People Before Profit blog

Low-Wage Michigan Workers Get a Big Boost

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:41:00 +0000

03-30-06,9:14am

Thanks to the campaign by Michigan’s unions and community allies, the state’s low-wage workers will be better able to support themselves and their families.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) signed legislation March 28 that will boost the current state minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to $6.95 an hour in October, followed by a July 2007 raise to $7.15 and $7.40 a year later.

Earlier this year, minimum wage backers mobilized to put an initiative to raise the wage on the November ballot. The drive proved so popular—polls showed 80 percent of Michigan voters backed it—that Republican lawmakers got off the stick after years of opposing a raise and passed the minimum wage legislation.

Why the sudden change of heart in favor of low-wage workers? Fear of a huge Democratic turnout in November, political observers say.

Grassroots activists in states across the nation are pushing for ballot initiatives or legislation to boost states’ minimum wage in the face of repeated efforts by the Bush White House and congressional Republicans to block any increase in the federal minimum wage. Those efforts to raise the pay of low-paid workers is enjoying widespread support.

Workers haven’t seen an increase in the $5.15 an hour federal minimum wage since 1997. During that time, Congress has voted itself eight raises.

The fear of voter backlash against candidates who oppose raising the minimum wage has bubbled up to the White House where there are now reports the Bush administration is softening its opposition to a raise. The question is—will Bush back a meaningful increase without including some poison pill such as a large number of exemptions to the law or changes in the Fair Labor Standards Act?

Last year Sen. Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.) introduced a bill, which would have raised the minimum wage but that included draconian provisions to exempt millions of workers from the minimum wage, cut overtime pay and weaken job safety and health protection.

(You can become a citizen co-sponsor of legislation to raise the federal minimum wage. Click here.)

The Michigan victory follows a January win in Maryland, when the legislature voted to override Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s (R) 2005 veto of a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $6.15. In Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont in 2005, unions and community groups pushed hard for and won legislation boosting those states’ minimum wages.

In Arkansas, union activists working with community groups in a “Give Arkansas A Raise Now” coalition succeeded this week in urging legislators to consider a minimum wage increase during a special session.

According to KATV in Little Rock, Ricky Belk, of the AFL-CIO, says the increase, up to $6.25 an hour, “will be significant if you look at what they’re earning today.”

With the new minimum wage on the way, the ballot drive has been suspended. Michigan coalition members plan to mobilize around other working family issues, including get-out-the-vote efforts.

Read more about the Michigan minimum wage campaign here and go here to see how lawmakers in other states are feeling the heat to raise their states’ minimum wages.

Liberia-Nigeria-Sierra Leone: Handcuffed Taylor deposited at war crimes court

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:33:00 +0000

03-30-06,9:05am

FREETOWN, 29 Mar 2006 (IRIN) - UN peacekeepers delivered handcuffed former Liberian president Charles Taylor into the custody of a UN-backed Special Court in Sierra Leone on Wednesday where he will be the first former African head of state to face prosecution for war crimes before an international tribunal.

A UN helicopter brought Taylor from the Liberian capital Monrovia directly to the landing pad of the Special Court in Freetown where officials whisked him directly to his waiting cell.

Nigerian police captured Taylor, who is indicted on 17 counts of war crimes, on Tuesday after he disappeared from the mansion where he was living in exile in the south of the country. Taylor was detained Tuesday night in Borno state in northeastern Nigeria, Information Minister Frank Nweke told reporters. Authorities immediately informed Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo who is on a visit to the United States and the Nigerian leader ordered Taylor’s immediate deportation to Liberia.

“Taylor was received as soon as he landed and the UNMIL peacekeepers read him his rights and he was handcuffed by peacekeepers,” Liberia’s chief prosecutor, Tiaon Gongloe told reporters after Taylor’s departure in a white UN helicopter.

A UN Security Council resolution late last year mandated UN peacekeepers in Liberia “to apprehend and detain former president Charles Taylor” in the event of his return to Liberian territory and depose him with the Special Court in Sierra Leone.

“It is a triumph for international justice,” said Gongloe, also a former human rights activist imprisoned under Taylor where he was tortured and suffered severe internal bleeding.

Warlord-turned-president Taylor stepped down as elected leader of Liberia in 2003 and accepted exile in Nigeria under intense international pressure led by the United States. His departure cleared the way for a ground-breaking peace deal that ended 14 years of brutal on-off civil war that killed tens of thousands of Liberians and displaced millions.

“God willing, I will be back”

At his departing speech Taylor, dressed head to toe in white, vowed to return to Liberia, and the Nigerian plane that flew Taylor into Monrovia on Wednesday was much like the one that collected him to begin his exile less than three years ago.

Repeated attempts by Taylor’s lawyers to get the Special Court to drop the charges against him have failed and Court officials recently told IRIN that they are ready and waiting to receive him.

Nigeria had always maintained that it would hand Taylor over from exile only at the request of an elected Liberian government. That request came earlier this month while new Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was visiting the United States – Liberia’s main potential donor to help rebuild the war-battered country and a key proponent of the drive to get Taylor before the Special Court. Nigeria followed up with an announcement that Liberia was “free to take” the former president.

But before arrangements could be made for his transfer, Taylor slipped off in a car on Monday night and waiting commandos swooped in and took him to vehicles standing by to help him make his way to the northeast town of Gambouru near the Cameroon border, Nigerian officials said. But Taylor, loaded with cash, was arrested before he crossed the border.

International applause

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, US President George Bush and human rights activists welcomed news of Taylor’s detention saying in part that it sent a clear message to other leaders that they are not above the law.

“I think his capture and being put on trial does not only close a chapter, but it also sends a powerful message to the region that impunity will not be allowed to stand, and would-be warlords will pay a price,” Annan said at UN headquarters in New York. “And I think this is relevant, not just for what happened in Sierra Leone and Liberia, but in other parts of the region and the continent.”

President Bush who met with Nigerian President Obasanjo at the White House on Wednesday also stressed the regional importance of Taylor’s trial. “The fact that Charles Taylor will be brought to justice in a court of law will help Liberia and is a sign of your deep desire for there to be peace in your neighbourhood,' Bush told Obasanjo before reporters.

Human rights groups working for Taylor’s arrest said his capture means his victims could finally see justice done.

“Today there is a tremendous amount of both relief and hope. Relief that an indicted war criminal accused of having wrought great suffering throughout West Africa is finally where he belongs, and hope because justice for the victims of these crimes is now in reach,” said Corinne Dufka, West Africa representative of Human Rights Watch.

And Alhaji Ahmed Jusu Jarka, who had both his hands cut off by Taylor-backed rebels in Sierra Leone, is looking forward to seeing Taylor in the dock.

“I will raise my hands to show him what he did to the people of Sierra Leone,” said Jarka, head of the Amputees and War Wounded Association of Sierra Leone. “This is what we have been looking forward to…Everybody is anxious to see him and to see the Special Court try him.”

Unease in Freetown

Only this week many Sierra Leoneans said the very existence of the Special Court and Taylor’s presence could threaten to the country’s stability.

“I personally did not want the Special Court to be set up here at the beginning when I thought of the security threat it could bring. After 11 years of war there are still some sore wounds and bringing Charles Taylor here is a huge security threat. He still has plenty of supporters back in Liberia,” said 25-year-old student Victor Bangura. He is particularly concerned about security since the departure in December of the UN peacekeeping force known as UNAMSIL that restored order in Sierra Leone at the end of more than a decade of brutal fighting.

“We had huge confidence, for the most part, in [UNAMSIL]. If they were here now we would be very confident that things would be fine.”

The Dilemmas of the Darfur Conflict

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:19:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:54 am

Let me start with what the martyr Martin Luther King once said “An abscess can only be cured if it ugly pus is fully exposed to the air.”

Geographically the largest country in Africa, the Sudan abuts nine sub-Saharan and north Africa countries. All their ethical and cultural diversities are reflected within its borders. As a result, the Sudan has been described as an Afro-Arab microcosm of the continent.

War, political instability, and the resurgence of obscurantist ideology are all symptoms of the present crisis in the Sudan. This crisis is a crisis of structure, a crisis of development and crisis of leadership (ruling elites whose vision of Sudan is distorted by ideas of race, religion and place of birth).

The accumulative direct outcome of the above crises is exemplified by the National Islamic Front (NIF) regime's years in power, which was the accelerated decay of the traditional village communities, mainly in the clay savanna belt (East, Blue Nile, South and Dar Fur) the tide of displaced, mainly non-Arab villagers, gave rise to unprecedented growth of the towns and appearance of very large shantytowns around the principal cities (similar to Soweto, or Mamelodi here in South Africa); and millions of refugees in the neighboring countries and around the world; it’s an apartheid system of Sudan.

There have been constant low-scale conflicts for several decades in Dar fur caused by ecological degradation and failed rains; a classic battle for resources, particularly land. Simply the state has lacked policing capacity and as a consequence, it has been common practice among all ethnic groups to arm themselves and organize self-defense mechanisms and minor clashes has occurred from time to time. However, the local traditional leaders managed to control most of those clashes. For historical record, it should be mentioned that the Umma party (1988) and NIF regime were the ones who armed some tribes to disarm others (war by proxy). In other words, to empower some as far as the land control was concerned.

Why crisis in Dar Fur now? Although the current conflict in Dar fur has historical roots, it is still necessary to find explanations as to why it started to escalate in early 2003. Was it because of the fear of being further politically and economically marginalized as a consequence of the NIF and SPLM/A peace agreement or what became known the comprehensive peace agreement (CPA)?

On the other hand, some might argue that the international alignment on the Dar fur crisis is dictated by the political economy of oil. To the extent this is true, let us not forget that oil influences China who would like continued access to Sudan's oil and the USA which covets that access. But for those who do strategic thinking about the Dar Fur conflict, the more important reason may be a political one, and that is who controls what? Bear in mind that any success or development in the South thanks to the CPA, it would give legitimacy for the other marginalized areas in the country to carry arms in order to have a better share in power as well as wealth, a situation which already took place in Eastern Sudan (low intensity conflict) and genocide in Dar fur.

In this article I would like to share some thoughts that might help address ways and means to expose these dilemmas, in the hope of building a New Sudan.

As is often expected, the task to build anything new depends upon a new vision or a new conception which implies that tomorrow can be different from today and yesterday. We cannot rely upon the same old formula, what constitutes the proper organization of a state (Sudan). We must address ourselves to new conceptions in order to realize new possibilities.

The economic dimensions of the conflict

The economic dimensions of the Dar Fur conflict are linked to the Sudan’s political and economic evolution. For example, the main line of development in the Sudan was the establishment of monetary economic relations and the increasing development of a dependent agrarian economy. This line of development was started by the Turko-Egyptian rule and vigorously continued by the British. The economic development fostered by the successive colonial regimes led directly to the establishment of a dual pattern of economic activity; namely the creation of peripheral economic relations in the center (Gezira and Khartoum) while people in the rest of the country continued to live in their old established traditional ways. This dual economic system has created the state of marginalized areas; inadequate physical infrastructure which linked the production areas to consumers areas (cities); inadequate financial infrastructure; high level of unemployment; increasing in the taxes, and uncontrollable inflation, which was severely felt in rural Dar fur and other marginalized areas in Sudan that lacked the essential services such as schools, roads, and hospitals.

Thanks to the NIF regime rule since 1989, the Sudan is now a class society. The intensified exploitation of the countryside and appearance of a class of extremely wealthy merchants and bureaucrats side by side with the disintegration of the traditional economy and the appearance of a broad sector of town poor have found expression in the ideological and political field. Someone might ask what is the role of the Sudanese intellectuals and elites? Are they contributing in this crisis? Quite obviously the answer is not the easy one. Perhaps the answer lies in the following quotation from Dr Mansour Khalid who wrote that “Sudan has lacked leadership endowed with a sense of history, intellectual integrity, and a spirit of toleration needed to ensure that the rights of one ethnic group are not purchased at the expense of another.”

The bottom line in the present Dar Fur crisis is economic deprivation. On the other hand, talking about the exploitation of the Dar fur by the center without due regard to the equally dispossessed and marginalized of some parts of Sudan (East, Blue Nile, and South) places the issue in a wrong context. Equally justifying the impoverishment of the Dar fur by saying that some parts of the Sudan are also impoverished is again placing the issue in the wrong context. Sudan’s economic plight is how to achieve equitable development in a country where the urban elite is favored against the rural populace. Therefore the whole national economy needs to be restructured to end entrenched privileges and adjust disequilibriums.

The political dimensions of the conflict From political and historical perspectives, in 1874 Dar fur was an autonomous state with strong roots in to the traditional and political state (1445-1874). After the end of the Mahdist revolution in 1898 until 1916 Dar fur was again established as an independent state. In other words, Dar fur joined Sudan after the death of sultan Ali Dinar in 1916. So what happen to this long history? Who was responsible for the disappearance of this history? Where are we now?

Dar Furians attribute the development of the modern political history of Dar fur to two political Dar Furian figures, namely Ahmed Diraige and Dr Ali Elhaj, who were regarded as the founders of the first Dar Furian political identity (the Sunni organization) after the independence.

It was thought that the new organization that the two leaders pioneered would have become a great and strong organization which would unite all Dar furians and further their political aspirations and identity. Unfortunately the two gentlemen dissolved the organization, and joined the Umma and Muslim Brothers parties. History books on Dar Fur tell us nothing substantive about the disappearance of the Sunni organization or why the leaders decided to dissolve it. However, Dar Furian elders believe that some of those early Dar Furian elites were “bought by Jalaba political leaders and parties for personal gains” and recently some are said to be “hiding in Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to reproduce NIF era in Dar fur”.

