People Before Profit blog

Bush's Lousy Civil Rights Record, Part II

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:47:00 +0000

From Redefining Rights in America

Chapter 6: The Bush Record Reviewed

This report documents that civil rights problems are entrenched in American society, the result of unequal treatment over the course of history. Furthermore, new means of prejudice and discrimination have become manifest, for example, unequal treatment in a post-terrorism era.

Past Presidents have tried to resolve civil rights problems with varying levels of vigor and success. Only robust enforcement and vigorous commitment on the part of the country’s leaders will fulfill the promise of civil rights laws and ensure the survival of equality and freedom from oppression.

In the Commission’s last presidential evaluation, it offered six indicators of effective presidential civil rights leadership. It said that the President should:

(1) Clarify and articulate a commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity. (2) Aggressively secure resources for civil rights promotion and enforcement. (3) Demonstrate beliefs and intent through actions and perseverance. (4) Develop a strategy and implementation plan in coordination with other branches of government and civil rights groups. (5) Develop and implement success measures for civil rights goals. (6) Find and build upon common ground, even on controversial civil rights problems.

Have George W. Bush and his administration advanced civil rights as tested against the six indicators?

(1) Clarify and Articulate a Commitment to Civil Rights

President Bush has not been clear in his commitment to civil rights. Overall, he has made relatively few public statements about related matters, and when he has done so, overwhelmingly it has been to carry out official duties, for example to declare annual heritage celebrations or to note significant historical dates. He also substitutes the term 'diversity' for civil rights. Although a worthy concept which includes ethnicity, background, and race, diversity does not represent all that civil rights embody or guarantee that protections will be upheld.

President Bush also characterizes problems that are fundamentally civil rights in nature as ones that are general, with no such focus. For example, hate-motivated violence has heretofore been understood as attacks that denigrate a class of people for their beliefs or immutable characteristics. President Bush has said that all violent crime constitutes hate crime. That belief ignores the common feature of bias-motivated lynchings, draggings, beatings, and firebombings: that they are committed upon people because of characteristics such as race, color, creed, ethnicity, national origin, or sexual orientation.

The reverse is also true; that is, President Bush refers to programs that have little or no civil rights relevance as ones that promote equality and justice. For example, the program that he most frequently promotes as a civil rights measure, the faith-based initiative, has nothing to do with civil rights, except that it allows employment discrimination prohibited under Title VII. He equates the lack of support for churches with prejudice and bigotry, making a case for his initiative that the public feels compelled to support. He speaks about the faith-based initiative in civil rights terms more than any legitimate civil rights proposal. Characterizing unrelated programs as ones that end prejudice and bigotry not only confuses the public, but also directs resources and attention from relevant initiatives, and as such is detrimental.

The President’s appointments say much about his commitment. A number of his key appointments are admirably diverse by race, ethnicity, and gender. However, his statements reveal that he equates color with civil rights expertise. In significant instance, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or other characteristics, his appointees do not favor, and some are on record as opposing, prevailing civil rights law. While President Bush did not dismantle some of the previous administration’s programs, he also did not develop a strategy to strengthen or advance them, nor demand accountability from those charged with responsibility to carry them out. The administration reauthorized numerous study efforts and advisory committees, but few have produced noteworthy results. Furthermore, some have been relegated to administrative channels for implementation without perceptible support from the administration, and as such, seem without true purpose. For example, President Bush renewed the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; however, the office has not moved forward any specific plans or established tangible goals.

(6) Build Upon Common Ground, Even on Controversial Civil Rights Problems

When the President has sought input from affected populations, such as the New Freedom Initiative and the President’s Commission on Special Education, he has found cooperation and success. However, he has not made effective use of this tool in other endeavors. For example, he consistently consults a narrow base for advice and support, particularly with regard to controversial civil rights issues. He has declined opportunities to seek dialogue and counsel from established civil rights leadership, including the Congressional Black Caucus. Not only has he not invited them to the White House, even to discuss matters on which they have invaluable expertise, he also has declined invitations to speak at some of their main conventions, such as National Council of La Raza and the NAACP. Doing so would represent respect and cooperation, and also demonstrate an openness to diverse viewpoints in the policy process.

After the September 11 attacks, some praised the administration’s initial response against backlash directed toward Arab Americans, Muslims, people of Middle Eastern descent, and those perceived to be so. The administration asked Americans not to blame and suspect all Arab Americans, and vowed to punish perpetrators. That response was eventually overshadowed by policies that now allow law enforcers and government agents to target individuals and groups for surveillance, detention, arrest, and other actions, without rights to counsel and representation.

Policies allow such behavior so long as the enforcers assert they are acting to avert terrorism. The administration’s own policies soon fomented a backlash against certain groups. Failing to build on common ground, the Bush administration missed opportunities to build consensus on key civil rights issues and has instead adopted policies that divide Americans. President Bush could have, early on, called on public officials to unify and show America and the world that, together, the nation could improve its voting systems. Likewise, he could have exerted leadership on affirmative action by soliciting diverse viewpoints and promoting policies that achieve diversity. Future presidential administrations, in fulfilling their duty to advance civil rights, should inspire Americans to unity, not divisiveness.

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Our Battle for Democracy

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:37:00 +0000

In this last week of the campaign, we who fight against the Bush administration, the horror that we know, fight also to turn away from a reactionary past and begin to work directly for a civilized future. I say civilized rather than socialist or even progressive, because that is where this administration, with its preventive war and disastrous occupation in Iraq, its craven stooging for Halliburton and every other big corporation, its war against labor, the environment, social security and seniors, has led us.

There have been other crucial elections in U.S. history. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson, 'liberal' slaveholder that he was, defeated a Federalist government that had enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts and, with Alexander Hamilton waiting in the wings, might have moved toward war and dictatorship. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, representing the anti-slavery reformist Republican party, won against forces that would have either completely appeased the bullying slave holders or tolerated their secession. In 1940, as the Swastika flew over all of Europe, Franklin Roosevelt prevailed over liberal Republican Wendell Willkie, whose party nevertheless was filled with isolationists who might have prevented any Republican, no matter how liberal, from providing aid to England and later the Soviet Union against the Nazis.

Today, John Kerry and the Democrats face an administration that proclaimed Iraq, Iran and North Korea an 'Axis of Evil' and has already invaded and occupied Iraq. Will it, if it is returned to power, launch a war against Iran, where the evidence of the Iranian government’s involvement with terrorist groups and possession of 'weapons of mass destruction' is much more real than the nonsense Bush insulted and continues to insult our intelligence with about Iraq? The fact that Iran has a much more powerful military than Iraq had and the clerical nature of its regime in a region with a Shiite Muslim majority in Iraq and significant Shiite minorities in Syria and Lebanon, would deter even 'sane' imperialists. But who can say honestly that it will deter this administration?

There has been an armed truce on the Korean peninsula since 1953. North Korea also borders China, a fact ignored contemptuously by General Douglas MacArthur when he marched to the Korean-Chinese border, the Yalu River, at the end of 1950. Chinese military forces intervened, drove US and South Korean forces out of North Korea, and MacArthur was contemplating air and possible nuclear attacks against China when Harry Truman removed him from command. Even though China is now a significant nuclear power, who can say that this administration, continuing its 'victory march' for 'freedom' would not get into a second Korean war and escalate that war into a war with China, which of course would be a nuclear World War III.

Given what Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al have said and what they have already done, these are only two possible scenarios. They may not be probable at this moment but who doubts that they will be very possible if Bush returns to office?

The domestic policy effects of Bush’s consolidation of power should be clear to all non-Bush supporters. More of the same in its anti-labor, anti-environment policies. 'Partial privatization' of social security and a very strong chance of a draft. A third 'energy crisis' which is literally beginning now with the huge increase in crude oil prices and super profits for the administration’s most important backers, the energy monopolies, the military industrial complex firms that produce the weapons that destroy countries, and firms like Halliburton which get the contracts to 'reconstruct' them. To paraphrase John Kennedy, as important as domestic policy is, foreign policy is more important than domestic policy because foreign policy can kill you.

Anyone who says today, whether they are Ralph Nader or various sectarian left parties on the ballot that there is no difference between Kerry and Bush in this election, goes beyond Lenin’s famous definition of infantile leftism in 'Left-wing Communism:An Infantile Disorder.' They can be more properly called 'fetal leftists,' or in the case of the sectarians who have attacked those who have written, campaigned and fought on the necessity of supporting Kerry against Bush 'stem cell leftists.' At least infants have seen the outside world even if they can only scream at it when it doesn’t give them immediate gratification.

Let us all make election day a work day and work as hard as we can to get everyone we can to the polls to defeat the Bush administration and all Republicans running for office. To paraphrase the last line of the Communist Manifesto: 'we have nothing to lose but an administration which calls the chains of exploitation and oppression freedom: we have a country and a world to save and win.'

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

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If Bush Says It's True, It Must Be So

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:54:00 +0000

My Wife, the Terrorist

I didn’t realize my wife was a terrorist until the Bush administration’s Rod Paige informed us last spring. Rod Paige, Bush’s Secretary of Education, called America’s largest teacher’s union a 'terrorist organization.' Since President Bush didn’t condemn Rod Paige’s statement Bush must agree with him. Bush obviously must believe that teachers are terrorists too.

I had the task of telling my wife that she was a terrorist. She took the news well because she knew that no one in the Bush administration would ever make such an accusation unless it was true. President Bush has repeatedly said that 'if you not with us, you are against us.' According to Bush, all teachers are against Bush and everyone in his administration. Since my wife is now deemed a terrorist, I suppose our next step should be to try to get on Osama bin Laden’s email list so my wife can get up to date on what she is supposed to do. If we can’t reach Osama then perhaps we could get in touch with one of his deputies.

My wife was first dismayed because she was considered a terrorist by the Bush regime until she started to think of it as being an opportunity to buy a new wardrobe. She has already started buying Islamic clothing such as a contemporary two piece Jilbab, a georgette hijab, a lovely Khimar, and a nice triple layered Burka. She is getting excited about fulfilling Rod Paige’s statement by wearing clothes that make her at least look like a terrorist.

We don’t own any weapons or any explosive stuff so I don’t know how good my wife will be as a terrorist. Heck, we don’t even have a BB gun or a box cutter. Even if she had such things my wife wouldn’t know how to use them. She is hoping that Osama, or one of his followers, will teach her the fundamentals of being a terrorist. She thought maybe the leaders of Al Qaeda would have a DVD on how to become a terrorist. She searched on Ebay and Amazon but became discouraged because neither had any terrorist training DVDs.

While my wife is waiting for instructions from Osama, I suppose she will wait until the next gun show comes to our area. She is looking forward to buying a lot of assault weapons and plenty of ammo. I believe she can get box cutters at Home Depot.

My wife has always been an excellent teacher. She teaches multiple handicapped children, almost all of whom can’t function on a five year old level. These are children who were born with physical and mental defects. Their ages are chronologically between eight and fourteen but they perform at 4 to 5 year old levels. It is very hard and demanding to teach these children. And it is a very emotionally draining experience. My wife cannot help but get emotionally attached to each of her students. She is a real miracle worker. She has a gift that allows her to get through to the children and with time they respond very well. They will never be self-sufficient but they can be taught to be more aware of their surroundings and taught to be more socially adept.

I mentioned my wife’s teaching history because I believe she will be able to bring the same commitment, devotion, dedication, and passion to her new job as a terrorist.

After all, terrorists must have a lot of passion to be willing to blow themselves up with a suicide bomb. My wife will be anxiously waiting for contact from someone in the Taliban, Al Quaeda, or from Osama bin Laden for future instructions.

At first it disturbed my wife to be linked to the Taliban, Al Quaeda, and Osama bin Laden until I told her that President Bush and his father had a lot of ties with them.

The Bushes and the bin Laden family have been friends for thirty years. And President GW Bush even gave 43 million dollars of our tax dollars to Taliban leaders in the spring of 2001, just five months before these terrorists attacked the US on September 11, 2001. I also told my wife that when GW Bush was still governor he met with Taliban leaders in Texas. They talked about building a pipeline through Afghanistan. So my wife thinks that if President Bush has had such a close relationship with terrorists then she sees nothing wrong with her being friends with them too.

My wife is getting excited because of the new challenges she is now facing. If she is going to be called a terrorist by a high official in the Bush regime then she must be a terrorist. After all, we all know that no one in the Bush regime has ever told a lie.

-- Contact Larry S. Rolirad by e-mail at

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Bush’s Lousy Civil Rights Record

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 02:51:00 +0000

This article originally appeared in .

Now that the presidential debates are over and campaign surrogates have tried to interpret or misinterpret what we saw for ourselves, there is no better time to ignore the rhetoric and check out the candidates’ records.

