the construction of the Norden bombsight, the state-of-the-art unit that was an integral need of the US Air Force and attributed to being a major contributor to the victory over fascism. It was Harvey Picker who came to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a famous White House meeting and informed the president that no contract was needed. The Picker Company CEO stated he would convert the major portion of its facilities away from x-ray needs to the Norden contract. The price would be tabulated strictly on a cost basis. War against fascism, Picker told FDR, is not a time for profit.

That vignette has been told many a time, and has been cited as a reason why many aware medical buyers and physicians have remained loyal to the Picker Company. Regrettably, this was the exception that makes the rule. The profit-before-people philosophy that guides the medical supply industry has contributed so mightily to the shameful way health care is now delivered in the US. This year, it is hoped that the Dellums bill calling for a government-run single-payer plan will gain momentum, and with it strict control on the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment needs of a grateful nation.

--Don Sloan is assistant editor of Political Affairs.

Collateral Damage

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 05:11:00 +0000

When does “regrettable collateral damage” become a deliberate and calculated war against families? This is an important question to consider now.
Seven percent of all bombs dropped during the Gulf War in 1991 were so-called smart bombs. In total, three-quarters of the 80,000 tons of explosives dropped by coalition forces during the Gulf War missed the intended target. As a result, numerous hospitals were damaged, 9,000 homes were destroyed and approximately 3,500 Iraqi civilians were killed. The use of inaccurate dumb bombs is one explanation for civilian slaughter, assuming that some of these civilian targets were not deliberately targeted. But, in fact, we know they were.

One widely publicized example involved a bomb shelter in Baghdad that harbored the families of an entire neighborhood. Hundreds of these people, entire families, were incinerated when the United States deliberately targeted, bombed and destroyed this neighborhood bomb shelter. The United States admitted that this shelter had been deliberately destroyed because it was believed to be a military communications center. Subsequent inspection of the bombed-out facility by reporters from international media found no evidence of any military communications. They found just incinerated bodies – the ashes of neighborhood life. The United States military never apologized.

In any case, by war’s end, more than 50,000 Iraqi soldiers were dead, as were several hundred soldiers of the coalition forces. Immediately after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, an international trade embargo was enforced upon Iraq, severely limiting what it could sell or purchase. The embargo is still in effect and has had a far more damaging effect on the health of the Iraqi people than the actual war itself. Before the Gulf War, 70 percent of Iraq’s population lived in urban areas served by sophisticated electrical grids and modern water and sewage systems. Nearly three-quarters of their food was imported, as were most of their medicines and medical supplies. The sale of oil produced 90 percent of all export earnings and paid for the commodities that formed the basis of a modern society.

The deliberate bombing of the nation’s electricity-generating plants condemned all Iraqi families to terrible hardships, illnesses and for some, death. The electrical pumps that delivered water to homes across the nation ceased operating. The electrical equipment that moved and processed sewage in towns and cities across the nation no longer functioned. As a result, water is no longer pumped through the distribution system and sewage is left untreated. Post-war economic sanctions have made repair of these facilities impossible.

Meanwhile cholera, polio, typhoid, hepatitis A and diarrhea sicken and kill children in home after home by the tens of thousands. Bombed power-generating stations cannot power refrigerators and freezers in hospitals. Desperately needed vaccines and medicines spoil on the shelves and have not been replaced. Severe shortages of medicine and medical equipment persist in the years after the war because of the economic sanctions. In part these shortages exist because of the extreme poverty Iraq has experienced as a result of the sanctions. In other cases, the international manufacturers and suppliers of critical medical supplies simply refuse to deal with potential Iraqi buyers. Venders fear difficulties collecting payment, and they fear intimidation by the United States, which threatens sanctions against companies that deal with Iraq, even in commodities that are not prohibited by sanctions.

In the summer of 1991, a Harvard-based group of researchers conducted a comprehensive, nationwide investigation of child deaths during and after the war. They found that the rate of infant mortality tripled during the first half of 1991, resulting in 33,000 additional dead babies during that period. The researchers documented that 70,000 children under age 15 died in 1991, most of them victims of economic sanctions. This pallid, carefully crafted phrase fails to conjure up the image of tens of thousands of small burial caskets and grieving families.

Moreover, the Harvard group determined that an additional 35,000 civilians died during the postwar civil violence. In summary, 30 times as many civilians died of postwar health effects as died during the war itself. A 1995 United Nations study found that approximately 500,000 children died in the five-year period after the war, from both war and sanction-related causes. The evidence clearly indicates that this has been a war against the people – families, mothers and children, the infants of Iraq. A savage slaughter of the innocents, and the United States has been the driving force.

In the years after the Gulf War, various United Nations agencies have repeatedly warned that the majority of Iraqis are suffering psychological and behavioral problems, such as “extreme deprivation,” and “severe hunger.” As victims of economic sanctions, malnourished mothers cannot sustain healthy pregnancies. Unhealthy low-weight Iraqi babies increased from 4 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 1995. The Harvard team found that half the families surveyed suffered from heavy debts, and that 60 percent of the women interviewed reported psychological problems, often complicated by anxiety-related physical problems. Researchers who interviewed more than 200 primary school age children in the months after the war found extremely high levels of psychological stress. Two-thirds of these unfortunate children did not believe they would live to be adults.

If the United States drops bombs on their neighborhoods again, how many thousands of these Iraqi children will have their worst fears realized?

Bush’s military opinion makers have launched a massive “PsyOps” campaign to make the American public, and the people of all potential “allies,” for that matter, believe that the new, improved weaponry will be precise and accurate. The idea is that “smart weapons” such as laser-guided missiles and smart bombs will only kill the enemy and will leave neighborhoods and families unscathed. The theme is that this will be a humane war with only “minimal collateral damage.” As an analysis by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences entitled War with Iraq points out, this may make for convincing pro-war propaganda, but it is military nonsense: On April 3, 2002, as part of its reprisal operations on the West Bank, Israeli forces entered the town of Jenin (and the adjacent refugee camp). After a week of occasionally ferocious fighting, 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians (some of them civilians) were dead. For Israel, Jenin turned into a nightmare of ambushes, booby traps, and door-to-door fighting in a densely populated urban maze. Israel’s losses were high, civilian casualties were unavoidable, widespread and visible destruction of civilian infrastructure took place, and politically damaging television footage of the devastation flooded the world. In this combat context, Israel’s enormous military superiority – its advantages in technology, heavy equipment, air power, and trained military personnel – were undermined, neutralized, or irrelevant, and could be employed in this heavily populated urban environment only if Israel were willing to cause enormous casualties among civilians. War on Iraq will be much the same, bloody and full of unknown dangerous consequences for Iraq, the United States and the world. Despite the “PsyOps” blitz, the repeated use of lies and jingoistic patriotism, Bush’s war on Iraq is a criminal, murderous assault on Iraqi families. Moreover, it is a tragic waste of the lives of American soldiers who are just cannon fodder for the new imperialism and the corporate lust for Iraqi oil.

