People Before Profit blog

The US Legacy in Iraq

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 07:37:00 +0000

From Foreign Policy In Focus 'Competence…made order out of chaos. It knew how to analyze problems and set priorities…It saved lives. But a life saved is not a life released from hatred or the other legacies of violence or repression.' As far as modern military organizations are concerned, U.S. forces would have to be rated as quite competent at what they are designed to accomplish: killing people, destroying things, and bringing chaos out of order.

If that were the extent of expectations about modern armed forces, nothing more would need be said. But today’s military forces are expected to reverse the traditional process, particularly those who, like the U.S. in Iraq, created the problem. To date, efforts by the U.S. to recreate a stable, new order that incorporates the best traditions and practices of the past, nourishes expectations for the future, and meets the immediate needs of the population, have lagged significantly.

On meeting the immediate needs of the population, a survey by the Iraqi Health Ministry, the UN, and a Norwegian nonprofit agency found that malnutrition among children under five has almost doubled – from 4.0 to 7.7% – since the March 2003 invasion. The culprit is a combination of unsafe drinking water, lack of reliable electricity or fuel stocks to boil water, and crumbling or non-existent sewage systems.

Security – the absence thereof – for Iraqis, for humanitarian aid workers, for UN personnel, even for military forces in central Iraq and a number of locations elsewhere in the country, has created a climate of fear both for the present and the future. The U.S. trumpeted its action as liberating the Iraqis from a tyrant, which is true as far as it goes. But the tyrant, for all the predictable and utter ruthlessness he employed when 'needed,' managed to provide enough services to keep a restive population under control. So far, the U.S. has neither duplicated the provision of services nor provided a general sense of security. Major aid agencies have been forced to withdraw their staff because of the dangers. And despite the intentions of Washington, official government humanitarian aid and reconstruction has been limited by the continuing violence. As two long-time aid workers observed November 23, 'aid or reconstruction carried out at gunpoint…[is] virtually indistinguishable from military and political action.' Their summary: 'Reconstruction has not occurred. Civil society has not been restored.'

In fact, 20 months after the invasion, some among those who supported war are beginning to call for troop reductions. The change of heart comes not because the security situation has improved but because it just might get better if the aggravating presence of large numbers of foreign troops is reduced. Fewer 'occupiers' would remove a major pretext for continued violence and could serve to induce more Iraqis to abandon armed conflict for political participation.

Indeed, with the announcement of elections for the national assembly on January 30, a definitive statement of U.S. intentions in Iraq would be well-timed. It would complement other recent decisions and announcements, including: November 18: agreement by the 'Paris Club' (the 19 wealthiest creditor nations) to write off 80% of Iraq’s debt to the Club members ($42 billion, roughly one-third of Iraq’s total debt of $120 billion) in three stages between 2004-2008. November 23: statement by Iraqi election officials that 220 parties had applied to participate in the elections. (Less well publicized was a November 18 report that 47 groups – Sunni, Shi’ite, Christian, and Turkomen – agreed not to participate because of the U.S. attack on Fallujah.) November 24: the communiqué from the high-level meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh of Iraq’s neighbors, the Group of Eight leading industrial countries, China, the European Union, Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the UN that called for a concerted effort at pre-election nation-building that would set the stage for a 'united, federal, democratic and pluralistic state.' These follow a fatwa issued in October by Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that directs all Iraqis to vote in the January ballot, a move that puts enormous pressure on the interim Iraqi government to stay with the electoral timetable, especially since the national assembly will choose a new interim government from its members. It will also draft a new constitution and prepare for a final round of elections in December 2005 for a permanent government.

So what could the U.S. do to move toward resolving its dilemma? It should: publicly commit the U.S. to total, unconditional withdrawal with no residual bases; cut Baghdad Embassy staff to fall in the range of other U.S. embassies in the region; concentrate redevelopment aid on small projects that directly employ Iraqis so that more Iraqis feel they have a future; respect existing cultural 'authority' lines; they may be imperfect, but correcting them is not the purview of foreign occupiers; properly train and equip Iraqi security forces on the premise that quality is more important than quantity; trust these quality Iraqi forces and let them operate independently of U.S. troops; keep the commitment to leave unconditionally and completely. The last, of course, is the most important – and will be the hardest to do. But without it, the U.S. may well discover that its Iraq adventure, instead of releasing Iraqis from 'hatred or the other legacies of violence or repression,' only intensified and spread anti-American hatred throughout the world.

--Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus.

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US Meddles in Ukrainian Election

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:37:00 +0000

From ZNet

A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.' It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by America as the country's next president: the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko supporters, druggy skinheads from Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth organisation, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (Unso), a semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic.

It is because of this ideological presupposition that Anglo-Saxon reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairytale about a struggle between a brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the present Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale are suppressed. Thus a story has been widely circulated that Yushchenko was poisoned during the electoral campaign, the fantasy being that the government was trying to bump him off. But no British or American news outlet has reported the interview by the chief physician of the Vienna clinic which treated Yushchenko for his unexplained illness. The clinic released a report declaring there to be no evidence of poisoning, after which, said the chief physician, he was subjected to such intimidation by Yushchenko's entourage – who wanted him to change the report – that he was forced to seek police protection.

It has also been repeatedly alleged that foreign observers found the elections fraught with violations committed by the government. In fact, this is exclusively the view of highly politicised Western governmental organisations like the OSCE – a body which is notorious for the fraudulent nature of its own reports, and which in any case came to this conclusion before the poll had even taken place – and of bogus NGOs, such as the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a front organisation exclusively funded by Western (mainly American) government bodies and think-tanks, and clearly allied with Yushchenko.

Because they speak English, the political activists in such organisations can easily nobble Anglophone Western reporters.

Contrary allegations – such as those of fraud committed by Yushchenko-supporting local authorities in western Ukraine, carefully detailed by Russian election observers but available only in Russian – go unreported. So too does evidence of crude intimidation made by Yushchenko supporters against election officials. The depiction is so skewed that Yushchenko is presented as a pro-Western free-marketeer, even though his fief in western Ukraine is an economic wasteland; while Yanukovych is presented as pro-Russian and statist, even though his electoral campaign is based on deregulation and the economy has been growing at an impressive clip. The cleanliness and prosperity of Kiev and other cities have improved noticeably.

There is, however, one thing which separates the two main candidates, and which explains the West's determination to shoo in Yushchenko: Nato. Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining; Yushchenko is in favour. The West wants Ukraine in Nato to weaken Russia geopolitically and to have a new big client state for expensive Western weaponry, whose manufacturers fund so much of the US political process.

Yanukovych has also promised to promote Russian back to the status of second state language. Since most Ukrainian citizens speak Russian, since Kiev is the historic birthplace of Christian Russia, and since the current legislation forces tens of millions of Russians to Ukrainianise their names, this is hardly unreasonable. The continued artificial imposition of Ukrainian as the state language – started under the Soviets and intensified after the fall of communism – will be a further factor in ripping Ukraine's Russophone citizens away from Russia proper. That is why the West wants it.

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US Government Behind Ukraine's Election Crisis

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:00:00 +0000

From The Guardian

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory – whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked 'chestnut revolution' are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. 'There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,' the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words 'gotov je', meaning 'he's finished', a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr. Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.

In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.

In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the 'parallel vote tabulation', a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.

There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the 'largest civil regional election monitoring effort' in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr. Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.

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Bush's Plan for Regime Change in Cuba

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:42:00 +0000

From

I'm living in a war zone, but what I see when I look out the window of my apartment in Havana, Cuba does not resemble the pictures in the papers of the war in Iraq. No missiles have been fired here, there are no camouflaged soldiers in the streets with guns, no armored tanks roll by. The sun is still shining, the birds still sing, and the streets are alive with people busy living their lives. There are no children dying in the streets from shrapnel wounds, but there is no doubt the nation is under attack. Here the war is manifested not in body counts and car-bombings but in the constant assault of material poverty: crumbling homes and rolling black-outs. It doesn't look like a war zone, but the US government is waging a silent war here and no one is left untouched.

The war in Iraq is not the only war that the Bush Administration is involved in today and its plans for 'regime change' are not limited to the Middle East. They might have caught Saddam, but there's another bearded 'bad-guy' on the loose, and another nation, weak after years of US sanctions, to be 'liberated.' There's nothing new about the war against Cuba, which started in May of 1961, only four months after the Revolution overthrew US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Forty-five years and over 600 assassination attempts later, the war against Cuba is now principally fought with weapons of economic destruction. The Bush Administration has intensified this economic war and made overthrowing the Cuban government a higher priority in this election year than in previous years.

Last October, Bush began his presidential campaign with a pledge to radical rightist elements of the Cuban-American community in South Florida to take drastic steps to strengthen the enforcement of the US embargo against Cuba. 'Clearly, the Castro regime will not change by its own choice,' Bush said, 'But Cuba must change.' In his speech, Bush announced the establishment of the Commission for the Assistance to a Free Cuba, 'to plan for the happy day when Castro's regime is no more and democracy comes to the island.' The Commission was asked to draw upon experts within the US government to 'identify ways to hasten the arrival of that day.' Bush warned that, 'The transition to freedom will present many challenges to the Cuban people and to America,' and promised that, 'In all that lies ahead, the Cuban people have a constant friend in the United States of America. We are confident that no matter what the dictator intends or plans, Cuba sera pronto libre.'

On May 6, 2004 , the Commission for the Assistance to a Free Cuba, chaired by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and staffed by a 'dream team' of high level cabinet officials reported back to the president. They presented a 458-page report outlining concrete steps to be taken by the Bush administration to overthrow the Cuban government. As soon as the report was released, wheels were set in motion to write these recommendations into law. On June 16, 2004, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published a new set of regulations in the Federal Register to govern US economic relations with Cuba. (OFAC administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions that support US foreign policy and national security goals).

Much of the press coverage in the US about these new measures has focused on the ways in which they have affected Cuban families on both sides of the Florida Strait. However, the most controversial measures are contained in other new regulations. The US government has instituted new measures limiting Cuba 's ability to engage in international trade in its attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

The Bush administration's current war for regime change in Cuba depends not on cluster bombs and depleted uranium, but on the use of a 45-year old economic embargo as a weapon to isolate Cuba. By preventing other countries from trading with Cuba , the US government hopes to make it impossible for the nation to provide for the needs of its citizens. Cuba will reach a breaking point; the people will rise up against their government and welcome the US 'liberators' with open arms. At least, that's the way it is supposed to work. A full 400 pages of the 458 page 'Commission for the Assistance to a Free Cuba Report' are focused on the delivery of aid by the US government to a new regime to ease the suffering caused by the crippling economic embargo. The report outlines in detail a plan for rebuilding the country in the US 's image of a model representative democracy with a free-market economy. Does the term nation building sound familiar from some other context?

When socialism ended in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union , Cuba lost its largest trading partner and fell into a deep economic depression. In the US , many hoped that Cuban socialism would follow and it was to that end that they chose that moment to tighten the embargo. In October 1992, less than a month before the US general elections, Congress passed the Torricelli Act. Foreign subsidiaries of US owned companies were prohibited from trading with Cuba. Ships that delivered goods to Cuba were prohibited from docking in US ports for six months after, forcing shipping companies to decide who they wanted to trade with: Cuba or the United States. Because a ship docking in Cuba either loses access to the US market or risks a steep fine if they dock in a US port, Cuba 's shipping costs skyrocketed.