Because John Kerry and his Democratic vice presidential running mate, John Edwards, served in the Senate, their votes can be reviewed. And the same can be said for Vice President Dick Cheney, who served in the House. Like many groups, each year the NAACP issues a Civil Rights Report Card, grading members of Congress on issues important to African-Americans. Every year they were in office, both Kerry and Edwards received As. When Cheney served in Congress from 1977 to 1988, he received an F every session.

Of course, President Bush has never served in the House or Senate, making it more difficult to assign him a grade. But the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has examined Bush’s White House years and last week issued a draft staff report titled, 'Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration, 2001-2004.' The report is available online at

The 166-page study by the independent, bi-partisan agency concludes: 'President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.'

It explains, 'Public statements are a means by which Presidents draw the country’s attention to important matters. However, President Bush seldom speaks about civil rights, and when he does, it is to carry out official duties, not to promote initiatives or plans for improving opportunity. Even when he publicly discusses existing barriers to equality and efforts to overcome them, the administration’s words and deeds often conflict.'

Although it is impossible to review all of the findings in this limited space, let’s look at a few key areas:

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND – Described as the most sweeping public education change in decades, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law on Jan. 8, 2002. It requires states to test students on a regular basis, issue state-wide progress reports and have all students academically proficient by the year 2014. 'The Bush Administration has not pushed for funding to support the requirements,' the Commission study says. '…The actual funding has fallen short of levels authorized in the legislation. In 2003, funding fell $8 billion short, and in 2004 the President’s request was $11 billion below target.'

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION – When the Supreme Court decided to rule on two affirmative action cases involving the University of Michigan, one to admit undergraduates and another for entry into law school, the Bush Administration opposed both programs. The court struck down the undergraduate plan but upheld the law school program. After the rulings, Bush praised the court for 'recognizing the value of diversity' and announced that his administration favors race-neutral approaches. The study notes, 'The President’s comments mischaracterized the Court’s holding, using the decision as a platform to promote race-neutral alternatives and to defend the administration’s briefs, neither of which matches his verbal support for diversity.'

FAIR HOUSING – 'The President shifted resources away from rent assistance for the poor and toward home purchasing programs for minorities,' the report says. 'Although a worthwhile effort, the President’s ‘A Home of Your Own Program’ is hampered by insufficient funding to relieve the chronic affordable housing crisis.'

JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS – The study notes that Bush’s critics accuse him of packing the federal courts with Right-wing judges, some of them Black. It observes, '…Race and gender alone do not guarantee support for civil rights. Some of President Bush’s non-minority nominees hold views that would limit the scope and strength of civil rights laws, as some of his minority and female nominees.'

FAITH-BASED INITITATIVES – Upon entering office, Bush pushed for expansion of religious groups to receive federal funds. The study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observes, 'Although the initiative constitutes a retreat from civil rights, President Bush has consistently presented it as an extension of civil rights to religious groups.'

HISTORICLALY BLACK COLLEGES – In 2002, Bush re-established the President’s Board of Advisors initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 'The board recommended that 27 participating agencies designate 10 percent of all money spent on higher education to HBCUs; only the Department of Education has met the goal,' the report states. 'The board also is more than two years behind schedule in releasing annual performance reports, rendering a government-wide evaluation of HBCU programs difficult.'

No amount of post-debate spinning can alter that record.

--George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service and BlackPressUSA.com. His most recent book is 'The Best of Emerge Magazine,' an anthology published by Ballantine Books. Curry’s weekly radio commentary is syndicated by Capitol Radio News Service (301/588-1993). He can be reached through his Web site, georgecurry.com.

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State of the Union: Before the Election (special issue)

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:24:00 +0000

Our union appears deeply divided – both locally and nationwide. We are held together by a common economic system – monopoly capitalism – which serves the interests of large corporations and banks at the expense of the vast majority of people, who are torn by class, ethnic and racial divides fueled by the government and the mass media. Five areas of daily life, not necessarily in order of importance, show how we have fared in the last four years and provide an estimate of just what the 'State of the Union' is in 2005.

First, the state of our health care system is steadily deteriorating. The spiraling cost of health insurance denies basic coverage to millions, and for millions of others, doesn't cover their major expenses. Over 43 million people are without any health care coverage at all. Drug prices are out of control due to the super profit driven policies of the big drug companies acting in collusion with lobbyists and 'our' elected representatives who sell us down the river for big contributions. The recent Republican 'Medicare Reform' is a boondoggle for the drug companies not a way to provide affordable prescription drugs to the elderly and chronically ill. By any measure, the state of the union with respect to health care is in terrible shape.

Second, the condition of housing in this country is also in deep decline. The government has cut back on housing programs for the poor and homelessness is on the increase. Programs around the country to keep rents stabilized are being attacked and eliminated. Yet, as with the problems with health care, millions of people continue to vote and support both local and national politicians who support policies that contribute to these declines. The left must find a way to get its message more widely disseminated.

Third, it is part of our national myth that we are a peace loving country and would never start a war without being attacked first – even if we have to stage the attack ourselves or make one up. We still find ourselves fighting in Iraq – an unjust and aggressive war waged to control the oil resources of the Middle East, a war cynically justified by our leaders by exploiting the events of 9/11. The nation finds itself – due to political leaders who betrayed their obligations to the people in order to pursue their own personal agendas – engaged in what the UN secretary general has called an illegal war under international law, and occupation which exposes us to ever increasing dangers of disastrous magnitude. Hostility towards Cuba and Venezuela is on the increase, as well as against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. We are sending more troops to Colombia and have already staged a coup against the freely elected government of Haiti. Meanwhile, more evidence of the use of torture and illegal detentions and the violation of the Geneva Agreements is coming to light that goes beyond what we already know about with regard to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Fourth, in the last four years the gap between the income and ability to get health care, employment, and educational opportunities of white males and minority populations – Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, women and others – has broadened and deepened. Attacks on abortion rights have increased, as have those on affirmative action and the rights of the gay and lesbian community. Compared to four years ago this is a nastier and more bigoted and divided country.

Five, the threat to the environment has increased during the last four years. Laws previously enacted to protect national parks, forests, preserves and wet lands have been repealed or modified to favor commercial interests and their rights to exploit and even destroy areas previously protected in the interest of the future health and preservation of natural areas. The endangered species act has been tampered with threatening the extinction of many species previously protected by law. Pollution laws have been weakened and the responsibility of corporate interests have been lessened – all to the detriment of the health and well being of the majority of the American people. The ultra-right has pushed through the 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' acts which will result in dirtier skies and more atmospheric pollution, as well as unhealthy and materially depleted forests. The Kyoto Treaty still remains to be adopted by the US.

Besides these five areas there are many other issues where the last four years have produced either no improvement or actual decline. For example, right-wing religious fanatics, posing as Christians, have infiltrated the government and threaten not only to wage holy war against their opponents but also to beat down the constitutionally protected separation of church and state. This grave development puts at risk the democratic rights and civil liberties of all.

The deterioration of the quality of life and the disrespect by the authorities for their own laws (witness the mass illegal detention of protesters at the Republican convention) is seen in almost every community. Pick up your local newspaper – in almost every issue you can read about official misconduct from government officials, elected and appointed, with respect to welfare, day care, education, nursing homes, law enforcement, foster care, voter registration, civil rights enforcement – you name it.
Recently my local paper reported that in Connecticut the Republican governor had to resign due to corruption. State officials are also under investigation for taking thousands of dollars in 'gifts' from people doing business with the state. In New Jersey the poverty and social conditions are so bad that all 21 counties are now gang infested, with over 10,000 youth seeing no better way to live. The state’s homicide rate is rising as a result. And this is just one state!

Meanwhile, in New York, Samuel G. Freedman, who writes the 'On Education' column for the New York Times, reports that it looks like the State Board of Education has deliberately adopted policies to prevent the advancement of immigrant children, a shameful policy ('A State Test Seemingly Intended To Keep Able Students Behind,' NYT 10-13-04). The Republican mayor of Salt Lake County (Utah) dropped out of her reelection race after being brought up on charges (two felonies) of using public money for her personal use.

Finally, this litany about the decay and degeneration of our nation over the last four years could go on indefinitely. Check out the web page (www.usccr.gov) of the US Commission on Civil Rights, for example. There you can read the draft of a report titled 'Redefining Rights in America-The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration, 2001-2004,' which the Republican commissioners wanted to prevent from being released to the public.

So, what is the State of the Union? Its in sad shape, and it is up to the left, allied with the broad people’s democratic movements to fight to improve it.

Special Online Fall 2004 Issue

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:08:00 +0000

Defeat Bush on November 2

In this special issue... Oil Wars: Fueling the Empire Commentary – Cuba Subverts US Imperialism Farce to Tragedy State of the Union: Before the Election Book Review Essay – Books to Avoid The Most Important Battle of Our Lives Letters Marxist Quiz

Farce to Tragedy (special issue)

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:03:00 +0000

I wrote the following as a wild and crazy satire of events in the midst of the Clinton scandals. I reprint it here for a little levity at a dark and sinister time, when the Ralph Nader and various left-wing parties are spinning their own fantasies that 'Kerry is a greater danger than Bush' and that Bush’s return to power in 2004 will bring about the collapse of capitalism.

The Original pre-Bush II Satire

When asked to explain why he quit performing in the 1970s, political folk singer and progressive satirist Tom Lehrer remarked that 'when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, who could do satire any more.' But this was a generation before the Lewinsky affair, which, with all of its sinister underside, makes Wag the Dog seem like Social Realism.

Think of the creative possibilities. First, Hollywood could do a contemporary version of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which has more than a little similarity to the present disaster. For the Bubba market, Dolly Parton might play Paula Jones. For general viewers, Vanna White might play a physically improved Lewinsky. Charlton Heston, combining art and politics, might play Clinton as a heterosexual Michaelangelo, and Michael J. Fox, reprising his Family Ties role for the youth market, would make a great Kenneth Starr. For football and courtroom drama fans, O.J. Simpson might revive his mutilated acting career by playing Linda Tripp.

But, before there was Hollywood, there was history. The History Channel might seek to present history before it happens, (a great marketing strategy) and hold a forum of historians in the year 2020 debating the effects of the Lewinsky scandal on World Depression 2, which began with the World Stock Market crash of 1999, following Clinton's resignation and appointment by Gore as ambassador to Monaco. The economic slump led to the sweeping Republican victory of 2000 AD under the leadership of Texas’ own George Bush II. Historians now debate whether or not it was the depth of the economic crisis and the threat of social revolution, or simply the discrediting of all political establishments by the Lewinsky affair, that led Bush to move the Republican party in a socialist direction, nationalize high tech and other basic industries, establish a national health service and socialized day care in the name of family values, and create an international economic war criminals tribunal which tried many ex-Republicans, free market economists, moral majority preachers, ex-British Tories, ex-German Christian Democrats, and others blamed for World Depression II. Certainly historians in 2020 believe that the US is far better off today than it was twenty years before, as the new Social Republican Party and its opponent, the Democratic Labor Party, debate with each other over how to best coordinate efforts to continue to upgrade the full employment economy, advance the new garden city-suburb complexes, improve education (80 percent of the population now have quality college degrees) and advance health care (life expectancy reached 95 last year in the 18th year of the national health service). As George Bush II said in 2009, before turning over the presidency to his handpicked successor, Ralph Nader, 'those who want the luxuries of the old capitalism can go to Russia,' which is exactly what his father, the last old Republican president, did, losing the family fortune in Siberian oil speculation. Clinton also ended up in the new capitalist Russia, with its infamous credit card debtors gulag, and was last reported to be the governor of a small province in Southern Russia, inviting peasant girls to his condo-dacha for political chats.
Finally, many old conservatives, who the History Channel reports, meet in theme parks where smog and homeless people surround old Ronald Reagan movies and old Rush Limbaugh radio broadcasts, still believe that the last 22 years were part of a vast conspiracy, pointing to Kenneth Starr's 20002 defection to Iran and Linda Tripp's 2003 marriage to Alan Greenspan as evidence (actually, Tripp used her trusty tape recorder to marry many prominent men in the early 21st century, after the economic war criminals tribunal stipulated that wives cannot be forced to testify against their husbands).

There are other possibilities for satire beyond Hollywood and the History Channel though. A Moral Majority version of 1984, where Big Celebator loves all the chaste and has his eyes and ears in every bedroom, is also not out of the question. But, as we approach the year 2000, our politics have come to resemble 1884 America rather than Orwell's 1984. Then, during the presidential election which centered on Grover Cleveland admission that he had fathered an illegitimate child, Republicans chanted 'Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa,' and Democrats replied (after Cleveland's victory) 'Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha.'

There were other issues in 1884 of course – great urban and rural poverty in an age of new industrial wealth, the federal government's betrayal of the Southern Blacks who were now 'free' from slavery, but the parties and the politicians, then as now, had no desire to upset the political apple cart by addressing them. And that may be the most important lesson history can teach from the Lewinsky affair

PostScript

As we approach the last week of the election of 2004, we are somewhere between Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, about a Fascist victory in America in the 1930s and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Monica Lewinsky is long gone politically, Republicans are trying to keep Blacks and other minority voters away from the polls as the KKK did in the South during Reconstruction, and the election next Tuesday is probably the most important the nation has had since 1940. 1964 and 1980 were also very important but in those elections, the winners, Johnson and Reagan, were pretty certain by election day.