However, the breadth and depth of the international peace movement is a weapon with far more potential than all of Bush’s smart bombs and guided missiles. The explosive growth and consolidation of the worldwide peace movement is the only weapon that can defeat militaristic imperialism. Ultimately only the peace movement can save the domestic economy of the United States.

The children of Iraq do not believe they will live to be adults. We must prove them wrong.

--DAvid Lawrence is a contributor to Political Affairs.

Healthcare not Warfare

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 04:59:00 +0000

As much as anything else, we need to turn the 2004 elections into a referendum on whether all Americans should finally be able to get affordable, high quality health care with their right to choose their own doctor. -- AFL-CIO Executive Council, February 2003. This policy statement by the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO, along with its resolution in opposition to the war drive in Iraq, has sounded a clarion call to everyone that the labor movement is back and ready for action.

The AFL-CIO Executive Council is responding to a growing movement among individual unions and state and local affiliates. State labor councils in Wisconsin, Oregon, California and others are putting forward stopgap state-based plans to stem the growing tide of escalating health care costs and increases in the uninsured. International unions and individual locals are fighting tooth and nail to maintain and possibly improve health benefit packages.

The Executive Council’s resolution pays particular attention to thegrowing right-wing attack on the federal Medicare system, the health program for people over 65 years of age. It also cites the attempt by the Bush administration to convert the Medicaid program from a health service program for people with low or no incomes into a pork-barrel financial gift for state governors.

The new position is the most important statement by labor on health care since 1994.

Since the Clinton health policy was put forward in 1993-94 the Democratic Party and the labor movement had agreed to keep health policy “off agenda.” This was the result of a complete misreading of the failed Clinton efforts. Rather than targeting the Medical Industrial Complex as the enemy of national health legislation, they tacitly agreed with the right wing that the Clinton proposals were too complicated and ill conceived. They were complicated, but the policy debate was a good one, even though it was lost to the power of the insurance carriers, drug companies and right-wingers in Congress led by Newt Gingrich.

The vacuum created after 1994 was rapidly filled by profiteers. Their promises that the marketplace would solve the health crisis utterly failed. But, with each passing congressional and presidential election, the opportunity to respond to the crisis was thwarted by the right-wing agenda within the Democratic Party and unfortunately followed by labor.

Changes in the Democratic Party leadership and the AFL-CIO position open a window of action that everyone has to fill. But in this new period the mistakes of the past must not be made. In US history no piece of socio-economic legislation has been enacted by Congress that was not led by or strongly supported by organized labor. The following principles must guide the mass people’s movement for a national health program that truly encompasses everyone:

• labor must lead the fight and draft the policy; • civil rights groups must be at the table to make sure that Black, Latino and other oppressed people are assured their health rights - racism is pervasive in the health care system; • women activists in the pro-choice movement must be at the table; • public worker unions must be guaranteed a major role; • rural health organizations must be included to guarantee true universality of access to health services; • health care unions must be at the table to prevent employment dislocations; • public health care research must have a priority in funding.

Legislation Drafting Principles The formulation of the legislative drafting process should guarantee that the gains of the past are protected for the future. This is a major bone of contention among advocates of sweeping health legislation. Too many non-labor, non-Medicare activists are ready to discard past gains in favor of future promises.

This all-or-nothing approach is faulty on its face. But more importantly, it has made sure that most labor unions along with Medicare leaders would not be part of the process of new congressional legislation. It was the death knell of all legislative efforts from 1994 to the present.

These organizations should be encouraged to drop their slogans and quick-fix legislation solutions and allow labor and Medicare leaders to flex their muscles. Labor unions and their members must have the opportunity to maintain their own programs regardless of any national program. (This is the way legislation was initially enacted in France, Canada and other countries with national health insurance programs).

Medicare must be maintained (federalized with full benefits, again) so that all recipients can be assured they will not be getting less under a new national program. All civil rights and right-to-choose laws must be strictly enforced.

Over the years, most unions and to some extent the AFL-CIO have worked closely with national and local public health and community-based organizations on major social and economic issues. There is growing trust between many of these groups to draw upon. This is the time to act.

Some anti-labor forces will try to drive a wedge between organized labor and the community over some aspects of this strategy. But labor will make it clear that while they want to maintain the right to keep their own benefit programs, they will fight for a health benefits package for everyone else that is as good or better than most unions have negotiated with their employers. This would be the same for Medicare rights organizations.

Labor-led Coalition for National Health The Executive Council resolution, in addition to signing a new approach, fortunately makes no mention of an ill-conceived coalition with big business insurance carriers and financed by drug company foundations.

State and local labor coalitions have been forming in Wisconsin, Oregon and California. These federations, before the enactment of the new labor position, were pressing for a state solution. But, as the AFL-CIO resolution makes clear, this a national health crisis. It is a crisis that confronts all labor unions and the growing number of unemployed workers who are without insurance. (Insurance policies required following unemployment are simply too expensive to buy.) The crisis is national and does not conform to state lines.

The time for state experiments is past. During the period of retrenchment, state experiments made sense. They not only showed what is possible, but also kept people in motion. Combining these experiences with national movements to get Congress to act is the next strategic step. A good idea is to pressure state and local government to memorialize Congress to begin enacting universal health care coverage.

Special Role for Medicare/Medicaid The Bush administration is aiming its salvoes against two of the most important entitlement programs: Medicare and Social Security.