The law also restricted remittances, prohibited economic assistance and debt forgiveness to any country conducting trade with Cuba, and increased punitive measures for anyone breaking the trade embargo or traveling to Cuba illegally.

Four years later, in another election year (1996), Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act. This Act included another series of harsh measures aimed at preventing non-US firms from trading with Cuba by punishing those who engage in commercial dealings with Cuba. Under the Helms-Burton Act, any naturalized US citizens whose Cuban property had been confiscated since the Revolution now had the right to sue, in US courts, the foreign companies or individuals who they deem have gained from investments in those properties.

It also authorized the US State Department to deny visas to the executives, majority shareholders and their families of companies that have invested in property that belonged to US companies prior to the Revolution.

Before the Helms-Burton Act, many elements of the embargo existed only as executive orders and regulations that could be modified by the president.

Helms-Burton codified the embargo requiring an act of Congress to lift the embargo. It also dictated the conditions that must exist in Cuba before the embargo would be lifted. Top on the list were the creation of a new government in Cuba that does not include Fidel or Raul Castro and proof that this new government was 'substantially moving towards a market-oriented economic system based on the right to own and enjoy property.'

The recent attacks by the US Treasury Department on businesses trading with Cuba show the strength of the Bush administration's commitment to 'regime change' in Cuba. Perhaps these attacks also demonstrate its lack of commitment to fighting international terrorism. While the Treasury Department has 21 employees who track financial transactions with Cuba, it has only four employees responsible for tracking the funding of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda operatives may remain at-large, planning future terrorist attacks, but we can all rest assured that James Sabzali, a Canadian citizen who sold resins used to purify public drinking water in Cuba, has been slapped with a $10,000 fine and a 12-month conditional sentence for his dangerous actions. To you or me, this may sound a little harsh; to the Bush administration, it is clear that an unequivocal message must be sent to the international business community that trading with Cuba is 'trading with the enemy.' As the well-known axiom of Bush's foreign policy clearly states, 'You're either with us or against us.'

One recommendation in the Commission's May report was that the US government establish a Cuban Asset Targeting Group, to investigate and identify new ways in which hard currency is moved in and out of Cuba. In May, the US Federal Reserve fined UBS AG, Switzerland 's largest bank, $100 million dollars US for allegedly sending US dollars to Cuba in violation of provisions of the embargo that prevent Cuba from trading in dollars. This action has created serious problems for Cuba by making it very difficult to deposit its dollars abroad and renew bills in circulation.

Although the Bush administration claims that, 'There is a growing international consensus on the nature of the Castro regime and the need for fundamental political and economic change on the island.' for thirteen straight years, the UN General Assembly has voted to condemn the US embargo against Cuba. On October 28, 2004, the UN General Assembly voted 179 to 4 with one abstention on a resolution condemning the US economic embargo of Cuba. During these thirteen years, the margin in favor of Cuba has steadily increased. This year, only the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voted against a condemnation of the embargo. Is this the 'coalition of the willing' who supports US policies for 'regime change' in Cuba? Just as in the current military war for 'regime change' in Iraq, the US government stands alone in its economic war against Cuba, supported only by a weak coalition of 'allies' who cannot refuse.

A war of attrition is being fought by the US in Cuba. The Cuban people are suffering from the cumulative effects of 45 years of economic policies designed to create the conditions for a US-assisted transition to a free-market economy. The island is blockaded, not by US battleships and destroyers, but by a collection of laws and presidential mandates that fly in the face of international law, limiting the free movement of trade and the economic sovereignty of Cuba and those who would do business with them.

--Hope Bastian is an educator working to educate US citizens about the ways that US foreign policy affects the people of Latin America.

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Don't Let Frances Newton Die

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 04:28:00 +0000

America: Two conflicting conceptions of security

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:13:00 +0000

Bush Assault on Minimum Wage

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 21:45:00 +0000

From ILCA

Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

Bush’s success in reducing the value of the minimum wage in each of the past four years has wreaked havoc with the lives of millions of working Americans, but it does not exist as a media story. The minimum wage loses value as the cost of living rises. Were the government to take action to partially correct for this loss in value, the media would cover that story, but would refer to it as 'raising the minimum wage.'

The minimum wage has lost well over a third of its value to inflation since 1968 and has not been adjusted since 1997. Correcting the current $5.15 to $9 would not be a new experiment, but would restore the minimum wage to a value it held during years when the U.S. economy performed better than it does now. Contrary to myth, there is no correlation between the value of the minimum wage over the years and the unemployment rate. One doesn’t rise or fall with the other.

Two years ago, Bush’s proposal to gut what was left of welfare included elimination of the minimum wage for workfare workers. He lost on that point, but only after thousands of angry people, organized by the Center for Community Change and ACORN, protested at the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services and took over the lobby of the Heritage Foundation. The media paid attention for 24 hours in March of 2002. Since then, from the media’s point of view, Bush hasn’t done anything, so there’s nothing to cover. Over the past ten years, two important trends have developed, both of which the media has largely ignored. First, states and localities have taken matters into their own hands. Since Florida and Nevada passed initiatives on November 2nd, there are now 14 states and a couple of cities with minimum wage laws set higher than the federal level. There are also 123 cities and counties with living wage laws applying higher minimum wage levels to jobs dependent on public funds, including work on government contracts or at companies benefiting from corporate welfare. In not a single city or county have any of the dire predictions of job loss so often recited by the media materialized. And most living wage ordinances are indexed to automatically increase with the cost of living.

Second, more and more economists have shifted their positions, to the extent that a general consensus has emerged that restoring value to the minimum wage would benefit the economy. Even leading opponents of the living wage movement who continue to predict negative effects, concede that there are positive effects that outweigh them. These effects include lifting families out of poverty, allowing parents to work less and spend more time with their children, increasing consumer spending by workers, and improving productivity.

In addition, public opinion in survey after survey consistently favors restoring value to the minimum wage by a large majority. With two new states, and red ones at that, having just joined the list of those who will help themselves whether Congress helps them or not, with the new minority leader of the Senate announcing that the minimum wage is a top priority, and with Bush and Kerry having offered their support during the campaign to competing minimum wage bills, one might expect some significant interest in this topic from the media.

One would be disappointed. A search of the Nexis database in recent weeks turns up few substantive articles or transcripts on the minimum wage, including none quoting any economists claiming to have studied it, and none quoting any workers earning it. Instead, Larry King treated us on November 16 to the baseless and disproven claims of that expert on wage policies, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said he had vetoed a minimum wage 'increase' in order to protect jobs.

On the 21st, the Contra Costa Times promoted this nonsense by writing: 'No one should expect the governor to support any measure that could harm business growth, including tax increases, higher minimum wages, or bureaucratic burdens on businesses.'

The only support in the media for restoring value to the minimum wage is either found in letters to the editor (there are a good number of those) or in appeals to xenophobia and racism. On November 17th, Lou Dobbs on CNNfn announced: 'The results of our poll tonight, 82 percent of you say raising the minimum wage would attract more U.S. citizens to industries now dominated by illegal aliens, 18 percent disagree.' Two days earlier, Fox News had treated us to this exchange between Pat Buchanan and Bill O’Reilly:

BUCHANAN: Look, a lot of them work in a job slightly above the minimum wage. They don’t want thousands of people coming in and taking their jobs. They don’t want guys coming in all drugged up, driving drunk on their streets. Every -- I mean, Hispanic Americans I think want the borders of their country protected as well as anyone else.

O’REILLY: I think most of them do, but it has to be sold that it isn’t just a persecution of Latinos. Now you -- my solution, if you read my books or anything, is just to put the National Guard down there to back up the border patrol, stops it dead. And then you concentrate with this nuke stuff on the trucks because it would have to be trucked in.

BUCHANAN: Right.

Several newspapers around the country, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Baltimore Sun, and the Chicago Tribune, printed an article last week that touched on the minimum wage. The headline in one paper was 'Making money on Bush victory.' The reference to the minimum wage was as follows:

'Energy stocks should do well because companies will face less resistance to the use of nuclear or coal power, [Alfred ] Goldman [chief market strategist with A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.] says. Retailers should prosper, in part because any increase in the minimum wage probably will be smaller than it would have been if John Kerry had been elected president.'

The Hill newspaper, a publication largely for and about Congress, may have been unique in carrying on November 18th an article about reactions to Bush’s campaign proposal to 'raise' the minimum wage by $1.10, and the chances that even that small adjustment will actually be made. The Hill quoted AFL-CIO Director of Legislation Bill Samuel to the effect that the AFL-CIO would protest any change smaller than the $1.85 correction proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy and supported by Senator Kerry.

Don’t expect a flood of coverage of this issue. Don’t expect lies about the effects of a decent minimum wage to be eliminated or corrected. Don’t expect 'think tanks' funded by restaurants and hotels to be identified by their funding sources. And don’t expect the views of those working for the minimum wage to be included in media coverage. Public opinion, of course, favors fixing the minimum wage, but our public discourse – dominated by the major media outlets – often has little regard for public opinion.

--David Swanson is International Labor Communications Association Media Coordinator.

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Free-market Religion or Ignorance?

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:53:00 +0000

Eduardo Porter, writing in the Sunday (11/21/04) New York Times 'Week In Review' section seeks to explain the theory that religion is so popular in the US due to supply-side economics. Just like any commodity competition the commodity of religion is so wide spread due to the competition between its suppliers. This is a new view, Porter says, replacing, perhaps, the older view that the more educated the more secular a country becomes.

The US, Porter maintains, is an exception to this rule which applies to Europe and Japan rather than to us. Studies show that for 80% of Germans, 88% of Japanese, and 89% of French people religion doesn’t play a very important part in their lives. As for the Dutch – 25% describe themselves as atheists. Porter quotes David Voas (University of Manchester) as saying, 'If you take the United Nations’ Human Development Index and look at the top 20 countries 19 of those are very secular. We must be the 20th – with only 40% of Americans not thinking of religion as very important.

The question Porter asks is 'Why is the United States, the world’s most prosperous and educated democracy, so religious?' I’m not even going to go into the 'free-market' theory because there is, I think, a fundamental problem with the assumptions of the question itself.

The idea that the US is the most 'educated' democracy is ludicrous. Compared to other developed countries, the American educational system is a sorry joke.

I want to consider the following facts, all from the Chapter 'The Sorry State of Education' in Valdas Anelauskas’ Discovering America As It Is (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2003). Valdas points out that a baby born in the US has a 20% chance of ending as an illiterate adult. This means a fifth of American adults can’t read! The US ranks 49th in adult literacy among the world’s countries

Also note that when American students are compared to students in other countries in the developed world they usually end up at the bottom of the barrel. 'Americans are at or near the bottom in most international surveys measuring educational achievement.' Even our best students come well behind those of the top ten countries when test scores are compared. We come in around 16th.

What this reflects is the appalling poverty rates for children in this country coupled with a blatant disregard by national, state, and local governments of the needs of schools and students. Valdas refers to studies by Richard Jaeger at the University of North Carolina that revealed 'America’s rising childhood poverty rate, breakdown of families and all other social problems account for all of the disparity between American and foreign students’ achievement.' So we are not only not the most 'educated' we are not the most 'prosperous' either.