On the external front, the recent developments in Dar fur have complicated the relationship between Chad and the Sudan. The main reason for this is that Chad’s current government with President Idriss Deby is to a large extent dependent on support from the Zaghawa people whose homeland straddles the border between Dar fur and Chad. The Zaghawas are also well represented in the JEM and Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) which puts pressure on Deby to sympathize with their cause. But Chad is a weak state and is dependent on support from stronger Sudan. So what are we expecting Deby to do in such a delicate situation? Bear in mind that, the NIF supports the rebels in East of Chad to overthrow the Deby government. It would seem that in such a situation the neutral role for Deby would no longer help. Given the fact that thousands of refugees have entered Chadian territory is of course something that needs political action from Deby side or he will face the music.

On the other side, Libya has had its own agenda for a long time in Dar Fur. Some claim that it is the Libyan political agitation that has led to the increased focus on the divide between Arabs and non Arabs in Dar fur (The Green land of Dar fur). The impact of these external factors in Dar Fur conflict, namely, the role of Chad and Libya, has in many ways escalated the crisis. However, we could add another potential element and that is the oil conflict between China and US in Sudan.

Dar fur reaction; the liberation philosophy

What is the philosophy of the Liberation for the Dar Furians struggle? To attempt to answer part of this question, one would argue that the possibility of secession of the South from North was to large extent the main fear of the other marginalized areas, which prompted them to take up arms, including Dar Furians. However, the majority of southern politicians and the public have never considered secession as the only and ultimate viable solution to the South-North conflict. Many knowledgeable Southern Sudanese are quite aware that the factors underlying this conflict are those of all underprivileged regions of the Sudan. It is clear that the exploitative relationship between the central region of the Sudan and the underprivileged peripheries is a situation that cannot be resolved in the benefit of all the Sudanese people through secession without risking dividing the Sudan into several tiny states, which will create more conflicts, who knows how long they might last or how many more victims?

From the manifestos of the Dar Furian movements (SLA/M, JEM) they have vindicated that they haven’t taken arms for secession from the rest of Sudan, rather, they are fighting for redistribution of power and national resources. In other words, justice should be prevailed for all the Sudanese.

As far as the conflict in Dar fur is concerned, there are a pile of questions to ask: Why are brothers, the so-called Janjaweed fighting against their brothers in Darfur? Who is benefiting from this fighting by proxy? They are all poor, without schools, roads, and hospitals.

In principle the Dar Furians should unite and confront NIF regime, and not fighting themselves by proxy to add more instability in the area. Fighting among themselves means many people will be killed, and many more will be displaced from both sides. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said “when the white man came here, he gave us the book (Bible) and he took the lands”.

At the national level, the peripheries should organize themselves to work together for the benefit of all marginalized in the country. In this regard, the role of the post-CPA Southern Sudan in helping Dar Fur and Eastern Sudan to resolve their conflicts is an obligation that the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) must carry out. There is a broad consensus that there can be no comprehensive peace in Sudan without settlement of Dar fur conflict. Then if this is the case the peripheries must unite today before tomorrow, to create what I called “United Democratic States of the New Sudan, (UDSNS)” that consists of Dar Fur + South+ East and any marginalized area that is affiliated to this ideology.

What should be done?

In the short and medium terms, I suggest multi-pronged process in the Dar fur.

First, whatever the level of civilian support enjoyed by militias, it would be a mistake to punish the communities with the sins of the particular militia they support. Instead, every effort should be made to neutralize or re-organize or disarm the militia and stabilize communities in Dar fur through local initiatives. This means both a civic conference of all communities - those identified as Arab and those as African - and reorganized civil defense forces of all communities. This may need to be done under the protective and supervisory umbrella of an African Union with full support, preferably by South African troops or United Nations policing force.

Second, priority should be to allow people to return to their homes in safety and in dignity. But this process must be entirely voluntary. The indigenous conflict-resolution mechanisms, through which tensions over resources were handled such as land and water, can also play a role in short and long term reconciliation processes.

Third, as a prerequisite for peaceful co-existence among the Dar Furians efforts should be made to support the culture of peace, of a rule of law and of a system of political accountability. It will require creating the conditions for a reorganized civil administration in Dar fur in order to engage with the people in the ground.

Fourth, of particular importance is to recognize that the international community has created an institution called the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try individuals for the most heinous crimes, such as genocide, war crimes and systematic rights abuses that prosecutions should follow. The parties to the conflict in Dar Fur are therefore reminded that the ICC has this mandate, should it becomes necessary that some of the parties to the conflict are involved in these crimes, and should come before the court whether in Pretoria or Alaska it does not matter the place.

Fifth, for the African Union, Dar fur is both an opportunity and a test. The opportunity is to build on the global concern over a humanitarian disaster in Dar fur to set a humanitarian standard that must be observed by all. And the test is to defend African sovereignty in the face of official America's global 'war on terror.' The first priority must be to stop the war and push the peace process.

Concluding observations

In order for the Sudan to progress towards a peaceful solution to the central- periphery conflict, we must bridge the rift. Some NIF political leaders should realize by now that numerical superiority of those who believe in Arabism, Islamism and the control of the country’s political and economic institutions does not necessarily give them the leverage to impose their will on the people of peripheries as the South and Dar fur conflicts have revealed. The Sudan is a pluralistic society. Peace, unity, and national prosperity can be achieved only if “Unity in diversity” is institutionalized within the framework of democratic principles.

In the final analysis, Sudanese political leaders have to make meaningful adjustments to their normative views of the future of the Sudan, and most importantly, be honest enough with themselves and the public at large to admit the need for radical, constructive changes, and then be able to expose the ugly pus very fully to the air.

-- Abu Saadia holds two Masters Degrees in developmental Management from University of Bochum, Germany and University of Western Cape, South Africa and currently resides in Pretoria – South Africa. Can be reached through

Immigrants' Rights: The Los Angeles Demonstration

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:16:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:51 am

The over half a million immigrants rights supporters who rallied in Los Angeles March 25 sent their fellow American people, and their government a clear message: We are Americans, we are workers who build up this economy and society, we are not terrorists nor criminals, we deserve justice and equality with legalization! ****Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in the march sent these messages on their white tee shirts, on placards, carrying banners and American flags, with chants as well as roaring cheers for the speeches of grass roots, labor, political and religious leaders.

The march and rally were timed to precede Senate debate on immigration policy starting March 27 where Republican proposals for severe repressive measures and restrictive programs are being opposed by growing numbers of labor community coalition which has been drawing in leading Democrats and some Republicans, religious, some business groups and a growing number of Democrats.

The earnestness of the message was embodied in the character of the marchers, they came hours early, and hundreds of thousands were already there at the 10am assembly time. They came as community, whole families came many with infants in strollers as well as their grandparents, and others came in groups of coworkers and neighbors. Over two thirds wore white as a symbol of peaceful advocacy for their rights as requested by organizers. The American flag predominated; some carried it along with their former homelands’ like of Mexico, El Salvador, and other many other countries. They carried themselves with the dignity they want from their government and the American people. There were no alcoholic beverages, people were so solidly pressed together that tobacco was virtually absent. No arrests were made

The march was called to oppose HR 4437 that criminalizes undocumented workers as well as the family, neighbors, employers, clergy, teachers and others who provide them with service and assistance. Also called for was pro immigrant comprehensive immigration reform and the clear demand was for permanent residency with a path to citizenship. Strong opposition was shown to temporary worker programs with unequal rights with no path to citizenship as proposed by President Bush.

“I am an American, we are American, we are here today and will not go away” said Gloria Saucedo, president of Hermandad Mexicana of the San Fernando Valley to the thundering cheers of the multitude.

California State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez said, “we are a community looking for justice, we want permanent residency, this week President Bush and Congress can decide whether to open their arms...or turn their backs on our beautiful community.” Nunez referred to the scheduled Senate debate and votes on immigration the week of March 27.

Father Mike Kennedy Pastor of Dolores Mission Catholic Church in Los Angeles spoke of the Catholic Conference of Bishops support for immigrant rights. He said that the anti immigrant proposals in Congress “are sinful...we need an amnesty.”

“Bush and Congress we will not allow you to treat us as modern slaves we want a path to citizenship said Angela Sanbrano Director of the Central American Resource Center.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigoza declared to cheers “We are here as one family” seeking legalization as part of the “American Dream, we are not illegal we are workers.”

Emcee Juan Jose Gutierrez asked the crowd “those opposed to Bracero (oppressive temporary) programs raise your hands, hundreds of thousands raised their hands.

“Hoy Marchamos Manana Votamos (Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote) and Hoy Marchamos Manana Boicoteamos (Today We March Tomorrow we Boycott). “Were the slogans the whole crowd chanted to let government and business leaders know that national political and economic actions were key ways for the immigrant rights movement in the coming days.

Maria Elena Durazo, leader of the 800,000 members Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said the nations labor movement was “entirely behind you”. Labor union members along with community activists lead the security for the march. Durazo was joined by SEIU local 1877 President Mike Garcia in labor openness, where appropriate, to work stoppages as a form of pressure for immigrants rights.

California congresspersons Hilda Solis (D) and Linda Sanchez (D (D) said they were struggling hard against the anti immigrant measures of Republican leaders, Solis got rousing cheer when she told the crowd “we are fighting struggling in Congress help us in the elections!

The March 25 Los Angeles mass demonstration, was the largest in other mass immigration rights demonstrations during the week in Milwaukee, Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, New Jersey. On March 24 thousands of students in the Los Angeles area walked out of school Continued demonstrations are coming, the first was March 26 in Los Angeles where some 2000 members of the United Farm workers Union joined by another 2000 supporters to a rally and mass commemorating the birthday of Cesar Chavez by calling for immigrant rights.

Dolores Huerta, a cofounder of the UFW with Chavez said the farm workers would picket and demonstrate at the offices of every Republican politician in California if the Republican leadership moves forward with anti immigrant legislation.****Rep. Howard Berman (D CA) a veteran of the House Judiciary Committee said that it would be possible to pass an acceptable comprehensive reform bill in the House, overturning the previous vote on HR 4437, with continued pressure.****Bishop Mary Ann Swenson of the United Methodist Church California-Pacific Conference. Told the Chavez birthday celebration “we need an open policy, open minds, open hearts and open borders.”

From The North Star Bulletin

Book Review: The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:08:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:43 am

The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism

Edited by Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2003

The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism is an important collection of essays on Italian American working-class history. Generally perceived as conservative, Italian Americans have a lengthy and influential record of radical working-class activity. According to the editors, this conservative image, fueled by media stereotypes, presents Italian Americans as 'hostile to political, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.'

The radical history of Italian Americans is often ignored by people in that community because it is deemed 'somehow too Italian and not sufficiently American' for fear that this history 'deviated from the norms of dominant society.' In the view of the editors, distorting or ignoring this history 'increase[s] the community’s vulnerability' by eliminating a rich history of socialists, anarchists, communists and civil rights activists who sought solidarity and equality of all working-class people.

Often prominent Italian American figures and organizations led the way in erasing this past and pushing a conservative image. They emphasized a historical narrative, say the editors, of Italian American history that ignored politics and insists that Italian Americans have no need for ideology or struggle for society-wide equality. A recovery of this history is needed, argue the editors, in order to tell the truth about Italian Americans and to re-inspire the community to reclaim its long tradition of political activism.

This book emerged out of a 1997 academic conference on Italian American radicalism and includes essays by prominent scholars such as Rudolph J. Vecoli, Jennifer Guglielmo , Fred Gardaphe, and Donna K. Gabaccia.

Vecoli’s essay provides a broad picture of the forging of Italian American working class radicalism and its early demise in the first half of the 20th century. Vecoli notes the eagerness with which Italian immigrants joined the US labor movement in the first decades of the century. Italian radicals, moved by the Russian Revolution, urged 'the uprising of the American working class.' Left-wing figures such as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were persecuted for their involvement in workers’ struggles. And by the Depression-era and the founding of industrial unionism, Italian American workers 'participated in unions and labor struggles on a larger scale than ever before.'

Vecoli catalogs a number of factors, both domestic and transnational, that affected the early demise of this radical ferment. Political repression in the US leading to deportations of Italian American radical leaders was one major factor. Another was the rise of fascism in Italy. Italian American organizations like the Order Sons of Italy in America promoted support for fascist Italy and rejected their previously pro-labor positions. (Vecoli notes, in contrast to this, that Italian American radicals were among the leading figures in the anti-fascist movement.) The rise of gangsterism in working-class institutions, a phenomenon spearheaded by Irish and Jewish criminal elements and taken up by some well-known Italian American individuals, writes Vecoli, also contributed to the decline of radical activism in the community. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, McCarthyism and anti-labor laws severely curtailed left elements and pushed conservative working class figures to the foreground.

Most important, perhaps, was the issue of racism. Like other European immigrant communities, Italian Americans were racialized in the US as white. This process, both a result of existing racist practices and institutions in the US and of pro-fascist attitudes among Italian immigrants and Italian American communities, according to Vecoli, receives further examination by Jennifer Guglielmo.

Guglielmo, co-editor of another book titled Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America, points out that by the 1940s with the decline of radical leadership and activism in the Italian American community, like many other European immigrant communities, Italian American workers had begun 'to insist on their whiteness, entitling them to privileged political rights, better-paying jobs, and leadership of the union.' Guglielmo goes on to add that they 'did so by practicing and institutionalizing policies of racialized exclusion in the union and industry.' Thus white identity for many Italian American workers came as a result of their direct attack on the equal democratic rights of non-white workers.

Fred Gardaphe’s essay works toward recovering the left tradition among Italian American writers. Gardaphe looks briefly at the works of such figures as Communist Party founder Louis Fraina (Lewis Corey), Communist Party member and author of the proletarian novel, Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato, pro-working class writer Jerre Mangione, anti-fascist biographer Frances Winwar, pro-Communist novelist and McCarthyite witch hunt victim Carl Marzani, and writer Angello Pelligrini as well as a score of other radical poets, novelists, artists and essayists.