Privatization, in whole or in part, is their primary goal. But these entitlement programs are the building blocks of a national health care system.

While Medicare was enacted to provide health services for people over 65, it also provides important health services for the disabled. Since enactment, it has unfortunately been administered by insurance carriers. That was the price Congress had to pay. It was a big mistake. In the 1990s Medicare has been privatized, to some extent, into so-called HMOs run by different insurance companies. But, this partial privatization has not been enough for the Bush ideologues. They now demand, as the price for prescription drug, the full program be privatized into for-profit insurance carriers.

This carrot-and-stick approach must be militantly opposed. It is already being opposed by all Medicare activists and the labor movement. As the AFL-CIO resolution correctly notes, these changes in Medicare would mean that “insurance executives rather than Medicare” would decide its future.

Medicaid The most insidious attack is in regard to Medicaid. Medicaid is a life-and-death issue to millions. It has too little political support as its recipients are not powerful enough to protect their own interests. This is a cutthroat effort to stop Medicaid as an entitlement program and turn it into a so-called block grant to state governors. Block grants carry few restrictions for use. This proposal would have fallen mostly on deaf ears, but Bush ideologues are more than aware that governors are in terrible financial shape and are crying to Washington, DC for help.

To sweeten the pie, Bush is offering more Medicaid money to those governors who take it.

Stopping Bush Bush may not care about the people’s will, but all candidates for the House of Representatives, the Senate and Democratic hopefuls for the White House in 2004 must have a different agenda. Even the Republicans’ allegiance to the ultra-right and their bogus think tank ideas are tempered by reelection efforts.

Every candidate for Congress and the Senate must be approached and pressured to save and improve Medicare and Medicaid; and, now, under the leadership of the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s resolution, to fight for a national health program.

Labor put the question squarely: “Now, even more than in the past, the AFL-CIO believes strongly that universal coverage is the best and ultimately only way to achieve the goal of extending affordable, high quality health care to all Americans.”

By making health care a priority and beginning the process of an expedited legislative struggle to enact a national health program, labor and its allies are making it clear to all politicians that our country must join the rest of the human race. In most industrial countries, health care is a human right, not a privilege. This goal is fully achievable, but it will require the broadest peoples’ struggle under the leadership of labor. Advocates from every mass struggle in our country must be included. We can leap frog over traditional national health insurance schemes and achieve the full comprehensive system that is called for in the national health service program (HR-080) introduced each year by heroine Barbara Lee, Congresswoman from California. This makes practical sense since to adequately implement a real national health program there must be more trained health professionals; public facilities for the delivery of health services; and health planning to make sure it all works.

--Phil E. Benjamin is health editor for Political Affairs.

Ideology and Mental Health

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 04:44:00 +0000

A reporter from the BBC recently interviewed a Cuban psychiatrist about the innovative treatments being employed at his hospital. She asked him why, given that so many neuroses and psychoses result from living under capitalism, people develop mental illness in Cuba. This was bait. No doubt she expected him to say that because the revolution was not yet complete, and a Communist world order had not yet been achieved, lingering mental illnesses were bound to arise from social conditions that did not yet fully reflect man’s recognition of man. Instead, the Cuban psychiatrist gave a sober response. He replied that schizophrenia, for instance, is the same everywhere, but that it takes different forms depending on the social context. He gave the example of a delusional patient who was convinced that he was a heroic guerrilla fighter, commenting that in the US such a patient might fancy himself a millionaire or a CEO. This difference, however, did not make one man healthier or sicker than the other.

The answer given by the Cuban doctor seems to contradict recent bourgeois ideology on mental illness that has influenced some thinking on the subject from the left. Some discussions about depression have been particularly cavalier and irresponsible. The thinking goes that treatments for depression serve to reconcile the patient to an exploitative and oppressive society, and that to be “healthy” or “happy” in a sick and depressing society is not to be healthy or happy at all. Though it has its source in bourgeois self-loathing, this ideology also seems to have support in certain strains of Marxist literature (particularly the writings of Marxist cultural critic Herbert Marcuse). Here, the insistence is that psychological problems cannot be divorced from political or social problems, and that it is not enough to cure the mentally ill by preparing them to become docile fodder for the economic system. But there is no need to move from this position to the conclusion that to treat mental illness clinically and scientifically means to give in to the status quo.

The chief problem under capitalism is not that people are getting treatment for mental illness and reconciling themselves to capitalism. It is that people cannot afford, or do not have access to, quality treatment that can enable them to lead a life that is productive (not only economically, but socially, politically, culturally and emotionally). It would be romantic and utopian to believe that mental illness will disappear under Communism. In fact, it seems likely that the number of diagnosed and treated cases would go up. This does not mean, of course, that we should temper our criticism of a psychiatric establishment whose every facet is subservient to the demands and logic of the capitalist market. It does mean, however, that these criticisms should be directed toward the establishment of better, more comprehensive and more creative methods of treatment, not toward the abolition of psychiatric care itself.

This is the direction in which Cuba is moving. The BBC interview centered on using active participation in the performance of Cuban music, in addition to more standard medical techniques, to treat long-term patients.

War Crimes

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 04:40:00 +0000

In an October issue of Profil, an Austrian weekly magazine, the columnist, Georg Hoffman-Ostenhof, raises the question: “Is Bush a War Criminal?” Such a charge may sound outrageous, yet Hoffman-Ostenhof painstakingly points out that the UN Charter drafted by the United States and other allied nations in 1945 explicitly decreed that “the threat or use of any force against the territorial integrity or political independence” of any sovereign state was illegal. Hoffman-Ostenhof goes further to contend that during the Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders pre-emptive war was declared a war crime.

While many would balk at the charge of pre-emptive war being a distinctive war crime since interventions by nations have occurred often over the past 50 years, Hoffman-Ostenhof cites the instance of Bush embarking on pre-emptive war on Iraq as extremely dangerous, because it would set a precedent for pre-emptive wars around the world, by more powerful nations against smaller ones and by those governments eager to control the resources of their neighbors. He also issues a caveat about the arrogance of pursuing the principle of Pax Americana, warning that it could trigger further instability and exacerbate regional and national conflicts to the point of having a war-infested world for the future.