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

Commentary – Cuba Subverts US Imperialism (special issue)

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:46:00 +0000

MACHINE politics has been a constant part of a South Florida patronage system entrenched since the 1959 Cuban Revolution exercised its right to self-determination, independence and sovereignty. While recent outcries of foul play interfering with Cuban American family ties may have broken the log jam of indifference, distinguishing CIA intrigue from psy-op warfare, state terrorism and government complicity will take wise consideration to expose injustice.
The bellicose attempt by a Bush administration to antagonize public opinion to cover up ongoing election fraud should not surprise anyone. Enforcing slavery law to annex a compliant population dates back to the slave master mentality of states rights advocates. The ex-Batista henchmen and new wave neo-conservatives became fast political allies in bribery, collusion, fraud and racketeering schemes to shortcut democracy for their corrupt alliance. The conspiracy to steal the November 2000 election may have been an afterthought of the Elian Gonzalez event, but the Washington/Miami connection has been an established historical fact based in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

For example, fair trade with Cuba defined by Helms-Burton in Section 106c as ineligible for foreign assistance – unless 'friendly governments' subservient to monopoly corporate interests – drips with nullification and interposition. Political censorship of foreign travel by US nationals, economic blockade during peacetime, violation of the Neutrality Act and massive disfranchisement in local electoral precincts flows through the application of a law discredited by increasing numbers of informed people.

With only 90 miles separating US people from Cuba, how did the 2003 decision of Congress (S.950) expanding trade relations with Cuba get reversed after the final vote? Apparently, the illegitimate intent for our obstructionist law rests in Title 11 called Assistance to a Free and Independent Cuba. Section 203 authorizes Reports to Congress for the purpose of interference with a legally constituted government recognized by every nation save one. It is the policy of the US/Cuba Committee to implement a plan through means [Section 201 paragraph (10)] including the unseen hand of the United States government.

This plan for economic assistance to support counter-revolutionary activity in Cuba depends on withholding vital information to achieve the destabilization of the Cuban government. The FAA knew in advance of he BTTR flight plan in Feb. 1996. James Cason, Director, US interests Section-Havana, conspired to form independent political organizations with US finances in Cuba. The FBI had extensive files proving terrorist connections with Miami. Disclosure of secret information alleged to weaken the States’ case by denial of defense attorney access to their client’s files damaged due process for the Cuban Five. Suppression of the above information and more was done to guarantee political loyalty of the Cuban community in the Miami/Dade area for the selection of George W. Bush in November 2000.

Certain facts that the Cuban Liberty Council intimidated the Electoral commission carrying out the vote count to stop until the Supreme Court appointed Bush are indisputable. By logical inference, language in Section 203 (b) that a democratically elected president shall submit … a plan … 'subject to an authorization of appropriations' [Section 203 (c)(3)] for accomplices in Miami who support his election campaign takes on substantial implications of 'subversive activity.' Of course, every time Bush goes South the Cuban Liberty Council reciprocates with a White House Committee Conference to obtain NED grants and other USAID funding through CIA conduits in a quid pro quo arrangement.

Public law 104-468 (Helms-Burton) states in Section 202(b)(1)(A) when a transition government [usurps] power … based upon threats after consultation with [a cabal of terrorists] democratically elected by executive order, a Cuba coordinator administers to a 'feeding frenzy at the public trough.' Codification of such perverse legislation is no one’s idea of representative government and has been a shameful exercise in futility since Congress passed it. The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act (S.950) was a conservative approach to remedy a stupid blockade that no one understands why it still exists. Yet, we are not any closer to normalizing relations.

The best answer to foreign policy guidelines for mutual respect is to allow unrestricted travel. Ex-HUD Secretary Mel Martinez is spokesman for the rightwing extremists responsible for unethical conduct regarding foreign relations. Bush is a lame duck. His minions in the State Department overlook the obvious: a lie in defense of freedom is still a lie. A gag order devised by thugs from Miami is what led to the overturn of a decision by Congress last fall to quit enforcement of a travel ban. As a travesty of justice, Helms-Burton should be repealed for the insanity it creates as a pretext to subvert democracy in Cuba, a friend and neighbor emerging on the world scene. Otherwise, the American taxpayer will be forced to submit to exploitation by the denial of human rights we can no longer take for granted.

Book Review Essay – Two Novels to Avoid (special issue)

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:43:00 +0000

I made more trips by plane this year than normal. Here are reviews of a couple of books that I picked up in airport bookstores.

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is the subject of a new motion picture. It is a predictable love story narrated by a man in a nursing home whose wife has Alzheimer’s Disease. Though touching, in fact heartrending, at times, the story never lingers beyond the quixotic story line. Good writing saves the novel from descending into romantic drivelry. Sadly, though, the individualistic slant of the novel annoyed this socially conscious reader. Sparks presents Alzheimer’s as a personal tragedy that robs one man of his wife, and the wife of her dignity.

The problem with this novel is that it deepens the perception that Alzheimer’s is a personal tragedy rather than a social problem. No one denies the pain Alzheimer’s wreaks on families – even Ronald Reagan’s. My own mother died from complications of the disease last year. I would like to see a novel that assesses the damage Alzheimer’s does to communities, cultures and the world economy. Or, perhaps, a novel about the financial burdens US citizens must shoulder when family members have the disease. I realize I am accusing Sparks of writing his own novel and not the one I would write – but hey. A little old-fashioned socialist realism would be so welcome today.

The other novel is The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. This is Kidd’s first novel, and it suffers from the common pitfalls of most first novels. However, although the story is contrite and thoroughly predictable, Kidd’s level of social consciousness surpasses that of many white southern women writers.

It is about a white teenage runaway in 1964 South Carolina. The main character, ironically named Lily, runs away from her abusive father, T. Ray, with Rosaleen, her African American maid, whom some local whites assaulted and jailed. The pair escapes to the town of Tiburon, where they move in with a trio of fascinating Black women, named May, August and June, engaged in a honey-making business. In the end, Lily stays with the Black women, forming a tight makeshift family more real that that of her widowed and bitter father.

That said, the novel suffers from excessive attention to heroic individuals. The main story line is about Lily’s gutsy determination to find out whether she was truly responsible for her mother’s death when she was a small child. Heroic white men punctuate the thin but present Civil Rights theme. Lily’s whining self-pity is occasionally irritating. There is also a persistent and occasionally confusing symbolic theme shaped around the Virgin Mary, which is the image printed on the honeymakers’ labels. Otherwise, the book is laced with tons of trivia about the lives and mating habits of bees.

In the end, I must give both novels a negative assessment. The main characters in both stories are self-interested soul searchers. Noah Calhoun finds his soul mirrored in the eyes of his dying wife, and Lily finds her lost mother inside her own heart. These are typical romantic themes, and I find them stultifying. But then, why should I expect something different? They are, after all, American novels – written by and for proponents of capitalism in a self-interested society.

Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook, New York, Warner Books, 1999. Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

Oil Wars: Fueling the Empire (special issue)

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:27:00 +0000

Prior to formally ordering the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, self-declared 'war president' George W. Bush sternly warned the Iraqis: 'Do not destroy the oil wells'. The war on Iraq was, reportedly, originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation, instead of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Someone realized, however, that the acronym would be OIL. That wouldn’t make for good PR—not that it didn’t clearly represent their interests, but not the interests the Bush gang cares to advertise. I suppose it was therefore a compromise, and a nod to their Capitalist-in-Chief, to name some of the US military bases in Iraq after oil companies. (They really did name a Base Exxon and a Base Shell somewhere in the deserts of Iraq!)
Even though Bush declared an end to 'major combat operations' on May 1, 2003, of all days, under a banner on an aircraft carrier announcing 'Mission Accomplished,' and transferred so-called 'sovereignty' to Iraqis on June 28, 2004, the business-oriented Bloomberg News reports that 'The battle for Iraq’s oil is just beginning' (June 18, 2004).

Oiloholics Bush and Cheney both have deep and dirty connections to the oil industry, not to mention National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, who actually had a Chevron oil tanker ship named after her. It is not just that so many in the Bush regime have closely worked for—and with—oil companies or in the energy sector more generally. There is also the issue of the legalized system of bribery called campaign contributions. With millions of oil dollars pouring into mostly Republican coffers, and with favorable legislation and tax laws for oil companies, the slick and symbiotic relationship is powerful and sickening. Oil kingpin Bush and his gang are economically—and therefore politically and militarily—addicted to oil. They have been lusting after oil for years, as the Bush-connected Project for the New American Century has made clear since its founding in 1997, fantasizing about a 'new Pearl Harbor,' which they—and we—got on September 11th, 2001.

Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia), but with newer technology engaging in further exploration and analyses, Iraq may very well prove to have the most oil. That has made Iraq a favorite target for the 'oiloholics,' as Rabbi Arthur Waskow describes them ('Oiloholics and the Burning World,' Tikkun, March/April 2003). Though Bush’s wars are about oil, it’s not just about controlling oil, what the Bush administration calls 'energy security.' It’s also about controlling the price of oil, controlling those prices in U.S. dollars instead of Euros, and controlling the flow of petro-dollars, the money made by selling oil which is then invested abroad—so as to more efficiently grease their palms. The Kuwaiti royal dictatorship, for example, makes more money from their oil-funded overseas investments, primarily in the U.S. and Britain, than they do through direct oil sales.

Although Secretary of Offense Rumsfeld quipped, with a perfect poker face, that the war against Iraq has 'nothing to do with oil', other political and military leaders made much about securing Iraqi oil wells very early into the invasion. 'It is no mere coincidence,' the Amnesty International Annual Report states in May 2004, 'that, in the Iraq war, the protection of oil wells appears to have been given greater priority than the protection of hospitals.' Documents from Bechtel and the US government further evidence an obsession with Iraqi oil, and the Aqaba pipeline to carry it to Jordan, at least since Rumsfeld’s 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein. The record also shows absolutely no concern—let alone obsession—with Saddam’s disgusting use of torture or chemical weapons or his infringements of civil and human rights. When asked by talk-show host Charlie Rose how the war was going on April 1, 2003, General Joseph W. Ralston, former Supreme Commander of NATO, didn’t hesitate, stating 'We own the... oil wells.' As with corporate leveraged buyouts, Bu$hCo. seeks to pay for its war and the privatized reconstruction of Iraq using revenues from future Iraqi oil sales. The U.S.-run regime in Iraq, whether a military or civilian dictatorship (the first thing the new Iraqi 'civilian' president did was to declare martial law), will undoubtedly promote promiscuous privatization as a key plan—of oil, of course, but also of other 'commanding heights'—i.e., transportation, communications, water, and other prime resources and infrastructure—what Naomi Klein describes as 'privatization without representation.' According to recent polling, some 92% of Iraqis seem to realize what only a little more than half of Americans do: that the US is an occupying force in Iraq, not a liberating one.

As feminist Grace Paley says, 'today’s wars are about oil. But alternative energies exist now—solar, wind—for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work than cannot be done without oil is war' (Ms., Spring 2003). Therefore, she concludes, 'men lead us to war for enough oil to continue to go to war for oil.' This vicious cycle is like a well-oiled imperialist machine, doing different types of damage at home and abroad, while benefitting pathological, parasitic, and GOP-connected mega-corporations like Bechtel, Halliburton, Enron, ExxonMobil, Unocal, the Carlyle Group, and their greasy associates.

During Gulf War I, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times essayist Thomas Friedman remarked that 'the U.S. has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic principles... This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price of oil' (August 12, 1990). It becomes less surprising, then, that the Bushies have tried to get their unguinous hands around the necks of oil-connected countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Colombia, Liberia—and cozying up to others—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan—while virtually ignoring other (dryer) locales. Reflecting on the intimate—'embedded'—relationship between state and corporate power, what Mussolini reportedly referred to as fascism, Friedman laid it plain in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his intellectual love letter to corporate globalization and U.S. imperialism: 'The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.' Free markets? Not quite. The unspoken capitalist mantra has always been 'free markets for thee, not for me.'

In 'The American Empire (Get Used to It)', (NY Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, cover story), Michael Ignatieff states that 'because [the Persian Gulf region] has so much of the world’s proven oil reserves', it is 'the empire’s center of gravity.' Ignatieff refers to this as 'the burden of empire.' The following day the London Daily Mirror, also with a cover story, pictured a graphic showing a tough-looking Bush with his tough words interspersed with oil company logos. Underneath, the tag line reads: 'Now can you guess why George W. Bush is hellbent on a war with Iraq?' It shouldn’t surprise anyone—though it may disgust them—that while the U.S. military allowed the Baghdad library and museum to be looted of priceless Mesopotamian antiquities that epitomize human cultural history, it very carefully guarded the Oil Ministry with heavily-armed Marines and razor wire.