Immigrant historian Donna K. Gabaccia closes the book with an interesting essay that argues essentially that none of this history was inevitable or the result of inherent cultural or racial characteristics of Italians or Italian Americans. Rather, the trajectory of the history of Italian Americans resulted from the domestic and global contexts in which it occurred. 'Capitalism,' Gabaccia concludes, 'class, politics, and the state were not trivial players in the making of Italian Americans, or in the making of Italian American ethnicity. They determined Italian Americans’ losses, restricted their choices, and made them – along with Italian American studies – what they are today.'

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Veterans Affairs Nurses, AFGE Advocate for Increased Staffing and Improved Care

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:04:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:39 am

Chronic under-funding of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), insufficient staffing levels, poor compensation and mandatory overtime are just a few of the issues causing a patient care crisis within the VA says the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union representing VA nurses. To confront the growing crisis, AFGE recently joined RNs Working Together, a coalition of AFL-CIO unions tasked with coordinating organizing and bargaining activities to improve patient care nationally and give nurses a strong voice in fixing health care systems in the public and private sectors.

'As VA nurses struggle to care for the nation's veterans, this new structure will allow unions to pool our resources, leading to more aggressive legislative, political and bargaining activities that will benefit nurses and challenge the way the government and the health care industry treat some of its most valuable resources,' says AFGE National Vice President Jane Nygaard.

RNs Working Together is an Industrial Coordinating Committee (ICC), a new structure that is designed to foster common strategies and practices for unions within a given industry. Unions that agree to join ICCs will receive additional support from the labor federation. AFL-CIO unions that do not join the ICC will be prohibited from organizing in that industry.

'VA nurses constantly tell us that low staffing levels top their list of concerns,' says Nygaard. 'VA nurses are being forced to take care of too many patients at one time. If you talk to nurses around the country, most will tell you that understaffing is driving nurses out of the profession and having a negative impact on the quality of patient care.'

VA nurses are especially concerned about staffing levels due to the growing number of injured veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the needs of a growing older veterans population. Despite this, the administration's fiscal 2007 budget contains no boost in nursing home funding and actually includes a 13 percent funding cut for veterans' programs by the year 2011.

'Once again the administration has proposed a 'smoke and mirrors' budget,' says Nygaard. 'The new budget is based on unproven management efficiencies, overly optimistic collection rates, and dead-on-arrival proposals for increased drug co-pays and enrollment fees. Our veterans deserve better.'

Additionally, recent studies have revealed a clear link between staffing shortages, overworked nurses and patient care. According to a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing study, 20,000 people die each year because they checked into a hospital with overworked nurses. The study also found that Americans scheduled for routine surgeries run a 31 percent greater risk of dying if they are admitted to a hospital with a severe shortage of nurses. Staffing shortages also are leading to more mandatory overtime for already overworked nurses, high turnover rates and recruiting problems.

'Increasing the pay for nurses would go a long way toward increased recruiting and retention,' says Nygaard. 'However, when the administration refuses to properly fund the VA, we are back to square one and that means that veterans won't get the care they need or deserve. VA nurses are extremely concerned about the persistent wear and tear on the VA health care system, which both parallels and affects all U.S. health care systems. If something isn't done soon, both the public and private sector systems will be broken beyond repair and this country can't afford to let that happen.'

The eight unions that comprise RNs Working Together are AFGE, United American Nurses, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Federation of Teachers, Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers, Office and Professional Employees International Union, and United Auto Workers.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 600,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.

From American Federation of Government Employees

A Profile of Philip Bonosky, Proletarian Novelist

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 01:54:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:29 am

After he had an article published in Collier’s magazine, Philip Bonosky returned to Duquesne, Pennsylvania, the steel town where he had grown up. A fellow worker had shown his father the article, and few working class people in the town had ever had anything published. In a recent conversation, Bonosky told me that his mother, who spoke Lithuanian and had been cook and housekeeper, never talking much about anything, now came to him and sang him a song in Lithuanian – a song about the suffering of immigrants. He was a writer, she said, and she wanted him to write for her, for the immigrants for the people who could often neither write nor read.

The notion of the role of a writer that Bonosky’s mother conveyed was different than the ideal of 'modernist' subjectivist literature, writing for yourself, and impressing others with your imagination that even then was being championed by establishment literary critics. As the modern working class developed with the rise of industrial capitalism, first in Europe and North America in the 19th century, workers fought for literacy and education, traditionally the privileges of ruling classes and their servants. Capitalists needed a workforce with basic skills, but not workers that would think for themselves. As mass literacy developed, capitalist societies produced a popular media and literature. Both were commercial, formalist, escapist and either denied the existence of working-class life or portrayed it in the most sordid terms, as most movies and television programs continue to do today.

However, there were writers who sought to explore capitalist class relations and understand through fiction the lives of working people. Called realists, they included the 19th century French writers Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, the 20th century US writers Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Jack London and many others.

After the Soviet Revolution, working class literature, there called socialist realist literature, became the center of art and culture in a country whose diverse peoples, particularly in the countryside, were largely illiterate. Just as the class struggle between the capitalist system and the socialist world movement reached a higher level with the establishment of the Soviet Union, the war over art and literature, over its exchange and use value, reached a higher level in the 1920s and 1930s.

'Proletarian literature' or 'social realist' literature flourished in the US and other developed countries not under fascist control in the 1930s and 1940s. Such literature was literally publicly burned by the Nazis when they took power in Germany in 1933. It came under relentless attack as 'inferior,' 'party line,' and 'agit-prop,' by elitist conservatives and various rivals of the Communist movement on the left. As one example, the Partisan Review, a magazine originally founded to promote working-class literature in the 1930s, soon shifted editorial views and advanced what one might call anti-realist writers and artists, those who took the 'arts for arts sake' philosophy of the conservatives and turned it into subjectivist expression, action without content, language and situations that shocked for the sake of shocking, became the darlings of the critics, right, left and center, who formed an 'anti-Social-Realist United Front' in the cold war era. By the Cold War period, Partisan Review was aligned with the US government-funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

In the midst of this ferment, Philip Bonosky was a proletarian writer. Growing up in an immigrant steelworker family in Western Pennsylvania, he got himself a library card for the children’s division of the local Carnegie library at age five. (Andrew Carnegie fancied himself a benefactor of the workers his steel company exploited and endowed libraries to improve his image.)

Bonosky published a poem in his school newspaper at the age of ten, which led to his becoming 'joke editor' of the newspaper. He later recalled that an African American student whom he got his first joke from really was denied the position, an early introduction to the pervasive racism of the society.

Eventually he got his adult card at the Carnegie library and began to read journals like the Nation, the New Republic and the Bookman, liberal journals, which, at the time, constantly criticized Communist actions without explaining their positions. This made him interested in what Communists had to say. He became high school class poet, but there wasn’t much of a future for a working-class youth outside of the mines and the mills, and the coming of the depression took away even that future. Bonosky realized that there had to be a deeper answer to what was happening beyond denouncing Herbert Hoover and demanding help, which his family and most working people were doing.

Bonosky joined large numbers of unemployed youth to ride the rails in the early 1930s, and eventually found himself in Washington, DC, living in a warehouse for transients that the early Roosevelt administration had provided. He already a had strong interest in the left and Communist movements, in the steel town from which he came. No one would openly proclaim themselves to be Communists because of the likely results – firing and blacklisting at best, terroristic company violence at worst. In Washington he met Communists and others seeking to organize working class struggle.

Like a hero in a Charles Dickens novel, Bonosky then met a 'patron,' a progressive social worker named Ann Terry White. (Ironically, White was the wife of Harry Dexter White, a prominent New Dealer, vilified to this day as a Communist and Soviet agent, even though he was the chief US negotiator at the Bretton Woods Conference creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). White helped Bonosky first get into Wilson College in DC (a free college) and then into a small job with the New Deal’s resettlement administration.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Bonosky wanted to join the anti-fascist brigades, but his attempts to get a visa from the State Department failed. He formally joined the Communist Party USA in 1938, which had organzied the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and led most anti-fascist activities.

As a local leader of the Workers’ Alliance in Washington, D.C., which represented workers in the major New Deal relief program, Works Progress Administration (WPA), Bonosky, along with other local leaders, met with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House to discuss the administration’s cuts in WPA programs. He later participated in a public forum on the issue where Mrs. Roosevelt and he were on opposite sides. Subsequently, she gave him a check for $50s for the Workers’ Alliance and told him keep her gift a secret, itself a comment on the tenuous but productive center-left politics of the New Deal era. Bonosky never cashed the check because he did not have a bank account. Of course, few working-class people, not to mention Communists, ever, before or after, were invited to have tea with the First Lady in the White House.

Red-baiting was always a part of the world that Bonosky knew even in the best of times. Even before the Cold War, the State Department discriminated against anti-fascists, and right-wing vigilantes used the press and congressional committees to attack the left and purge New Deal agencies. The onset of the Cold War, however, gave it much more virulent form as 'new' Cold War liberal Democrats joined Southern segregationists and Republicans to support legislation that repress the CPUSA and intimidate all potential allies on the left.

By this time, Bonosky was an open Communist. But keeping one’s membership a secret was no guarantee of safety. He recalled that red-baiters particularly targeted both those who were not open members along with CPUSA leaders whom they sought to imprison.

During the Cold War, his writing and publications flourished. The Burning Valley, rediscovered today as a major proletarian novel, was published in 1953. Its story deals with workers’ struggles in the Pennsylvania coal fields. The Burning Valley was reprinted in 1998 as part of The Radical Novel Reconsidered Series, published by the University of Illinois Press. A number of novels authored by current and former members of the Communist Party were also re-published as part of this series. The Magic Fern, published in 1960, is a less appreciated and perhaps more significant work. It tells the story of steel workers’ organizing struggles in Pennsylvania. It openly talks about the role of Communist Party members in those struggles and responds to Cold War hysteria by showing how anti-Communism divides and weakens the workers’ movements. Unfortunately, this novel has yet to be reprinted. Bonosky also wrote a major non-fiction work, Brother Bill McKie, a biography of the remarkable Communist trade unionist and UAW founder.

Government agents stepped up their efforts to spy on Americans during the Cold war. Communist and left publications of all sorts lost large numbers of subscribers when it became known that federal, state and local police agencies stole or unscrupulously acquired subscriber lists. Just as workers in the pre-New Deal period had the 'right' to form unions and employers had the right to use blacklists and break those unions, so in the Cold War period the CPUSA remained 'legal' (though many of its leaders were imprisoned), and people had the 'right' to read Communist and left publications, even though subscribing or even being seen with those publications might led to police home visits, loss of jobs, and blacklisting.

After a decade of such actions, the official story in the US became that the Communist Party, left trade unionism and proletarian literature and the working class itself had 'ceased to exist' and US society had been transformed into a de-politicized suburban utopia, or dystopia, depending on how you look at it.

Bonosky refused to become a political turncoat or drop out into obscurity in the long period of political repression that followed World War II. Rather than a hindrance, his Communist Party commitment enabled him to continue to grow as a writer and an activist, to travel widely in the socialist countries, and reach an international audience. Still, most US critics treated him exactly the way they asserted the Communists treated all writers who didn’t toe the party line.

During the Cold War period particularly, both establishment and 'loyal left opposition' (found in journals like The Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary) critics either celebrated repentant ex-Communist writers or looked favorably on those who gave up on politics or social content in their work. One should remember that the CIA’s first great moment as an impresario in the arts was the funding of the publication of a book titled The God That Failed, a collection of remembrances of former Communist writers, edited by the British laborite Richard Crossman. CIA sources funded its translation into many languages as well. Also, the CIA helped fund the creation of the World Congress for Cultural Freedom as well as various cultural journals of the 'democratic left' through the world to fight Communist and anti-imperialist writers, artists and organizations. George Orwell’s 1984, which gave the world such terms as 'unperson,' 'thought police,' and 'newspeak' were also disseminated globally by CIA connected sources at the same time that they used these 'Orwellian' methods on Communist and left writers who refused to toe the 'anti-party line' in the United States. At the height of domestic cold war repression, Bonosky joined with Charles Humboldt, Annette Rubenstein, Herbert Aptheker, Walter Lowenfels and others to publish Mainstream, a left journal of the arts which continued the people’s art and culture traditions of the New Masses. At this time, Bonsoky directed a Harlem writers workshop which included John Oliver Killens, Alice Childress, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry and Lonnie Elder III, along with other men and women who would become prominent in African American literature and theater in the postwar era. This was at a time when the publishing venues available for African American and women poets and writers were still severely restricted.

One of Mainstream’s important contributions was to nurture African American writers and artists along with educating readers about the cultural dimension of the global struggle against imperialism and for peace, which was the world’s 'mainstream' in the 1950s, however much US cold warriors may have denied it.

Unfortunately Mainstream has never really gotten the recognition it deserves for this still largely unwritten history. In research for this article, I found a tender tribute from Robin Washington in a Duluth newspaper. Washington’s father, an African American poet, had hoped to publish his poetry based on his experience in World War II with the help of a recommendation from Robert Frost. After a tangled series of events, the publication fell through and his father returned to business, never really getting the chance to write and publish the poetry that was his first love. Following his father’s death, Robin Washington accidentally threw out his father’s manuscript, and really was mortified. But, with the help of the Internet, he was able to find that some of the poetry that had been published in Mainstream in 1960. It also reconnected Washington with his father and gave his father’s poetry a place in history.