Here is how 'educated' our kids are. Number of forth graders who think the world is FLAT: 40% Number of sixth graders who can’t find the USA on a map: 20% Number of high school seniors lacking the most basic knowledge of American history (forget world history): 57%. Number of seventeen year old students who don’t know when the Civil War took place: 66% – 33% didn’t know who Abraham Lincoln was!

There is one encouraging result here, and that is that 25% of college seniors think that the slogan 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need' is from the Constitution. This is no doubt due to effective campus propaganda by the Young Communist League.

Who benefits from the bad education given to American students? And its really bad. The US ranks 28th out of the 29 counties in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (we beat out Mexico) in the number of students who graduate from school (72%, compare Germany at 91%). The beneficiaries of this education system are the forces on the right and the religious fundamentalists who thrive in conditions of educational deficiency.

I therefore conclude that the 'old-school' sociology, as Porter calls it, was correct in holding 'that as nations become more prosperous, healthy, and educated, demand for the support that religion provides declines.' The fact that so many of our citizens are religious is a mark of how backward the US is. So I’ll end with another quote from Anelauskas’ book, from a gentleman even more obscure that Abraham Lincoln, namely Maximilien Robespierre: 'The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.'

--Thomas Riggins writes a weekly column for this web site and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

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Fight Night in the NBA

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:46:00 +0000

I don’t think we’ll be hearing the 'NBA Action is Faaaantstic' slogan revived anytime soon. The aftermath of the most violent player/fan brawl in US sports history has met with the hand wringing we usually associate with Janet Jackson’s right breast. The fight between several members of the Indiana Pacers and a garrison of Detroit Pistons fans veered wildly from the frightening to the ridiculous.

There were Pacers forwards Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson, swinging haymakers at anyone with a potbelly and a Pistons jersey. There were their 5’9' inch 220 pound combatants throwing punches at Artest like he was Joey from the block and not a 6’8' inch pro athlete who could cave in their face. There was Rick Mahorn of all people - the tough guy of the 1980s Pistons teams, getting up from the broadcast booth and pulling people apart – like an 'old timers brawl' of sorts (I kept looking for Charles Oakley to emerge from the crowd and hit Mahorn with a folding chair.) And there was that moment when tragedy truly became farce: seeing Rasheed Wallace step in as 'peace maker.'

As soon as Artest was pelted by a cup of ice, hurdled into the crowd, and started throwing haymakers like Clubber Lang, you knew that NBA commissioner David Stern would bring down the hammer and he did not disappoint. Artest, the reigning NBA defensive player of the year, received a 73 game suspension, the longest in NBA history. Also getting nailed with historic time away from the court were the Pacers’ Stephen Jackson who got 30 game vacation, and all-NBA forward Jermaine O’Neal who was not only pegged with 25 games but also face charges for cold cocking a fan off camera in full view of several Auburn Hills’ cops.

Whenever an event this out of the ordinary occurs, the sports establishment ever fearful of a black eye, treats it like a catastrophic epidemic and has already offered PR solutions ranging from banning beer sales to circling armed cops around the court (that is exactly what Friday needed amid the chaos: guns).

What this approach ignores, including logic, is the opportunity to confront a new phenomenon in US sports: the simmering animosity between ticket holding (emphasis on ticket holding) fans and the players. Here, whether Stern and the NBA brass want to discuss it or not, we have a mulligan stew of race, class and grievance that says a great deal about the uneasy place of pro sports in US society. First, as columnist Jason Whitlock commented after the brawl, 'Many fans love the sport but just hate pro athletes.' Athletes in the eyes of many fans are too spoiled, too loud, too 'hip-hop' too tattooed, too corn-rowed – all of which translates to players as 'too Black.'

Also in this era of fantasy leagues, yipping high testosterone sports radio, high-ticket prices, and league sponsored EA sports video games that wallow in computerized bench-clearing brawls, fans more than ever see themselves as participants and not observers (the EA sports slogan actually is 'get in the game'). Those fans in Detroit, $50 ticket in hand, believe they have more than the right – they have the duty – to throw punches at opposing players if the opportunity presents itself. One striking scene from the Auburn Hills fight was when a man clearly on the gray side of forty, appears to be pulling at Artest to break up the fight, and then throws three straight rabbit punches to the back of the 6’ 8 inch forward’s head.

This man also happened to be white, which is the other side of the fan/athlete resentathon. NBA players the overwhelming majority of whom come from poor inner city backgrounds, don’t look at the stands and think, 'Hey! What a terrific group of 40-year-old white guys I’m going to be dunking for this evening!' As one player said to me, 'I look at the seats and don’t see anyone from my old hood or anybody that looks anything like me. It’s like you’re a monkey in a cage.' So we have angry white fans trying to punch out angry black players with the players returning the favor. This animosity is very real and not going anywhere.

This violence is also heated by the bloodshed engulfing US society – not street violence, but the state-sanctioned variety. ESPN has replayed the 'horror' of the fight ad nauseum, in black and white, with all kinds of slo-motion angles. They have reveled in this fight and crying all the way to the ratings bank. But as the 'World Wide Leader' cries over the punches thrown, remember that this is also a network that did a week of Sports Centers in Kuwait, on a set made up to look like a machine gun nest. Ask people in Falluja what violence really looks like, and the role a network like ESPN plays in promoting the acceptance of such violence. An NBA player’s union rep quite correctly tried to give some perspective to the brawl, commenting that 'Yes it was violent. But there is violence everywhere. There is violence in war.' This is a thoughtful comment with at least a modicum of perspective. He will probably be fired.

None of this is to excuse what broke loose in Auburn Hills. Without question the assaults were as ugly as anything seen on in an NBA arena since Paul Mokeski. Artest is a troubled young person who recently took the number 91 as a tribute to Dennis Rodman. But unlike Rodman, who in his spare time, took part in World Championship Wrestling Shows and cheesy action flicks with Jean Claude Van Damme, Artest has never seen basketball as entertainment or spectacle and has had real issues with rage. Washington Post Columnist Michael Wilbon has said for years that Artest’s much talked about on court 'antics' and flagrant fouls were not funny and someone in Pacers management needs to step in and get him professional help before 'something terrible happens.' I don’t think Wilbon has ever felt worse for being right.

--To receive Dave Zirin’s column every week, e-mailgive feedback, just e-mail editor@pgpost.com.

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National Treasure Still Missing

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:27:00 +0000

National Treasure

Wild and incredible legends of secret societies – Knights Templar and Masons – hidden passages in ancient churches, coded rhymes and encrypted historical documents have been popularized by such writers as Dan Brown in his best-selling controversial novels, Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. An immense popular interest in these myths and the adventure tales surrounding them has found its way onto the big screen in the newest release from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, National Treasure.

Absent the controversy and religious symbolism of Brown’s tales, National Treasure is a fast-paced adventure with touches of humor starring the increasingly eccentric Nicholas Cage as Benjamin Franklin Gates. Gates is an amateur and obsessed historian on a quest for the mythic and secret National Treasure believed to be composed of artifacts from the great civilizations of the world and hidden away by the US founding fathers during the Revolutionary War period. Legend has it that an invisible map on the back of the original Declaration of Independence holds the final clues to the treasure's location. Gates's one-time collaborator, Ian Howe (played by Sean Bean of Lord of the Rings), after a falling out over tactics in 0pursuit of the treasure, is his arch nemesis. History buffs will note the rivalry between Gates and Howe, names derived from generals leading opposing sides in the US revolutionary war. Similar tidbits of US history can be found throughout the film.

Gates is aided by sardonic and witty, but resourceful Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and Abigail Chase (talented and attractive German actor Diane Kruger). Chase is a National Archives historian who is intrigued by Gates adventure and becomes an unwilling accomplice in the search for the treasure and the effort to save the original copy of the Declaration of Independence after discovering that Gates has stolen the document to protect its secret. Jon Voigt's role as Gates disillusioned father and one-time treasure-seeker is notable.

Throughout this circuitous tale, Ian Howe, a wealthy investor, competes with and eventually overtakes Gates in the race to the concealed riches. While Howe's goal is strictly motivated by the desire for financial gain, power and prestige, Gates seeks only to restore his family's honor lost over the generations as people came to see the Gates as crackpots perpetuating dead myths.

In the process of searching, however, Gates also discovers the importance of recovering the collective artifacts of human history built by human labor and knowledge and the value of returning them to their rightful owners. If imperial power is symbolized by possession of these ancient artifacts – if they indeed exist – Gates' democratic impulse is to return the objects of history to the people as they are its makers and rightful owners.

This democratic ideal depends, however, on whether or not the treasure is real. Gates isn't absolutely certain it is real, but refuses to give up the quest and continues to argue against the skeptics and cynics who doubt his sanity. His father, a symbol of a comfortable and quiet generation, has come to accept his own inability to find the lost treasure and assumes it was only a myth.

Among other things, this film is about competing and contested factions in the struggle to define America's past and future. In this conflict – not so subtly a class conflict – Howe signifies the worst traditions in the national story: imperialism, class exploitation, power, slavery, domination and violence. Gates expresses the best, if currently suppressed, traditions of democracy, unity, and a larger belief in the intrinsic value of a universal humanity that defies borders.

If the treasure does exist, who will ultimately control it? Will the Ian Howe's of the world subvert its internationalist democratic meaning, say for example like George W. Bush has done, in order to garner wealth into the hands of a few or will the treasure's true meaning and value be returned to the people of the world? The outlines of this very real struggle are at the heart of the story.

This film's glaring shortcoming is its implausibility. If we are asked to believe that a story about the struggle for democracy is populated with only white actors (as is the case with National Treasure's main cast), then it defies reality. If the film's makers simply aren't aware of this flaw in their otherwise entertaining achievement, then perhaps they need more schooling in US history than trivial tidbits about Benjamin Franklin's writing habits or the names of Revolutionary generals. A film about the American national saga that excludes people of color falls short; when that story centers on the struggle for democracy and excludes people of color, it fails outright.

--Martha Kramer writes on popular culture for Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.

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American Elections: Bad News and Good

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 13:19:00 +0000

From Socialist Voice, November 2004

The puppet wins

The election of George Bush for a second term in the White House is a big setback for democratic forces, not alone in the United States itself but right across the globe. George Bush is nothing more than a puppet for the most bellicose forces centred around the giant corporations in what is known as the military-industrial complex.

We now have the working out of the long-term strategy of these forces to dominate government. The means of achieving this was the power base of evangelical Christian movements, racism, and the monopolised corporate media.

You would have to ask how, in the most advanced industrial country in the world—with a developed scientific knowledge base, and which has sent people to the Moon and spacecraft to explore the universe—46 per cent of the population believe that women came from the rib of Adam, and that human life began 12,000 years ago. The result also shows that there is widespread alienation and deep mistrust of the power structures by millions of citizens of the United States. Many people are alienated in this decadent culture, a society where a substantial part of the economy is built on the use and abuse of the human being, in particular women, in the production of pornography. The commodification of every aspect of life has reached a point where people are deeply unhappy. With the everyday pressure of living, many people are working at two jobs, six days a week, just to pay the bills. What Marx had to say about people’s religious beliefs—'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world'—is nowhere more clearly expressed than in this election result; and there is certainly no more heartless place than the corporate-dominated United States.

