People Before Profit blog

President Obama Pledges No Troops in Libya

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:22:00 +0000

In a televised address this week, President Obama defended US intervention in Libya and promised to hand over leadership of the "No Fly Zone" and Libyan humanitarian efforts to NATO by Wednesday. He proclaimed the tactical objectives of the "No Fly Zone," authorized by the UN security council, a success, having reversed Libyan leader Gadaffi's declared intent to show "no mercy" and annihilate the popular rebellion against the 40 year dictatorship.

He defended the UN intervention, which includes participation from the UK, France, Italy and some Arab League partners, on both strategic and humanitarian grounds.

To summarize, then: in just one month, the United States has worked with our international partners to mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre, and establish a No Fly Zone with our allies and partners....Moreover, we have accomplished these objectives consistent with the pledge that I made to the American people at the outset of our military operations. I said that America's role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation, and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners. Tonight, we are fulfilling that pledge.

The president declared that a large scale, "horrific" massacre of the Libyan opposition would destabilize democratization efforts in both Egypt and Tunisia, overwhelm their own fragile reconstruction efforts with thousands of refugees, and give a nod to dictators that repressive methods were an acceptable solution to the democratic upsurge. That upsurge, he argues is the best hope for future Mid-East stability and progress.

A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful – yet fragile – transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the UN Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling its future credibility to uphold global peace and security.

On the humanitarian side, the scale of carnage he envisioned as a consequence of Gadaffi's use of air power and mass murder against his opponent would dwarf similar repressive efforts noted in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. To those who argue moral and political (and oil-interest) biases and inconsistencies, the president was straightforward:

It is true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action.

He argued that in this particular country – Libya – at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale; "we had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves." And, he added, "We also had the ability to stop Gaddafi's forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground."

The president was emphatic about distinguishing the international effort from "regime change" schemes which have had a poor record of success after 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If we tried to overthrow Gaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs, and our share of the responsibility for what comes next.

Navigating the management of both humanitarian efforts, the economic isolation and arms boycott against Gadaffi, and neutralizing his military domination without putting troops on the ground, or "taking over" the revolution will be a lengthy and complex process, he admitted, but restated his pledge to not go down the Iraq road:

The United States will not be able to dictate the pace and scope of this change. Only the people of the region can do that. But we can make a difference.

To critics who favored further negotiation and diplomacy instead of military intervention, Obama argued that all diplomatic, third-party, efforts were effectively exhausted once Gadaffi reneged on his "cease-fire" claim by deploying air power and other atrocities against his own people.

The president close with a defense of "American ideals":

Born, as we are, out of a revolution by those who longed to be free, we welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East and North Africa, and that young people are leading the way. Because wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States. Ultimately, it is that faith – those ideals – that are the true measure of American leadership.

Those lofty sentiments are, of course, complicated and marred by the record of interventions and imperial policies that dominated the cold war years, both Gulf wars and Afghanistan; most of the dictators in the developing world, including till recently, Gadaffi, have been "friends" to US foreign policy. Nonetheless, President Obama has made a promise to steer a different course, admitted (for a President, a rare thing) some past blunders, and thus gives hope that we, and the peoples of the world, can find a common destiny.

Photo: White House

A View from the Third World: A letter in response to Michael Moore’s “America is not broke” speech in Wisconsin

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:12:00 +0000

A View from the Third World: A letter in response to Michael Moore’s “America is not broke” speech in Wisconsin.

Hersh Zakheim
Rebelión [Creative Commons]

Dear Michael Moore,

I had the opportunity to read the text of your March 5, 2011 speech in Madison during the recent events in Wisconsin. I would like to share with you some thoughts regarding your statements.

To begin, I want to tell you that I have a serious respect for you as a person. You have said and done things that, coming from an American, are worthy of respect for both will and intelligence. It is quite uncommon for a citizen of the land of Uncle Sam to dare to confront the corporations that are in power. And you did just that, fearlessly and with talent.

And I also want you to know that you and I have something very important in common: we were both born of the working class. From what I have read of your statements, we are both proud of our parents. In my case, both of my parents worked hand-to-mouth.

As I read your words I can tell the love that you have for your people and how you encourage them and raise their morale with every step you take. This is the attitude that one should expect from an honest politician with a working class background. But I hope that you will accept the fact that I have a different point of view, thanks to the fact that I belong to a country that, like so many others in the Third World, has been a victim of exploitation by U.S. capitalist corporations. And as such I want to share my concerns with you, speaking as a man of the working class.