Bonosky continued to write widely about the fate of US literature and his work is still quoted and cited in scholarly studies of US literature, particularly his analysis of the general corrupting effects of the Cold War, commercialism and contemporary imperialism. In 1983 he published a book titled Afghanistan: Washinton’s Secret War, which was based on his time in Afghanistan as the Moscow correspondent for the People’s World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA. It is an invaluable source for understanding the disasters that Reagan administration policy created first for the people of Afghanistan and then later for the people of the region and the US.

In the Afghanistan that Bonosky experienced in the 1980s, there were trade unions, schools for men and women and women without veils working in traditionally male-dominated jobs. The 'democracy' and attempts at 'modernization' that the Bush administration says it champions today were a reality. But Reagan and the first Bush administrations spent billions to arm and incite those who would become both the Taliban government and Al Qaeda in the service of overturning the Communist-led government there and to fight the Soviets that aided them.

Although Bonosky was born in 1916, when Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President on the phony slogan, 'he kept us out of war,' he remains active and optimistic today. While he still sees the working class largely missing in official US literature and culture and is dismayed by what he sees as an imperialist arrogance that has trickled down in the society, that is, everyone else has to 'learn' from the United States, he continues to see in the working class and in its literary tradition, one that Bonosky and many of his contemporaries share with Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, a road to freedom and eventually to socialism.

Although bourgeois literary criticism has long sought to add insult to HUAC-McCarthyite injury by contending that Bonosky and other proletarian writers and artists ceased to function after the 1950s, I discovered in my research for this article an amusing sidelight. Today there are Internet 'term paper mills' which sell term papers on every conceivable topic to students who then turn them in as their own. I found that someone can access a paper on the work of Philip Bonosky for a literature class, a sort of left-handed compliment from a capitalist system that will seek to literally profit from the work of those it cannot effectively silence.

Although he first began to write on butcher paper when he was a child, Bonosky’s pen, typewriter and word processor remain dedicated to providing a voice for the working class from which he came and whose interests he has dedicated himself to. In his lack of dogmatism and deep sensitivity to the diversity and dignity of working people, Philip Bonosky continues to be a model working class intellectual and artist.

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

The Immigration Bomb Explodes

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 01:48:00 +0000

3-30-06, 8:23 am

Rarely have U.S.-Mexican relations received the sort of public scrutiny that the currently raging immigration debate is now attracting. But the problem, fostered by years of diplomatic indolence and half-measures, now demands an approach that boldly confronts associated problems on both sides of the border, if a sustainable path forward is to be found. Although Thursday’s summit among Canadian Prime Minister Harper, and Presidents Bush and Fox in Cancún, will likely be dominated by talk of immigration plans, these are unlikely to produce a major agreement, let alone a breakthrough.

A Long Stewing Issue

The immigration issue has been propelled to the forefront of public debate in recent weeks. A harsh House bill that included the incendiary proposal to construct a nearly 700-mile long border wall helped incite a wave of protests, which culminated in a 500,000-strong march in Los Angeles on March 26. Further raising the issue’s profile has been the unchecked wave of drug and gang violence in Northern Mexico, which has prompted concerns pertaining to spillover and the thought that the wall might come to be defended as serving the dual purpose of blocking both migrants and drugs. With the topic of immigration now becoming the key election season issue in many U.S. border areas as well as further inland, the debate has often veered from measured approaches towards reckless policies.

Overall, the current debate largely lacks the required degree of depth or relevance. Illegal immigration to this country is not a new phenomenon, yet it has never been addressed with consistent and comprehensive policies. Successive administrations have pursued policies that sought to interdict migrants at the border, but permitted almost non-existent enforcement of hiring practices throughout the rest of the country. And even the front lines were thinly manned: last March Bush proposed hiring only a tenth of the 2000 new border patrol agents he had originally sought in a 2004 intelligence bill. This was not unintentional, as the steady stream of cheap labor proved beneficial for employers and consumers alike, and such easy alternate solutions proved irresistible for White House staffers. Labor unions appreciated the new recruits, and accepted that while there was no shortage of labor in the country, there was an insatiable market for cheap, disposable labor. A push-pull equation was at work here, where illusion was substituted for the facts on the ground which told the story that if you made it over the border – and nearly all those who survived to persist in their efforts eventually did – there was virtually no likelihood that you would be apprehended, because this was the way the Chamber of Commerce and its membership wanted it to be.

Moreover, when natural disasters struck Central America, creative policymakers chose to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to illegal migrants from the affected areas, substituting the remittances of those workers for large scale U.S. government aid, which the Bush administration wanted to avoid at all costs. In effect, illegal immigration was driven by demand and tolerated by politicians who found it more expedient to avoid the issue than to confront it.

The New Impulse

If illegal immigration had been a dirty secret in the past, it is now at the center of the U.S. political debate, and forces arrayed along the entire ideological spectrum have laid out proposals on the subject. Hard-right groups, such as the freelance border patrolling “Minutemen” (a band even President Bush referred to as “vigilantes”) and their legislative equivalents, Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), have failed to put forth anything approximating a rational proposal. Yet holding the middle ground has been a difficult task. The bill produced by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and backed by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ), is a constructive attempt at balance that has been hailed throughout Latin America as a positive step. But there is a rough legislative path ahead for such attempts at moderation. Even Senator Arlen Spector (R-PA), who voted in favor of the Judiciary Committee bill that eventually was approved by his committee, acknowledge that a fierce debate remains to be faced. The bill, which offers illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S. an inviting path to citizenship, has been blasted by right wing activists – including the Washington Times – as offering “amnesty.” Yet the bill’s proponents steer away from the dreaded “A” word, insisting that their version is something else. Tancredo has already vowed that the Senate Judiciary Committee’s measure would never pass the House.

A Border has Two Sides

A new impulse to tackle the immigration issue could offer a fresh opportunity for a more dignified reworking U.S.-Mexican bilateral relations, which previously were almost entirely based on the policies concerning the flow of migrants. But a balanced reform of U.S. labor and migration codes is only one step, with several others being of equal necessity. Conditions affecting emigration to the U.S. are perhaps the dominant domestic political issue in Mexico and Central America, and if the Bush administration successfully calls for the implementation of responsive, as well as effective reforms, it will go a long way towards repairing relations with the region.

Washington must still go further than that, however, and attempt to address the root causes that drive people to the difficult decision of migrating illegally. Disappointingly, the region’s historic underdevelopment has not been solved by a globalizing economy, and the lack of inclusive economic growth has become an endemic problem. The free trade accords that the Bush administration so tirelessly promotes do little to remedy such maladies, as both NAFTA and CAFTA-DR leave regional agricultural sectors profoundly vulnerable, as well as disadvantaged, in the face of robustly subsidized U.S. agro-business that enables Iowa to undersell Mexico when it comes to corn. Given that many illegal migrants originate from economically devastated rural areas in Mesoamerica, that these trade agreements that are not intrinsically win-win in their design will do little to rectify the underlying corrosive situation. While its proponents argue that free trade will stimulate the creation of industrial jobs, the resulting low-end maquiladora industries are unstable and ephemeral, frequently flee to China, and offer only poorly-paid employment with little hope of advancement – hardly a recipe for removing the incentives to emigrate.

Profiting from Privation

Mexico too must confront the immigration question and not wink and then throw up its hands. Since the Salinas administration, Mexican leaders have pursued ruinous policies that have helped lead the country’s traditional rural sector to collapse, encouraging the depopulation of the countryside in the hopes of promoting the establishment of large-scale agro-business. But that policy has failed to feed the country – Mexico remains a net food importer – and a carefully crafted “escape valve” for displaced rural workers put into place by Salinas and utilized by all Mexican presidents since, is now likely to be shut off. Furthermore, Mexican leaders have become reliant on remittances, which have surpassed oil revenues as the country’s most important economic inflow, and have allowed illegal migration to stand in for meaningful job creation and welfare at home.

There is much the Mexican government can do to encourage its citizens to remain in the country, and a resolution adopted by the Mexican congress in February recognizes that, noting that “a large number of Mexicans do not find in their own country an economic and social environment that facilitates their full development and well-being.” The document proposes incentives such as tax breaks for migrants building homes in Mexico, a “bilateral medical insurance system,” a plan which would allow immigrants in this country to receive their U.S. pension benefits in Mexico, and suggests reforms to the Labor and Social Development Ministries to encourage migrants to return to their homeland.

Enticing migrants back to the country may be one step, but ensuring inclusive long run economic growth that will eliminate the baleful factors of poverty and unemployment that drive illegal immigration in the first place is a larger challenge, and one which requires an examination of the country’s macroeconomic strategies. Instead of viewing illegal immigration as a convenient solution to a tough problem, Mexican policymakers must now overcome their chronic fatigue when it comes to solving that country’s persistent inability to ensure the basic welfare of its citizens. Cancún

The cresting public attention on the immigration issue coincides with tomorrow’s meeting between the leaders of the three NAFTA countries in Cancún, where the topic will be undeniably one of the two or three themes that are certain to dominate the discussion. The meeting is also something of a last gasp for lame duck President Fox, whose stature in office is dwindling at a faster tempo than the rapidly approaching July 2 elections. A reform of immigration policies was supposed to be Fox’s crowning achievement when he came into office in 2000, as the fresh start afforded by new administrations in both Mexico City and Washington seemed to offer a prime opportunity to hammer out a sweeping accord. But the September 11 attacks crushed that promise and diverted the Bush administration’s gaze from the needs of its southern neighbors. Since then, Fox has struggled to achieve progress on pressing domestic issues, faltering on such questions as security and employment. Additionally, Fox has accomplished almost nothing on pressing border issues, particularly reining in the out-of-control drug cartels, a step which would have helped calm tensions in the U.S. communities bordering Mexico.

At the Cancún reunion, a forlorn Fox will once again pose for photo ops with his fair-weather friend, the U.S. president, in the hollow hope that this time he will be gaining something more concrete in return. After a stint in the presidency that has left him as battered as the hurricane-ravaged Mexican host city, Fox is now in desperate need of a political trophy worthy of bolstering his sagging image and polish the truncated legacy he likely will leave behind amidst a round of deprecating laughter. And while the current attention on the immigration question would seem to make this a prime opportunity to negotiate an agreement, Fox lacks the momentum and his U.S. counterpart lacks the political capital to predictably achieve a successful resolution on the issue, making the summit encounter likely to once again promise far more than it’s able to deliver.

The hard truth is that Bush cannot credibly offer Fox much of anything, even if he was inclined to do so, as he simply does not control the high ground on immigration, as his right-wing base has rejected the more moderate policies that he has proposed and the left has its own problems with the issue. Yet a good faith effort, while not enough to salvage Fox’s legacy, would be a constructive step. And Bush – who in an exclusive interview with famed José Carreño, Washington correspondent of the highly regarded Mexico City daily El Universal, declared his openness to working with whoever wins Mexico’s July presidential election – could himself use some positive momentum coming from the south.

From Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Major Mobilization Set for April 29th, N.Y.: MARCH FOR PEACE, JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 03:36:00 +0000

03-29-06,10:09am

A war based on lies

Spying, corruption and attacks on civil liberties Katrina survivors abandoned by government

MARCH FOR PEACE, JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY

End the war in Iraq - Bring all our troops home now!

SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2006 NEW YORK CITY

Unite for change - let's turn our country around!

The times are urgent and we must act.

Too much is too wrong in this country. We have a foreign policy that is foreign to our core values, and domestic policies wreaking havoc at home. It's time for a change.

No more never-ending oil wars! Protect our civil liberties & immigrant rights. End illegal spying, government corruption and the subversion of our democracy. Rebuild our communities, starting with the Gulf Coast. Stop corporate subsidies and tax cuts for the wealthy while ignoring our basic needs. Act quickly to address the climate crisis and the accelerating destruction of our environment. Our message to the White House and to Congress is clear: Either stand with us or stand aside!

We are coming together to march, to vote, to speak out and to turn our country around!

Join us in New York City on Saturday, April 29th

Hunger strikers and supporters march against anti-immigrant bill

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:27:00 +0000

3-29-06, 9:03 am

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Hunger strikers and supporters, two of them in wheelchairs, headed a march of 5000 people in San Francisco, protesting bills in the US Congress which would criminalize immigrant status and violate the rights of immigrants.

--David Bacon, Photographs and Stories:

Fidel Castro Confirms Cuba will donate WBC Prize Money to Katrina victims

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:26:00 +0000

03-29-06,8:55am

The announcement arrived firm and in the voice of the leader of the Cuban Revolution. The money that the Cuban National Baseball Team will receive for finishing second in the World Baseball Classic will be donated to the victims of hurricane Katrina in the United States, exactly as was said by the Cuban authorities before the departure of the team two weeks earlier.

“That multiplies the moral of our athletes,” Fidel assured. He also informed that an equivalent amount of money, be it half a million, a million or more, will be assigned to improving for baseball in Cuba, without leaving aside other sports.

After having ended his speech at the celebration to honor the runners ups of the Classic, Fidel returned to the podium to comment about ideas, that he said are strictly sports related, because “I don’t want to mix politics with this historical event for baseball in the world,” he underscored.

Fidel also stated that he didn’t want to turn his words into an instrument to criticize professional baseball players or the Major Leagues. “Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Panama and the Dominican Republic behaved generously with Cuba, even when four Cubans tried to place some signs,” the leader of the Revolution reminded the audience.

When pointing to the fact that his greatest admiration for the team was for its firmness and serenity so as not to let themselves be provoked by such individuals in an event of a different nature, where a high degree of security was assured by the organizers, including the United States. “The shot backfired on them once again,” Fidel stated.

The second topic that he dealt with after returning to the microphones was related to the renovation and construction of new sports training schools, where facilities will be created for the practice of 22 different sports.