There is now a complete blurring of where power and influence begin and end between corporate power and that of government. Generals can retire from the army one day and the next day be Secretary of State; the chief executive of an arms corporation one day can be Vice-President of the United States the next; you can be a major player in the oil companies and then become responsible for government energy policy.

A number of things are clear from this election: that only those candidates backed by big business can run (it is estimated that $1.4 billion was spent by both candidates and their corporate sponsors) that racism is still a powerful political weapon in the United States that the media are not independent or above the day-to-day struggles within society but rather are active players on the side of the powerful elites that people’s religious views are manipulated by the elites to confuse them and make them submissive to the interests of those who control them that Islamic fundamentalism is not the only religious fundamentalism that the world has to take seriously and to combat. But the fact that more than 49 million people in the United States voted against Bush (rather than supported Kerry) is proof of the validity of the famous saying of Abraham Lincoln, 'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.' They harassed, bullied, terrified and even managed to bring their old ally Osama Bin Laden out to frighten the most gullible, yet they only just managed to swing the election in their favour.

Those within the United States who stood up and actively campaigned against Bush and the corporate media deserve everyone’s admiration. In a paranoid society, a society where people are encouraged to inform on their neighbours, where there is a high level of police surveillance, tens of thousands did not buckle but worked hard to mobilise millions, with the added handicap of a very poor candidate.

The labour movement in the United States clearly has a lot of thinking to do about the best strategy for the future. It can descend into despair, or it can recognise that it has a powerful base to build on. The debate will no doubt rage about whether the Democratic Party is a useful vehicle with which the labour movement can have influence and can effect change, given its class character and the forces that control that party.

And there are still those in the Irish media and political establishment who welcomed Bush’s re-election. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, welcomed it, expressing concerns about the Irish economy if John Kerry had been elected. Clearly war is good for business.

The forces at work in the United States and the lessons to be learnt also apply to Ireland. The media are not neutral; business and financial interests determine the political priorities and the agendas of governments and the majority of the parties that move in and out of government.

The next four years will be hard and dangerous. The signs are not good, with those ominous words from Bush that he has a lot of 'political capital' to spend. It is clear that the peace forces need to reach out further. There are millions waiting for leadership and direction. No doubt the working class of the United States is going to pay a heavy price, as well as those around the world who oppose imperialism.

Good news from American elections

On 31 October, Venezuelans went to the polls in regional elections and delivered a ninth, and perhaps final, electoral defeat to the opposition. Chávez supporters won twenty out of the twenty-two state governorships contested, and the important mayoralty of Caracas.

The defeated governors of the opposition, most of whom had been involved in the April 2002 coup d’état, predictably refused to accept the result. After the referendum, nobody believes them, and the European media that have been predicting Chávez’s defeat for so long just totally ignored the election. The pro-imperialist parties of the Fourth Republic are in total disorder and are incapable of mounting any political challenge to Hugo Chávez.

But they still have enormous financial resources and in their desperation are likely to resort to more violent methods. Carlos Andres Pérez, ex-president of Venezuela and wanted for corruption, urges the assassination of Chávez, and one of his colleagues repeated this on Miami television. (Have they no laws against terrorism in the United States?)

Meanwhile in another American election ignored by our media the left Frente Amplio (Broad Front) candidate, Tabaré Vásquez, won the Uruguayan presidency, and a referendum against the privatisation of water was also carried. Throughout Latin America the old pro-imperialist elites are losing ground. The United States is trying to establish new forms of domination but is finding this very difficult indeed.

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Don't Let Bush Rob Social Security

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:18:00 +0000

Social Security isn’t broken, but Washington is full of reformers looking to fix it. Many, especially those who favor privatization, claim that the retirement of baby boomers and budget problems will cause the Social Security Trust Fund to run out of money within anywhere from the next decade to the next 40 years. Ideologically driven claims rather than facts, however, lie at the heart of the pro-privatization arguments.

In 2001, Bush appointed a commission whose sole purpose, despite claims to the contrary, was to devise the best Social Security privatization methods available. This commission was composed entirely of investment-oriented technocrats and pro-privatization ideologues. For two decades, the right has worked on generating the political momentum to dismantle Social Security. Their goal is ideologically motivated rather than based in any factual claims about Social Security’s viability.

Despite large annual surpluses ($138 billion in 2003 despite a weak recovery), privatizers insist that the system has about 14 years before it collapses (2018). They set 2018 as the date because the sell date of many US bonds purchased by the Social Security Administration is that year. This is the year that SSA’s income from payroll taxes is expected to be smaller than what it has to pay in benefits. They forget to remind us that like any other public debt Social Security bonds will be rolled over into another cycle. They also neglect to state the simple fact that the assets owned by the SSA are adequate enough to cover the difference between its income through the payroll tax and what it has to pay in benefits. According to both the Social Security Trustees and the Congressional Budget office, this balance is safe decades into the future.

If we follow the privatizer’s debt crisis logic, however, we might conclude that foreign investors who hold trillions in US bonds could bankrupt the US government at any time by demanding payment. But privatizers don’t seem overly worried about that. They know that people who buy US bonds have more to gain by holding on to them.

Privatizers also claim that the growing and aging workforce will put greater pressure on the system once those workers retire over the next decade. Surpluses will disappear. But this assumption hinges on slower than normal economic growth. Since the Social Security depends on current workers paying in through a small payroll tax, its financial future depends on how well the economy creates jobs and how well those jobs pay. Job creation is related to how well the GDP grows.

Since the Reagan era, the Social Security Trustees have predicted a dire economic picture with slower than average rates of GDP growth in their estimation of the financial future of Social Security. Even with pessimistic predictions – they paint an economic picture worse than the Great Depression – the Trustees conclude the system without any changes will remain financially sound until 2045 when some benefits would have to be cut. If Bush used the same numbers to forecast the growth of the federal debt, he’d never pass a single tax cut plan.

A Congressional Budget Office report released last June, using more realistic predictions, said that surpluses would persist until 2052, and in 75 years the financial trouble it would incur would be about half of what the Trustees predict. When compared with the current federal debt (4 percent of GDP) or the current foreign debt (5 percent of GDP), the Social Security’s financial shortfall – 75 years from now – would account for an easily manageable 0.4 percent of the entire economy. The cost of Bush’s tax cuts alone over the same period of time, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, will be about three times that amount.

To avoid collapse, privatizers claim that benefits will have to be cut or payroll taxes raised. Another option in their view is to allow current workers to opt out. Instead of paying a tax, the government would withhold part of their earnings and put them in private accounts managed by large investment firms. Investment bankers would put the money in the stock market or whatever speculative schemes they have cooked up at the moment: corporate debt, Enron-type deals, housing bubbles, price or currency derivatives and so on.

Individuals wouldn’t control these accounts; corporate financial bureaucrats would. They aren’t guaranteed to give workers any return in the future, but you better believe that brokers fees and commissions will fatten the bottom line of some investment companies. According to Barbara B. Kennelly, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, it would cost $940 billion to move from the current system to private accounts alone.

Private accounts will also speed up Social Security’s financial problems by removing trillions of dollars from the system in just a few short years. Current retirees and disabled workers could expect severe cuts in their benefits almost immediately despite the claims of the privatizers.

Because hundreds of billions of Social Security surplus dollars are used to cover part of the US government’s spending needs, the withdrawal of the money would have a negative impact on the government’s ability to finance its operations and pay its debts.

The rapid loss of so much money would still require cuts – between $300 and $500 monthly – in benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Without any changes, cuts in benefits, increased taxes, or privatization, however, Social Security over the next 75 years would continue to pay the same benefits for without any financial problems. A lot could happen in those 75 years to improve such a bleak future predicted by the privatizers. Spending priorities could shift from bloated military budgets, rich tax cuts, and corporate giveaways to investment in job creation, training, education, and trade policies that keep jobs here.

Privatization schemes, however, will rob our parents, us, and our children of the promise of financial security after a life devoted to work. Let’s not allow the fruits of our labor to line the pockets of the filthy rich.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine and can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

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US Military Attacks Worshippers in Baghdad

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:06:00 +0000

From Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches

Abu Talat calls me frantic. The deafening roar of hundreds of people in a confined area yelling, 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Greatest) reverberate behind his panicked voice.

'I am being held at gunpoint by American soldiers inside Abu Hanifa mosque Dahr,' he yells, 'Everyone is praying to God because the Americans are raiding our mosque during Friday prayer!'

He makes short calls, updating me on the atrocity. After a few sentences of information he hangs up because he is trapped inside the mosque and trying to let me know what is happening. Being Friday, the day of prayer and holiday, this was supposed to be an off day for us.
I just finish typing what he told me before he calls back.

'They have shot and killed at least 4 of the people while they were praying, and at least 20 are wounded now! I cannot believe this! I can’t let them see me calling you. I am on my stomach now and they have our guns on everyone, there are at least 1,500 people inside the mosque and it is sealed. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation.' Several Humvees and Iraqi National Guard (ING) vehicles showed up and 50 soldiers and well over 50 ING sealed and entered the mosque with the goal of detaining the Imam, Shaikh Muayid al-Adhami.

Abu Talat calls back, 'We were here praying and now there are over 50 here with their guns on us,' he said. 'They are holding our heads to the ground, and everyone is in chaos. This is the worst situation possible. They cannot see me talking to you. They are roughing up a blind man now.'

The soldiers eventually released women and children along with men who were related to them. Abu Talat was only released because a boy approached him and told him to pretend to be his father.

Shortly thereafter he phones me from his home in tears.

'Dahr I cannot believe what has happened,' pausing to collect himself, 'I will go back to see what is happening now.'

I urge him not to go, but he insists.

'This is my mosque and my people. I must go see what is happening to them.'

It is now 2:15pm and the mosque is still sealed. We begin to interview people he is with via the mobile as he describes the scene.

'People were praying and the Americans invaded the mosque,' Abdulla Ra'ad Aziz said, who had been released along with his wife and children. 'Why are they killing people for praying? After the forces entered they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns. There were wounded and dead, I saw them myself.'

Some of the people who had been at prayer were ordered by soldiers to carry the dead and wounded out of the mosque.

'One Iraqi National Guardsmen held his gun on people and yelled, ‘I will kill you if you don't shut up’,' said Rana Aziz, a mother who had been trapped in the mosque. She was now waiting outside for her brother, who was still inside.

She said someone asked the soldiers if they would were hostages. 'A soldier yelled at everyone to ‘Shut the Fuck Up,' she said. Suddenly, she laughed amid her tears. 'The Americans have learned how to say shut up in Arabic, ‘Inchev’.'

Hammad Mohammed, a 20 year-old man, said, 'My uncle’s coffin was taken inside the mosque to be prayed on, and the Americans raided the mosque and went to the Imams’ room. Then they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns-it was a gun bigger than a Kalashnikov. There were wounded and dead, as I saw them myself. I saw 4 killed and 9 wounded.'