I want to assure you that if it were otherwise I wouldn’t bother you with my analysis of your words, since very frankly, when it comes to questions of culture and ideology my view of the majority of your compatriots (of course, not of all!) is that of a people that has been dumbed down, manipulated and dehumanized to such a degree that they have become highly dangerous to the rest of humanity.

Perhaps my ideas will seem very simplistic to you, but my working class parents taught me that the fundamental for living in society is respect for human rights. And, that since we humans are material beings, we must “first of all eat, so we can think afterwards.” My parents classified our most fundamental rights in this order: First of all, an economic equity that guarantees enough to eat; and after that, when we can sit down and think about it, political equality and solidarity with others. These ideas, which always seem so simple when they are proposed, turn out to be extremely complex both to understand and to realize in practice.

So, let’s begin at the beginning.

You say that “the United States is not broke.” I understand that you want to give your own people confidence and strength to take action. But I cannot concur with you. For me, the United States and her people have already been in moral bankruptcy for many years. The only difference is that now you are in a growing state of economic bankruptcy as well.

When you say that in your country there has been a great transfer, “the greatest heist in history, from the workers … to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich,” you are absolutely right.

But this fades to insignificance when compared to what the very same American capitalist corporations have been doing for decades to the workers of the third world, transferring this surplus value to these very same private banks and portfolios belonging to your country’s super-rich.

And this gigantic rip-off, as you yourself ought to recognize, Michael, has to some degree benefited the U.S. people in general, maintaining up to this point a more or less acceptable level of life in contrast to the misery that these very same thieves that you are referring to have inflicted upon the rest of the world.

It hurts me to say this, but in this way your very own bosses have associated American workers with the exploitation of, and theft from, the workers of the third world, thus managing to anesthetize your working class consciousness.

To be sure, this bonanza is now coming to an end. Capitalism in general has entered a stage of decline, something which, to my surprise, you yourself have begun to observe. I say “to my surprise,” because it isn’t easy to think independently in the heart of the capitalist citadel, surrounded as you are by total disinformation, an absence of human solidarity, and the most frenzied degree of individualism. I have to remind myself that this may help you to get back to your working class family roots.

You say that “400 obscenely rich people … now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined,” and you attribute this to “a financial coup d’etat,” and to the fact that you Americans “surrendered [your] precious Democracy to the moneyed elite, Wall Street, the banks.” And you add that in your opinion, the American people “feel helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.”

Here once again I beg to differ. When you speak of a “coup d’etat,” you refer to something sudden, surprising. But it isn’t that way. For more than two centuries capitalism has exploited and robbed the workers in order to give to a few privileged ones and their private banks, in just about that same permanent proportion of 400 super-rich to 155 million poor.

And in order to do it they employ your “precious democracy,” carefully designed to snooker the people. If you do nothing but vote every four years for two parties that have the same ideology but different names, then those who are elected, those who always represent the rich, will logically decide everything in favor of the rich.

Tell me, Michael: After more than two centuries of hearing this same old fairy-tale repeated over and over again, why wouldn’t you feel helpless, unable to do anything?

You said you learned in school that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” However, that’s not precisely true either. Particularly in the United States, money does grow on trees.

I say this especially because, even though money is made everywhere from paper, which is made from wood pulp, today’s U.S. dollar is worth precious little. It has no backing at all, and is being printed by the ton in the Federal Reserve’s money-factories on printing presses that are overheating under the strain. Even then they cannot keep up with the deficit created by your financial speculators in their desperate search for the quick buck, or with what America owes to the rest of the world, the equivalent of years of work for your entire people. The deficit is the result of having lived through recent decades as though you were rich, without actually being so.

This is why I say that in the USA money grows on trees, because you don’t have real money as the capitalist market understands it, backed up by some super-powerful industrial base, which, as you well know, is no longer so powerful and no longer enjoys the exclusive world market it used to years ago.

And if the world still accepts the dollar as a reserve currency it will only be for a short time, and only because it is backed up by a criminal military machine financed by that very same money that grows on trees. But remember that old saying: “You can build an empire with bayonets, but you can’t sleep on them.”

You say, “If those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy.”