Fidel assured that the program is going well, and that soon news will be available in relation to what’s being done. Likewise, he reaffirmed that all athletes that have brought glory to this nation will have what they need to enjoy a dignified and wonderful life during their retirement.

The powerful empire stands informed that the ninth inning was already played, that we have runs to our advantage, and that we are the home club. On no field can they beat Cuba, the leader of the Cuban Revolution concluded.

Washington Guns after Castro at Any Cost

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:23:00 +0000

3-29-06, 8:58 am

In the face of a sweeping debt and budgetary crisis currently afflicting the U.S. economy, the passage of the FY 2006 budget witnessed a brutal bloodletting of vital domestic programs from education and child welfare to Medicaid. At the same time, Congress, at the White House’s passionate urging, allocated an additional $10 million to purchase a specially equipped aircraft to transmit the broadcasts of the long-standing anti-Castro media project, Radio and TV Martí. This figure comes on top of the $27 million the media operations already receive annually. Since its founding, the Martí concept has been a 'bridge to nowhere.' Nevertheless, almost half a billion dollars have been thrown away in the project.

As in the past, this year’s funds were routinely granted despite what have proven to be fatal weaknesses in the daily operations of Radio and TV Martí, namely no audience, no legitimacy, no professionalism – with the whole enterprise representing a colossal waste of taxpayer funds. The Martí operation’s most hard-hitting critics, including highly regarded neutral specialists, have not been able to persuade Congress to shut it down. In their evaluations, these critics allege that the whole venture is little better than a glaring boondoggle, which mainly serves as a propaganda machine spewing its tendentious product to a miniscule audience. It must be seen as little more than a custom made product to service the radical rightwing fringe of the Miami Cuban community, and a act as job-bank for unemployed ideologues within its fold.

As mentioned above, over the past 20 years, the highly criticized Martí operations have absorbed close to $500 million of public funds. This huge figure has generated a number of spirited attempts in Congress to cut – if not completely eliminate – Martí’s funding. But such initiatives have been stifled by thunderous recriminations and even open threats from Miami’s lethal politicians, led by Miami and Dade county’s rabidly rightwing Congressional delegation composed of the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The South Florida exile community has been able to purchase such pervasive influence as a result of years of working a brilliant strategy based on significant, but still relatively modest, financial largesse to both Republican and Democratic politicians. By means of this alchemistic process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in private campaign contributions to the White House and members of Congress are converted into hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds for programs enacted by Congress that are used to bankroll anti-Castro groups and which are aimed at destroying the Castro regime.

Thus, the continued funding of such a certifiably questionable project as the Martís in many ways reveals the long reach of Miami’s Cuban community into the U.S. legislative agenda. The political process has already witnessed its uncanny ability to convert carefully targeted campaign contributions into raw ideological, ineffectual hard-line projects aimed at deconstructing a Cuban society that is perpetually in Miami’s cross-hairs.

The shameful willingness of local and national politicians to bend their knees to South Florida’s financial backing, while egregiously pillaging the public treasury on its behalf, results in the squandering of hundreds of millions of dollars on worthless enterprises like Radio and TV Martí, while at the same time much-needed domestic social welfare programs are slashed or eliminated. This should be cause for national outrage.

From Council On Hemispheric Affairs

Australia: It’s now a crime to defend your rights at work

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:20:00 +0000

3-29-06, 8:55 am

The WorkChoices Act and the accompanying 400 plus pages of regulations criminalise legitimate trade union activity. They criminalise workers, union officials and trade unions for merely taking industrial action to defend their interests. Workers who take “illegal” industrial action face not only government fines but the possibility of being sued by employers and others affected, and risk losing their homes, cars and any savings.

Other “criminal acts” under the legislation carry even higher fines or jail sentences for non-compliance with orders. Wages are set to fall, jobs are even less secure and awards and enterprise agreements will be gutted. The Howard Government is deregulating the workforce – for the employers, and to do so workers and trade unions will be regulated as never before. Not just in what they cannot do; workers and union officials will also be gagged and subjected to visits from workplace inspectors.

Never before in Australia have there been so many prohibitions on workers and trade unions.

“These laws are an affront to basic Australian democratic rights. They impose harsh fines on Australian workers and unions simply for standing up for fundamental values like job security and fair treatment for employees”, said Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Greg Combet.

Employer bodies are licking their lips, ecstatic that the Howard Government has at last delivered on the next stage of their anti-worker, union-bashing agenda. “Unions can’t expect to use old fashioned industrial muscle to get around the legislative provisions of WorkChoices”, pronounced Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chief Executive Peter Hendy.

Monday, March 27 was Black Monday for trade unions, workers, their families and communities – the day when the legislation and regulations came into force. The Government has virtually outlawed all “old fashioned industrial muscle”, and the little industrial action that technically remains lawful places many hurdles in front of unions. Even if they can overcome these the Minister for Workplace Relations can intervene and render their action unlawful.

The devil is definitely in the detail, and while some aspects of the legislation will be felt very soon, there are others that will hit workers and unions in the face as time moves on.

The plan is for awards to wither away (it will be impossible to improve their provisions); to inhibit the ability for trade unions to negotiate collective agreements; and see individual employment contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements – AWAs) replace them.

Free hand for bosses

Employers with 100 or fewer workers will be able to sack workers, virtually at will – even for the reason that the boss does not like them personally. In larger workplaces they just have to say it is for operational reasons. A sacked worker seeking justice will have to pursue it through the court system – something beyond the means of all but the very wealthy. Forget it if you are a clerical, maritime, building or hospitality worker, electrician, mechanic, nurse, teacher, a shop assistant or any other worker. Your union might be able to help, but for how long? Unions have finite resources. One of the Government’s and employers’ aims is to bankrupt unions in the courts and with fines.

Bosses will be able to make signing an AWA a condition of employment for job applicants. It will be “sign or no job!” As for existing workers, there is nothing to stop an employer standing over individual workers demanding they sign away their conditions and accept lower wages with an AWA. A worker has the right to refuse, but this is a meaningless right if the worker is sacked for refusing.

Even when a workplace agreement has been signed, the employer is still free to sign up those covered by the agreement and any new employees to inferior AWAs. These AWAs override collective agreements and awards.

It is an offence for a worker to disclose to anyone, even other family members, the provisions of his or her AWA, or compare wages and conditions with other workers.

The only minimum requirements that AWAs must meet are the minimum wage and four other legislated provisions relating to leave and length of working week. The “no disadvantage test”, which compared an AWA with the award, has gone. The employer lodges the AWA with the Office of Employment Advocate. There will be no inspection or certification of the contents of the AWA by the Employment Advocate or anyone else. Employers simply have to certify that they have met their legal obligations! The contents remain secret.

Wages to fall

The minimum wage under this legislation is a farce. The Government’s guarantee that the minimum adult full-time wage will never fall below $12.75 an hour is meaningless. Employers will be able to vary the wage paid over a year, as long as the average over that time span meets the minimum – what is known as “pay averaging”. Blind Freddie can see the obvious here: pay a worker $6 or $8 an hour for the first month or two – just say times are tough, orders low, etc. Later sack the worker with some other story of failed expectations. It won’t be hard to sack a worker – previous legislation which offered some protection has gone.

The worker has a right to pursue the under-payment, not in the Industrial Relations Commission, but through the court system just as one corporation would pursue another over disputed payments for goods or services. This is the Government’s concept of “fairness” and “justice”. The worker has Buckleys’ chance. As for the Industrial Relations Commission, its main role now is to police industrial action – or rather to prevent it. The Commission is required to report weekly to the Minister on specified matters coming before it. These include applications:

•to initiate, suspend or terminate enterprise bargaining periods

•to hold secret ballots on industrial action

•by union officials for right-of-entry permits to workplaces

•to initiate dispute resolution procedures.

“Prohibited content in agreements”

Any matter in an agreement that does not directly relate to the employment relationship between the employer and ALL persons employed is prohibited and will be unenforceable. Could this mean that paid maternity leave is unenforceable? It does not matter if the employer and workers agree on a provision – to even seek such a provision is illegal. Workers could be hit with $6,000 fines and unions fined $33,000 just for suggesting the inclusion of a prohibited matter. And to make sure employers do not show any sympathy for their workers, they can also be fined for any offence.

The penalties for other offences in relation to industrial action and failing to carry out orders of the Commission or breaching the Act in some other way are much heavier, including jail sentences.

The regulations contain a long list of “prohibited content”, and the Act provides for the Minister to add to that list as things arise that they have overlooked. It is now illegal to include in agreements provisions:

•prohibiting AWAs

•restricting the use of independent contractors and labour hire workers

•allowing for industrial action during the term of an agreement

•providing a remedy for unfair dismissal

•mandating union involvement in dispute resolution

•providing for union right of entry

•for trade union training leave

•for payroll deduction of union fees

•paid union meetings

•restricting on part-time and casual labour

and much more.

The WorkChoices legislation overrides the industrial reations legislation of the States where there is a conflict between the two sets of laws. It will affect training, apprenticeships and a whole host of other matters. The regulations remove current restrictions on training and apprenticeships under state awards, particularly on the length of apprenticeships to allow for much shorter training periods.

As for paid training during the boss’s time, this is “something which people are entitled to do in their own time. It is not part of the job they are doing”, said Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews.

Hurdles to prevent industrial action

Compulsory secret ballots are now required before industrial action is taken. The process has restrictions such as on who can vote, who can take action and for what reason. Such action is restricted to “bargaining periods” – after an existing agreement has expired, when a new agreement is being negotiated and providing there are no “prohibited contents” in the agreement.

Even if all the stringent requirements are met – by no means an easy task – anyone who is affected by the action can intervene and seek to have it halted. The Minister also has considerable powers to intervene.

If the action is deemed “protected” that means those taking the action cannot be sued by employers and third parties affected. But it does not prevent the employer sacking any of those workers or hiring scabs.

With the rights of union organisers and officials to enter workplaces reduced to almost nil if an employer is determined to keep them out, trying to organise members and meet the bureaucratic requirements for a ballot is no easy job.

The above are only a fraction of the detail in the Act and regulations. More information will be provided in future issues of The Guardian.

Defeat the legislation!

Defeat the Government!

The ACTU has re-launched its highly successful advertising campaign. Unions have been educating their members. They now have the difficult task of sifting through the hundreds of pages of the legislation and accompanying regulations. Tactics and campaigning for its defeat have to be worked out.

Local actions are on the rise such as the formation of Your Rights at Work Committees which bring together trade unions, community groups, political parties and individuals. The Inner Sydney Your Rights at Work Committee had a successful march and rally last Saturday (see page 4) and in Adelaide there was a protest outside Senator Minchin’s office on Black Monday.

The CPA is encouraging and participating in the formation of these committees and other groups to fight the legislation. If there is a group you know of near you then join it. If not, then why not get together with others and form a committee. The broader the opposition to Howard’s WorkChoices the stronger the movement.

There are many other ways of joining the campaign and building opposition to the new legislation – talkback radio, letters to the editor, leafleting, holding small meetings and inviting a Party or union speaker. Chat to others in the bank queue or on the bus or train.

Lobby your MPs and Senators. The hotter it gets for them, the better.

May Day is just over four weeks away and provides a great opportunity to show the Government and employers that the new laws are unacceptable. Begin organising now for May Day. A big turnout against this most vicious and dangerous attack on workers and trade unions in 100 years is essential.

From The Guardian

Leader of Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, pledges his organizations support for the Cuban Five

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:17:00 +0000

03-29-06,8:50am

Havana, 27th March, (RHC).- The Honorable Minister, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, at a meeting with the families of the Cuban Five, Saturday in the Palco Hotel, Havana, said in statements to Radio Havana Cuba that he and his organization will take an active part in seeking the release of the Cuban Five.

The event was organized to inform the Black Muslim leader and his African American delegation, who are in Cuba to meet with US students who are medical students at the Latin American School of Medicine as guests of the Cuban government, about the case of the Cuban Five. A screening of “Mission against Terror”, the documentary about the five Cuban political prisoners incarcerated in US prisons was presented to give the group some background knowledge about the case of the Five.

The short Cuban documentary “Ivette”, which features the seven year old daughter of Rene Gonzalez, one of the five, was also shown. After the presentations of the films, Bernie Dwyer and Roberto Ruiz, co-directors of “Mission against Terror” a Cuban/Irish co-production, answered questions about the making of the film and the reaction of US audiences during Dwyer’s recent tours of the United States.

The Nation of Islam leader and his delegation were visibly moved by the accounts of the wives and mothers of the five Cuban political prisoners of the emotional hardships suffered by them in the absence of their men folk. The women also recounted their difficulties in obtaining visas from the US authorities to visit to the United States to visit their husbands and sons.

After the meeting, in a short interview with Radio Havana Cuba, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan stated that he and his delegation had learnt from the presentation that the Cuban Five, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, René Gonzalez, Ramon Labanino and Fernando Gonzalez, were part of a group to infiltrate terrorist organizations within the Cuban community in the United States that were planning terrorist actions against the government and the people of Cuba.

He also said: “we have learnt of the horror of the legal system and the wickedness of those that have manipulated that system to put innocent people in jail. So we hope to learn more and do as much as we can to help those who are fighting to release the Cuban Five.

When asked if he sees any parallels between the attitudes of the US government to the Nation of Islam and its treatment of the Cuban Five, The Honorable Minister replied:

“There are always parallels between those who suffer injustice and the more that we find the ways to unite our efforts, the stronger will be our effort to free those who are in prison unjustly but the main thing is to establish justice”.

US Farrakhan Defends Cuba Havana, March 28 (PL).- US Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and his accompanying delegation are winding up Tuesday a visit to Cuba, after touring places of social, economic interest and meeting with local authorities.