Yes, there is an empire and there is a burden of empire. It is not, however, that the U.S. must 'reluctantly' (as Bush says) be an imperial power—it has quite often rushed to the occasion. Unfortunately for the misfortunate millions (and billions!), it is the citizens of the world who bear the burden of empire by paying its tremendous costs while the élite reap the tremendous profits.

'The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is a war not only for the maintenance of U.S. hegemony, but for the strengthening and enlarging of an Empire,' Steven Rosenthal and Junaid Ahmad declare ('The Problem is Bigger than the Bushes: Reviewing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11,' ZNet, July 1, 2004). 'That is something much bigger than the corrupt war profiteering of Halliburton or the sleazy relationships between the Saudi ruling class and the Bush family. It is much bigger than the ideological fantasies of the clique of neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration.' Now, as Baghdad smoulders and the survivors continue to dig themselves out, the bells of Operation Iraqi Freedom are ringing in the ears of Iraqis like the sound of night time air raid sirens.

Investigative journalist Jim Valette, author of a report called Crude Vision, reflects on U.S. policy in Iraq: 'Is this pursuit of oil or the pursuit of empire? ... Right now it’s really two sides of the same coin' (CounterPunch, April 9, 2003). While it may seem that the U.S. empire is increasing its reach and strength with military victory in Iraq, it is also following in the footsteps of all other historical empires. Excessive military budgeting (equal to the rest of the world combined), rising deficits (contributing to a public debt of over $7 trillion), imperial overstretch (with as many as 1,000 U.S. military bases in over 130 countries and territories), the disregard and disrespect of allies and others (including France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Mexico, in addition to the UN and international law, while enraging world opinion) and outrageous arrogance (the many offensive words and deeds of Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al.) all lead to an unsustainable system of oppression that frays from the edges inward and rots from the top down. The revelations of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers and 'private' contractors further inflames this increasingly explosive 'theater of operations.'

Professor and social critic Cornel West, speaking of the necessity of 'Finding Hope in Dark Times' (Tikkun, July/August 2004), begins by saying: We are living in one of the most frightening and terrifying moments in history. In this age of the American Empire, imperial policies and imperial mentalities are becoming pervasive in a variety of different forms. America has become a superpower, a hegemon, a leviathan, a colossus, with no competing or contesting power. Becoming an empire is always dangerous because every empire in history ... has been filled with hubris, arrogance, and nihilism. Every empire we know of in human history has succumbed to the idolatry of power. West concludes that we need to speak truthfully, act courageously and democratically, pursue justice, be loving—in short, we need to create communities of resistance. We must be that 'second superpower', as a front page New York Times news analysis described the millions of anti-war protesters who rallied around the world (Patrick Tyler, 'A New Power in the Streets,' New York Times, February 17, 2003).

Much is the same in this imperialist 'game' (as one military leader called it) of conquest—old oil in new barrels, so to speak—though a tragic line has been crossed: first-strike unilateralism by the US—with mass manipulation and mass media warnography, mass murder, mass public expense, mass private profits, mass ecocide, mass terror, and mass destruction—including the US use of weapons of mass destruction, such as napalm, depleted uranium, cluster bombs, Daisy Cutters and other massive bombs containing chemical slurries. The Bush regime also threatened to use nuclear weapons, while continuing to research, build, and modernize nuclear weapons, including so-called 'tactical' or 'mini' nukes. The consequences of acting in these ways will reverberate in very painful ways, as history will undoubtedly demonstrate.

In the seventeenth century, the famous Japanese Zen poet Basho wrote a time-honored haiku:

Summer grasses: all that remains of great soldiers’ imperial dreams

Public health advocate Susan Clarke, though, recently adds:

Not even grasses remain when toxic war waste undermines their very nature

But at least the Bushies will get their oil fix. They—and we—need to kick the habit. No one fights over the sun and the wind.

--Dan Brook is a freelance writer and can be contacted via CyberBrook’s ThinkLinks.

We are nobody's pawns

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:07:00 +0000

Iraqis need international solidarity, not support for violence From The Guardian

Some in the west have argued wrongly that the chaos in Iraq represents a national liberation struggle. They risk perpetuating a historical myth about our country. There is always a risk of cultural imperialism when people speak for others in the name of national liberation.

When I talked to students at Baghdad University in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam's regime, they told me: 'We were against Saddam, we were against the war, and we are against the occupation.'

Today, those young people have endured a further 12 months of deteriorating security, a downward spiral of violence, an epidemic of kidnappings of Iraqi (not to mention Arab and foreign) nationals, and the grotesque emergence for the first time in Iraq's history of the suicide bomb. The deployment by US forces of helicopter gunships and F16s against civilians reminds Iraqis of the brutality of state-sponsored violence.

Ordinary Iraqi workers want to build a united, democratic and federal nation where they can enjoy human rights and political freedoms available to those living in Europe, not be used as pawns in a clash of ideological fundamentalisms.

I was forced to flee Iraq in 1978 as an elected officer of the student union that Saddam banned. In Rome that year, five thugs from Saddam's Mukhabarat attacked me and stabbed my friend while we handed out leaflets in a student canteen.

With other Iraqis, both in exile and clandestinely within the country, I worked in the 1980s and 90s to preserve a labour and student movement independent of the state-controlled unions. In February 2003 we marched in London and other cities against the war, conscious its first victims would inevitably be the same Iraqi civilians it claimed to liberate. Our first act after the fall of Saddam's regime was to establish an open, democratic independent trade union, the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions.

Today Iraq is on fire. Those in Britain who love human rights and freedoms have two options: to add petrol to the flames and fuel the violence, which will certainly lead to the end of Iraq's territorial integrity, to its dismemberment and Balkanisation; or to offer solidarity and support to Iraqi democrats, socialists and trade unionists.

The emerging signs of vibrant civil society, such as organisations of women, trade unionists and students, present a real political opportunity to end the occupation and isolate the forces promoting sectarian, communal and religious violence.In this context the recent attacks on the IFTU by the Stop the War Coalition, George Galloway and others - in particular, their claims that we lobbied trade unions at the Labour conference to support the government's position in the Iraq debate - must be answered.

We have received enormous support from the TUC and British trade unions. I was invited to the Labour party conference as a guest of Unison. Addressing a fringe meeting, I was joined by speakers who supported the IFTU line against the war and the occupation. My speech called for the removal of foreign troops and a genuine transfer of power to the Iraqi people. I explained the IFTU's policy of support for UN resolution 1546. I did not offer voting advice to trade unions on Labour's Iraq motions and confined my remarks to urging solidarity with Iraqi workers.

The IFTU is opposed to the occupation of our country, remains opposed to the illegal war on Iraq and to the horrendous decision of the occupying powers effectively to dissolve the functions of the Iraqi state rather than cleanse it of Saddam's henchmen.

They are trying to introduce free-market and privatisation policies carried out by incompetent corporate plunderers whose aim is the economic occupation of our country. Our trade unions are the main impediment to such policies.

Some present a false dichotomy between the Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and a mainstream Iraqi national resistance.

Iraq is not another Vietnam; the so-called resistance are no maquis. The resistance offers at best another dictatorship modelled on Saddam's regime, at worst an al-Zarqawi-inspired mediaeval theocracy using Iraq, rather than Afghanistan, as a base for its war against the US and Arab regimes. These forces offer only hell to Iraqis and harbour some of the world's most dangerous ideas. They have no open social or political programme and no popular base, and are feared by most Iraqis.

Widespread, popular sentiment against the foreign occupation of our country does not translate into legitimation of these forces. With the support of the British and international labour movement, and others, we have a duty to ensure that the voice of Iraqi civil society is heard.

--Abdullah Muhsin is the foreign representative for the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions

» Find more of the online edition.

The Bush Administration's Attack On Workers

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:02:00 +0000

With the message 'Give back our hard-earned money! Take back your overtime pay cut!,' several thousand workers on Wednesday, October 5, delivered hundreds of thousands of postcards to the Bush/Cheney office headquarters in 17 battleground cities against the Bush overtime pay cut, even taking over their offices in several cities. These workers are enraged about the fact that the Bush Administration's overtime pay cut strips up to six million workers of their right to receive overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

With this new rule, President Bush has given his corporate friends the green light to stop paying overtime to hardworking Americans. It's a corporate welfare handout at workers' expense, and it's just plain wrong. Many of the workers that participated in Wednesday's actions talked about how they will personally be impacted by these cuts, saying that they will now be forced to work longer hours for less and that this is the last thing they need right now when they're already struggling in this tough economy.

By denying workers their overtime pay, George Bush has taken the first set of steps toward dismantling the eight-hour workday. With his effort in manipulating the Department of Labor to rename overtime protection for professional employees and others, Bush has begun and signaled his intention to move back the eight-hour workday and its promise of some measure of leisure for America's workers. Despite the fact that the United States Senate has repeatedly voted to stop his efforts, he continues to pursue his radical agenda.

If Bush can get away with taking away overtime pay from six million workers, then what is next on his chopping block? Social Security? The minimum wage? Child labor laws? We're angry, and we're not going to take it.

Rolling back collective bargaining rights for America's workers is his next target. When the Bush Administration created the Transportation Security Administration, thereby making airport screeners federal employees, he destroyed their right to organize and bargain collectively as private sector employees. Despite this, screeners in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore- Washington and other airports are still struggling to form their unions to win quality health care, a living wage, and a say in their working conditions.

Now George Bush is trying to cancel collective bargaining rights for thousands of other federal employees, including privatizing the Department of Defense and other agencies, guided by his scornful vision of destroying the unions and bargaining rights these employees have built and earned over decades of effort.

There may be no clearer example of the cynicism of the Bush Administration than the cancellations of collective bargaining after 9/11 in the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration for the sake of 'security concerns.' Every worker who answered the call on 9/11 and went into those Twin Towers - every fire fighter, every police officer, every EMT - was a union member. Over 300 union members died that day trying to rescue Americans from a terrorist attack.

Yet, when the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security, they cancelled collective bargaining rights for 160,000 federal workers. In the Bush Administration, union members are good enough to die in the war on terrorism but not good enough to process files and paper in their Washington offices. With his multiple attacks on overtime, the eight hour work day and collective bargaining and organizing rights, George Bush and his administration have begun their assault on the most fundamental freedoms of America's workers. These rights were won at the cost of extraordinary bloodshed and employer and government sponsored violence.

From the early days of the American labor movement in the 19th century to the New Deal Reforms of 1930's and beyond, more strikes, more job actions, and more employer violence happened in the struggle of America's workers to win the freedom to form their own unions and limit their hours of work than any other issue.

Bush has attacked and appears to be intent on destroying the foundation of today's labor movement, and he's making sacrifices of the worker martyrs who died for these rights.

* In 1898, in the Homestead, PA Steel Strike, 50 workers were killed while on strike for union recognition and the eight-hour workday.

* In 1916, the state militia intentionally burned 13 children to death in Ludlow, Colorado because their fathers were on strike for the eight-hour workday and union recognition.

* In 1937, 12 marching steelworkers were murdered at Republic Steel in Chicago, Illinois, while on strike for the freedom to form their own union.

* Cesar Chavez spent decades fasting and struggling to earn the freedom to organize and bargain collectively for farm workers.

* In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated while leading a struggle of city-employed garbage works to form a union and bargain collectively.

The stakes for America's workers and progressives in this year's election could hardly be higher. We must beat George Bush. We have to run our politics this year like the welfare of our kids is at stake. We have to work politically like our future is at stake. We have to campaign like our way of life is at stake - because it is. We must work this year with the weight of history on our shoulders and the sacrifice of our martyrs in our hearts and minds.

» Find more of the online edition.

Cobb, Kerry and Nader

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:35:00 +0000

[originally published October 19, 2004]

I was struck by two emails that came my way a few days ago. One was an endorsement of John Kerry by Winona LaDuke. The other was a press release from the N.Y. Independence Party announcing that, this coming week, Ralph Nader will 'campaign in the Black community with Independence Party leader and activist Dr. Lenora Fulani.'

Winona LaDuke, of course, was Ralph Nader's Vice-Presidential running mate in both 1996 and 2000. Her endorsement of Kerry is in many ways a metaphor for Nader's 2004 Presidential campaign. Large numbers of former Nader supporters, including the national Green Party of the United States, are not supporting him this time around. Some, like LaDuke, are supporting Kerry. Others are supporting David Cobb. Other Greens are focusing their efforts on local campaigns.