Well, in your own documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story,” the role of the banks in breaking the economy of the United States is clear. And my conclusion is one of extreme simplicity, perhaps even overly simplistic:
a) I ask you: Why do your compatriots let the rich keep the money that is generated by the workers’ work (“workers” here meaning all those who participate in the production of merchandise). More concretely, why do those 155 million willingly turn over the fruits of their labor to these 400 crooks?

Why and wherefore do we still need those 400 thieves to manage production and make off with its fruits?

b) I ask you: Among the 300 million Americans, aren’t there any who are capable of organizing production and dividing the profits among all, in the form of goods that allow everyone to live better?

c) I ask you: Why do the rich have to pay taxes? Doesn’t it seem absurd to you to allow them to keep all those fruits of others’ labor, and then ask them to please return a crumb or two in the form of taxes?

Of course it is difficult to collect taxes from them! You have gotten them used to laughing at the working people and to managing all the levers of power and of the law, all thanks to the U.S. Constitution that you respect so much and even take pride in.

I see that you are very worried about the banks.

And when you say “the economy and the market are in free-fall, and we catch the banks running a world-wide Ponzi scheme,” you are pointing out a reality that is a warning to the world: the absurdity of the very existence of private banks.

I agree with you that you are “a nation full of dummies,” because your compatriots deposit their money in private banks, when we know from history that, sooner or later, these same banks will rip-off the suckers who believe in them. And their rip-off techniques keep on getting better year after year. Even “the Ponzi scheme” that you refer to already existed in the Middle Ages, in the year 1300. “Bbankruptcies” were already habitual among those improvised banks back in the plazas of Italy.

A friend of mine says, “to deposit my money in a private bank managed by some other citizen like me is just like sending my young spouse to spend the night in the neighbor’s bedroom, trusting that everything will come out okay.”

It seems to me to be incredibly stupid that our goods, represented by money, are managed by the owners of the private banks, who are in the last analysis people like you and me, rather than being exclusively in the hands and under the guarantee of the State, which represents us all and which ought to use them for the benefit of all.

Michael, I regard you as an American with a high level of social consciousness, and I know you respect your working class roots with pride. But as long as you think, as I infer from your text, that the rich of your country have the right to have more than other citizens, just not quite THAT much more, the process in Madison that you are so proud of will remain stalled.

You say that “the smug rich went overboard. They were not satisfied. They wanted our soul.” But I wish to remind you that workers’ souls are the last thing the bosses are interested in. What they are interested in is squeezing out the labor power of their workers, and if possible, doing it for free.

You say that “what is broke is the leaders’ moral compass.” Look, Michael, the leaders of your country have always had and still have their moral compass pointed at maximum profits, at exploiting the labor of the peoples of the world. And I warn you that now, thanks to that bankruptcy that you deny, they are having to squeeze the American working people harder than ever into that capitalist moral compass.

Once again I beg to differ with you when you wish for “our country to return to what it once was. Give us back our democracy. Give us back our good name, the United States of America.” And you ask, “What do we have to do to achieve this?”

I’ll tell you what Americans need to do: First of all, self-criticism is fundamental, understanding that that idyllic United States of long ago never existed. Ever since its birth, it has been a predator country. Nor should you venerate a constitution that justifies and supports the privileges of a small group of exploiters over the immense majority of the people. You need to change it, make it participative, and do away with the fairy-tale of representation, a representation that keeps the rich in power; one person, one vote, and then back to sleep for another two years.

Those who are sleeping in the cold in Madison in order to defend the rights of labor need to understand that they need to protest and struggle against the hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world with the very same dedication that they have shown defending their union ideals.

Your politicians and Hollywood sell you a fairy-tale of terrorism and you do not even seem to understand that at this moment the only terrorism that is besieging the world is the U.S. Army invading its neighbors to steal the oil, with the silence and tacit agreement of the American people.

I believe that in order for the United States to have a good name it must NOT go back to being what it was before, and must NOT return to what there they called “democracy.” It must put aside that economic regime that is called capitalism. Only then will it show its “talent, ideas, hard work, love and compassion,” as you want it to.

You know what? I used to think that this Michael Moore would be the ideal man to be president of the United States. He has moral gifts that previous officeholders lacked, plus a respect for the humble people, that is to say, for the majority. This is proven by what he has done, in contrast to other presidents who did nothing but proclaim their campaign lies.