During his stay on the island nation, Farrakhan urged the White House to exert justice for the five Cuban anti-terrorists illegally imprisoned in US jails.

He also slammed the US travel restrictions that keep Americans from visiting Cuba and called for lifting such arbitrary regulations. He said the Cuban Revolution’s original ideals are more humanist than any of the religions he is acquainted with.

When attending the radio-TV roundtable broadcast Monday, Farrakhan rejected George W. Bush’s warmongering policy, revealing that in 2001, he sent a letter to the president warning him about Iraq.

Shortly before concluding the program, the religious leader sent a message to Cubans, affirming the US people will love Cuba when the truth about it is fully known.

'The Cuban Revolution must be defended, as this is one of the richest nations regarding human nature and development,' the visitor stressed.

Effort needed for peaceful solution to Iranian nuclear issue

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:16:00 +0000

3-29-06, 8:51 am

The Iranian nuclear issue has come up for discussion at the U.N. Security Council which is capable of imposing sanctions. A serious effort is needed to solve the question peacefully and diplomatically.

Sovereignty and world's concern

Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran decided to resume activities in preparation for uranium enrichment last summer and restarted enrichment activities this year.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors adopted a resolution at its emergency meeting on February 4 expressing 'serious concerns' about Iran's nuclear program and stating its decision to report the issue to the UNSC.

The resolution urged Iran to 're-establish full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.' It is due to the 'absence of confidence that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes ... after nearly three years of intensive verification activity.' This is the period when Iran suspended its uranium enrichment activities.

The IAEA Board of Governors' regular meeting on March 8, according to the chair's summary statement, reconfirmed the finding on this issue and decided to report it to the UNSC.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty provides its parties, including Iran, with the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. This is what the Iranian government is claiming it is doing. However, Iran's failure to declare activities that might be related to the 'nuclear black market' has caused concerns in the international society.

Nuclear weapons can be made from highly-enriched uranium or plutonium extracted through the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Iran needs to accept IAEA verification and receive international understanding in order to make certain that its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

Problematic NPT structure

The IAEA resolution called on Iran to implement safeguards based on the NPT. Condoning the monopoly of nuclear weapons by the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China, the NPT imposes on them a non-proliferation obligation (Article I) to prevent other members from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The NPT is a discriminatory treaty in favor of the nuclear-weapons states.

The NPT is clearly problematic as the nuclear monopoly structure continues and the U.S. government practices 'double standards' to change its policy depending the party it deals with.

However, the emergence of a new nuclear weapons state cannot be justified for any reason. The NPT in Article VI states that 'each party to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith' for nuclear disarmament. What is needed now is efforts to eliminate the threat or use of nuclear weapons by nuclear weapons states, advance international negotiations for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and to turn this promise into a reality.

The Iranian nuclear question has been inflamed by media reports about U.S. plans to impose sanctions against Iran or attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

Iran has expressed its hope that negotiations will 'remove ambiguities that its nuclear activities remain peaceful' (Letter dated February 2, 2006, from the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council to the director general of the IAEA).

As the IAEA director general stressed, countries concerned should avoid the exchange of exaggerations and make every effort for a 'political solution.'

Intensification of tension must be avoided

Along with discussion in the U.N. Security Council, the IAEA will continue inspections and discussions, thus helping in the effort to bring about a peaceful and diplomatic solution.

It is strongly needed for the U.N. and the international society to avoid actions to further increase tensions in the region and solve Iran's nuclear question through peaceful negotiations.

From Akahata

MOZAMBIQUE: Trying to bridge human cost and economic benefit

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:49:00 +0000

03-29-06,8:20am

JOHANNESBURG, (IRIN) - A rights NGO has warned that a proposed a bridge across the Zambezi River in central Mozambique would not only bring economic prosperity to the region, but also pose a real threat of child prostitution and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The 2.3 km bridge connecting the towns of Caia in Sofala province and Chimuara in Zambezia would result in the influx of 'a large army of men without their wives and with money to spend, [which] has spread concern among many local adults and children,' said Chris McIvor, Mozambique programme director of Save the Children UK.

Caia and Chimuara are located in provinces with HIV/AIDS prevalence rates of more than 20 percent and a history of truck drivers exploiting women and children, which has heightened the concerns of health and social workers in the region, said Save the Children UK and its Norway-based counterpart.

Two years of research by the child rights organisation showed that weak family structures in the chronically poor communities along the Zambezi had created a 'particularly dangerous' environment for children.

After 14 years of peace, the towns have yet to recover from the impact of nearly two-decade long civil war that displaced thousands of families and undermined family and community support networks, said Save the Children in its report, 'A Bridge Across the Zambezi: What needs to be done for children?'

Researchers found that chronic poverty and food insecurity forced more than 70 percent of the region's children to work to help support their families; almost 40 percent suffered chronic malnutrition because they could only afford to eat one meal a day; they were vulnerable to abuse at the hands of outsiders brought in by infrastructure projects in the region and had been exploited in the past.

Girls aged between 14 and 17 had abandoned family and school to live with the staff of an electrification plant in Chimuara.

'At first, boys who went to the camps would do small jobs and run simple errands for the workers. The girls would often go and cook and clean there. Eventually, the girls were giving sexual services to the men for a bit of money. It is understood that girls have two responsibilities as domestic servants at the camps: cooking and cleaning, and sex work. There was no way to prevent girls visiting these camps. Where there are opportunities, the girls will go with the men,' the report quoted a local teenager as saying.

Most disturbing was the culture and prevalence of sexual abuse in the informal settlements or 'barracas' on the either side of the river. The ferry service across the river is generally overloaded, often causing truck drivers stay overnight at the barracas, which have developed into centres of child sex abuse and exploitation.

According to a 12-year-old girl quoted in the report, 'Many young girls in this area 'chat' with men. They get pregnant and make abortions here at the river. There is no playground here. Sometimes we play rope games, but some girls do not want to play and come to the river looking for men. They do not know how to use condoms and do not want to go to school.

'I came here with my father but I do not walk alone. Many people die here, maybe because of illnesses. There are young boys who are sent to look for young girls by adults. The men pay the boys 5 or 10,000 Meticais (less than 50 US cents) for finding them, depending on how fast they are. There is a beer party here every day - the men drink and get drunk and then sleep with girls. Sometimes they fight. They are going to die soon, but I do not want to die.'

Boys as young as 10 or 11 years live and work by the river; some attend primary school, but others have dropped out. 'As soon as I get up, at 6 in the morning, I wash dishes in the barraca of the boss, I sweep the yard and I sell fried fish. At night I go with those who drink and dance in the barraca - I go to sleep very late when it is busy. There is neither Saturday nor Sunday, all days are alike,' a 12-year-old boy told Save the Children.

The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among children has increased in both towns. The head nurse in Chimuara told the NGO that children as young as 12 years with STDs visited the clinic in 2005, whereas in 2004 the youngest child found with an STD had been 15 years old.

Mozambican law is inadequate in terms of protecting children from sexual abuse, exploitation and prostitution. National laws concentrate more on possible penal sanctions for certain sexual offences, and often are not properly implemented, said the NGO. According to a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) study, there is no law that criminalises child prostitution, except where parents are instrumental in selling their children.

The construction of the bridge linking the northern and southern parts of the country will bring much needed jobs and access to better healthcare to both towns, Save the Children acknowledged. But the fact that it will take at least three years to build has sparked concern among residents that the transmission and spread of HIV/AIDS and STDs will increase, affecting workers and local communities.

'None of these negative consequences are inevitable if action is taken now to put in place measures to mitigate against these impacts,' said McIvor. He has suggested recruiting local workers 'where possible, as it will make the community more integrated' and less vulnerable to abuse or exploitation.

To help avoid the promotion of a sex industry in the towns, the NGO has recommended allowing workers to visit their families regularly, and noted that the government had made it mandatory for the construction company involved to promote HIV/AIDS awareness programmes in the region.

Book Round Up #14: Climate Change Catastrophe and Media Failures

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:30:00 +0000

03-29-06,8:00am

Here is another in our series of book previews (reviews of reviews) on important new works that have recently appeared. If anyone is inspired to write a full review of one these works (800 words) please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: MAN, NATURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 210 pp., reviewed by Mariana Gosnell in The New York Times 3-16-2006. The reviewer says this is “the latest of a large crop of books” on the subject of climate change. Climate change can be seen all over the world and dire consequences seem to be store for us. Ms. Kolbert is credited with clear, comprehensive and succinct language and Gosnell thinks the “book may make a good handbook” on the subject. Global warming is almost certainly caused by our modern industrial society. She tries to be objective but can get up set. Gosnell says “’Astonishingly’ [Kolbert writes] ‘standing in the way’ of progress [in solving the problem] seems to be President Bush’s goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on [carbon] emissions, almost killing the treaty in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes in it.” At the end of the book, after interviewing scientists, politicians, and lay people, the author allows herself to express her personal opinion when she writes: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” Actually, society does not make such a “choice.” People in power are making choices to ignore science and to continue to pollute the earth because vast, incredibly vast, sums of money are to be made in so doing. It is the capitalist economic system and its inculcation of greed and profit making at any cost that is responsible. Capitalists are blinded by greed and will take all of us along with them down the road of doom if we don ‘t resist and overthrow this destructive economic system.

FEET TO THE FIRE: THE MEDIA AFTER 9/11 by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 2005, reviewed by Frances Cerra Whittelsey in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR -- The Media Watch Group, April 2006. This is a book that addresses the credibility of the news media. Reporters face all sorts of pressures from the government, corporate America and their own publishers to restrict and censor the news. Ms. Borjesson has gone out and interviewed 21 'of the most respected journalists and editors' to see the extent of the problem. Whittelsey writes, 'Her questions include many that progressive Americans have been urgently asking: Where were the media in the run-up to the Iraq War? Why was the coverage so unquestioning? How is it that the Bush administration has been so successful in getting its message out to the public? Why, ultimately, are we at war in Iraq?' Here are some of the things she found out. There was agreement that TV news had failed to do as good a job of credible reporting as other media outlets. Ted Koppel was one of the few defending the record of TV news. Borjesson quotes Tom Yellen (ex-executive for Peter Jennings at ABC News) to the effect that 'some of the people controlling TV aren't comfortable with the role of the press as a watchdog.' How did the claim about Iraq's WMDs get taken hook-line-and-sinker by the press, especially TV? Well, it seems that ABC, CBS, and also the AP just took the administration's word for it. Some reporting! There was good print coverage-- but not in New York or Washington 'where elite decision makers tend to reside.' Knight-Ridder's coverage was good (in fact the 'best') but they haven't papers in NY or DC. She also quotes John MacArthur (publisher of Harper's Magazine) who, according to the review, 'blames media owners for the largely unquestioning coverage of the run-up to the word. 'The owners decide what journalism we get,' he says. 'By and large, owners are very conservative, go-along-to-get-along establishment figures,' whose primary responsibility, in the case of public companies, is to their shareholders.' Besides institutional bias, threats and intimidation is also used to control the news. Knight-Ridder's reporters were threatened and 'barred from traveling with the vice president. The majority those interviewed also remarked on the profound ignorance of both our military and political leaders with respect to Iraq and the Middle East in general. The American people mare also, I think, fairly ignorant on those subjects. The media is at fault, especially TV which dumb downs the news. Ted Koppel, however, disagrees. He blames the American people directly. According to the reviewer he 'accused the American public of not paying attention and staying deliberately ignorant. The information people need, asserted Koppel, is available if they make an effort to find.' But wasn't that Koppel's job? I guess not. Our press had been improve because as Borjesson concludes, 'our continued collective ignorance can only lead to global-scale catastrophe.' Don't blame 'Political Affairs'!

Thomas Riggins is book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at

Understanding Racism Today: an Interview with David Roediger

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:27:00 +0000

3-28-06, 1:00 pm

Editor’s Note: David Roediger teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author of several books including, Working Toward Whiteness, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness and The Wages of Whiteness.

PA: In your new book, Working Toward Whiteness, you use the term “racialization” to describe the experiences of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Can you explain this?

DR: I think the big advantage we have now in scholarship on race in the last several decades is that we get to start from the fact that it’s a biological fiction. So a term like racialization is just meant to say that race is not biological and is made in society. It describes the processes in which race made, both by how groups of workers are slotted into jobs economically and are brought to nations under certain economic circumstances but also in the way that they’re treated in terms of citizenship rights by the state. Mainly those two processes determine how workers get put into a certain category. For my book, Eastern and Southern European immigrants were in an “in-between” position in both of those matters. They were slotted at the bottom of the economy, but not at the very bottom. By virtue of their whiteness in some contexts, they had civil rights and voting rights. But the state was constantly calling them into question through immigration restriction campaigns and saying, “You don’t really belong here. We can’t have a nation based on your citizenship, although we can have one based on your labor.” “Racialization” is that process through which the political economy and the state sort workers into different racial categories.

PA: Much of your work focuses on the working class’s role in the social construction of race. Why this emphasis rather than on the role of the ruling class in the creation and control of racist ideology, institutions, and practices, and does it risk sidestepping the responsibility of the ruling class?

DR: A lot of the new work, and certainly mine, matured in the Reagan years. Many of us on the Marxist left were anxious to try to figure out how it was that such a significant percentage of the white working class was voting for Reagan – the so-called Reagan Democrat. That gave, I think, a certain spin, a certain urgency to focus on the working-class population.