But Nader just keeps motoring along, accepting support from individual Greens, several socialist groups, disaffected Republicans, former Pat Buchanan backers in the Reform Party, state Republican parties (as in Michigan where they filed 35,000 signatures to get him on the ballot) and the Fred Newman/Lenora Fulani/Independence Party crowd. This latter group has, over the past 12 years, supported white, male, multi-millionaires and rightists like Ross Perot, Abe Hirschfield, Tom Golisano and Pat Buchanan in races for President and N.Y. Governor, as well as Nader this year.

Nader has shifted his focus as the 2004 campaign has evolved. At the beginning of it he was almost supportive of Kerry, going so far as to praise him as 'Presidential' after meeting with him in the spring and then publicly advising him that he should choose John Edwards as his running mate. Now, because the Democrats have done everything they could to keep him off state ballots, he is saying there are no real differences between Bush and Kerry, spent the last week campaigning in battleground states and is prominently displaying 'Spoiler' t-shirts for sale on his website.

I am so glad that the national Green Party had the common sense and political smarts to choose David Cobb as its Presidential nominee.

Cobb and his running mate, Patricia LaMarche, the only female Presidential or VP candidate among the parties or campaigns on the ballot in more than half the states, are not going to get the vote numbers of Nader/Camejo. The name recognition disparity is too great.

Neither will get very many votes; Nader is down around 1% in the polls, and Cobb is, unsurprisingly, much lower. But the Cobb-LaMarche campaign has done yeoman/yeowoman work this year to keep the Green Party together, in the public eye, and positively evolving despite all the tremendous difficulties.

As a result, with two weeks to go before the election, there is a realistic chance that we could emerge after November 2 with two victories: the removal of the Bushites from office, and the survival/growth of the Green Party as an increasingly more mature and broadly-based alternative to both the Democrats and Republicans.

Key to both of these objectives is the turning out of as many of the 'sleeping giant' as possible, that 50% of the eligible electorate that doesn't vote. Fortunately, there is concrete evidence via a major increase in voter registration in urban areas and among students and youth that some of these usual non-voters are planning to vote this year. We all need to do everything we can, publicly agitating until November 2, to reinforce this momentum.

One concrete way to do so, particularly among communities of color and progressive whites, is for local activists to connect with 'Vote for Racial Justice Week,'

October 18-24th. Resources, including literature that can be downloaded, copied and distributed this week and until election day, is available at .

Finally, it is encouraging to see the advance preparations being made both to defend the right to vote in areas like Florida where it is under attack (), and to publicly demonstrate beginning on November 3 if there is obvious or likely voter fraud on election day. Three websites, , and , have information about networks that have been formed and actions that are being planned.

The independent progressive movement, in the broad sense of the term, is having a decided political impact this year. Whatever happens on November 2nd it is absolutely critical that we continue building upon this momentum. Whoever is elected on November 2nd, or selected later, the crises we are facing in this country are too great to allow our sadness over a Bush victory or our elation over a Kerry victory to stop us from moving ahead independent of both corporate parties afterwards. But for the next two weeks let's personally give everything we can.

Let's make history on November 2!

--Used wth permission of the author.

» Find more of the online edition.

The Bush Oil War in Colombia

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:31:00 +0000

Even as the US becomes more bogged down in an unwinnable war in Iraq – fueled by the desire to control Middle East oil, the Bush administration has stepped up the American military presence in Colombia. For over forty years the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been fighting, in alliance with the Colombian Communist Party (CCP, founded in 1930), for what they perceive to be social justice for the down trodden rural masses. The FARC came into existence in 1964 as a result of a full-fledged military attack on the peasant movement in Marquetalia, Tolima Department, by the Colombian armed forces in collusion with the US. The peasants had organized themselves outside of the framework of the landed oligarchy. The Colombian state was determined to bring them to heel. Past attempts to bring about a peaceful solution to this long running revolution in the countryside have been systematically upset by the Colombian authorities backed by the US. For example, a truce was reached in the 1980s, and the FARC, the CCP, and other left organizations as well as the labor movement founded the Patriotic Union (PU). The PU was created to contest in elections and the violence of the revolutionary war would be ended. All the PU members wanted was an opportunity to be fairly represented in the political process, heretofore monopolized by the elite and the bourgeoisie. The electoral popularity of the PU was so great among the Colombian workers and peasants that the government, allied with right-wing paramilitaries, unleashed a reign of terror based on murder and high profile assassinations against members of the PU. Two presidential candidates were murdered (1987, 1990), the only senator elected by the PU was also killed (1990) – and fighting resumed. In 2001 the newspaper Pravda reported that in 2000 another mass murder campaign was launched against the members of the PU who were not a part of the armed resistance. Union leaders, members of the Colombian Congress, and many leaders as well as regular members of the CCP were murdered both in Bogotá and throughout the rural areas of the country. The war has simmered – but in the last ten months or so it has really heated up, as revealed by Juan Forero in an October 22 article in The New York Times ('Safeguarding Colombia’s Oil'--Business Section). Bush has changed American policy in Colombia and, for the first time, Special Forces have been sent to Colombia to train units of the Colombian Army to protect the commercial interests of private oil companies. Colombia is one of the top ten sources for crude oil imported into the US – but it needs to locate new untapped fields. Forero reports that backed by US helicopters, as well as by planning and surveillance assistance, the Colombian Army has attacked in four Colombian states (Putumayo, Caqueta, Meta and Guaviare) to wrest control from the FARC insurgents. Although the bogus charge of 'narco-terrorism' is the reason given by the US, the real reason, indicated by the Times, is 'to make potentially oil rich regions safe for exploration by private companies and the government run oil company.' If a soldier gets killed it sure looks better if he or she died fighting 'narco-terrorists' than making regions safe for oil companies to explore. Columbia President Alvaro Uribe (a former associate of deceased Drug King Pablo Escobar, according to a recent report in Time magazine) has contributed to the continuing weakening of the state oil company and changed the laws to benefit international oil interests, especially American oil interests. According to Forero, the state oil company has reduced from 50 per cent to 30 per cent its participation in joint ventures – this cedes authority and control to the oil companies. Also, the 20 percent royalty has been replaced by a 'sliding scale' – it will most likely slide down! So, our tax money, and now more of our soldiers too, are down in Colombia protecting the pipe line and oil wells of American companies. Which ones? Here are a few: Argosy Energy International (based in Houston), Occidental Petroleum, Exxon-Mobil (both with name changes from the Standard Oil cartel), Chevron (also from the Standard Oil cartel with a name change)-Texaco, and Harken Energy. Also benefiting are some British (BP), Canadian and Spanish companies among others. I know we need oil – but its time to vote out the Bush administration and its war policies, and then put pressure on Kerry to find alternate sources of energy and to remove our troops and military equipment from Colombia. We have no business intervening in, and prolonging, a civil war in Colombia. Nor should the government become a private security agency for big American oil companies.

--Thomas Riggins is book review editor of Political Affairs and writes a weekly column for the online edition. He can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

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Election 2000 Recycled?

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 02:19:00 +0000

History repeats itself From Granma International

WASHINGTON (PL)—Despite the measures adopted and harsh attacks from the civil society, irregularities are mounting in terms of the upcoming U.S. elections on November 2, which could be a repeat of events four years ago.

A report from the Electoral Reform Information Project, a bi-party organization, quotes various problems in these elections that could tarnish their transparency.

Failings include the technology, which caused a scandal in 2000 in Florida, where the system of perforated cards was used.

All eyes will be focussed on that state, because it will be one of the few to decide the result and the yardstick for electoral reform throughout the country, according to the report.

Although the authorities approved a change in technology, several million U.S. voters will exercise their suffrage rights via those machines.

However, the new systems have also caught the attention of various experts and civil organizations due to the ease of their being penetrated by computer hackers.

Moreover, the electronic voting machines are prone to failure or their results can be doubtful, given that as they do not print out a paper receipt, in the case of error there is no means of effecting a recount.

One of the first results of the last elections was the authorization granted to all citizens to vote prior to the official polling date.

The advance vote was previously only for citizens who had some external reason for not turning up at the polls on election day or who were not in the country at that time.

Voting began last Monday in four states, including Florida, a decisive territory in 2000 after a controversial count.

The scandal unleashed a 36-day lawsuit between Democrats and Republicans that was settled by the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush.

In barely three days various irregularities have been detected in that southern state, arousing Democratic suspicions, while the events of four years ago and the proven partiality of the authorities are not being forgotten.

Not only is the state governor, Jeb Bush, the younger brother of the president, but the woman who heads the territory’s electoral division, Glenda Hood, is a fervent Republican.

Already, incomplete voting slips, machine failures and citizens unable to vote due to their names not appearing on the list have been reported in that state.

For example, the system froze in Orange county, while in Hillsborough problems on the information network led to lines waiting more than two hours.

Given that situation, both Democrats and Republicans have organized large teams of lawyers to file charges in any area of the country where difficulties may arise.

The campaign for John Kerry, senator for Massachusetts and the Democratic presidential candidate, has announced that legal experts will be present at the polling booths to verify the process and prevent fraud by Bush’s party.

It is estimated that the vote will be close in some 20 states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, where there will be a mass presence of lawyers from both parties.

In order to try and avoid fraud once again various social organizations like the United for Peace and Justice coalition have joined the observers’ campaign.

Although nobody is daring to predict the winner in these elections, many are beginning to question the advantages of the reforms undertaken and doubts as to the transparency of the process are growing.

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Resist Republican Attacks on Voting Rights

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 02:13:00 +0000

Republican-engineered election irregularities are already surfacing across the country. Minnesota’s Republican governor issued terrorist warnings for polling place lines through his Department of Homeland Security. Republican Florida Governor Jeb Bush ignored warnings that errors with voter rolls needed to be corrected. A Republican-hired organization in Nevada and Oregon discarded voter registration forms filled out by residents they felt would likely vote for Democratic candidates and harassed workers who objected to this practice. Michigan’s Republican Secretary of State and Bush/Cheney campaign co-chair allowed printing errors to appear on absentee ballots that gave advantage to the Bush ticket. But perhaps the most egregious threats to the democratic process, however, is the Republican Party machine’s tactics in Ohio.

Republican Party officials have made $360,000 available, according to the New York Times, to pay 3,600 recruits $100 a piece to disrupt voting in Cleveland, Dayton and other Ohio cities. These paid election workers are being trained and sent into numerous polling places in predominantly African American neighborhoods and other working-class neighborhoods to challenge voters and their right to vote.

The Republican machine has already challenged the voting rights of some 35,000 Oho residents who recently registered in massive registration drives over the summer and early fall. Additionally, the Republican Party has begun an enormous training effort to challenge voters who seem mentally disabled, whom they thing look foreign or who they think may not speak English.

Racial and ethnic profiling of voters is illegal, say Ohio officials, because poll workers must have actual knowledge of a voters’ ineligibility in order to have their ballot eliminated, not racist or stereotypical beliefs about their qualifications.

What is the purpose of this Republican attack on voting rights? First, it is a racist tactic to suppress African American voters and other voters who appear to not be white, who all the public opinion polls indicate will vote for Senator Kerry in very large numbers. Republican strategists believe that a greater proportion of white voters will deliver a Bush victory. Disenfranchisement of people of color by Republican operatives pushes America back into the pre-Civil Rights era when Jim Crow reigned and KKK thugs roamed the countryside attacking Black men and women who dared exercise their rights. It is a cynical and racist tool to divide and foster animosity among Americans by race and ethnicity.

Second, the Republican effort is designed to discourage as many new voters as possible from casting a ballot. In Ohio, as with numerous other states, registration drives organized by Democratic and independent progressive organizations have far outstripped Republican Party campaigns in signing up new voters. This massive voter registration effort in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri and Florida means that more new voters will go to the polls on November 2nd for the first time than in previous elections going back decades. Most of these new voters were energized by the necessity of sending Bush to Texas permanently, a fact that has many Republican operatives nervous.

Finally, the Republican tactics are meant to reduce voter turnout as much as possible. Disruptions and challenges, they hope, may discourage many voters from waiting in long lines or from facing angry and abusive Republican vote challengers.

Why do the Republicans feel they have to use these racist and anti-democratic tactics in our elections, which we have long touted as the most democratic in the world? This is the only way they can win. It is as simple as that. But the deeper root of this problem is the glaring fact that these anti-democratic tactics are the heart and soul, they are, without a doubt, the signature of the conservative authoritarian Bush regime.

We can win this election and should not throw our hands up in despair, however. We can win if we stand up to this thuggery by knowing and defending our rights.

Here are some basics:

1. Call the local elections office to verify the location of your polling place. Locations may have changed, and a vote cast at the wrong place might not get counted.

2. Bring identification to the polls in case it is needed, preferably government-issued ID or a utility bill, phone bill or paycheck with your name and current street address.

3. Ask for help from poll workers and check posted information signs if you have questions or need assistance.

4. Make sure you cast a vote. If you arrive late in the day and are in line when the polls close, you should stay in line because you are entitled to vote.