At a rally celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and protesting against the US planned war against Iraq in Washington, DC on January 18, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark publicly called for the impeachment of George W. Bush for usurping the powers of the Constitution by threatening to use nuclear weapons, calling for the overthrow and assassination of a foreign leader and ordering US troops into war without the approval and support of the US population. Clark declared that Bush had contravened US law by engaging in hostile acts against a sovereign nation that did not threaten the United States and argued that since the Congress had voted for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, for far lesser wrong-doings, the call for the impeachment of George W. Bush ought to be amplified. Robert Fisk of the London Guardian asks why nothing is done to determine what is causing the deaths and ruin of the people of Southern Iraq and our own military veterans. Blaming Saddam Hussein does not answer the question, Fisk retorts. Why does not the UN carry out a serious inquiry into the cancers, heart failures and deaths that have occurred since the inception of the New World Order in Iraq, just as they so thoroughly scrutinize the Iraqi landscape for “weapons of mass destruction,” Fisk wonders?

There are numerous ironies in the Bush onslaught towards war against Iraq: The US has over 6,000 nuclear weapons, stores thousands of agent tons of chemical weapons in Anniston, Alabama, Pine Bluff, Arkansas and other sites across the country and has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to examine its chemical and biological weapons plants on the grounds of “national defense,” while insisting that Iraq dismantle its chemical weapons. The Commerce Department authorized sales of equipment to Iraq by companies like Kodak, Hewlett Packard and Bechtel (of which former Secretary of State George Schultz was a board member) that manufactured mustard gas and other contaminants. Donald Rumsfeld met and shook hands with Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s shortly after Hussein used mustard gas against the Iranians and the Kurds. Bush claims Saddam Hussein is fabricating lies to hide weapons of mass destruction, while strenuously lying to connect Al Qaeda to Hussein, even though the CIA itself has rejected such links. Bush claims Hussein is a dictator who has violated human rights, while thousands of Muslims living in the United States have been denied their civil rights due to detentions, deportations or harassment, solely for being of Arab or Asian descent. Bush claims that he desires a peaceful solution while he orders the largest build-up of troops in the Gulf since 1991. He insists that Iraq is a threat to the world’s peace and security while he engages in military threats, including using nuclear weapons against Iraq. He excoriates Hussein for being an international outlaw because he disregards the UN and the global community, while Bush has declared that the US could wage a war against Iraq without UN approval and daily coerces and bribes other nations in the region like Kuwait and Turkey to become international outlaws and support an illegal war. Bush has established a national security state in the United States and terror abroad, in the name of freedom, democracy and fighting terrorism, even though most of the world, including 37 percent of Canadians, now believe that the US is the greatest threat to world peace, even more than Al Qaeda. Tony Blair is willing to wage war in defiance of the British public and his own party, 80 percent of whom are against any form of unilateral military action against Iraq.

If George W. Bush has lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (since he has not produced any evidence as he has repeatedly said he would) then his motive for pursuing war against Iraq is not for peace and justice as his regime claims, but for another reason: oil perhaps?! It’s time that we took a hard look at what really is happening in the US and understand why the Bush regime is so isolated in its policing and colonizing of the poor peoples of the world. No blood, be it of US soldiers or Iraqi people, is worth shedding for the gluttonous oil companies. Let the UN weapons inspectors do their job, and dismantle the weapons of mass destruction right here.

--Julian Kunnie is a professor of Africana Studies and author of Indigenous People's Wisdom and Power.

Book Review - Globalization and Its Discontents

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 04:07:00 +0000

Joseph Stiglitz is no radical. He is a mainstream “free market” economist who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. He served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bill Clinton, starting in 1993. In 1997 he left the Clinton administration to become the chief economist and a senior vice president of the World Bank.

Globalization and Its Discontents is a fascinating insider’s look at the process of capitalist globalization. It offers a unique perspective from one who has increasingly become uncomfortable with rigid, right-wing dogma and economic theory of what Stiglitz calls the “Washington consensus.”

In January 2000, Stiglitz had enough and quit the World Bank after a series of increasingly public disputes. He dared to question things like privatization-at-any-cost (he believes privatization is a good and useful tool), or willy-nilly deregulation of financial and capital markets and other conservative ideological assumptions. His “deviations” made him progressively a more controversial figure in finance capital circles.

Several chapters in the book are stand – alone case studies of the destructive greed of finance capital in the process of globalization. For example, Stiglitz takes you on an absorbing walk through the East Asian economic crisis and shows how International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy nearly led to global meltdown. In an interesting twist, he has high praise for how the People’s Republic China is managing and did manage its economy during the crisis that began in 1997. He writes: Though differences in individual circumstances make the reasons either for the occurrence of a crisis or for quick recovery hard to ascertain, I think it is no accident that the only major East Asian country, China, to avert the crisis took a course directly opposite that advocated by the IMF, and that the country with the shortest downturn, Malaysia, also explicitly rejected an IMF strategy. Stiglitz, likewise, shows how “shock therapy” policies, favored by the US Treasury and the IMF, brought incredible suffering and chaos to the people of Russia and Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of socialism. A sizable section of his book is on post-Soviet Russia. In a way, Stiglitz kind of sees as his specialty as from socialism to capitalism. “Seldom has the gap between expectations and reality been greater than in the case of the transition from communism to markets,” he writes. Privatization, deregulation and liberalization were supposed to lead to a short recession and then great economic growth. In fact, only Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia, of the former socialist countries, have regained a GDP roughly equal to the final days of socialism. Russia has only about two-thirds of its 1989 GDP; Moldova’s decline is the worst with less than a third of its socialist GDP and the Ukraine is at roughly a third of its 1989 GDP.

Stiglitz makes the case that with the Wall Street, IMF policy direction of the transition, “Russia had quickly been transformed from an industrial giant, a country that had managed with Sputnik to put the first satellite into orbit into a natural resource exporter.”

In 1989, by Stiglitz’s calculations only two percent of Russians lived in poverty. By 1998, 23.8 percent were living on $2 or less a day. More than 40 percent were living on $4 a day or less. More than 50 percent of the children of Russia live in poverty today. Most Political Affairs readers will find the book’s simplistic dismissal of socialism, Marxism and the Soviet experience a bit much. Again, he’s a free market true believer and no radical. Nevertheless, in his own kind of aloof and pragmatic way he does care about the inequalities of a totally unregulated market economy, even if he seems to miss the point of what causes the problems.