There is a sense in which my own work does not emphasize enough the fact that all of this activity by the working class took place within structures that were created by capital and in the early United States by slavery, settler colonialism and industrial capitalism together. My book Wages of Whiteness actually tries to emphasize those things and see the development of the white worker within those structures, but there’s no constant reminder that capitalism is implicated. I think it’s because so much of this work is done by Marxist scholars, going all the way back to Du Bois and James Baldwin, but up to Karen Brodkin, Noel Ignatiev, Alexander Saxton and above all Theodore Allen. Sometimes we assume that people know the ruling class’s responsibility for racism and for creating both the structures in which working-class racism matures and also for sometimes deliberately pitting groups in the working class against one another. My book Working Toward Whiteness tries to argue that much of US management in the early 20th century was not scientific management, but was simply – and people knew and talked about it – the pitting of racial groups against each other.

The criticism implied in the question is one I don’t reject. It grew out of a specific way that this literature has emerged, and I don’t think that it’s impossible to be concerned about both ruling class responsibility and the working class as the group that can actually change things. If it’s true that the ruling class structures racism and benefits from racism, we can’t look to the ruling class to change racism. At the end of the day, much of the emphasis has to be on studying the working class and race, but not in order to blame or to figure out which class is more culpable, but to figure out which class can move society and how.

PA: Usually we view the industrial unionism of the New Deal period as a spark for enormous social progress: expansion of democracy and the left-led fight for citizenship rights that were not linked to whiteness. In Working Toward Whiteness, you suggest a reexamination. Can you explain this?

DR: There are two dimensions. One is the unions themselves, the CIO unions that come out of the ferment of the 1930’s. Clearly, those were an advance for working people, Black and white, creating possibilities that just were unheard of before. African American organizations with few exceptions rushed to embrace that new sense of possibility. On the other hand, the logic of the CIO was very much to organize workers as they were and sometimes, in the more right-led unions, to organize as they were in terms of their racial attitudes as well. The term I use in Working Toward Whiteness is nonracial syndicalism, the idea, where race is concerned, that you organize people at work and that will break through toward Black, white and brown unity in the whole society. That couldn’t have been fully effective as an anti-racist strategy in the 1930’s because so few workplaces were integrated. So already the project accepted much of the structure of society. Even in integrated workplaces, so few departments were integrated that the CIO was bound to have lots of problems concerning skilled work being dominated by white workers. Even the left-led unions had a mixed record on this. You had Mine-Mill being so heroic in a city like Birmingham, Alabama and in various Latino struggles, but then in Montana in the copper industry not really having an answer for white workers’ hate strikes during World War II. The transit workers’ strike in Philadelphia is another excellent example where left-led unions had more progressive politics but didn’t really have a way to challenge this sense that what they were trying to do was organize the existing workers. But when the existing workers said that we don’t want Black workers, that was a hard question even for the left-led unions.

The other dimension to this question is the New Deal itself. It was very much an advance for specifically white workers and citizens in many ways. The Wagner Act, the labor relations law, rejected Black calls to make racism an unfair labor practice. The Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act rejected agricultural and domestic workers thereby defining almost all white workers into industrial citizenship and keeping almost all Black and Latino workers out of industrial citizenship. The homeowners loan policies of the New Deal invented redlining and ensured the huge differential in white and nonwhite wealth that comes from homeownership in the postwar period. The fact that the CIO’s advance was allied with these New Deal policies, that Ira Katznelson in When Affirmative Action was White has talked about, gives us reason to go back and look at the New Deal and see what was progressive about it and what wasn’t.

PA: How large of a role do you see anti-Communism linked to proponents of Jim Crow play in decimating working-class anti-racism and assisting the process of racialization you describe?

DR: As my previous answer suggested, I don’t think that without the Red Scare the CIO unions, even the left-led unions, could have automatically gone on to be the basis of the civil rights movement. I think there were lots of tough issues to be worked out within those unions. With that said, anti-Communism played an enormous role in turning back the possibilities of struggle against what we’re calling in this interview “racialization” in two ways at least. One, it removed a whole layer of the most internationalist Black leadership. Du Bois, Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and Claudia Jones – exactly the people who could have made the most meaningful links with anticolonial struggles and who could have helped us figure out how race functions in the whole world (Gerald Horne’s recent work is an important starting point on this) – were being removed from their jobs, mainstream organizations, were being denied the right to travel. All of those things mattered enormously. Some left-led unions were setting tremendous examples about united struggle: I am thinking of the longshore union in Hawai’i, Mine-Mill in Birmingham, Alabama, cannery workers, tobacco workers. There were some pockets, especially in unions where the membership was mostly people of color, of really progressive advanced organization that were also derailed or defeated by the Red Scare.

PA: Some critics of your field, the critical study of whiteness, view it as potentially discounting white working people, who because of white privilege cannot be won to antiracism. How do you respond?

DR: The impulse of the field is to try to center the white worker in some ways because we were thinking about the Reagan Democrat as a problem. I don’t think the study would have occurred as it did if there weren’t some kind of hope that white workers could move. So the question for me always is, under what circumstances have white workers moved? One of the answers to that question is that they have tended to move when they are in industries that are very integrated, like packing workers where Black workers had the social power of running the kill floor and there was no way to avoid united action if the union wanted to win. Mike Honey’s work on the left, race and workers in the South uses examples of unions which had enormous numbers of Black workers and some white workers. Those white workers moved in a way that’s different from unions that either managed to stay all white or to stay overwhelmingly white and helped to keep Blacks out of certain jobs in the plants.

The other dimension is that we need to be able to say that we want to realize the importance of the white worker without making it seem that to do so we have to put the accent on white. We have to be unwilling to give way before the racial backwardness of some white workers. I have an associate who uses the term the “whited workers” to remind us that people aren’t actually white and to remind us about the process of racialization. But the term also helps us to see that for white workers, part of the problem is that they have been racialized as whited workers and therefore accept a lot of misery in society in order to get rather meager benefits. I think we need to not think of the worker and the white workers as the same thing, and then other segments of the working class as peripheral. Increasingly those segments won’t be peripheral; in fact, they never were. White workers will be moving in a context that gives them a lot of freedom to move because they will be in workplaces that will be mostly Black and Latino in a lot of cases. So we need to be careful about how we discuss the white worker and not automatically think of the white worker as the center of everything.

PA: Don’t white workers have more of an interest in rejecting racist ideologies and practices than they do in, as you say, being “whited”?

DR: I believe that they do, but I don’t think that we can always measure that in terms of the opportunity of getting a home loan or the opportunity of making an extra 25 cents an hour or the opportunity of retaining skilled work rather than democratizing skilled work. Part of the reason that white workers lose in a racist society is that to preserve white privilege means that you have to give up on the idea of living in a good society. So you can get mired in smaller issues and lose the freedom dream, lose the eyes on the prize by being so wedded to what are at the end of the day relatively small privileges.

PA: How do you compare the situation of the “new immigrants” you describe in your book to the experiences of immigrant communities of today?

DR: One thing that interested in me in writing the book was as I read things from the 1890’s, conservative experts kept predicting that the US was about to lose its racial character. They would give dates and say the nation won’t have its allegedly excellent racial base by 1940. They’d look at figures and predict this. It was exactly the same kind of argument that we hear about the US becoming a non-white nation in 2040 or 2050 in current articles. The difference was that the “racial threat” in the 1890’s and early 1900’s was Poles, Greeks, Eastern European Jews and Italians. So one of the questions people are beginning to ask is will new groups get classified as white. I don’t think that’s the most important question. There are white supremacist societies with a white minority. That’s what the colonial world is all about. I don’t think whiteness needs a majority, and I don’t think we’ll necessarily see say Cubans, for example, classified as white in order to cobble together a white majority.

But I do think the important question is how can we build a set of political demands that challenge white supremacy for broad groups of people and makes it less than appealing to new immigrant groups to think of themselves as white and to identify their interests with whiteness. In other words, how do we build broad bold coalitions that encourage people to know that their biggest interests, their biggest dreams are not going to be tied to something as meager as thinking of themselves as white.

PA: One of your critics, writing in The Nation, accuses you of lacking a balanced approach, of describing new immigrants in the early 20th century as passive receptacles of racial ideology. How do respond?

DR: I am glad you asked that question. It goes to the earlier question about the ruling class and the working class. I do think this book is anxious to establish the structures and the roles of the state and the political economy in the process of racialization for Eastern and Southern Europeans. So there is now a situation where my work is being criticized for being both too much about the decisions that the working class made and blaming them too much for racism and then, in this Nation review that you are talking about, for overemphasizing structures and the absence of agency and activity on the part of working people. Usually when that happens, authors say, “Well, I must be right. I am getting criticized from both sides. The truth must be somewhere in the middle.” I wouldn’t want to say that. I would want to say that both ends of the process need to be emphasized. James Baldwin, the greatest writer on whiteness ever in the US, said that becoming white for immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe was, as he put it, “absolutely a moral choice.” Then immediately after that he said it was a choice “made under a vast amount of coercion.” So he also, at the same moment, wanted to emphasize the role of the state and the role of what he called the “whiteness factory,” the political economy. He wanted to not choose between those poles, but to say that both of them are important things to discuss. In a sense I don’t mind getting criticized from both sides because I am really trying to do two things at once.

--Send your letters to the editor to

Savage Subsidies

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:15:00 +0000

3-28-06, 1:00 pm

Few Americans are aware of the incredible resentment caused by the US policy of subsidizing agricultural products which are dumped on the international market, while insisting that manufactured goods, in which the US has a competitive advantage, be subject strictly to the laws of free trade.

It is estimated that government of developed countries, largely the United States and the European Union, provide more than $300 million in domestic support and export subsidies for agricultural products: most notably sugar, cotton and corn which depress world market prices, diminish the earning of poor countries and prevent them from competing with artificially low prices of the developed world. This is one of the major reasons that, despite the proclaimed economic advantages of “free trade” and the Washington Consensus, the poverty in Latin America has doubled over the past decade.

The economic competitive advantage of countries such as Brazil and Guatemala is that they can grow and harvest sugar cheaper than the United States. Mexico can produce corn cheaper and Argentina, beef. However, subsidies to agricultural conglomerates in the developed countries have created an artificially lower price whose net result is an economic depression in these Latin American countries, abandonment of farm and ranch lands, and – in Mexico – the net importation of corn from the United States. Mexico at least has some leverage to fight back since it is the United States’ largest trading partner. Recently it has sought an exemption from the Canadian and US agreement to eliminate tariffs from all agricultural imports. President Fox of Mexico has been negotiating a side agreement which will exempt beans and white corn from the tariff elimination process. Regardless of the outcome, opposition leaders in the Mexican Congress will make the agricultural aspects of Nafta a major issue in the coming years.

The West and Central African nations (Chad, Mali, Benin and Burkina Faso) produce cotton five times cheaper than the United States and it accounts for 80 percent of their exports. However, with $4 billion in subsidies to US cotton farmers, the United States is able to flood the market with “cheaper” cotton, thus simultaneously bleeding the American taxpayer and the poor Africans. Nor do the subsidies protect independent farmers in the United States, since they go mostly to massive agribusiness corporations. Subsidies are, in effect, corporate welfare provided by successive administrations who have removed safety nets for the marginal workers, cut food stamps and welfare, while transferring the surplus thus provided to double-dipping corporate agribusinesses. When a representative group of these African nations at the Cancún conference called for an immediate elimination of subsidies on cotton because they were destroying the livelihoods of African farmers and impeding development in the region, their proposal was greeted with contempt by the US delegation. One US negotiator reportedly quipped, “Create a larger demand for T-shirts!” The depths of resentment and even hatred that encounters such as these create abroad are considerable, and undermine the United States’ legitimacy as a world leader. According to the New York Times: Any hope that the United States would take a moral high ground at Cancún, and reclaim its historic leadership in pressing for freer trade, was further dashed by the disgraceful manner in which American negotiators rebuffed the rightful demands of West African nations that the United States commit itself to a clear phasing out of its harmful cotton subsidies. American business and labor groups, not to mention tax payers, should be enraged that the administration seems more solicitous of protecting the most indefensible segment of United States protectionism rather than protecting the national interest by promoting economic growth through trade.

A report by the Carnegie Endowment, an independent Washington research group, found that after 10 years of Nafta, Mexico was worse off that it was before it signed the agreement. Jobs in the manufacturing sector had fallen by 2 percent, as well as those in the service sector. But those who suffered the worst were the farmers “who were adversely affected by falling prices for their crops especially corn,” a problem intensified by the lowered tariff barriers to American-grown corn which because of US farm subsidies could be sold at a lower price than the domestic Mexican commodity.

This issue of subsidies is interesting, too, in the light of the US public’s negative attitude toward foreign aid (less than 1 percent of the federal budget). We give more economic aid to multinational corporations to increase their profits than we do to all the countries in the world combined. And if we were to end those subsidies tomorrow, as the African delegation suggested at Cancún, the economic growth of those countries exporting their products at market prices would obviate the necessity for more foreign aid. Another boon to the US taxpayer.

In Miami two months after the Cancún walkout, there was a conference to formulate guidelines for the new Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a plan by the Bush administration to construct a set of rules in which economic relations in the Western Hemisphere would be organized. Knowing the inconsistencies, inequalities and disruption that Nafta caused in Mexico, Miami became a site for protests by union leaders, environmentalists, feminists and workers’ groups. Their suppression by the Miami police was both brutal and unprecedented. According to a report filed by Rebecca Solnit there were over 200 demonstrators arrested and over 100 injured, most as a result of tear gas, pepper spray and blows to the head and face by police batons. People were pulled out of their cars at gunpoint outside of the International Hotel in Miami: “mostly white, mostly labor organizers, environmentalists and religious” who saw the dangers inherent in another Nafta-like agreement which would despoil the lands of Central America, pollute its rivers, dislocate its farmers and plunge the economies into a nosedive similar to that experienced by Mexico after the signing of the 1994 accord.