In this speech of yours in Madison, you say, “You have awakened the sleeping giant known as the people of the United States. From this moment forward the earth will shake and the floor will move under the feet of the powerful. We are many more than you are.” In my opinion, in this speech you express wishes that do not really mesh with the reality of the moment, but which form a guide for action toward a better future for the American people. And this is the function of an honest politician, to propose a just future.

But then I thought, wow, what a task I’m proposing to Michael, to confront the rich, who have so thoroughly tamed this people that 400 can historically laugh at and cheat 155 million.

I will tell you that in my viewpoint, we are living in a moment, all around the world, when intellectuals who get involved in politics, who teach in schools and universities, who write in the media, who make movies and TV, people who think and try to understand what is happening, have been infiltrated by a bunch of cowards, those who close their eyes to what they understand and open their pockets to greed. They agree to neither see nor act, but rather to take counsel with thieves.

And your ancestors and mine, living or dead, do not deserve for us to close our eyes. Those who were exploited just as workers are today, are the ones who make things and who are the legitimate owners of the things they make.

You need to explain to your people that capitalism is just another experiment created by humankind. It was not invented by God, and it doesn’t have much time left. And, you need to say that among all the economic systems that humans have invented up to now, it is probably the most unjust. And that, since it is a destroyer of nature, it is also the stupidest.

As you end you shout “Madison, not one step backward!” Someone once said that “one step backward in the struggle of the excluded is not that serious. The important thing is to then take two steps forward.”

Sure, you might answer, “Why did you write to me? Why are you bothering me and giving me extra responsibilities?”

Please excuse me if I load you down with extra responsibilities, but it’s your fault for having a social conscience and a sense of justice and, unfortunately, for being a gadfly in your own country.

To conclude, I understand that it much easier to offer ideas than to occupy the place that you have earned. But I hope you will read this if you have time, with the conviction that these opinions are expressed with all the mutual respect that I believe both of us practice.

I send you a fraternal embrace.

Hersh Zakheim

Photo by StretchyBill/cc by 2.0/Flickr

No Stomach for Global Food Inequality

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:14:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
E - The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I understand a recent government report concluded that our global food system is in deep trouble, that roughly two billion people are hungry or undernourished while another billion are over consuming to the point of obesity. What’s going on? -- Ellie Francoeur, Baton Rouge, LA

The report in question, the Global Farming & Futures Report, synthesized findings collected from more than 400 scientists spanning 34 countries, and was published in January 2011 by the British government’s Department for Business Innovation & Skills. Its troubling bottom line conclusion is that the world’s existing food system is failing half of the people on the planet.

Economic inequality among nations and other factors have contributed to a global food system whereby a billion people are hungry (lacking access to sufficient amounts of macronutrients, e.g. carbohydrates, fats and proteins), another billion suffer from “hidden hunger” (lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet), while yet another billion are “substantially over-consuming” (spawning a new public health epidemic involving chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes and widespread cardiovascular disease).

The report, which was prepared by the research firm Foresight on behalf of the British government, also predicts that the cost of food worldwide will rise sharply in coming decades, increasing the likelihood of food-based conflicts and migration, and that people won’t be able to feed themselves without destroying the planet—unless we can transform the global food system on the scale of the industrial revolution.

“The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account,” Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the report, told the UK’s Guardian. The report warns that an expanding world population that is already overexploiting its natural resources is a recipe for disaster, especially given the onset of climate change.

“Farmers have to grow more food at less cost to the environment,” said Caroline Spelman of the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which commissioned the report. That may sound simple, but many factors determine if production of a given food is economically viable.

Fixing the global food system will be no small task. Fundamental will be the spreading of existing knowledge and technology to the developing world to boost yields. Other keys to such an endeavor include dramatically reducing food waste—Americans toss as much as 40 percent of their food—especially since food production and distribution accounts for as much as a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Also, researchers suggest that investing in genetically modified crops and cloned livestock, despite the potential risks, may be “essential in light of the magnitude of the challenges.”

What can those of us in developed nations do? Staying active and eating right is the best way to prevent obesity and ensuing health problems. And choosing locally produced food over that which is shipped in from far away will help reduce our food’s carbon footprint. Also, support the efforts of groups working to end hunger and malnutrition in poor countries. If nothing else, those who wish to help feed the hungry can set their web browsers’ home page to The Hunger Site and click on a button there once a day which triggers a donation of food from one of a number of sponsors to needy people in developing countries.