5. If you are offered a provisional ballot because of a question about your eligibility, ask if you can cast a regular ballot by providing additional ID or by going to another polling place. If no alternative is available or practical, cast a provisional ballot.

6. Stand up for your rights and do not be intimidated by people who challenge your Constitutional right to have your voice heard!

Learn more about your rights in the polling place by visiting the following websites:

On November 2, if you have complaints about how you were treated at the polls or feel you rights have been violated, contact the Election Protection Hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

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

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Guidelines for Submissions

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 04:07:00 +0000

Political Affairs considers all submissions, but we strongly encourage readers to follow the guidelines below.

Writers are asked to read through back issues online to get a sense of style, content and editorial policy before submitting. Please consider word counts given below to be firm.

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Irish communist leader slams EU illusions

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 03:33:00 +0000

From Communist Party of Britain

Speech at the conference of European and Left parties London 14 October by Eugene McCartan general secretary Communist Party of Ireland

Dear comrades.

I would like to thank the Communist Party of Britain for inviting me to address this important seminar. This seminar provides an opportunity for parties with perhaps differing perspective on the European Union to share their experiences and hopefully to find common areas and issue which we can unite around. The views and positions that I will present are those of the CPI. They are based upon our understanding of the process underway, the forces propelling and driving us into a highly centralised superstate, which the current draft Treaty Constitution epitomises.

Every party has the right and the duty to decide its own view and understanding of the nature of this process and the extent of the assimilation into the European Union and this emerging superstate.

I will attempt to place our position in a context: that it is not some narrow nationalistic or chauvinistic position but rather one of a patriotic defence of the sovereignty of our country, our people and our long-fought-for and hard-won national freedom. It is also from an internationalist position.

My paper will be in two parts:

1. Our position: why we take the view we do of the European Union; in

other words our evaluation of the class character of the European Union.

2. A criticism of the Draft Constitutional Treaty.

Our position:

The European Union affects every aspect of our people's lives, from the way economic decisions are taken to how our budget is formed, the level of government borrowing and spending, the economic and political priorities of this State, even to what constitutes a fruit or vegetable.

The Communist Party of Ireland has been opposed to the Common Market since its inception and in particular since the Republic of Ireland joined it. We opposed membership then and we still express grave reservations about our continued membership, about the direction in which the European Union is going, and how it affects our ability to make political and economic decisions based on the needs of our people.

Within the working class movements across Europe, both Communist and Social Democratic, there have been and are differences both in their understanding of and in their approach to the nature of, and what is, the European Union - The extent to which they co-operate with and go along with the efforts of European-based Monopoly Capital to reshape Continental Europe. In other words, the process is driven by the needs of monopoly capitalism and not by working people.

Others have never really considered the European Union as a problem but a fact of life and have never had to question its nature or its role and the relationship of their countries within it. The idea of a united European structure is taken for granted by some as a good idea.

There has been a debate within the European labour movement over whether a United States of Europe would be good or bad for working people. The economic forces driving EU integration, the people who really make these decision, do not use such categories as 'good' or 'bad ': their values are based upon maximise profit, market share, market penetration, labour availability, global strategies of domination. They are guided by their economic and political class interests.

In 1911 Rosa Luxembourg took two famous German social democrats to task over their belief in a 'United States of Europe,' Ledebour and Kautsky. Kautsky in particular was then a leading figure in the workers' movement. He wrote:

Ledebour was also concerned about the emergence of the economic and political power of the United States of America on the world stage to challenge the dominant position within world markets enjoyed by the European states. The source of their wealth resulted from their empires, then as now, and their unequal trading relationships with the countries that they occupied, exploited, and controlled. Clearly the ruling classes then where also analysing and debating these very same issues which found an echo within the working class movement.

I have used both quotes before. I use them again to day because they highlight that the debates around a 'United States of Europe' are not new. Then, as now, the argument presented is that a United States of Europe is good for world peace and world stability, that such a united European State would be a benign force for good.

It is true that there are many shared values among European peoples, many shared experiences, historical, cultural, and economic, and also experiences of war. Most are former empires: their peoples have benefited from colonial exploitation and plunder; which retarded the development of the nations and peoples colonised. Others such as Ireland have experienced colonial domination, also resulting in retarded economic, social and cultural development.

THE CLASS CHARACTER OF THE EU PROCESS

The development of the Common Market in the 1950s and the process of its gradual development into what is now proposed, a strong centralised European superstate, was and is driven by European monopoly capitalism, tied closely to and dependent upon the big nation-states, in particular the former European imperial powers that lost their colonies after World War 2 - France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Holland, Belgium. European capitalism, or what I would prefer to call imperialism, needed both to break and to combine and strengthen the European nation-states into one unit in order to streamline investment, production, the movement of goods, a larger market, and the consolidation of labour resources, and to create a more friendly business environment. As separate economic powers they are were not capable of competing with the United States on their own due to its population size, vast natural resources, the scale and the level of development of productive forces etc.

The United States both welcomed and pushed closer co-operation between European states in the initial phase as a bulwark against the threat from the Soviet Union and the growing strength of working-class forces in post-War Europe and the role that those forces played in the defeat of fascism. The contradiction between keeping socialism at bay and building up a potential economic and political opponent are apparent.

Are we now seeing those contradictions emerging with the attempts by the U.S to consolidate its influence in Eastern Europe? In its effort to prevent an EU challenge to its world hegemony, its 'Old Europe' and 'New Europe' tactic? This poses a number of questions. Clearly, the interests of the ruling elites do not always coincide. The divisions which emerged between certain leading EU states and the United States over Iraq and the role of the United Nations reflects areas of tension and potential division and dangers for the future.

These divisions and tensions have had the effect of speeding up the process of European consolidation around the Franco-German axis. The expansion of the European Union eastwards has more to do with the consolidation of Franco-German control and influence and their desire to minimise the influence of the United States in Eastern Europe. Parallel with this are the economic advantages to be gained. This expansion is to secure markets and human and material resources under the control of European monopolies . . . To dominate and control these low-wage economies with their resources and infrastructure . . . To prevent any return to the socialist path of development.

At this stage in the development of the European Union we need to ask a number of questions about the role, the nature of, and the balance of forces within the EU. With the help of the governments of Britain, and some eastern European states, is the U.S hoping to turn the EU into a subservient ally? Is the U.S worried that an independent Europe with its own strong currency and political and military structures could pose a challenge to its strategic goal of world domination? Have all global rivalries ended between the developed capitalist countries? Do we all agree that the E.U is an imperial entity in itself? Unlike when Ireland joined the EEC, when the dominant political forces were social-democratic parties and Keynesian economic theory and practice, the European Union of today is dominated by neo-liberalism. The social democrats have abandoned their previous economic and political positions, and their social legacy is now being reversed. This process is now further sharpening in Germany, France, and Italy.

A reflection of this dominance of neo-liberalism is that the central thrust of the the Single European Act(1987), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), and the Amsterdam (1998) and Nice Treaties (2003) remain intact. These treaties are now to be totally repealed and superseded by this proposed Constitution as the legal, political a and constitutional basis of the EU.

Throughout the European Union, with the backing of EU law and the Commission, governments, including the Irish government, have been commodifying and privatising services in accordance with neo-liberal dogma and the proposed GATS. This, while simultaneously enriching a few, represents an attack on the living standards of the majority. It is a strategy directed towards removing any competitive dis-advantage in relation to the United States. We are not being presented with a choice of either 'Boston' or 'Berlin', the choice is only Boston.

Capitalism, and even more so imperialism, has never been, and by its very nature can never be, benign. It has only class interests.

The EU rules are about ever-increasing uniformity and the centralisation of decision-making and homogeneity. The new Draft Constitutional Treaty is an intensification of that process, and in our view poses a grave threat to national democracy and the right of nations and peoples to self-determination, and to world peace.

'The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe'

After the first defeat and then the re-run of the referendum on the Treaty of Nice in Ireland, the EU political elites issued the Laeken Declaration of December 2001. This outlined their view that the European Union and its institutions must become more democratic and more accountable. The declaration required that there be more clarity between the role of member-states and the European Union, that 'the division of competences be made more transparent', that the European Union 'must be brought closer to its citizens.' It spoke about the possibility of some powers being shifted back from Brussels to the EU Member States. This Constitution will bring about the complete opposite.

As part of the Laeken Declaration the question of a possible Constitution for the EU was suggested. This was immediately picked up by the Euro-Federalists who set about drafting a constitution. They bullied it through the Constitutional Convention, refusing to have amendments translated, distributed, discussed or voted upon that were critical of the direction of the draft Constitution they wanted. Over 1000 amendments were presented and not a single one was voted on. The Convention chairman, V. Giscard d'Estaing, decided that there was a consensus. It was all highly anti-democratic, essential the outcome had been decided before the Convention had even met.

Until now the EEC and European Union has been made up of member-states more or less on an equal legal basis, in so far as you can have equality between capitalist countries. The proposed treaty changes that relationship profoundly.

The majority of our countries have written constitutions. These form the basis on which we give expression to the history, culture and legal traditions and the rights struggled for and won over many centuries by our different nations.

A constitution is not the same as a treaty between States.

A Constitution in this context is the fundamental law of a State.

It is clear that if we use Article 1 Montevideo Convention: THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF STATES 1933: Is generally accepted in international law and international relations as setting out the following generally accepted legal criteria for state recognition: If we apply those criterion then the European Union possesses (a) a permanent population: (b) its own legal personality and separate corporate existence. A President, Foreign Minister and Diplomatic Service. (c) its government (the Commission),as well as its own currency, Parliament, Supreme Court, Constitution etc. (d) It will have the powers to sign treaties on its own behalf as a separate identity.

Also the Constitution for the first time legally gives the EU its own State symbols, its flag, anthem, motto(unity in diversity) and annual holiday (Europe Day), as well as declaring the euro to be its official currency, even though most of the 25 Member States do not as yet use the euro.

We can see that the EU meets all the generally accepted criterion of a state, apart from having direct taxing powers. It will be a state in its own right, which means it will be superior to and above its constituent members.

There are many other areas that I could draw attention to within this draft treaty to show the extent of the shift of power away from national parliaments and national democratic accountability to the European Union.

This Draft Constitutional Treaty is the culmination of the political and ideological domination by corporate Europe over the peoples of Europe. It is the first state with its own constitution in modern times to have been created by and for big business. The people are secondary in the process, not primary. The EU constitution even defines its economic policy as 'a social market economy' based on free competition.

In essence, the EU Constitution, like the EU treaties up to now, is a contract NOT TO HAVE socialism. Socialism implies controls on capital. The EU Constitution re-enacts as a constitutional principle the article of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which states that there shall be no control on the movement of capital either within the Union or between the EU and the rest of the world. This is in effect a legal charter for the owners of capital. The basic principles of classical 'laissez-faire', of capitalist competition, of competition not co-operation as the basic mechanism for advancing public welfare, are fundamental legal principles of the EU: free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

The EU is today the conduit through which the neo-liberal social and economic model is being institutionalised in Europe. Not alone is this ideology being imposed in Europe, but they are imposing them upon countries across the globe with disastrous consequences for millions of people. In July 2004 the EU tabled requests under the worldwide General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to 109 countries; each such request involved asking the government of the country concerned to open certain, specified service sectors to competition from EU firms.

Policies favouring public enterprise as against private, are legally forbidden by the EU Constitution. The Constitution enshrines the legal independence of the European Central Bank in Frankfort for the 12 countries of the euro zone. The 12 national governors of the ECB control the money supply and interest rate for 300 million people, without any political control over themselves. In Britain the Bank of England is independent, but Parliament can change that or change the Bank's terms of reference. In the EU there can be no change in the rules of the ECB unless 25 States unanimously agree to amend the EU Constitution or the relevant Treaty.

Normally, most bourgeois Constitution do not embody a particular ideology or social philosophy. It sets the basic rules of public conduct, how a country should be governed and how its public policy decisions may be taken. But it leaves political parties on the Left and Right to argue over the content of these policies. The EU Constitution is flagrantly ideological however. It lays down public policies in detail. It makes socialism and socialist measures effectively illegal and comes down decisively in favour of out-and-out neo-liberalism, the competitive free market, hostility to public enterprise, monetary policy to be controlled exclusively by bankers etc.

No other model is to be considered. What we have in Europe today is already a 'social market economy', with high rates of unemployment, privatisation being pushed forward in health and education, and continual cuts in social provisions. The gains made by the working class over many decades are being stripped away daily.

Is this the only model that we are going to be allowed to aspire to?

The Commission has all the powers over economic policy. None of the bodies exercising power in the European Union are answerable to the voters, unlike the situation in members-states, where executive bodies are responsible under the national constitutions.

We know from experience that the countries with large populations and strong economic power will dominate. Under this draft Constitution they will have the dominant say. The deepening of co-operation between the central core of states will leave the small countries being pulled in the direction in which the big powers wish to go. We will be caught up in their centrifugal pull. That is one of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism.