Abu Talat then breaks the interview and tells me, 'Doctors and staff are standing outside but the Americans refuse to let them inside. They can do nothing, and the Americans are not letting them inside while there are wounded people inside the mosque.'

Just like in Fallujah, soldiers denied Iraqi Red Crescent ambulances and medical teams access to the mosque. As doctors negotiated with U.S. soldiers outside, more gunfire was heard from inside the mosque.

About 30 men were led out with hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind them. Soldiers loaded them into a military vehicle and took them away around 3.15 pm.

A doctor with the Iraqi Red Crescent confirmed four dead and nine wounded worshippers. Pieces of brain were splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets in several places.

Later Abu Talat comes to my hotel to see me. He is distraught, crying while he recounts the story. After listening to the tape he recorded inside the mosque during the atrocity, he says…

'I am in a very sad position. I do not see any freedom or any democracy. If this could lead into a freedom, it is a freedom with blood. It is a freedom of emotions of sadness. It is a freedom of killing. You cannot gain democracy through blood or killing. You do not find the freedom that way. People are going to pray to God and they were killed and wounded. There were 1,500 people praying to God and they went on a holiday were people go every Friday for prayers. And they were shot and killed. There were so many women and kids lying on the ground. This is not democracy, neither freedom.'

After several weeks of relative calm in Adhamiya, the detention of the Imam of Abu Hanifa and killing of worshippers inside their mosque is sure to ignite the fires of revenge in this area, which is already known as the Fallujah of Baghdad.

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Another Pyrrhic Victory for White Supremacy

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:02:00 +0000

From The Black Commentator

Why would so many US working and middle class citizens vote against their own class interests in the recent presidential election?

And what can really be said about the 'morality' of those who oppose stem cell research, effective social programs for the poor and disadvantaged, adequate funding of schools, abortion and the right of women to control their bodies, national health care insurance, and affirmative action programs but at the same time support capital punishment, economic inequality with the most extreme income gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots' of any industrial nation, racism, both structural and otherwise, and the criminal invasion of Iraq with the slaughter of at least 100,000 children, women, and men all for the sake of Iraqi oil and imperialist dreams of conquest and domination, and white supremacist visions of world hegemony?

Given such glaring contradictions, one wonders if many US citizens are able to discern the difference between the wheat and the chaff and what is the quality of their reality contact.

Or is there another dynamic lurking just beneath the surface: white control, white exclusivity, and in a word, white supremacy under the guise of so-called 'Christian' values which are often egregious violations of many of the basic tenets of authentic Christianity including the Golden Rule, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' a rule predicated on liberty, justice and equality, as well as other integrative aspects of Christianity like 'Love thy neighbor as thy self' which speaks of socialism rather than unjust, misanthropic, dog-eat-dog capitalism and class conflict. As Jesus said, 'What thou doeth to the least of these, thou doeth to me.' This contrast is clear if you compare the teachings of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with those of Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Do you really think that the God of Christianity as revealed in the Bible is unconcerned about the environment, or war and peace, and injustice and poverty? Does God want 45 million Americans to be without healthcare and does God support the racist exclusion of people of color and other out groups?

So we see that the deeply ubiquitous ideology of Euro-American supremacy trumps class interests and, in this instance, leads to a tragic, dangerous, and irrational choice, the election of an overtly racist, war criminal hell bent on destroying the last tattered remnants of the social safety net and seems intent on attempting to remake the world in accord with his own destructive, anti-democratic, white supremacist vision: George Walker Bush.

Bush’s Iraqi imbroglio is simply a stale rehash of the tired, old 'White Man’s Burden' routine. When he announces in his messianic, megalomaniac zeal he will bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, he denies Iraqi cultural history, Iraqi legitimacy, and Iraqi autonomy, and the value and worth of the Iraqi people themselves. In the end, according to the Bush plan, 'Big Boss Man' will be in control, in charge of the destiny of the Iraqi people, and more to the real motive, in charge of their oil.

If one were to substitute the word, 'Iraqis,' for the word, 'slaves,' a comment by a Euro-American holder of enslaved Africans, 'We turn our slaves into whatever we want them to be' precisely mirrors Bush’s simple minded, tragically ineffective Iraqi strategy which seems doomed to failure but is likely to produce terrible consequences, to unleash the proverbial whirlwind.

But again, from the Bush perspective, 'Big Boss Man' rules and Euro-American superiority and Bush et al.’s intrinsic right to world hegemony are tacitly assumed.

Unfortunately, all too many Americans seem to agree, especially Bush supporters.

Pertinent in this context is a recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, 'The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters,' that yielded surreal, delusion-like results. The survey revealed that 72% of those who support Bush still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them while Kerry supporters had opposite beliefs on all these points.

In addition, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda and 63% believe solid, irrefutable evidence of this was found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. And again, large majorities of Kerry supporters hold exactly opposite, more veridical views.

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, commented: 'One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree.' Eighty-two percent of Bush supporters perceive the Bush administration as asserting that Iraq had WMD (63%) or that Iraq had a major WMD program (19%). Similarly, 75% say that the Bush administration has indicated that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Equally large majorities of Kerry supporters perceive the Bush administration as expressing these views. Seventy-three percent say that the Bush administration asserts that Iraq had WMD and 74% that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.

Also, according to Steven Kull, 'Another reason that Bush supporters may hold to these beliefs is that they have not accepted the idea that it does not matter whether Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda. Here too they are in agreement with Kerry supporters.' When asked whether the US should have gone to war against Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not developing WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61% believe that the President would not have.

Kull continues: 'To support the President and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress [, repress, and deny] awareness [italics mine] of unsettling information about prewar Iraq.'

The proclivity of Bush supporters to utilize the triad of hysterical defenses, suppression, repression, and denial, to ignore dissonant information also extends to other realms, a highly significant finding.

Despite an abundance of evidence including polls conducted in 38 countries, only 31% of Bush supporters are able to recognize and acknowledge that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent mistakenly believe that views are evenly divided, and 26% mistakenly believe that the majority approves. Among Kerry supporters, 74% are able to acknowledge that the world is opposed to the US war of aggression.

Likewise, 57% of Bush supporters mistakenly believe that the majority of people in other nations favor Bush’s reelection, 33% assumed that views are equally divided, and only 9% believed that Kerry was preferred. A recent survey of 35 major countries around the world revealed that in 30, a majority favored Kerry while in just 3 was Bush favored.

Bush supporters also harbor gross misperceptions of Bush’s international policy positions. Substantial majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to international issues, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%). the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto treaty addressing the problem of global warming (51%). After Bush denounced the International Criminal Court in the recent debates of Presidential candidates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still a majority of 53% continue to believe that he favors it. Seventy-four percent incorrectly believe that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these instances, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush while Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

To turn to Steven Kull again, 'The roots of the Bush supporters’ resistance to information [italics mine] very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters – and an idealized image [italics mine] of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters.'

I find Kull’s explanation of Bush supporters’ resistance to information discrepant with pre-existing beliefs to be the joint result of the traumatic experience of 9/11 and the quality of the President’s leadership in the wake of that event myopic and unconvincing.

Kull seems to be positing that the propensity of Bush supporters to tune out discrepant information is situationally determined. He does not seem to entertain the possibility that the behavior may not wholly be situationally determined but, instead, may also be, in part, dispositionally determined as well, that is, the behavior may be an interaction of state-determined and trait-determined components.

Since Kerry supporters were also in the same situation as Bush supporters, they, too, experienced 9/11 and Bush’s 'leadership,' and they, too, should respond like Bush supporters if resistance to information discrepant with pre-existing beliefs was primarily state-determined but they clearly do not. Why is that so?

Unfortunately, Kull is silent on this point so we will have to look elsewhere for a more veridical explanation of this highly significant difference in the behavior of Bush and Kerry supporters.

In a superb meta-analysis of the data from 50 years of research on the psychological motives, traits, and tendencies that underlie differences between the political right and left involving 88 samples, 12 countries, and 22,818 cases, Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway [see Jost, John T., Glaser, Jack. Kruglanski, Arie W., and Sulloway, Frank J. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), May 2003, 339 – 375] confirmed that several psychological variables predict political conservatism.

The researchers state: 'The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality [read: the rationalization of structural racism and the racist exclusion of out-groups] and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat' (p. 339).

The variables predictive of political conservatism in the order of their predictive validity are as follows: Death anxiety or mortality salience (weighted mean r = .50); system instability or threat to the stability of the social system (.47); dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to new experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); personal needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); and fear of threat and loss (.18).

Let us briefly examine each of these factors.

Death Anxiety or Mortality Salience

As the salience of one’s own mortality concerns increases through traumatic events like 9/11, ideological defensiveness and political conservatism also increases.

The most thorough research program to assess the effects of mortality salience on social and political attitudes has been carried out by Greenberg et al. who have demonstrated that mortality salience leads people to defend culturally valued norms and practices more fiercely and to distance themselves from, and to derogate out-group members. Death anxiety has also been linked to system justifying forms of stereotyping and a greater preference for stereotype-consistent women and minority group members ('Toms, Coons, Bucks, and Mulattoes' to borrow a phrase).

In addition, mortality salience has been shown to elicit greater punitiveness and aggression toward those who violate cultural values.

Greenberg et al. have also demonstrated that mortality salience led high authoritarians to denigrate those who were dissimilar to them but did not have this effect on low authoritarians. And in another study by Greenberg et al., mortality salience was found to increase political intolerance among conservatives but it increased political tolerance among liberals, perhaps because tolerance is an important attribute of the Weltanschauung or worldview of the latter but not the former group.

The significant difference between conservatives and liberals, political intolerance versus political tolerance, suggests that death anxiety or mortality salience is not simply the resultant of situational factors alone but reveals dispositional features as well.

System Instability or Threat to the Stability of the Social System

A large body of archival research demonstrates that during times of social crisis, people are more likely to turn to authoritarian leaders and institutions for security, stability, and structure. For example, during periods of severe economic threat, the depression years of 1930 – 1939, research has shown that people were more likely to join authoritarian churches and less likely to join non-authoritarian churches. Similarly, in another study which examined years of heavy unemployment in Seattle, Washington, 1961, 1964, 1969, and 1970, they found higher than usual conversion rates there for an authoritarian church and lower than usual conversion rates for a non-authoritarian church, while in relatively good economic years in Seattle, 1962, 1965, and 1966, coincided with lower than usual conversion rates to the authoritarian church and higher than usual conversion rates for the non-authoritarian church.

In another study, historians were recruited to rate all of the US presidential election years between 1788 and 1992 on the degree to which the social, economic, and political circumstances of that period were threatening to the American established order. The results showed that during system-threatening times, presidential candidates who were rated as high on power motivation, forcefulness, and strength were elected by larger margins of victory than during non-threatening times.

These studies provide fairly strong support for the hypothesis that threats to the stability of the social system increase politically conservative choices, decisions, and judgments.

Dogmatism and Intolerance for Ambiguity

A number of studies have found that dogmatism consistently correlates with authoritarianism, political-economic conservatism, and the holding of right-wing opinions. Further, political conservatives have been found to be more dogmatic, mentally rigid, and closed-minded than are either liberals or moderates.

Research on intolerance of ambiguity has shown that this trait is associated with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and political conservatism.