Stiglitz also cares about democracy, in that he does see that most of the problems created by the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are because these bodies are dominated by commercial and financial interests. That’s as far as it goes. He does not see them as instruments of capitalist globalization that, no matter their “development” and humanitarian rhetorical cover, are instruments of global domination and control for transnational capital.

Still, Stiglitz hammers the wrong-headedness, even from a ”free market” point of view, of World Bank, IMF and WTO policies. With very specific examples, he illustrates some of the many reasons for the rising anger and militancy of the anti-globalization movement.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the book is that it really doesn’t delve into the workings of capitalist globalization in Africa and Latin America. There are some examples, but here the predatory nature of globalization, piled on top of centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and deliberately forced underdevelopment are even more catastrophic.

One of the main questions debated in the anti-globalization movement is, “Can the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank be reformed?” Stiglitz obviously thinks the answer is yes. His final chapters have a lot of interesting ideas about reform worth thinking about as arenas of struggle. He believes in negotiating labor and environmental standards into trade agreements. He argues for government regulation and the need to control and mediate markets. He believes in transparency and more democratic governance in global financial institutions.

Many of us on the left have concluded that the problem is not just bad policy, but the more fundamental deadly flaws of the capitalist economic system. Still, Stiglitz’s book illustrates the broad possibility of coalition to fight the worst effects of capitalist globalization.

Globalization and Its Discontents has already made an important contribution to the further development of such a coalition. Stiglitz’s insider view gives substance and form to the many suspicions of millions in the anti-globalization movement.

Globalization and Its Discontents By Joseph E. Stiglitz W.W. Norton & Company 2002.

Sequel to a Disaster: Bhopal Victims Demand Justice

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:54:00 +0000

Editors note: PA science editor Prasad Venugopal interviewed members of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal last April. Bhopal, India is the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in history. Over 18 years later the people of Bhopal are still demanding justice. Venugopal spoke with Krishnaveni Gundu and Nityanand Jayaraman. Krishnaveni is the US coordinator for the International Campaign for Justice for Bhopal and has been involved since 1999 when she first volunteered in a free clinic for the gas victims. Nityanand is an India-based independent journalist who has been associated with the Bhopal campaign since 1994. Readers can find out more at the ICJB website: .

PA: Can you give a little background on the Bhopal disaster?

ICJB: The night of December 2, and in the early morning of December 3, 1984, about 40 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) and other lethal gases leaked from Union Carbide’s pesticides factory in the city of Bhopal, which is in Madhya Pradesh, a central state in India. In the immediate aftermath, in less than three days, it killed about 8,000 people and that’s an extremely rough estimate. The citizens of Bhopal estimate up to 10,000 died; official figures have never gone beyond 3,000 dead. Because of the aftereffects of exposure, about 20,000 people have died to date.

PA: There are reports that even today there are still people dying.

ICJB: We estimate 10 to 15 deaths every month because of the lasting effects of exposure. There are intergenerational effects amongst children of the people who were exposed. Some are being born with birth defects. They’re born with smaller heads, smaller limbs, respiratory disorders, attention deficits and growth disorders. They have serious health problems. These children can’t play; they play for 10 minutes, they’re tired, and have to sit down in order not to compromise their health. If you hear them breathing, it is almost as if they’ve run a marathon.
PA: What is the background to the legal case?

ICJB: After the disaster, cases filed in the US, were dismissed. In India, the people started filing cases against the company and there were a large number of individual suits. The government decided to argue the case on their behalf. There's no such thing as a class action suit in India. The government appointed itself as the sole representative of the vicitms and then passed a law preventing any Indian citizen from filing a lawsuit against Union Carbide or any of its officials. But in so doing, what they also did was rob the people of representation. While the case was being heard in the [Indian] Supreme Court, the government of India, in closed-door negotiation with Union Carbide, was offered a settlement of $470 million.

PA: How far did it go in the US? Was it just thrown out?

ICJB: Yes, it was thrown out of district court in New York. What they originally demanded was based on a figure that was far lower than what they actually expected the damages to be. Union Carbide was overjoyed. At this time, they negotiated with the India government that all criminal liability be dropped.

PA: Including for Warren Anderson?

ICJB: Warren Anderson, Union Carbide Corporation, Union Carbide Eastern and nine other individuals, who were primarily officials of Union Carbide of India, are named in the criminal case for culpable homicide, among other counts. They wanted the charges dropped so they offered $470 million. The government of India granted their wishes in 1989. There was a huge uproar from survivors. The Supreme Court said, “The settlement has been done, but you have no right to grant immunity.” So the criminal case was reinstated in a year’s time, and the charges were reinstated. Once the criminal case was reinstated, the Bhopal judge called for Warren Anderson. They published a legal notice in the Washington Post. The guy does not appear. Union Carbide disappeared. So in 1991 they were declared fugitives. The courts attached the assets of Union Carbide Corporation to ensure that the company would appear in court. Subsequently, the Union Carbide asked the Supreme Court for relief. They said something like, If you’d like to build a hospital, it will be much more beautiful, if you allow us to sell our shares. Justice Ahmadi allowed them to do so despite the fact that it was against the law, and three years later he became chairman of the Bhopal Hospital Trust. Union Carbide has written off that money, because it’s easy to write off when you’ve got liabilities that might be 10 times higher.

PA: And the status of the US legal case? Initially, a report, actually commissioned by Carbide, claimed that there was no contamination. As part of the discovery in the New York class-action lawsuit, in September and October of 2002, we discovered Carbide’s own consultant had actually not stood by the report. In some cases, the data is insufficient and in some cases faulty. They strongly suggested that it not go in the court’s record. This is something that was not known and is one of the strongest pieces of evidence of Carbide having complete knowledge of what was happening. They knew at one point that the ground water supply had been contaminated. They knew at one point that their solar evaporation ponds where they dumped the toxic waste had started leaking. There is documentation of communication back and forth between various officials in departments saying, “It’s leaking. What do we do now?” And suddenly they just stopped all of their internal studies. All of this documentation is up on our website, .