Increasingly the nation-states of Europe will fulfill the role of local territorial administrators and guardians of the repressive apparatus on behalf of the EU superstate.

The present EU is a project of the economic and political elites. It is totally lacking in democratic legitimacy. The role of the Left in relation to this project must be to give a lead to struggle against the subversion of democracy that is involved, always taking account of the specific conditions and histories of each country. The immediate arena of struggle will be around the proposed Constitution for the EU.

There is a strong possibility that this project will be rejected in a number of national referenda and this might have the effect of halting this particular part of the project. We would be naive to imagine that this will completely halt the project but it will certainly cause serious problems for its elite advocates.

If the new Constitution was successfully foisted on the peoples of Europe it would place them in a stratjacket that would erect even higher barriers to struggles for democracy and social progress.

For example, the Irish struggle for national democracy and independence has been progressively made more complicated and difficult as many of the powers of an independent Ireland have been transferred to the EEC/EU. This means in practice that in addition to the struggles for civil rights, democracy, community reconciliation and social progress, Irish national and progressive forces have had to confront and battle against the erosion of Irish democracy that has come with involvement in the EU.

This has proved a very difficult battle as is illustrated by ruling class maneouvres after their defeat in the first Nice Referendum.

A new layer has been added to our struggle for Irish national democracy in that in we must now battle to win back areas of national sovereignty without which it is impossible to imagine even the slightest possibility of a socially progressive Ireland.

Widespread rejection of the new proposed Constitution throughout the EU could open up the possibility of successful struggles for flexible forms of co-operation in a Europe of democracies and diversity.

We would welcome the break up of the EU but the possibility of that happening at this moment in time are slim. Particularly as we as one of the small countries are vulnerable to the economic consequences. Of course if some of the larger countries where to withdraw then that would open up a completely new scenario. The likely hood of that happening appear to be slim.

So, we believe that we need to develop a strategy to exploit the inherent contradiction within the whole process, there by leading to a situation that the character of the European Union itself changes.

It is our experiences of the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland, when we made the demands for democracy and democratic reform and therby exposed the inherently anti-democratic nature of the Unionist regime which eventually shattered under those demands.

So what is the Achilles Heel of the European Union? It is clearly the anti-democratic character of the whole project. It is skewed in favour of monopoly capitalism with power and control being ceded to and resting with the larger states to be used in their great power interests. These are the contradictions of our class enemies not ours. We don’t have to present alternatives, we have to exert the pressure of democratic opinion in general and working people in particular to these contradictions.

Can the European Union deliver democracy and accountability? The answer is no.

Can we meet the needs of our people in the economic straight jack of this emerging state? The answer is again no.

Can they deliver the changes that the working class requires without unravelling or changing the nature of the union itself? The answer is no again.

We have to have the confidence to know that they can not deliver. The global strategy of imperialism is to break and diminish as much as it can democratic control and accountability. So, we continue to raise our demands about investment in public services, job creation, health services, education, looking for the promised peace dividend. Directing our fire upon our national government the more their inability to deliver more the more the nature of the European Union is exposed.

We are in essence exposing the class nature of the EU super state as well as the servility of the National governments to those same class forces.

We are in essence exposing the class nature of the EU super state as well as the servility of the National governments to those same class forces.

There is much more to be said about the process now under way. Each country and party has its own tradition and experiences from which to draw. The Communist Party of Ireland's opposition is not based on a narrow nationalism, but rather we speak from our own experiences as a nation and a people who suffered seven hundred years of domination and occupation. We have experienced the near-loss of our language and near-extinction of our culture. We are and we believe communists must be both national-patriotic and internationalist. We see a dialectical unity between the two: one depends upon the other.

If we leave the ground open on the defence of national democracy and national representation, that ground will be filled by the forces of reaction and national chauvinism. We should not be misled by a false sense of some dubious internationalism.

Left unity and co-operation

There is always the desire and the pressure to seek short-cuts to overcome difficult problems. But as history has shown, short-cuts rarely if ever work in politics or class struggle. People's consciousness and understanding, their historical experiences and traditions, are different. They mature in their own way and in their own time and historical space. Crises within capitalism are experienced by different peoples to different degrees. The artificial construction of political vehicles that ignore this reality will end only in failure and frustration.

Within the European Union we can see and experience the uneven development of capitalism. We have been joined in the European Union by countries and peoples that have experienced some form of socialism, warts and all. These experiences cannot be completely obliterated.

We are of the belief that the emergence of a centralised European superstate - for which the EU Constitution is a decisive step - is a grave threat to world peace and could possibly lead to future conflict and worsen inter-imperialist rivalry. As Jacque Delores, the former EU President, put it so well:, the wars of the twenty-first century will be resource wars. Whose resources do they want to control, and by what means do they wish to bring this about?

What is on offer in the EU Constitution is not in the interests of the working people of Europe. What is being constructed is in the interests of big capital, corporations and corporate Europe.

We can either go along with this process thereby legitimising and increasing the political power of our class enemies, or we can continue to argue and campaign for an alternative set of progressive relationships, political and economic, between the peoples and countries of Europe. We are the stage of resistance not advance. Democracy is the key, and the denial of national democracy is the Achilles heel of corporate Europe.

Therefore, the left and anti-corporate forces have to find common cause in breaking the neo-liberal straitjacket and to free nation-states to adopt policies to meet their specific needs. The 'one shoe will fit all' theory will not work and is not working.

The strategy contained in the Treaty of Nice was to establish an inner core of countries. The proposed refinement of that proposition contained in the new draft constitution will exacerbate the inequalities between the larger, developed countries and the present smaller members-states and virtually the whole of the new members from the East.

So it will not lead to a harmonious relationship. We know from our own history that the strong economic centres dictate the political and economic course and pace. We don 't believe that the consolidation of the European Union into a superstate is in the interest of the workers of Europe or of world peace.

It is our belief that there is not and cannot be a social-democratic or democratic imperialism, or some unique European benign imperialism, willing to save the world from the ravages of a neo-liberal imperialism led by the United States.

This Constitution licenses the big states to use EU military and other resources for the foreign interventions they favour but that some member-states might oppose.

No-one can deny that there is a need for closer co-operation in the first instance between communist and workers' parties within what is now the European Union. Co-operation is one thing, buying into the structures and the process is another.

We would like to share the following proposals with the party’s attending this conference.

1. We must respect all parties as equals and value their experiences. Their views should be valued regardless of their size or electoral support;

2. We need to internationalise the struggle for national democracy and not leave that to parties and forces on the right;

3. At the same time we must argue for policies that are centred on mutual solidarity between peoples and nations;

4. International or supernational regulations should only be introduced in problem areas that cannot be solved by individual States. It should be national parliaments or peoples alone that determines what powers should be exercised at international or supernational level:

5. We must campaign for a more flexible economic model of policies and co-operation in Europe;

6. We must struggle for controls on capital and on its ability to exploit regional differences within the European Union as it now stands.

7. We need to struggle for a more flexible relationship between the different nations and states of Europe, to work towards relationships that are built upon respect for national independence and national sovereignty.

8. We must challenge the spurious and artificial “European Values”. In spite of Europe’s cultural heritage the violent history gives the ruling elite no right to claim that human rights or democratic concern are especially characteristic of the European continent, and the historical role of its dominant states played around the world.

9. We support the right of nations to self determination.

Comrades, some of the debates here today are reminiscent of the debates and issues that the workers movement faced in 1914. Should we rally to the flag of the ruling class and abandon the struggle for social change and socialism at home, or march to some other destination?

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Afghanistan Polls and After

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 03:23:00 +0000

From People’s Democracy BY the time we write these lines, the people of Afghanistan had cast their votes in the first election after a long gap and the results were awaited. Though preliminary results may be expected in a few days after sealed ballot boxes from 23,000 polling booths reach 8 regional headquarters, reports are that a final count may not come in before at least two weeks. And that too may be expected only if any one out of some 16 contestants for the presidential post crosses the 50 per cent mark, thus nullifying the need of a second round. In case one of the candidates fails to achieve a clear majority support, the outcome may not be known before November 6. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE POLL THE election process is being supervised by the Joint Electoral Management Body, a UN-Afghan organisation. It is widely believed that inexperienced staff, inaccessible terrain and the chaos the nation finds itself in after a quarter century of civil wars are the major factors making the smooth conduct of the whole process a major challenge. Sporadic violence was reported on the polling eve and one US base in the country was also hit by a rocket. Though it was widely believed that it was the handiwork of ousted Taliban fundamentalists, it failed to influence the popular mood in any significant manner.

Be that as it may, the very fact that the hitherto war-torn country has gone to vote, is in itself a matter of no small significance. There does remain the fact that US imperialists are keenly watching the poll process from the wings, as they want that the acting president Hamid Karzai should win the election. But even that cannot rob the election of its significance. And the reason for it is simple: the people of Afghanistan have got wary of the constant civil war and want a regime of peace in order to concentrate on reconstruction. As an elderly bearded person from Kabul was reported saying, “This election will not be an ideal one, but people need to participate and choose who they want.” Though acknowledging that security was a big concern, he added that “this will be a great day. I will vote. I’m optimistic that an elected government can improve people’s lives” (The Asian Age, October 9). This indeed sums up the expectations the people have from these polls. Similarly, while telling that he had come “to vote so that we can have democracy and stability and peace,” a shopkeeper put his finger on the weak spot itself: “There used to be only a transfer of power by force or killing” (Hindustan Times, October 10). It is clear that Afghans are anxious to have a peaceful life and that makes democracy, or even a modicum of it, far more preferable to them compared to civil war. This explains why the Taliban’s call for a boycott failed to have any impact on the people and why the remnants of the Taliban regime were forced to keep low during the whole poll process. The people’s urge for peace had been so great that the observers’ recommendation for a postponement of elections had had no takers. Another significance of this poll is that it has the potential to influence the course of world events to an extent. If a Times of India report on October 9 is to be believed, in the US “it has been decided that if a clear winner emerges from Saturday’s voting, the name would be declared on October 30, in time to reap benefits for the US polls on November 2.” The indication is that it is the Bush poll prospect that will brighten if Karzai emerges winner. US GUILTY FOR THE HELL HOWEVER, to be true to facts, it is the US imperialism that is squarely responsible for the living hell in which the country currently finds itself. After the Saur revolution of 1979, when a progressive government led by Noor Muhammad Taraki came to power in Kabul, it was the US that refused to honour the Afghan people’s will and violated the UN charter that the people of any country have the sovereign right to decide as to what type of economic and political system they want to have. The fact is that the United States has been interested in Afghanistan since the very beginning of the Cold War, in controlling Afghanistan in order to encircle the USSR. Moreover, the US idea has always been to get a foothold in this area that lies in the centre of the earth, from where it could threaten not only the USSR but also the People’s Republic of China, India, Iran and a host of other countries. This was the reason that after the Saur revolution the US stepped up its violent intervention in the country manifold and even engineered a clash between the Khalq and Parcham constituents of the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which culminated in the dastardly assassination of Taraki. The deteriorating situation forced the PDPA government to seek Soviet help to stabilise the situation and save the country from a counter-revolution. The bourgeois-imperialist media that never tire of condemning the so-called “Soviet intervention” in Afghanistan simply refuse to see any US intervention in the country for the purpose of ousting the PDPA from power. To them, evidently, any distortion or ignoring of facts is justified if the bourgeois-imperialist interests are at stake. USA’S ALLY IN THE REGION THE most loyal ally of American imperialists in their war against the PDPA regime was General Ziaul-Haque’s government of Pakistan. The most notorious aspect of this military government was that it had itself come to power by forcibly overthrowing an elected government and hanging its prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to death. To recall a bit more of history here, it was the same General Ziaul-Haque who had in 1970 led a big Pakistani contingent to Jordan and killed tens of thousands of Palestinian freedom fighters there. Therefore, it was simply too much to expect from the Ziaul-Haque government that it would in any way respect the Afghan people’s will. So it was not surprising that the Ziaul-Haque regime went too far to act as the USA’s lackey and fight the latter’s war against the PDPA government of Afghanistan. Thus, through the medium of the Ziaul-Haque government, the US poured arms and ammunition worth billions of dollars into Afghanistan and also helped Pakistan through material and monetary aid as well as diplomatic support. So much so that former US president Ronald Reagan waived on more than one occasion the restrictions imposed by the Pressler amendment on giving aid to Pakistan for its (then secret but widely suspected) nuclear weapons programme. Ziaul-Haque’s professed (but American motivated) jihad against the “infidel Soviets” also adopted a particular tactic whose legacy is still haunting us. This was the tactic of what came to be called the “proxy war,” for which the so-called Mujahideen were armed to the teeth to fight the Soviet army. Though the tactic was first adopted against the PDPA regime of Afghanistan, in a matter of only a few years it was being used against India --- first in Punjab and then in Jammu & Kashmir. Even if this low cost war against India promised no victory to Pakistan, it was meant to give India a severe headache. It was with this aim that even after the general’s death in a plane crash, successive Pakistani regimes continued this tactic, though there has been some let-up in terrorist depredations in recent times.