And intolerance of ambiguity and rigidity is clearly revealed in a statement made by George W. Bush at an international conference of world leaders in Genoa, Italy: 'I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right.' And on another occasion, Bush informed a British reporter: 'Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance…. My job is to tell people what I think.'

Openness to New Experience

Additional research indicates that conservatives score lower on measures of extraversion and are less likely to seek out interaction with others, score lower than others on measures of general sensation seeking, and are less likely than others to value broad-mindedness, imagination, and having an exciting life.

In an interesting experiment, conservatives were also found to be less likely than non-conservatives to volunteer for psychology experiments that required openness to experience, experiments on aesthetic interest, fantasy productions, and self-reports on sexual behavior, but more likely to volunteer for experiments on decision making and humor. In other words, conservatives evidenced an unwillingness to engage in tasks that were person-oriented but more likely to engage in object-oriented tasks.

This research provides consistent evidence that people who hold politically conservative attitudes are generally less open to new and stimulating experiences.

Uncertainty Tolerance

We next turn to a series of studies that investigate the hypothesis that conservatives find ambiguity and uncertainty threatening.

In a study of artistic preferences of people who scored either high or low on a scale for conservatism, conservatives were found to exhibit a strong preference for simple rather than complex paintings and a weaker preference for representational rather than abstract paintings.

Similarly, conservatives were found to prefer simple poems to complex ones; unambiguous over ambiguous literary texts; familiar over unfamiliar music; and familiar over unfamiliar stimuli.

These studies all converge to reveal that conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, less open to new experiences, and more avoidant of uncertainty compared with moderates and liberals.

Need for Order, Structure, and Closure

A number of theories hypothesize that conservatives have a heightened motivational need for order and structure. The research that exists is consistent with this hypothesis.

In summarizing this research, Jost et al. comment: 'This evidence is consistent not only with research on dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, and uncertainty avoidance but also with the notion that in the realm of political attitudes, authoritarians long for order and structure, advocating such diverse measures as firm parental discipline, comprehensive drug testing, core educational curricula, and quarantines for AIDS patients . . . ' (p. 358).

Integrative Complexity

There is also a large body of research that examines left wing and right wing differences in cognitive complexity. Content analytic techniques have been developed to measure integrative complexity that refers to the extent of differentiation among multiple perspectives or dimensions and the higher order integration and synthesis of these differentiated components.

For example, in a series of studies by Tetlock and his collaborators that focused on the thinking style of political elites, there was clear evidence that conservative ideologues were, in general, less integratively complex than their liberal or moderate counterparts. Similarly, data from an analysis of US senatorial speeches in 1975 and 1976 indicated that politicians whose voting records were classified as either liberal or moderate showed significantly more integrative complexity than did politicians with conservative voting records. These results were repeated or replicated almost exactly in a study of US Supreme Court justices. In another study of members of the British House of Commons, the results showed that the most integratively complex politicians were moderate socialists who scored significantly higher on complexity than extreme socialists, moderate conservatives, and extreme conservatives.

Fear of Threat and Loss

Right wing authoritarians, according to Altemeyer, '. . . are scared. They see the world as a dangerous place, as society teeters on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence. This fear seems to instigate aggression in them. Second, right wing authoritarians tend to be highly self-righteous. They think themselves much more moral and upstanding than others – a self-perception considerably aided by self-deception, their religious training, and some very efficient guilt evaporators (such as going to confession). This self-righteousness disinhibits their aggressive impulses and releases them to act out their fear-induced hostilities.'

In keeping with the idea that conservatives see the world as threatening, Altemeyer reported a study that found a strong, positive correlation between the perception of a dangerous world and high scores on the Right Wing Authoritarian Scale with a sample of Canadian college students. Other researchers replicated this finding with several samples in South Africa and New Zealand where they also noted a significant correlation between the perception of a dangerous world and scores on a Social Dominance Scale. Authoritarians in these studies generally saw the world as a dangerous place while liberals did not share this pessimistic perception.

In an ingenuous research program on the dream lives of liberals and conservatives in the US, the investigator found that Republicans reported three times as many nightmares as did Democrats. This finding suggests that fear, danger, threat, and aggression percolates more prominently through the unconscious life of conservatives than liberals.

To the extent that conservatives are especially sensitive and attuned to threat or possibility of loss, one reason they attempt to maintain the statue quo, it follows that they should also be more highly motivated by negatively framed outcomes or potential losses than by positively framed outcomes or potential gains.

Five days before the 1996 US presidential election, researchers presented high and lower scorers on the Right Wing Authoritarian Scale with persuasive arguments that stressed either the potential rewards of voting ('a way to express and live in accordance with positive values') or the potential cost of not voting ('not voting allows others to take away your right to express your values'). They found that high authoritarians were more influenced by threatening messages than by reward messages but the pattern was just the reverse for low authoritarians who were more influenced by reward than threat messages.

In general, research indicates that a 'prevention' orientation that focuses on potential threats and losses is associated with conservative ideas.

Conclusion

This brief review of the literature on the determinants of a conservative orientation strongly suggests that while situational factors may influence the experience and expression of conservatism, they are not the whole story.

Since we have already seen that character rigidity and motivational threat are related to the holding of conservative attitudes and values, system instability and other threatening circumstances should also increase conservative tendencies in the population.

A kind of matching process takes place whereby people adopt ideological beliefs that are most likely to satisfy their psychological needs and motives and ideology is a quintessential example of psychodynamically induced cognition and preferred coping mechanisms in that people are highly motivated to perceive the world in ways that satisfy their needs, values, and prior beliefs and commitments.

Non-elites like the working and middle class might adopt conservative ideologies under some circumstances in order to reduce fear and anxiety, cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, or instability while the more advantaged elites might embrace conservatism for reasons of self-interest or social dominance and maintenance of their privileged position.

We are now in a position to understand what Kull and his associates at the University of Maryland could not understand in the data from their survey of Bush and Kerry supporters: Why Bush supporters were extremely resistant to information discrepant with their pre-existing beliefs. This is a preferred coping mechanism, a psychological trait or orientation, the utilization of hysterical defenses of denial, suppression, and repression, to allay anxiety, fear, cognitive dissonance and other disruptive, dysphoric emotions evidenced more often in conservatives than in people who are liberal and who seem to be more solidly grounded in reality.

Conservatism as a system of belief is a function of many different kinds of factors. Politically conservative orientations are multiply-determined by a wide variety of factors that vary personally and situationally and have both a stable definitional core and a set of more malleable, situationally determined, historically changing peripheral associations.

It is the ideological core of political conservatism more than its peripheral aspects that seems to be linked to specific social, cognitive, and psychodynamic needs.

A distinguishing mark of political conservatism is fear of change and the self-definitions of liberals and conservatives have to do with acceptance of, versus resistance to, change.

Another core issue important to African Americans, other people of color, and out-groups concerns endorsement or preference for inequality. Liberals favor greater equality while conservatives perceive society as naturally hierarchical and are more explicitly racist.

Finally, there is a real culture war under way in the US between the 'Blues' who reside in the liberal, cultural and intellectual metropolis, major cities, college towns, etc. and the 'Reds' who are found in the more provincial outlying districts, two worlds which are separate, unequal, and often, mutually unintelligible to each other.

--Alvin Wyman Walker, PhD, PD is a Clinical Psychologist/Psychotherapist who earned PhDs in Personality/Social Psychology and Clinical Psychology. To hone his psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic skills, he spent six additional years of post-doctoral training at a psychoanalytic institute. Dr. Walker is currently in private practice in Harlem, New York.

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A Revolutionary Analogy

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 03:37:00 +0000

From ILCA online

Deep in the winter of 1776-1777, when George Washington's troops were freezing and starving at Valley Forge, the great revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine penned some immortal words at that same time, in Common Sense.

They are worth quoting now, because they sum up what the labor movement faces with four years of George W. Bush:

'These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

'Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us: That the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. 'Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.'

Why do we quote Tom Paine in 2004, some 228 years after he wrote those immortal words? Because--politically--workers face what Washington's soldiers faced physically that bleak winter, and we must gird ourselves for it.

Yes, these are the times that try mens' and womens' and workers' souls. Bush, having apparently won legitimate election to the White House, will--with backing of his business puppeteers and his congressional majority--deliberately and with malice aforethought try to destroy, kill, obliterate and smash labor.

Bush and Co. will stop at nothing to literally attempt to eliminate unions. The record of the last four years proves that, and now that Bush cannot seek re-election, there is nothing to stop the tyrannical Texan from carrying his anti-union hate to every logical and illogical end.

Name an idea and don't be surprised if Bush and his acolytes try it: Repeal the family leave act, destroy the minimum wage, eliminate overtime pay, substitute unpaid comp time for overtime, and outlawing card-check recognition. There's more.

Bush's Radical Right agenda could well include: Repeal of the National Labor Relations Act; destruction of workers' rights to sue for damages when they're hurt on the job a.k.a. 'tort reform;' baseball-style 'arbitration' of labor disputes; more unilateral bans on unions in the name of 'national security;' and --last but not least--privatization of public services, thus killing unions where they are now growing.

Bush hasn't announced these policies. His plans so far--which are bad enough--are for 'tax reform' that could tax workers' wages but nothing else, and diversion of one-sixth of Social Security's revenues to Wall Street-managed private accounts. But his minions and backers trumpet the others.

Which is why 'these are times that try men's souls.' Labor will not be just fighting for specific causes. It'll be fighting to stay alive. Bush wants to destroy us. Kill us. Line us up and shoot us. The point cannot be underemphasized.

Does the AFL-CIO recognize this? Do individual unionists recognize this? Frankly, we're not sure. The federation's Executive Council, at its Nov. 10 meeting, offered no complete plan to battle Bush. It concentrated on specific individual battles, not the wider war.

Individual unionists, despite Bush's record the last four years, split their votes on Nov. 2. Depending on whose exit polls you read, 33 percent-39 percent voted for Bush. And 2001-2004 could be a walk in the park compared to 2005-2009.

So let's go back to Tom Paine. 'Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,' he writes. That's what we battle now: Tyranny and hell. It will not be easily conquered.

But it will not be conquered at all--and we in the union movement will suffer, as will all workers--unless we realize that we face that tyranny and we face that hell. Otherwise, we lose, and lose big. And the country loses with us.

Because if we lose--and the union movement goes the way of the dodo bird, as Bush and his big business/Radical Right dicta-torial bullies desire--the U.S. is converted into a Third World nation, with a small, rich, Republican elite lording it over a large mass of poor. Not only unionists will suffer; we all will.

So get ready for the long haul. Get ready to battle tyrants. Get ready, as John F. Kennedy said, to engage in 'the long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation.' We'll be like those starving, freezing soldiers at Valley Forge.

But not battling the British. We'll be battling Bush.

PRESS ASSOCIATES UNION NEWS SERVICE E-mail: Mark Gruenberg, Editor 1000 VERMONT AVE NW #101 / WASHINGTON DC 20005 / 202-898-4825 / FAX 202-898-9004

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Major battles await new Congress

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 03:34:00 +0000

From People's Weekly World Newspaper Although hopes to wrest the House and Senate from right-wing Republican control were not realized on Nov. 2, the Bush administration may find some stumbling blocks in pushing their agenda through Congress.