The comparison of the two agreements by Solnit is not accidental. FTAA is an agreement which the current administration touts as having many of the same “benefits” as Nafta. However, a close look at the results of the agreement over the past 10 years show that besides loss of growth in the Mexican sector and the displacement of farmers, “close to 400,000 jobs have been lost in the U.S. since NAFTA with new jobs paying, on average, only 77 percent of the wages of their earlier employment.” So that explains why the labor leaders and union members were there in Miami,10 thousand of them in force.

The FTAA, as presently written, could force countries throughout Central America to accept genetically modified foods.

Being forced to buy expensive patented seeds every season, rather than saving and planting their own, will force traditional subsistence farmers in the developing world into dependency on transnational corporations and closer to the brink of starvation.

Of course, that’s the point. But, lest we think this is a Central American problem, keep in mind that more than 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity in corn and potatoes is in Latin America. If that biodiversity disappears and a virus infects the common Idaho potato which is now the single most common one grown and sold today, the result will make the Irish Famine look like a walk in the country, not to mention what will happen to the lovers of McDonald’s french fries deprived of their staple until the end of time.

As to the environmentalists, they know that since Nafta fifteen wood product companies from the US have set up operations in Mexico, and logging there has increased dramatically. In the Mexican state of Guerrero, 40 percent of the forests have been lost in the last eight years, and massive clearcutting has led to soil erosion and habitat destruction.

Those who risked being assaulted and imprisoned in Miami to protest the destruction of the US middle class, the right to fair wages, the preservation of a strong labor force and the conservation of the last remaining oxygen sources in our hemisphere were doing work which honored us all. The contempt with which they were treated is akin to the contempt with which Martin Luther King was treated when he was similarly beaten and imprisoned in the US South to protect the right and dignity of human beings and spoke up to insure the dignity of human life.

The US proposal of the FTAA is not a method to shape a global agreement. It is instead to shape a regional agreement in which US-based multinationals have an economic advantage and provide them with preferential positions. So, while the administration preaches free trade and globalization, what it is actually seeking is a restriction on globalization with a competitive advantage for US-based multinationals rather than those based in the Far East or Europe.

This in itself would not be wholly objectionable as it would simply encourage competition between regions. However, there is little that is “free” in it, either as free trader or as laissez-faire nongovernment interference in the market. It is direct manipulation of the market and so we have a gap both in ideology and in credibility.

US labor unions and even the National Association of Manufacturers urged that the FTAA not be approved by Congress unless there were revisions in the agreement for labor and environmental accords. While the US Chamber of Commerce, most multinationals, and the Bush administration were “flexible” on these issues because, of course, low wages and lack of environmental accords are exactly what allow large companies to make disproportionate profits. The price, though heavy: child labor, brutal conditions, lack of social services, destruction of lakes and rivers, deforestation, is not one the businesses will have to pay. These costs will be absorbed by the host countries in terms of loss of potable drinking water, disease, fetus malformation, polluted air and generations of physically and mentally marginalized citizens. They will also be absorbed by US taxpayers in terms of increased unemployment, global warming, increased immigration, anti-Americanism, and a less secure world. Add to this the displacement of hundred of thousand of farmers who can no longer make a living on the land due to the agricultural subsidies and the flooding of the market with the products of those subsidies, and you have the cauldron of civic unrest, domestic disorder and the violence born of desperation throughout Latin America.

When Henry Ford opened his factory in Dearborn, Michigan he had a revolutionary new theory. His idea was to mass produce automobiles, pay his workers a fair wage, and sell the automobile at a price his workers could afford. The idea worked, resulting in generations of highly paid workers, growth of the market, new designs and technological advances, and increased prosperity for his nation. He did not find the cheapest materials, the lowest paid workers; he did not move his plant to Guatemala or Cambodia. The reason: he wanted to create a larger market for his cars, not just sell them to the affluent. Ford knew that if he wanted his business to continue to grow, for the economy to grow, he needed to create customers for his products. In the process he provided business to the steel mills, to the tire factories, to the oil speculators the refineries. He provided millions of jobs to upholsterers, to mechanics, to oil workers, to traffic cops and construction workers. And he sold more cars.

This sane economic reasoning has been lost on the new generation of global marketers. They want to move the companies to areas where the labor force is most mobile, most desperate and cheapest, where the environmental laws are most lax. We are already seeing the inevitable results. The increase in inventory of hard manufactured goods, growing poverty in Latin America, irreparable damage to the environment, loss of employment in the United States, and recession. A factory worker in Mexico making $300 a month cannot purchase a new Ford. A electronics assembler in Guatemala making $45 a week cannot afford the digital camera or computer she assembles. If the workers in the factories where the products are produced cannot afford to buy those products what is the result? Short-term profits for a few manufacturers, cheaper prices for a few buyers, but – ultimately – stagnation, lack of growth, because even though more units are being produced, there are fewer people with the wages or savings to purchase them.

When former US Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick stated that opponents of globalization might have had “intellectual connections” with terrorists he was signaling a very dangerous formulation which is part of the newspeak which underlies an ideological divide that is as far from Henry Ford’s model of capitalism as the World Bank is from Jeffersonian democracy. What the new formulation consists of is a combination of corporate greed and antipopulist ideology which seeks to derive short-term economic advantage from the marketplace while at the same time destroying the economy now for the poor, 10 years from now for the middle class, and a generation from now for those who will inherit the no-growth companies and paper wealth their forebears accumulated.

There are, of course, alternatives. They don’t appear on CNN or in the press releases from the Oval Office. However, they do exist. The policies that now encompass globalization are, in fact, merely corporate strategies marketed as such and supported by those few who have their fingers in this very rich pie. It is in their self-interest to convince the public that there are no real alternatives, that free trade equals democracy, that its opponents are either Communists promoting class conflict or intellectual bunkmates of international terrorists. In fact, there are hundred of thousands around the world who are creating grassroots alternatives to this corporate globalization. Citizen groups composed of workers, small business people, investment counselors, doctors, attorneys, economists, teachers and scientists from around the world who have formulated an “Alternative Agreement for the Americas” which offers a view of what a totally responsible and environmentally sustainable economy in this hemisphere would look like. You can find this document on the Global Exchange website.

The media tells us largely by its silence, that there is little happening in Latin America besides earthquakes, hungry masses and economic chaos. When proposals such as Nafta and FTAA are decided on, when international economic conferences in Cancún or Miami are reported on, the media tells us that the protests outside the conferences are organized by anarchists and radicals whom the police need to keep in check to maintain public order. We are told that we are blessed to be living in the United States and that the problems of the third world are ones we should let the experts in trade, finance and diplomacy take care of. Never in the course of human history has that been less true, never has the importance of the knowledge and awareness of the American citizen been more important. We need to be proactive, we need to ask questions of our representatives in Congress, read alternative versions of events on Znet and other alternative publications and other sites which report economic and social news of the hemisphere which affects us daily.

As Noam Chomsky once wrote in another time and place:

Whether they’re called “liberal” or “conservative”, the major media are large corporations, owned by and interlinked by larger conglomerates. Like other corporations they sell a product to the market. The market is advertisers, that is, other businesses. The product is audiences…There are systems of illegitimate authority in every corner of the social, political, economic and cultural worlds. For the first time in human history, we have to face the problem of protecting an environment that can sustain a decent human existence. We don’t know that honest and dedicated effort will be enough to resolve or mitigate such problems as these. We can be quite confident that the lack of such efforts will spell disaster.

--Michael Hogan is the author of 14 books including The Irish Soldiers of Mexico. He lives and works in Guadalahara, Jalisco. Send your letters to the editor to

Sanctified or Sanctimonious: Hypocrisy and the Anti-Choice Movement

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:10:00 +0000

3-28-06, 1:00 pm

Defenders of women’s rights to reproductive health care options have long been aware of the far right’s opposition to women’s reproductive freedom. A major problem in recent years has been a growing number of so-called pro-life feminists who use increasingly persuasive moral arguments to gain support for the restriction of women’s access to reproductive health care and control over their bodies.

Historically, the anti-abortion movement sprang up almost immediately following the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which effectively legalized abortion by striking down state-level restrictions on reproductive choice.

After Roe v. Wade, the number of abortions increased dramatically. In response, “pro-life” forces mobilized. In January 1974, Nellie Gray organized a march on Washington to call attention to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. “It’s murder, pure and simple,” she said. Opponents of abortion lobbied to cut off federal funds that allowed the poor to obtain abortions. They insisted that abortion should be performed in hospitals and not less expensive clinics, and they worked to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Although the Supreme Court, which included Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman in its history, reaffirmed its judgment in 1983, the pro-life movement marched on, gaining steam.

In 1989, a solidifying conservative majority on the court ruled in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services that while women’s right to abortion remained intact, state legislatures could impose limitations if they chose. With that judgment, a major legislative debate over the issue began, and numerous states began to mandate restrictions. In response, the courts heard still further cases to determine what should remain legal.

In its 1992 decision in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court reaffirmed what it termed the “essence” of the right to abortion, while permitting further state restrictions. By a narrow 5-4 margin, it upheld most provisions of a Pennsylvania law that established a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion and required teenage girls to secure the permission of a parent or a judge before ending pregnancy.

Although the court struck down as an undue burden a provision requiring a woman to notify her husband of her plan to have an abortion, the ruling clearly gave states greater latitude in the overall restrictive effort. It also made an abortion harder to obtain, particularly for poor women and young women. With both proponents and opponents of abortion unhappy with the decision, the issue remained very much alive.

These and other more recent attacks on legal abortions have diminished Roe v. Wade significantly.

What are the arguments against abortion, and why are they so persuasive? According to Randall A. Lake, in his article “The Metaethical Framework of Anti-Abortion Rhetoric,” the intransigence of anti-choice forces is the product of a system of absolute moral assumptions underlying the right-to-life position that renders compromise unnecessary, unthinkable and unethical.

From its inception, the anti-choice position showed a clear preference for what it calls “deontological” (ethics of duty) arguments, based on duty and moral obligation. The anti-abortion position relies on a single moral rule: do not kill. Although obscured somewhat by the terminology “right to life,” the primary objection to abortion depends on a rule that prohibits murder. In anti-abortion rhetoric, this rule is represented as a universal moral law that, because of the fetus’s alleged human status, necessarily forbids abortion.

The anti-choice view conceives of ethics as a set of universal and immutable moral rules that distinguishes right from wrong. Classes of action that violate these rules are intrinsically and always wrong.

Anti-abortionists view humans as weak, selfish and basically immoral. They see the choice to abort as motivated by sheer convenience. They claim that concern for the mother’s welfare is often a mask for a deeply rooted urge to kill, and the abortion decision manifests a murderous intent. They claim that pro-choice people are deeply suicidal, and that doctors force women to have abortions to make money.

The anti-abortion position is also conceived on a legalistic model. The fetus, they claim, is a person with a right to life guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They believe that once society abandons a strict prohibition of killing and abortion becomes morally acceptable, infanticide, euthanasia and genocide against the unfit will follow. They use the example of Nazi Germany to support their claim. They argue that abortion, euthanasia and genocide are all equally wrong and basically indistinct.

Abortion would lead to death camps because certain malevolent individuals would use the case as a precedent to convince misguided individuals that incursions on the right to life are going to happen.

Defenders of a woman’s right to choose are basically evil, they think. They are accused of bad faith. All persons have a right to life. The fetus is a person. Therefore, abortion is murder and hence always wrong.

There can be no dispute because, to these people, freedom of choice cannot include the freedom to choose immorality. They use the guilty feelings of women who have had abortions as ammunition for their argument. We are supposed to “know” that abortion is wrong.

Recently, opposition to abortion has grown in liberal circles. The organization “Democrats for Life” has a huge following. This unfortunately viable pressure group appeals to the fundamental conviction that human life is “sacred.”

Their reasoning goes like this: many Christians, especially Catholics and evangelicals, abandoned the Democratic Party in recent years because of its support for reproductive freedom. Therefore, to win back the support of the moral sector of liberals in America, the Democratic Party must adopt a platform that respects life, “from the beginning of life to natural death.” This would include opposition to abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia.

Women’s groups, including one called “Feminists for Life,” point to “the strength of women and the potential of every human life,” arguing essentially that abortion has abused women by implicitly forcing them to murder their children. At the heart of their argument is the supposed immorality of choosing between women and children.

Says Carolyn Gargaro,

Pro-life feminists respect ALL human life, and they do not place their morality on people – including the unborn – by deciding who should live and who should die. Some people call pro-life feminists “anti-choice” – well, pro-life feminists are anti-choice, when it comes to abortion. They are also anti-choice when it comes to rape or the abuse of women. No one should have the “choice” to rape or abuse women either. No one should have the “choice” to beat a woman or not.

There are even gay and lesbian organizations aimed at restricting abortion. In 2002, leaders of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (Plagal) were arrested at the 29th annual March for Life. The arrests were conducted by direct orders of Miss Nellie Gray, the March for Life leader. Though interesting, this apparent lack of solidarity among pro-life forces does not diminish their potential power.

Defenders of women’s reproductive choice are facing dire times. The appointment of pro-life justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court is the tip of the iceberg. All people who recognize these threats must mobilize now. The question is not about right to life. The question is about the spread of a movement waging war on women.

The religious argument is absurd. When a woman conceives after violent rape, or a young girl by the father who’s abused her for years, this is not the work of a gracious God.

And this is not to mention the economic issues surrounding reproductive choice and access to reproductive health care.

My purpose here is not to list pro-choice arguments, but to mobilize proponents of women’s reproductive freedom. Get up to date information and easy ways to make a difference on the local, state and national levels at prochoiceamerica.org. Write to your senators and representatives. Insist on the protection of reproductive choice.

--Anna Bates teaches college history in New York State. Send your letters to the editor to