CONTACTS: UK Department for Business Innovation & Skills, www.bis.gov.uk; DEFRA, www.defra.gov.uk; The Hunger Site, www.thehungersite.com.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine ( www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Germany: The Greens Win the Day in Two State Elections

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:11:00 +0000

The two German state elections Sunday were of key importance – but only one party found the proper keyhole. That was the Greens. Much of that party’s remarkable gains were based on tragedy – the horror of Fukushima in Japan and fears that one of the four atomic reactors in Baden-Wurttemberg, the youngest 22 years old, the oldest 35 years old, might cause a similar disaster.

Huge demonstrations the day before the election, 90,000 in Berlin, over 400,000 in four major German cities, demanded an end to atomic reactors, and that is how the voters marked their ballots, giving the Greens 24.4% in Baden-Wurttemberg, double that in the last elections, and a very healthy 15.6% in Rhineland-Palatinate, an almost equally unusual gain of 11 percent.

In the latter they will now share power with the weakened Social Democrats, who hitherto ruled alone in Mainz, the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate, but now lost almost ten percent. The aging leader there, Kurt Beck, 62, stout, with his standard, well-clipped white beard and usually good contact with voters, the state boss since 1994, did not do well this time against the pretty, blonde former Wine Queen of the Christian Democrats, but will stay on top all the same thanks to the gains of the Greens.

In more important Baden-Wurttemberg, with both Mercedes and Porsche centered in its capital of Stuttgart and a hard-core conservative bastion of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats for 58 years, the Greens edged just ahead of their future partners, the Social Democrats, truly a sensation, and should provide the new Minister President in Stuttgart, the first Green to hold such an exalted office in German history. The jubilation in Green headquarters was overpowering.

Opposing atomic energy has been their main slogan since they were founded over thirty years ago, they have been most vocal on the issue for years, but especially since Fukushima, and although both the Social Democrats and the Left joined in they were viewed by large numbers of voters as the most vigorous and consistent campaigners on this issue, and this became a crucial factor as people watched the daily, frightful and frightening pictures from the Far East.

The zigzags of the Merkel government, supporting an extension of the reactors’ lives last autumn, obviously in cahoots with the handful of major companies in the field but then, after the Japanese catastrophe, declaring a 3 month moratorium on further development while closing seven of the oldest reactors, at least temporarily, were simply not trusted. A small scandal a week earlier did not help. A cabinet minister (one of the Free Democrats) told big business representatives at a private meeting that the moratorium was really only because of the coming elections and not to be taken too seriously. This all too honest confession was leaked to the press, the minister became a laughing stock in the Bundestag as he tried to disavow his recorded words, and both government parties lost a large passel of votes. In fact the Free Democrats, always close to big business, failed to win the required 5% in Rhineland-Palatinate and so disappeared altogether from the state legislature there. They barely managed to keep a few seats in Baden-W, with 5.2%, less than half their last vote. This loss in both elections might well spell the end of Guido Westerwelle, not as Foreign Minister perhaps but as head of his party. And the loss of this important, hitherto reliable state will be a major blow to the prestige of the parent party and government of Angela Merkel.

But sadly enough, on the periphery of all this excitement, the Left was also forced to lick its wounds. Its losses since the last elections were minimal, but they were losses, not gains, and in both states it missed the needed and so yearned for 5% level even more clearly than the polls had indicated, getting only 2.7% in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 3.2% in Rhineland-Palatinate. Its once triumphant entry into the West German political scene had been very unsuccessful this Sunday.

Several suggested reasons will certainly be the subject of hot debate in coming months. In Rhineland-Palatinate there had been constant quarreling within factions of the party. This was largely settled by January, it would seem, but that was not soon enough. Of course the media played up all internal differences. A second possible reason: the highly-publicized sentence or two by co-president Gesine Loetzsch in praise of communism as a future, if distant goal, a goal which she also called democratic socialism. This latter term was ignored, while the C-word (K-word in German) was trumpeted in all the media to frighten people. It undoubtedly had some effect. Another reason: the economic demands of the Left have been plagiarized by both the Social Democrats and the Greens, and they get media attention, while the efforts of the Left, including those on the atomic question, remain unknown to most voters. But probably most important was that the elections had been played up as a battle between Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on one side and Greens and Social Democrats on the other. In the face of this polarization even voters favorable to the Left decided to support the Greens, who had a real chance of gaining great strength – as they indeed did in the end. The Left, it would seem, will have to work out more aggressive, street-based and imaginative forms of political action if it is to beat out long-term prejudices and media hostility. Sometimes it has worked.