The stage is set for major battles, given majority public opinion in opposition to privatization of Social Security, tax breaks for the wealthy, the war on Iraq, and appointment of extremist judges. The labor movement and new voter coalitions have vowed to hold Congress accountable.

Republicans increased their majority in the House as a result of manipulative redistricting in Texas orchestrated by Tom DeLay. In the Senate, Republicans successfully targeted Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle for defeat and won open seats previously held by Democrats in the South, while Democrats won previously Republican seats in Illinois and Colorado.

Right-wing ideologues like Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) will have a firm grip, but they are not the only newcomers in the Class of 2004.

Also on the roster are new progressive voices including Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) in the Senate. Obama, the fifth African American to ever serve in the U.S. Senate, announced he will fight to expand health insurance for those who lack it, and change the tax code to help working families.

In the House, the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and pro-labor women increased their ranks, while progressives targeted for defeat were all re-elected.

First-term congressman and community organizer Raul Grijalva of Arizona’s 7th District won 61.5 percent of the vote, despite a vicious smear campaign from his Republican opponent.

For the most part, these victories are a result of strong labor and grassroots mobilizing to get out the vote. Former NAACP President Al Green overwhelmingly won election to an open seat in Houston, as did former Kansas City Mayor Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri.

State Sen. Gwen Moore (D-4) became the first African American elected to Congress from Wisconsin after winning a spirited primary with broad labor and community support. In Pennsylvania, Allyson Schwartz (D-13) and in Florida, Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D-20) won highly competitive open seats with the support of Emily’s List and Progressive Majority.

In Illinois, Melissa Bean (D-8) defeated entrenched Republican incumbent Philip Crane and in South Dakota, Stephanie Herseth was elected to a full term four months after winning a special election. Senators Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer and Barbara Mikulski were re-elected, as were all progressive incumbents in the House.

Union members and civil rights workers made history by joining together in Georgia to defeat a Republican incumbent and elect John Barrow (D-12). 'As our congressman, John will be a strong voice for protecting overtime, creating jobs, and making sure that health care is affordable for all Georgians,' said Richard Ray, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO.

In the adjacent district, Cynthia McKinney (D-4) regained her seat after having been targeted for defeat in 2002 for her outspoken opposition to Bush’s foreign policy. She returns to Congress no less determined to fight for human rights.

'This campaign represents a movement to bring America together,' said McKinney on election night. 'Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, together. Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, together. Those who still hum Dinah Washington tunes, together with those singing Tupac. ... Tonight is a victory for the people ... and for a new way of thinking.'

The heavy-handed thuggery of Tom DeLay can be challenged, even though the Republican majority in Congress has increased. Some moderate Republicans, like Lincoln Chaffee (R-R.I.) are even wondering if they should switch parties.

Street heat and pressure from the local level on the new Congress will be key to blocking privatization measures, appointment of right-wing activist judges, and forcing a change in foreign policy.

Democratic governors were elected in New Hampshire, Montana, North Carolina and West Virginia. In Colorado, Democrats won control of both the state Senate and the state House, while electing Ken Salazar to the U.S. Senate and his brother John Salazar to Congress from the 3rd District. Dozens of labor and community activists were elected to state and local office across the country, from Washington to Minnesota to Connecticut, spurred on by organizations like Wellstone Action, Emily’s List, and their own unions.

In New York, the Working Families Party emerged as a strong independent force, electing eight newly endorsed candidates, including David Soares for Albany County district attorney, who ran in opposition to the punitive Rockefeller drug laws.

While the right wing will use the results of referenda against gay marriage in a divisive way, the overwhelming passage of referenda in Florida and Nevada raising the state minimum wage by $1 an hour shows that grass roots organizing and unity building can prevail.

--Joelle Fishman is chair of the Political Action Commission of the Communist Party USA and can be reached at joelle.fishman@pobox.com.

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Arafat's Legacy

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 03:24:00 +0000

The Communist Party USA expresses its deep sorrow on the death of Yasser Arafat, the decades-long leader and larger-than-life symbol of the Palestinian people’s quest for justice, human rights, self-determination and statehood.
From his earliest days as a student activist, to his later roles as chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat devoted his entire life to the cause of his people’s freedom, to an end to the cruel U.S.-backed Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands seized in the 1967 war, and to the cause of national liberation and peace. Despite incessant efforts by the Israeli government to vilify and discredit him, despite all the slanders and snubs (including by President George Bush, who shunned the Palestinian leader in his last years), Arafat remained until the very end a dignified symbol of resistance to colonial occupation and aggression, and a steadfast champion of freedom and justice.

Whether he was presenting the case for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people before the United Nations, or building the PLO, or meeting with leaders of the Israeli and U.S. peace movements — which he frequently did — Arafat was untiring in his search for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He rejected terrorism as a path to liberation, and harshly condemned the harming of innocents. He and the PLO officially recognized Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.

At the same time, Arafat was unyielding in his support for the internationally recognized right of the Palestinian people to resist the Israeli occupation, and he refused to give up East Jerusalem or to renounce the right of Palestinian refugees to return. For that he was condemned and reviled by the U.S. and Israeli governments.

At a time when the United States is seeking to re-colonize Iraq and to dominate the entire Middle East, and as our government continues to pour billions of dollars each year into Israeli coffers for new missiles, bombs, helicopter gunships, apartheid-like walls, and prisons to subjugate the Palestinian people, we vow to redouble our efforts to build solidarity with the embattled people of Palestine.

The Communist Party USA pledges to honor Yasser Arafat’s memory by intensifying the campaign against the illegal, U.S.-backed Israeli occupation and against all U.S. efforts to meddle in the affairs of the Palestinian people.

We join with other peace forces, including Jewish peace activists in the U.S. and Israel, in calling for an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel until it returns to its 1967 borders. We support a two-state solution, with the state of Israel alongside a sovereign, viable, and contiguous state of Palestine with its capital in East Jerusalem. And we support the right of return to Israel of all Palestinian refugees, as spelled out in the relevant UN resolutions.

The road to peace in the Middle East is through justice and self-determination, adherence to international law, and strict compliance with the historic UN resolutions on Palestine and the Palestinian people. There is no other path. We stand firmly for that path.

We offer our deepest condolences to the family, comrades, and friends of President Yasser Arafat.

--National Board of the Communist Party USA.

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The New York Times and I

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:28:00 +0000

Political Affairs contributing editor Norman Markowitz corresponds with the New York Times, the major ruling class newspaper in the country and, even though they advertise that the publish 'all the news that’s fit to print' they never see fit to print his letters. These are some recent letters on topics that PA readers may find interesting.

The 'Southern Strategy' along with voter suppression put Bush back in office. If Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt, with strong AFL-CIO connections and a Missouri background, would the Kerry-Gephardt ticket pulled out Ohio and possible Missouri. Had Bill Richardson, an articulate liberal Democrat of New Mexico Latino background been the Vice Presidential Nominee, would the election have gone differently? The following letter, sent Oct 20, 2004 address some of these questions.

To the Editor of New York Times Magazine: [October 20, 2004]

In 'Black and Bruised,' Joann Wipijewski suggests that the Democrats abandoning the South would mean abandoning African Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. The twin 'Southern strategies' that have influenced both parties since the 1970s, the policies of pretending that the U.S. is a society of small towns and isolated people interested only in lowering their taxes and living in the modern world while not being part of it, have pushed American politics further and further to the right.

This pandering to the worst of post segregation Southern politics, making the South the standard for the nation instead of vice versa, has especially hurt African Americans both North and South, other minorities, organized labor and low income people generally.

The Southern States are 'right to Work' states in which the labor movement is very weak, wages are comparatively low, and political conservatives of various kinds are dominant. The 'solid South ' of today remains the political stronghold for rightwing religious fundamentalism, coded racist politics, and uncritical support for runaway military budgets – a series of political 'rotten boroughs' for the Republican Party and conservative political forces in national elections.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Republicans abandoned the South and fashioned a national majority based on the industrializing Northeast, Middle West, and the Agricultural Middle West and Far West. That did mean abandoning Southern Blacks to segregation. Today, a Democratic policy of concentrating on winning all of the major industrial states of the North East, Middle West, and Far West, fighting for states like Missouri and Ohio and much of the mountain West, where liberal and progressive traditions and politics exist that can be built upon, offers the best chance for the party to not only win elections, but make those victories the foundation for a new electoral majority, not an exercise in political pandering that will set the stage in the near future for rightwing Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Such a majority could then act to repeal Taft-Hartley, increase massively union membership in the region and the nation, revitalize public social services and raise sharply the living standards, level of education, health care, and housing, of the people of the South, both white and African-American, eliminating the sharp inequalities between the region and the nation which have for so long helped to drag down both.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz

The election is over, but is it really. In New Mexico there was widespread voter suppression of low-income Latino voters in overwhelmingly Democratic districts. In Ohio and Florida, there was voter suppression against low income African-Americans, the group most likely to vote against Bush. What is the ruling class media saying though? The Black and especially the Latino vote for Bush increased. Who is doing the math here? Karl Rove? The following letter, sent October 31, 2004, criticizes an article that takes a ho-hum attitude the political crisis in the U.S. and is blind to the direct danger to free elections inherent in present Republican policies. While the author blamed other parties, the Democrats have not exactly been disenfranchising wealthy suburbanites, members of fundamentalist churches or stock-brokers with felony records, three groups of likely Republican voters.

Dear Editor: [October 31, 2004]

Matt Bai’s article ('Another Contested Contest,' Oct 31, 2004) says nothing in the once over lightly way that passes for analysis in Reagan+2 Bush American politics. The Republicans have been engaging in the sort of voter suppression sans terrorist violence that the KKK, the paramilitary arm of the White supremacy Democrats, did in the late 19th century South. They also stole the 2000 election in ways that would have produced violent demonstrations and the seating of Al Gore as the duly elected president of the country in much of the world. The emergence of the modern Republican party as a party of authoritarian conservatism, something in between the old GOP and the mass European fascist parties of the interwar period, is the source of our political problem and danger, not any 'equal blame' for the two parties that Bai contends.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz

In a Bush league world where there are weapons of mass destruction anywhere you want them to be, why not have red as the color of rightwing Republicans. Then the faithful won’t have to worry about 'reds under every bed.' Perhaps our readers are angry about the Republicans stealing what has been our and our ancestors political color, but they have stolen so much else from the working class for so long that, until we have a powerful mass left, and a mass CPUSA, we may have to live with it. The following letter was sent in a lighthearted vein to Arts and Leisure Section on Nov 15 in response to Frank Rich’s fine article. Rich by the way is one of the few writers for the Times who richly (no pun intended) deserves to be considered what we would call a progressive and what right-wingers call a liberal.

To the Editor of the Arts and Leisure Section: [November 14, 2004]

Frank Rich ('On Moral Values: It’s Blue by a Landslide,' Nov. 14) makes some excellent points about what might be called the politics of institutionalized hypocrisy, but I have one caveat. Why are rightwing Republican states called 'Red States?' Red has been the color of revolution and the left through the world since the French Revolution and the official color in the flags of the former Soviet Union and the present Peoples Republic of China. Are the rightwing Republicans now to be considered 'the Reds'? Is Arlen Specter to be considered a 'Pinko'? What will the FCC do with old cold war propaganda films like 'The Red Menace,' 'Red Nightmare,' and the Reagan era classic, 'Red Dawn'? Will the old IWW song, 'Jesus Got His Red Card,' be given a new meaning? What about our 'heroic British allies,' for whom the color 'blue' has long been connected to the Conservative or Tory party. It is obvious that there will have to be a special committee of Congress established to investigate such 'un-American and un-coaliton activities.'