The other interesting thing we found out as a part of the discovery was the fact that the technology sent to Bhopal to control MIC poison gasses was untested and unproven. Carbide had to save money. It’s very interesting why they wanted to do it quickly because until that point they did not need to manufacture MIC in India. In the early 1970s, the Indian government passed the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act preventing foreign companies from owning more than 50 percent equity in any industry. So Carbide [US] had 50.9 percent equity in Carbide [India]. Now they wanted to maintain majority stake. But with this new regulation they were not going to be able to do that, unless they could find some means of “back integrating.” Therefore, instead of importing MIC gases, they wanted to manufacture it in Bhopal itself. And they wanted to do it quickly before the act was in place, so they could subvert it. That’s why this happened.

A document with Warren Anderson’s name among others on it says something to the effect that they were aware of the risks that they were taking by sending untested technology, but they had to do it in order to maintain control.

PA: It’s been said that the disaster also occurred because of cost-cutting done just prior to it.

ICJB: Absolutely. In 1982, Carbide’s own internal safety audit report shows there were 61 hazards in the factory. Eleven of them were serious and within the MIC unit. There was a series of leaks and accidents. In fact, there were reporters in Bhopal saying, “We’re sitting on a time bomb.” At the time of the disaster, they had shut down the refrigeration unit that is critical for the storage of MIC in order to save approximately $40 a day. This proved extremely critical in escalating the disaster. Safety personnel were laid off to save money. PA: Was the plant unionized? How has the Indian labor movement responded to this attack on workers’ lives and rights?

ICJB: Union Carbide factory workers were organized in a Carbide factory workers union. I think they were affiliated with the Center for Indian Trade Unions, that’s a Communist Party (Marxist) trade union. The first organized reaction was undertaken by the trade unions. They came down immediately in terms of relief work and stayed on. Even before the disaster happened, these people had raised a number of safety issues. People had been injured and killed in the past. Virtually every revelation about how the factory was poorly designed, how the people were not properly equipped and how, despite warnings by the workers themselves, the management did not pay heed to any of these things, was all brought out by workers. CBI’s entire case was built on testimonies by the workers because they knew the plant inside and out. One ex-Carbide factory worker, a supervisor there, was the one who provided most of the information about Carbide’s lies. Even internationally there is a lot of solidarity. Support on the Bhopal issue has been solid, even if it has not been very fruitful.

PA: Solid in terms of…?

ICJB: In terms of solidarity. Initiative has been taken primarily by the local people, the women’s trade union organizations.

PA: Can you talk more about the women’s trade unions?

ICJB: The group is called Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh (BGPMSKS), which means Bhopal Gas Affected Women’s Stationery Association. This is a trade union that initially began with 100 people. As part of the rehabilitation efforts, the government opened about 40 training centers in Bhopal. These workshops were set up to train local women [survivors of the disaster] in various skills, so they can be absorbed in mainstream life and can make a living. Of the 40, only one, the BGPMSKS, remained open because they filed a lawsuit against the government. Everything else was shut down after the training period, because the government said, “We’ve done our job. Training over. Go back home.” Realizing their rights, the Women's Stationery Center Organized themselves into BGPMSKS while the other centers were being shut down. Of the three organizations, one of them was the Women’s Stationery Workers Union of 100 women. When the state government threatened to close down the stationery factory, these women fought and kept it open. But they continued to work on a piece rate, not regular wages.

The other demand has been that other shops should be opened because that’s the obligation of the government to the survivors. The case was eventually heard in labor court, which grnated the survivors victory in Decemebr 2002. The court basically said, “You have to give them back pay from 1998 and you have to regularize them.” The state government is appealing the decision.

PA: What groups have been approached in the US?

ICJB: Approaching labor groups is a more recent strategy, but in these past 18 years there have been groups like Environmental Health Fund, the Ecology Center, Corpwatch, Pesticides Action Network (North America and UK) and the Center for Health and Environment. The initial alliance from day one has been international. It has tended to bring other similar disaster-impacted communities together, such as Minamata, Seveso and Chernobyl. All the initial victories and pressure put on the government of India and on Union Carbide, in the first 10 years, have been from this global coalition. What is happening now is more systematic outreach. The US is a place where the pressure needs to be built because it is where the headquarters of the corporations are. There’s been an effort to enlighten and recruit the support of the Indian community. Pollution-impacted communities and labor groups are being approached as well. PA: So this is the other side of globalization, global solidarity?

ICJB: It’s globalizing solidarity and resistance also. Common people and students are very important to the campaign. They’ve been very receptive, both Indian students and American students. At the University of Michigan, they [Michigan Student Assembly] passed a resolution [in March 2003] asking the university to divest from Dow. Dow is the biggest funder to that university. This is a historic resolution, saying that if the university does not take a stand against Dow, (Union Carbide is now a subsidiary of Dow), it will be complicit in the crimes at Bhopal. That has really got people worried because until now no one has tried to force the university to take a stand.

Book Review - Marx's Revenge, by Meghnad Desai

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:07:00 +0000

Meghnad Desai is the director of the Centre for the study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, and Marx’s Revenge is his analysis of the glories of globalization, free trade and the everlastingness of capitalism. His thesis is not only that globalization is good for us, but that if Marx were around today, he would give it his blessing and reject as reactionary the anti-globalization movement that arose out of the demonstrations in Seattle. Curiously, Marx’s “revenge” is thus: while it may seem as if Marxism got a kick in the teeth with the collapse of Eastern European socialism and the USSR and with the untrammeled rise of globalization, actually, this is all happening in accord with Marx’s theory of the development of capitalism. It is a proof, not a refutation, of Marxism.

Briefly, Desai’s argument goes like this: Marx saw capitalism expanding over the whole globe and would not be replaced until it was no longer able to grow and develop. The attempt to build socialism in underdeveloped areas (“the USSR was a Third World country”) resulted in the creation of distorted and backward regimes, which were actually forms of a primitive kind of state capitalism unable to successfully compete over the long haul with “free market” forms of advanced Western-style capitalism. Globalization is the historically necessary development of worldwide capitalist integration and must be completed before socialism is even on the agenda. Globalization is thus progressive and humane in so far as it is the most advanced type of economic system for the foreseeable future, as capitalism “provides the means for eliminating poverty.”