In general, a large proportion of voters signaled that they were sick and distrustful of the old Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Social Democrats as well, and they placed their trust in the modernist, more attractive Greens. They had frequently forgotten that whenever the Greens have gained power and influence they have all too often neglected many or most of their loudly proclaimed principles. They now represent, more than ever, a well-educated, fairly prosperous sector with few ties to people on the lower rungs of economic ladders. It remains to be seen whether this will remain so. In Germany the color green stands not for envy but for hope. May we hope that the voters are not disappointed.

ELECTION RESULTS.

Baden-Wuerttemberg:

CDU 39.0 (- 5.2); SPD 23.1 (- 2.1); Greens 24.2 (+ 12.5); FDP 5.3 (- 5.4); Left 2.8 (- 0.4)

Rhineland-Palatinate:

CDU 35.2 (+ 2.6); SPD 35.7 (- 9.8); Greens 15.4 (+ 11.0),; FDP 4.2 (- 4.1); Left 3.0 (- 0.6)

8,000 Rally against Georgia Anti-Immigrant Bills

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:06:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA -- Over 8,000 activists rallied outside the State Capitol on Thursday, March 24, 2011, to show their outrage and disgust over Georgia's Arizona-type immigration bills.

As previously reported by Atlanta Progressive News, legislation, HB 87, has already passed the State House. A similar bill, SB 40, has also passed the State Senate.

While the vast majority of protesters at the Capitol were Hispanic, opposition to the bills came from a wide spectrum of constituents including immigrants, students, religious groups, peace groups, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, Asian groups, GLBTQI activists, labor, artists, musicians, business owners, elected officials, and others.

"Thousands of Georgia immigrants and allies came together today to say no more to racial profiling and no more to the dangerous and unfair targeting of immigrant communities and communities of color," Adelina Nicholls, Director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and one of the rally’s central organizers, said in a statement. The business community, as well as the rally participants, hope to convince Governor Nathan Deal to veto the bill when it comes to his desk

“It makes no sense that Governor Deal seems intent on supporting legislation that will bankrupt the state – both morally and financially. We call on him to veto such misguided policy,” Nicholls said.

There were various estimates of how many people participated in the rally. Based on an analysis of the square footage on Washington Street in front of the Capitol by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper's Political Insider blog, and based upon the fact that activists were packed into the space like sardines, APN concludes there were over 8,000 activists present. Capitol police put the estimate at about 5,000, while Republican legislators said it was only a few hundred.

State Reps. Matt Ramsey (R-Peachtree City), Rich Golick (R-Smyrna), Alex Atwood (R-Brunswick), Allen Peake (R-Macon), Christian Coomer (R-Cartersville), and Ed Setzler (R-Acworth) released the following joint statement: “Today several hundred supporters of illegal immigration descended on the Georgia State Capitol to rail against legislation aimed at enforcing the rule of law in Georgia."

"In contrast to these angry sign waiving activists, there are millions of Georgia citizens working and raising their families, who no longer are willing to accept the loss of job opportunities to the nearly 500,000 illegal aliens in our state or to subsidize their presence with their hard earned tax dollars. We are the voice for these common sense Georgians and this kind of protest only bolsters our resolve to see House Bill 87 signed into law,” they wrote.

Opponents of the bills are concerned that it will have a negative impact of Georgia's economic growth and fear it will lead to racial profiling of immigrants andothers.

"We want to make the Capitol walls tremble, so we can send a message to the legislators and the Governor that what they are doing is not right," State Rep. Pedro Marin (D-Norcross) told APN in an English translation of his speech to the protesters.

The crowd enthusiastically shouted, "Si, Se Puede," or "Yes It Can Be Done," after every speaker. The Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, the Georgia-based folk rock music duo, sang "Shame on You" to loud applause from the rally.

Lyrics from the song include: "Let's go road block trippin in the middle of the night up in Gainesville town// There'll be blue lights flashin down the long dirt road when they ask us to step out// They say we be looking for illegal immigrants can we check your car// I say you know it's funny I think we were on the same boat back in 1694."