In order to earn the Americans’ goodwill, the Ziaul-Haque regime went so far as to ignore all the depredations being perpetrated by Afghan terrorists (so-called Mujahedeen) on its own soil. At one time Karachi, the biggest city of Pakistan, was home to more than a million Afghan terrorists who were virtually the harbingers of what came to be known as “narco-terrorism.” From here these terrorists spread their narcotics trade far and wide, and here they periodically engaged in gun running also, killing not only the members of rival Afghan groups but also the Pakistani nationals. In those days, not a single Karachi resident could ever be sure of the safety of his or his relatives’ life. Yet, the Zia regime did not lift a finger to curb the activities of these mercenary groups. On the other hand, despite their profession of fighting the drug trade worldwide, like their later profession of fighting terrorism worldwide, nor did the Americans say a single word against the Afghan groups that were engaged in narcotics trade and gun running. WORLD OPINION HAS TO ASSERT IT was thus the congenital hatred of American imperialists for communism, and their vengeful desire to overthrow the PDPA regime from Kabul, that made the life of a common Afghan an unending nightmare. Later, how the then US-controlled UNO deceived the Afghanistan president Dr Najibullah into abdicating power and taking shelter in the UN mission in Kabul, how the various Mujahideen groups came to form a ragtag alliance in order to form a government under Burhanuddin Rabbani, how they soon began to fight among themselves and how the US-backed Taliban then overthrew the Rabbani government and also overran the UN mission to get hold of Dr Najibullah and hanged him by an electric poll, how the events then turned the Taliban themselves against the US, how the US launched a war against Afghanistan in October 2001 on the plea that the ruling Taliban were in league with the Al Qaeda that had perpetrated the 9/11 crime -- all these are well known facts of contemporary history and need no elaboration here. The US war against Afghanistan was then followed by the installation of an interim government in Kabul, led by Hamid Karzai. But Karzai has since ruled the country only in the shadow of the Americans, so much so that he could not venture out without his American bodyguards and could not reach several provinces for poll campaign. Moreover, polls were held in the country only after three years of the Karzai government’s installation though it was originally decided that they would be held in a year after a Loya Jirgah met to decide the future course including the poll process. Yet, the same Americans who made the life of the Afghanistan people a hell, want to have a pliant government in Kabul, and Washington, to quote Hindustan Times again, is “still the most powerful player in Afghanistan.” But this move needs to be viewed in conjunction with the US hegemonic drive in the unipolar world of today and in conjunction with the NATO expansion in recent years even though the stated need of this war alliance has disappeared after the end of the Cold War. There also remains the danger that other contenders, who remain dissatisfied with the conduct of the polls, may again take up arms and that may give the Americans yet another chance to intervene. This will be the main concern of the peace loving people of the world after Afghanistan comes to have an elected government. This underlines the need of the peace loving popular opinion around the globe to assert itself and demand that Washington must pull itself out of the country, giving the Afghan people a chance to decide their future themselves. Apart from the United Nations, a body like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of which Afghanistan has always been an important member, is best suited to give voice to the world people’s urge in favour of peace. There is also scope for countries like India, individually, to play an important role in the country. Except during the five-year interregnum of Taliban rule in Kabul, Afghanistan has always been a trusted ally of India and the latter can do much in the reconstruction of the unfortunate country. India has already done something worthwhile in this regard in the last three years, but it has to step up its reconstruction work manifold, particularly in areas like infrastructure, health, education and the like. This is more so because not only Karzai but also most of his opponents profess to be friendly to India. The PDPA government of Afghanistan had once applied for SAARC membership though no decision was taken about it at that time. The country’s inclusion into this regional forum may also be considered afresh. In sum, the comity of nations has to explore all such options as may give Afghanistan a chance and capacity to pursue the path of independent development and regain its position of honour in the world. For, what is at stake in this part of the world is not only the fate of Afghan people but also the future of world peace.

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Globalisation and Popular Sovereignty

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 03:21:00 +0000

Paper presented by Robert Griffiths, Communist Party of Britain general secretary, to the seminar for European Communist and left parties on 'Popular sovereignty, globalisation and the new European Constitution', London, October 16, 2004

Marxist Approaches to Globalisation and Imperialism

Like other communist and workers' parties, the Communist Party of Britain has been developing its analysis of what is called 'globalisation'. We seek to deepen our understanding of it not least because globalisation provides much of the context within which the domestic and foreign policies of Britain's New Labour government are formulated.

This context is dominated by the drive of US imperialism - using its now unrivalled economic, political and military power - to impose a 'new world order' on the peoples of our planet. In pursuit of its own world-wide economic interests, British imperialism has aligned itself even more closely with US imperialism as a junior and largely compliant ally.

Our 46th and 48th congresses identified in these developments what it characterised as a new 'emerging phase' of imperialism. This phase germinated in the anti-working class onslaught led by the ruling classes of Britain and the US in the 1980s, before taking the world stage with the collapse of the international socialist system in the 1990s.

Its chief features are, firstly, to assert the superiority of the ethical and cultural values of the 'civilised' West; secondly, to claim on the basis of this supposed superiority the right to intervene politically and militarily in the internal affairs of any country in the world, regardless of the United Nations Charter and international law; thirdly, to use new and existing global agencies such as the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank to enforce economic regimes which benefit Western transnational corporations in general and those based in the US in particular; fourth, to orchestrate a process of global exploitation and concentration of economic resources on an unprecedented scale; fifth, to extend Western military power across the world and into space under the hegemony of the US; and sixth, to undermine and subvert national cultures in order to establish the supremacy of an Anglo-American mass 'culture' which incorporates and prjoects the values of US-led imperialism.

On all these fronts today, we are witnessing the ruthless use of neo-colonial methods to subvert, undermine and disregard the sovereign institutions of existing states.

For some, the term 'globalisation' is used to conceal or misrepresent what is actually this new emerging phase of imperialism. 'Globalisation' is presented as a mainly technologically-driven process which, we are told, is inevitable. Often allied to this approach is a tendency to see so-called globalisation as a predominantly economic process.

As Marxists, we do not disregard the dynamic of technological development as one of the forces of production with all its economic, social and cultural ramifications. Nor should we underestimate the significance of the economic base which underpins what is, after all, capitalist or - more accurately - imperialist globalisation.

Nevertheless, as our 48th congress resolution points out, 'developments that have been described as 'globalisation' are in reality primarily the result of political processes'. Economically, capitalism has involved movements of commodities, capital and labour across the globe for the past 400 years. From the East India Company and Barclays coffee house merchants of the 17th century to Exxon and Citibank today, almost all the major transnational corporations are based within one or other of the leading imperialist states. Politically, the capitalist state power which protects and promotes their interests has always been organised first and foremost at the level of the national or multinational state - and remains so.

It is US, British, German, French state power which drives forward the new phase of imperialism in its main features outlined above. It is the state power of each country which creates alliances with others where their interests coincide.

The collapse of their common enemy the Soviet Union opened up new opportunities to exploit the resources of the former socialist countries, but also to intensify exploitation in the Third World and in the imperialist countries themselves.

So the imperialist powers have combined together to impose IMF structural adjustment programmes, establish the World Trade Organisation and promote the abortive Multilateral Agreement on Investment and now the General Agreement on Trade and Services. But these policies are political decisions which ultimately rest upon the power of national states, acting in concert with one another. This is seen at its most naked in the case of imperialist military intervention to secure control of strategic resources and supply routes.

Although these decisions derive from the logic of capitalism's imperatives, they are not only the only ones that could have been taken. They were not 'inevitable' any more than many of the characteristic features of imperialist globalisation are inevitable.

Nor, given the origins and motive forces of 'globalisation' and the character of the political and economic forces which govern it, can we agree that globalisation is either a neutral or potentially benign process. There is the 'reformist' perspective which believes that the development of international regulatory organisations and codes of conduct can make it so. While Communists do not reject reforms out of hand, these offer no more than the hope of curbing some of globalisation's worst excesses, some of the time.

Then there is the 'utopian' response to globalisation which sees way forward in terms of building global resistance against transnational capital and related international organisations, believing wrongly that capital - and therefore the struggle against it - is no longer organised on a national basis.

Both perspectives share a common root in overestimating the economic - and underestimating the political - content of this new phase of imperialism. Both therefore downplay the importance of challenging monopoly capitalism at the level where most of its political power continues to be concentrated, namely that of the nation state.

For as long as this is the case, we take the nation - or in Britain's case the multinational - state as our starting point in the political class struggle. Our revolutionary programme Britain's Road to Socialism, constantly renewed and updated, is our party's strategy for the working class to 'first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie' as Marx and Engels put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Such an approach does not deny the value of reforms and mobilisations at the national and international - as well as the local - level. In particular, acting in solidarity with peoples across the world fighting to preserve or achieve national sovereignty against imperialist pressure is essential not only as our internationalist duty, but also because it promotes solidarity and political consciousness within the working class and progressive movement at home.

Successfully challenging the pro-monopoly, pro-war policies of Britain's New Labour government, achieving a left government here on the basis of mass struggle and a Labour, socialist and communist majority in parliament, would deal far more severe blows to 'globalisation' than could any number of international demonstrations and regulations .

II. National and Popular Sovereignty

The disappearance of the Soviet Union as a unifying factor has also exacerbated the divisions within imperialism which reflect their rival economic and political interests.

It is in this context that we assess renewed efforts to expand the European Union and cement it into the foundations of a single market, economic and monetary union, neo-liberal policies and an EU military-industrial complex. The drive to construct a monopoly capitalist United States of Europe with a common foreign and military policy has the same three-fold purpose identified by Lenin in 1916: to promote monopoly capitalism and suppress socialism at home, to exploit neo-colonies abroad and to compete against rival imperialist powers and in particular the US. At the global level, it should be no surprise that the EU is a champion of privatisation, the free movement of capital, GATS and other archetypal 'globalisation' measures aimed at the developing and former socialist countries.

No less important is the joint need of Europe's imperialist centres to circumvent the democratic institutions of their own countries in face of the system's deepening economic contradictions. These institutions still, in our view, hold the potential for fundamental change - demonstrated over the past decades by the increasing instability of political parties aligned to imperialism. For this reason the drive to a United States of Europe is also designed to undermine and circumvent the democratic institutions of EU member states. More specifically, EU laws and treaties have sought to limit the powers of democratic national parliaments - themselves the product of long working class struggle - precisely in those areas where they might limit the power and freedom of capital. Meanwhile, such unelected EU institutions as the European Commission and the European Central Bank acquire powers to initiate and enforce policies of privatisation, deregulation and monetarism enshrined in EU fundamental law.

Thus our 48th congress identified as a key task for our party 'the defence of the existing democratic institutions of member states and in particular the ability of national parliaments to exercise economic and social control over capital - and thereby to change the balance of forces against imperialism'.

In our view, the only practical way to reverse the process of globalisation is to attack its political base in the imperialist states. But merely to defend the imperfect institutions of bourgeois democracy is no attack at all. Which is why the concept of 'popular sovereignty' is so valuable.

For us, popular sovereignty is the ability of progressive anti-monopoly forces to transform the sovereign democratic institutions of their country in order to meet the economic and social needs of the people. We have to defend those institutions and their powers against the unelected and the unaccountable - history and Georgi Dimitrov have taught us that. But in this case, we do so also in order to transform them through mass popular struggle into weapons against monopoly capital and against those state structures that support it.

This concept of popular sovereignty can trace its pedigree to the French revolution, when the sans-culottes of Paris battled to impose popular control over elected representatives and - through them - over the power of property. Indeed, in one vital respect the revolution itself was a series of struggles to decide which class genuinely constituted the French nation and so should wield sovereignty.

Popular sovereignty reverberates through the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels call upon the proletariat to win the battle of democracy, to constitute itself as the nation, to take state power in order to wrest economic and social power from the capitalist class. When the people had to defend national sovereignty against Prussian invaders - bourgeois politicians and their institutions having capitulated - they transformed it into popular sovereignty and created the Paris Commune. Workers soviets or councils express the same revolutionary democratic essence.

In the present day, popular sovereignty is the struggle to impose the will of the working class and its allies - the vast majority of the nation - over monopoly capital. In Britain, the campaigns against participation in imperialist wars and in the US Star Wars programme are embryonic expressions of the aspiration for popular - and not just national - sovereignty.

In the immediate future, as Communists and internationalists in Britain our responsibility is to ensure that the referendum campaigns against the single European currency and the EU constitution are imbued with the same spirit. They must not be allowed to become dominated by right-wing and chauvinist ideas and led by sections of the bourgeoisie. They must be based in the organised labour movement and project the values of internationalism and anti-imperialism in common struggle with working people across Europe.

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