In fact, socialism may never be on the agenda, since capitalism will eventually collapse only if it has unsolvable internal contradictions that will make it break down and necessitate its replacement. But we have today a better understanding of the internal dynamics of capitalism than in Marx’s day and ways have been found to eliminate or resolve such contradictions so that capitalism can hang around forever.

This interpretation is based on Desai’s understanding of Marxism and just what capitalism is and what socialism is – and isn’t. If he has a confused understanding of these subjects, his theory can be dismissed as just so much hot air and capitalist apologetics.

Early on, he tells us there were two main types of socialism in the 20th century: communism (USSR), a “variant of social democracy,” and fascism (Germany), “the other variant of socialism,” which “for many, held out real promise.” For Desai, it seems that all you have to do to qualify as a “socialist” is to use the word in your party name, such as “National Socialists.” This does not show a high level of analytical understanding.

Desai realizes that the future of capitalism depends upon the law of the declining rate of profit. It is this law that eventually dooms the system. For capitalism to survive, it must suspend the operation of this law and not merely, as Marx thought, retard it. The solution, according to Desai, is provided by Keynes. Demand can be stimulated by government spending, which will allow for profitability and thus escape from the law. Governments have learned how to construct capitalism with a human face it seems.

We are further informed that “by the late 20th century, “the imperialist episode in world history had passed” and that Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism begins with “muddled thinking” and is “not by any means Lenin’s most cogent work.” Desai knows very well that if Lenin’s views in Imperialism are still relevant, his own theory is off course.

What else can we learn from Desai? That America’s “only imperial experience” in the 19th century “was the Spanish-American War.” Then how did two-thirds of Mexico end up American? Genocide against Native Americans doesn’t seem to rate as imperial behavior, but we are told that Black Americans have become “a full part of civil society.” Finally, the struggle is over!

More importantly, Desai often misreads Marx. An example from page 141 of his text, where he completely misses the meaning Marx intends in the following passage from Capital. He quotes Marx as saying “the degree of exploitation of [the] wage laborer remains indecently low” in America. Desai makes much of this quote and wonders how American capitalists can make profits with “indecently low” rates of exploitation. But Marx’s comment is meant to be satirical, not literal. He is making fun of the views expressed by E.G. Wakefield in his England and America and its portrayal of “the abstemious capitalist.”

Desai also gives Trotsky credit for Engels’ “dust bin of history” quote as well as for the theory that revolution might break out in a country that is the “weakest link” in the capitalist system (which had already been put forth by Marx and Engels long before Trotsky).

The book is replete with historical errors, misunderstandings of Marx’s writings, and perverse readings of contemporary history, such as insinuating that the violence at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was caused by student protesters (it was a police riot), or maintaining that the IMF can’t see to it that their economic policies don’t hurt the poor in developing countries because it has “to respect the sovereignty of these countries.” Finally, the Great Depression, which is blamed on Stalin, was brought about by agricultural oversupply “thanks to Soviet collectivization and dumping by Russian farmers.”

Marx’s Revenge lacks credibility as a theoretical contribution to the understanding of the nature of the present-day processes of globalization. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism By Meghnad Desai New York, Verso, 2002.

Chile Rising: Women Fighting Globalization

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 02:55:00 +0000

After attempting to turn around the economic crisis that the neoliberal globalized economy is experiencing, the world’s greatest imperial power, the United States, is leaving a trail of new contradictions that affect humanity not only in the economic area, but also at social, political, cultural and personal levels. For people in Chile, life itself has become more insecure, more unpleasant and less satisfying, as shown in studies carried out in recent years by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
According to the UNDP report for the year 2000, Chileans complain of a lack of confidence in personal relationships, deficiencies in public institutions responsible for the security of society and problems in finding meaning and direction. The insanity of a system that seeks to impose rules on the whole world to allow big capital to increase profits has reached such an extreme that it does not care if it endangers the very existence of the planet. The war-and-fascist-like atmosphere that has been created allows ndividuals like the director of the IMF, Horst Kohler, to state the US attack against Iraq “could have a positive effect on the world economy, in as much as it will eliminate the growing uncertainty which is scaring off big investors,” as long as the attack is a quick one.

The abrogation and violation of international agreements and treaties is a key characteristic of US foreign policy. The United States distanced itself from the Kyoto Agreement aimed at limiting global warming, broke the nuclear arms limitation treaty, and is testing its anti-missile shield. The US also withdrew from the International Conference on Racism and Discrimination and rejected the Biodiversity Convention at September’s Earth Summit in South Africa. Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to sign the agreement encouraging use of renewable energy sources, turning the US into the main party responsible for the ecological problems affecting the planet. The Chilean people, and, in particular, Chilean women, opposed the war against Iraq, while at the same time rejecting the Hussein dictatorship. To speak of women and neoliberal globalization implies rethinking the place of women in today’s society, which is changing amidst these intense and dramatic contradictions. It means looking again at women workers, particularly historically “informal” women workers who work in the home. It means rescuing from oblivion the idea of women “as a social subject,” regaining what has been stolen from us: our right to create and transform life as social agents, as subjects of our own work and our own history.

For Chilean women, this year has a special meaning because it is the 30th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the people’s government of Salvador Allende, the most democratic government in our history. The coup d’etat against the people’s government was only made possible by the intervention of the United States.

This year is a time to take account of the role played by the workers and progressive forces, especially Chilean women, in the process that culminated in the victory. It is a time also for reviewing, as well, the meaning of the military coup itself and the struggle against the dictatorship.

The participation of women in workers’ campaigns for the right to vote, healthcare and education meant women were also important builders of the social and political mobilization process that brought Salvador Allende to the nation’s presidency. Chilean women joined wholeheartedly in putting the program of the People’s Unity government into effect. The Kindergarten Law, the Half Liter of Milk a Day Program that provided free milk to all children under 14, food distribution through the Supply and Price Committees (JAP), the organization of more than one million mothers in the Mothers’ Centers, their active participation in the Vigilance Committees in workplaces and in voluntary work, all speak eloquently about the enthusiasm and dedication with which women took up the tasks of people’s government.