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz

With Bush purging the CIA and proclaiming the 'march of freedom,' no government or political leader to the left of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz can feel completely safe. This letter, written initially on March 5, 2003, was in response to a typical Times propaganda piece trying to whip up support for the overthrow of Chávez. With the support of the Venezuelan people Chávez has so far survived all attempts by the Venezuelan elites and the Bush administration to destroy his government. However, reactionaries, as the old saying goes, learn nothing and forget nothing and all of us must be ready to defend Venezuela from new attacks.

To the editor of the New York Times: [March 5, 2003]

Moises Naum’s crude trashing of Venezuela’s President ('Chávez and the Limits of Democracy,' March 5) assumes that 'democracy' is limited to electing to office politicians who are acceptable to the IMF-World Bank-WTO investment and trade system, now completely in the hands of rightwing conservatives. Like most of Latin America, Venezuela was influenced by and sought to follow the American presidential rather than European Parliamentary model in government. Chávez was elected by a large majority for a definable term and the attempt to force him out of office or call new elections was in violation of the Venezuelan constitution. Such actions carried out against an American president, a political strike of vital industries for the purpose of ousting the government, would lead to the arrest of the leaders of the strike under existing federal labor law.

'New elections,' for example, were not seriously contemplated as a solution to the Bush-Gore stalemate in the 2000 election, when they would have made more sense than in Venezuela.

While Mr. Naum’s hurling of sticks and stones at Fidel Castro will win him some support in the boardrooms and supper clubs of the United States, Americans who oppose gunboat diplomacy should remember that it was practiced by U.S. governments over and over again, beginning before the Russian Revolution, much less the Cuban Revolution. Too many brutal tyrants were installed by U.S. marines under the principle enunciated humorously in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt about a Central America dictator, 'He’s an SOB but he’s our SOB,' for anyone in Latin America to take any U.S. government or business initiative to 'defend democracy' in Venezuela or anywhere else in the hemisphere seriously.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz

The Bush administration continues to use both terrorism and terrorist to stimulate fear and submission to their policies at home. Terror is a policy, not an ism, and a policy that both states, including the U.S., and various groups, have used to slaughter innocent civilians to advance their policies. The answer to the Bush administration, given its identification with revealed religion, might be to have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al practice the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, although they might call that liberalism.

To the Editor of the Week in Review: [July 11, 2004]

Geoffrey Nunberg’s excellent brief article on the origins and uses of the words terror and terrorism omits a few important points. The 'Terror' of the French Revolution was never an ism but a state policy to destroy enemies and achieve the 'Republic of Virtue' envisioned by Robespierre. The British called a variety of groups opposed to their rule 'terrorists,' from Bengali guerrilla fighters at the end of the 19th century to Zionists in Palestine and Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya after WWII as the French did most famously in Algeria. Nunberg also fails to mention a very significant and sinister recent development. The old distinction between military/police and civilian targets used to distinguish insurgents and counter-insurgents from 'terrorists' has largely been destroyed, as civilians are routinely targeted by planes and people with bombs.

Sincerely, Norman Markowitz

The Bush administration continues to talk about the 'March of Freedom' and the testing of its resolve in Iraq as the body count mounts. 'Freedom' was a very positive slogan used in the Civil War, but even then, the 'war to free the slaves' was in reality a war to free industrial capitalists, and the end of slavery, while a profoundly positive development, did not lead to citizenship for the former slaves.

The victorious Northern capitalists ultimately had more to gain by supporting conservatives and treating the South as an internal colony rather than supporting abolitionist 'Radical Republicans' who wanted to redistribute the estates of the great slaveholders to the former slaves. In Iraq, eleven months after this letter was written Bush continues to pursue a policy based on military force and intimidation aimed at a domestic U.S. audience, regardless of its effects on the Iraqi people and the whole region.

Dear Editor: [December 16, 2003]

Jay Winick’s article on guerilla wars describes rather than analyzes complicated events. There was a guerilla war, for example, fought in the South after the Civil War. The KKK, led by confederate officers to fight the military occupation terrorized former slaves and white Southerners seen as collaborators with the occupiers. The failure during Reconstruction to carry out land reform for the former slaves and poor whites eventually enabled the guerillas to win elections and establish segregation along with a semi-feudal sharecrop system that restored much wealth and power to the old plantation owners. Whether the occupation of Iraq will succeed will depend ultimately on whether or there will be a social and economic reconstruction of the country that raises substantially peoples’ living standards and establishes an effective system of civil rights and civil liberties. Given the general negative view of the Bush administration about non-military government intervention, it is doubtful that such reforms will even be contemplated, much less implemented, as long as the administration remains in power.

Sincerely Yours, Norman Markowitz

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Rice Appointment Signals Hard Right Turn

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:21:00 +0000

From the Toronto Star

The editor of an American magazine who is exceptionally savvy politically was in town this week and had breakfast with some local journalists, including myself.

One of my questions was whether he judged that President George W. Bush had actually meant the comparatively encouraging comments he recently made about a possible Israeli-Palestinian peace deal — when Bush said he wanted to use his political 'capital' to create a democratic Palestinian state during his second four-year term — or had only said this to help out his election-bound buddy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The editor said he didn't know which interpretation was true but that he could offer one way to measure whether Bush might be sincere.

The word going around Washington, he said, was that Secretary of State Colin Powell might stay on if he believed Bush really intended to apply himself to a Middle East peace deal.

A few hours later the story broke that Powell was, in fact, resigning.

Maybe the editor's story was never true. Maybe, no matter whether it's fact or fantasy, Bush may still actively promote an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It was noticeable, though, that Powell at his post-resignation press conference was very cautious, almost off-hand, about the prospects for such a pact.

The story does have a ring of internal credibility. After four years at state, during which he was able to accomplish little while, far worse for him, his once stellar reputation went into partial eclipse, a real chance to make history in the Middle East would have been a powerful attraction for Powell to stay on.

Most probable of all, was that this option was never available to Powell. Rather than leaving because he wanted to — as, naturally, he now claims — Powell may not be staying on because Bush didn't want him to stay.

Instead, what Bush wanted was Condoleezza Rice as his messenger carrier to the world, and yesterday he nominated her as Powell's successor.

Rice isn't a neo-conservative ideologue in the manner of Vice-President Dick Cheney or Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom so effectively, and so brutally, undermined Powell. Rice, still National Security Adviser, is instead pure, unadulterated Bush. Probably only Laura Bush is closer to him than she is.

Their religious and sporting views are identical. She regularly spends weekends with him and his family at Camp David.

She fiercely supported the war on Iraq and strongly supported the doctrine of pre-emptive attack against potential threats (threats as the U.S. defines them, that is) and, therefore, of unilateralism.

As America's top diplomat Rice, thus, will have one significant advantage over Powell. Whenever she speaks, the world will know that it is Bush speaking. The price the world will pay for this is that from now on there will be only one voice, one attitude, one single, simple theme, coming out of Washington.

This will be, either you are for me, or you are against me, either my way, or the highway.

The moderates have been pushed out of the tent.

Almost as significant as Rice's appointment to the top post will be the rumoured choice of ultra-hawk John Bolton to be her deputy secretary of state.

After Bush's election victory, some commentators speculated that he would use his second, and last, term, to fashion a foreign policy legacy for himself, much as Ronald Reagan did when he made some bold disarmament moves — as at the Iceland summit — and reached out to the Soviet Union as the Cold War came to an end.

This analysis was right, but not in the sense that those advancing it intended.

Bush does intend to fashion himself a foreign policy legacy. But it will be his legacy, in other words, his version of how he wants to go down in the history books and not the version that the internationalists had in mind, of a peacemaker and a conciliator.

The legacy Bush has in mind will unquestionably be that of the victor of the war against terrorism and of the leader who brought — and imposed — democracy in the Middle East.

Powell's departure and Rice's arrival (plus that of Bolton in place of the moderate Richard Armitage, who was the top aide to Powell) signal that Bush's second term won't be just more of the same, but, rather, even more of the same.

As for the prospects for a serious attempt at Middle Eastern peace, Powell's caution, and off-handedness, were almost certainly justified.

In London, Blair, who undoubtedly was told what was coming when he was in Washington last weekend, could think of nothing more positive to say about future U.S. foreign policy than that it was 'evolving.'

Yes, it's evolving back to the rule that might is right.

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Risks Far Outweigh Benefits of Privatized Social Security

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:18:00 +0000

Originally from The Hartford Courant September 30, 2004

Social Security is about to be sold off to the highest bidder. Wall Street can barely wait to get its hands on the $940 billion in fees (according to one estimate) that it will collect if Social Security is converted into individual investment accounts, as President Bush's Commission on Social Security has proposed.

Young workers are intrigued by the idea of diverting their payroll taxes into Wall Street accounts. Privatizers promise ownership of accounts and big investment returns. What they fail to mention are the costs -- increased retirement risks, dramatic cuts in Social Security benefits and a multitrillion-dollar increase in federal borrowing.

There is no free lunch in privatizing Social Security. Diverting money out of Social Security will create an even larger solvency problem. The privatizers fill part of this funding gap by dramatically cutting Social Security benefits for younger generations. They cover the rest by borrowing more money, thereby increasing the burden on young taxpayers by trillions of dollars over the next half-century.

Privatization places much of the risk of a secure retirement on the individual. Young people will not only 'own' their accounts, but they will 'own the risk' of retirement. Markets go up, and markets go down. Woe be to the person who retires in a falling market. From 1999 through 2002, near-retirees saw the value of their market-invested 401(k) retirement accounts drop an average of 25 percent. A decline such as that puts a big dent in one's projected monthly retirement income.

Retired Americans overwhelmingly oppose privatizing Social Security -- not only for themselves, but also for their children and grandchildren. They understand firsthand the importance of Social Security in providing a sound, basic retirement income that lasts as long as you live. They worked hard, raised families and contributed to the economy just as today's young people are doing. But they realize that new challenges arise as you get older. And Social Security and Medicare provide a bedrock of protection. Just ask the widow who receives Social Security when her husband dies, or the seniors who lost their homes and possessions to the recent hurricanes. In a privatized system, one has to worry that the stock market might decline in the same year that incidents of poor health or loss may occur.

Social Security exists for the same reason that insurance exists. We often can't predict what will happen or when it will happen. So we pool our risks. Privatizing Social Security would make every American a risk pool of one.

Thank heaven privatizers are now being asked to explain exactly what happens when payroll taxes are diverted to private accounts. The reason we heard nothing after the president's commission reported its findings was that the transition costs were so high. The debate has finally begun. Private plans will dismantle Social Security. The alternative is making the difficult but reasonable choices that address the solvency of Social Security and keep a tried and true safety net for all Americans intact.

--Barbara Kennelly, a former congresswoman from Hartford, Conn., is president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare in Washington.

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