It is no coincidence that in his last words, spoken on September 11, 1973, Allende talked especially to women: “I speak to you, above all, to the humble woman of our land, the woman farmworker who believed in us, to the mother who knew of our concern for the children…” Allende understood Chilean women as an active subject in the thousand-day revolutionary process he led.

When the bloody coup d’etat occurred, women were the first to go into the streets to look for their arrested comrades. Women were the first ones to denounce the murders, the first to organize themselves to go out and protest, conquering fear and often risking their very lives, because it was necessary to lift the people’s spirits and to confront those who were sowing terror. They have been uncompromising in the struggle for full truth and justice, and against letting the crimes of the coup-makers go unpunished.

The long night of the dictatorship was lit by thousands of initiatives by women to confront unemployment, misery and impunity that the tyranny brought with it. Communal soup kitchens, buying clubs, hunger marches, ironing-board protests, barricades, chaining themselves up to demand freedom for political prisoners and the reappearance of the “disappeared” – women participated in every form of struggle against the dictator, from graffiti to armed struggle. During the 17 years of tyranny, each International Women’s Day meant a confrontation with the dictatorship, which prohibited any kind of demonstrations. March 8th became a red-letter day of battles in the streets against repressive forces. The role of women as defenders of freedom, democracy and life became clear in the minds of the people.

Women’s conditions of life and work have also changed with globalization. Historically, the work done by women has not been very visible, and often has been unpaid. However, it is undeniable that such work has permanently increased profits. Neoliberal globalization incorporates masses of women into the workforce precisely at the moment when job instability and uncertainty has reached previously unheard of levels, along with workplace injustice and unfairness. Today the new mode of capitalist accumulation leads to the deregulation of the job market and promotes minimal state intervention in terms of establishing a minimum wage. Thus, the conditions under which workers are hired are determined by the autonomous demands of the marketplace and the persistent destabilization of working conditions: less permanent workers, more subcontracting, salary cuts, less qualified workers, etc.

With this unheard of devaluation of work, labor relations have deteriorated, leaving little or no room for the majority of workers to participate in decision-making. Work as a central existential and cultural reality has been replaced by client-ism, where one lives on handouts, given in exchange for one’s loyalty, silence and passivity. Social space has been displaced by the mass media and is also monopolized by big capital.

In the midst of the impoverishment of growing sectors of the population, women appear, along with indigenous peoples, as one of the most affected groups. The “feminization of poverty” is not a mere catchphrase. It now appears the quality of life has thinned to the point where we are asked to believe there is no link between home life, life at work and the life of the nation. Today, consumption determines culture, including political culture, modes of creation and procreation, lifestyles, production and idleness, personal identity and belonging, and even emotional, sexual and social relationships.

Social and gender inequality have increased, leading to various forms of marginalization and intimate relationships that promote abuse, mistreatment and violence. The woman worker finds herself boxed into service work, commerce, and temporary employment, with all the associated lack of protection and super-exploitation. Women’s unemployment rate is much higher than men’s (in Chile, female unemployment is at 11.7 percent according to the 1998 Casen Survey). Women receive salaries that are as much as 40 percent lower than those of men, while facing sexual harassment, lack of proper attention to their health problems and less access to preventive care and services.

Concertación (the current governing coalition in Chile) governments have not introduced major changes that benefit women. Laws against domestic violence and other laws benefiting women, such as the Support Program for Female Heads of Household or the Pregnant Teens Program, exist on paper only, due to lack of training and technical and financial support, because women must dedicate a great part of their time to the home and caring for children. There is no retirement, no preventive health care available for female heads of households. Chile remains the only country in the world that has no divorce law and one of the few that criminalizes therapeutic abortion.

It is bizarre that when one tries to open a discussion on this theme, a woman’s right to choose regarding her own body is never taken into account, nor is her right to bear healthy children with minimum prenatal risk.

What is more, the Ricardo Lagos government’s proposed healthcare reform measures further undermine the right to healthcare, particularly for women. The most serious problem is that none of the three Concertación governments to date has been able to advance the democratization of Chilean society, as they all promised to do. Over 30 years after the military coup, the central institutional pillars of the Pinochet dictatorship remain firmly in place: the 1980 Constitution, the binominal electoral system, the designated senators-for-life, the Constitutional Court and the National Security Council. The Armed Forces continue to guarantee the institutional status of the current political system, while the neoliberal economic system guarantees 70 percent of all Chileans live in poverty.

The present neoliberal model cites as its ideological centerpiece the concept of “family” in order to maintain an authoritarian and conservative system. Its reference point is the bourgeois family, with its patriarchal, male-dominated and authoritarian norms, something that is very far from the way the overwhelming majority of Chilean families live today. The reality is that there is not a single type of woman, just as there is no one type of family.

This notion hides class differences, the civic, political and working faces of women. Neoliberal ideology defends women as housewives, confined to the home, a situation that no longer exists in the great majority of households. It does not speak to the rights of women as citizens. It incorporates women into the workforce, but it does not bother to reform the Labor Code to assure them the right to an eight-hour workday, a decent wage, the right to join a union or to strike. On the contrary, labor reforms pushed by the Concertación governments have worsened the working conditions of Chilean workers even more. This is demonstrated, for example, by the lack of legislation protecting women farmworkers from exposure to pesticides, chemicals that not only damage their health but also affect their reproductive capacity, endangering the very continuity of the human species. The predominant gender inequalities bring about abuse, mistreatment and violence. Inequality shows itself in the decline of civic public participation and motivation. The fact that there are five women cabinet members in the present government, that seven sub-secretary posts are held by women, as well as 14 governorships, have a purely symbolic and token value given the ruling system of sexual and gender discrimination. But these gestures do not hide reality. We have not seen any indication these tiny tokens of power can ever be translated into radical transformation in the way politics work, either from a gender point of view or with the objective of creating a project of democratic participation.

Now more than ever, our transformative powers must begin to exert power on the state and on the politicians in power, with the strength that comes from organization, mobilization and participation, as the only way to begin to overcome exclusive and elitist forms of conflict resolution and decision-making.

Today, together with the women of the whole world, we are called to block US war madness, to defend the lives of our children and the future of the planet.

--Gladys Marin is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Chile.