Both Georgia bills authorize all law enforcement officials to investigate the immigration status of anyone they have "probable cause" to believe has committed a criminal offense, including traffic violations.
Other provisions mandate vehicle confiscation, fines and/or jail time for transporting an "illegal alien" in a motor vehicle. [Good luck to MARTA on this one.]

HB 87 allows Georgia residents to sue state and local government agencies they believe are not enforcing the law. This could lead to a vigilante environment with anti-immigration activists suing every governmental agency in the state.

"We will stand and fight until we kill these vicious anti-immigration bills. The business community understands the bills will kill Georgia's economy. Georgia cannot operate without the immigrant work force," State Sen. Nan Orrock (D-Atlanta) said.

Some of the reasons expressed by State Rep. Ramsey for drafting the bill include the belief that undocumented immigrants are using public benefits. Ramsey cites the cost of illegal immigration in Georgia at 2.5 billion dollars per year.

"Ramsey is unwilling to acknowledge that the presence of undocumented workers and their families, contributed more than $400 million in direct taxes and more than $10 billion in economic output," Charles Kuck, an immigration expert, states on his blog.

According to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, food stamps, social security, supplemental security income, temporary assistance for needy families, full-scope Medicaid, Medicare premium free part A, PeachCare for children, and HUD public housing and section 8 programs are simply not available to undocumented immigrants by existing law.

Undocumented immigrants do qualify for K-12 public education and emergency medial care.

The 2.5 billion dollar statistic comes from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which, as previously reported by APN, is considered a hate group with ties to White supremacist groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

"We are here for two reasons today. We deserve and demand dignity and respect for without our immigrant community Georgia does not work. It is the immigrant labor, in the agriculture industry, that produces 68 billion dollars for Georgia," Jerry Gonzalez, Executive Director, Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, said. "It is time to move past politics and division - time to create jobs instead of killing jobs," Gonzalez said.

Estimates suggest that implementing HB 87 could cost over 400 million dollars in diverted law enforcement resources, detention beds, and foster care cost.

To separate children from their families is unconscionable, activists argue, and will cause psychological trauma and damage to those children.

Arizona so far has lost 140 million dollars as a result of its SB 1070. The Center for American Progress expects that loss to increase to 750 million.

State Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta) was a man of only one word: "Boycott!" The crowd screamed back boycott, Si Se Puede, boycott!

Often overlooked in the immigration debate is the influence of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in lobbying elected officials to support anti-immigration bills and in helping to draft Arizona's SB 1070. APN previously reported on these connections, with CCA lobbyists currently working the halls of the Georgia Capitol.

"The private prison corporations that make money off of immigrants are behind these bills," Azadeh Shahshahani, Director of the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project of American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, said. "Do we want Georgia to be known as a state friendly to CCA or a state friendly to immigrants?"

CCA's profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to their for-profit private prisons.

"There is nothing more powerful than a committed and determined people. You must not give up. You must not give in. You must to everything possible to keep this bill from passing," the legendary US Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said. "There are no illegal human beings. We do not want Arizona type legislation in Georgia."

"Immigration is an issue for the national government not the government of the State of Georgia," Lewis said. "If you are arrested, I will get arrested and go to jail with you. The jails in Georgia are not large enough to hold all of us," Lewis promised.

Can We Afford to Bomb Libya?

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:00:00 +0000

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford employment or income for millions of Americans.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford to launch the green energy and industrial investments we need to recover from the economic crisis.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford to pay the pension benefits promised to millions of private and public workers -- our parents, our grandparents, ourselves.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but millions have nothing left to even cover burial expenses.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we have to cut teachers salaries and medical coverage.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford to provide our children the education they need to thrive.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford NPR.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but not after school programs for kids.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but 80 million must suffer poor or no health care coverage.

We can afford to bomb Libya, but we can't afford a raise

Actually, voices are being raised from many corners saying we cannot afford to bomb Libya. First from Defense Secretary Gates who clearly does not want to get involved in another Mid-East war with two others with still no "end" in sight. The entire notion of defining an "exit strategy" in a war is identical in my mind to similar to "hunting for a snark", or some other non-existent entity like a Fruminous Bandersnatch, or a Jabberwock. Every use of force has plunged the country into deeper entanglements with peoples and nations of the world against whom we bear arms. And once started, there is no end. For better or worse we, and the nation we assault, are now bound together as never before – and till death do us part. What war honestly fix an endpoint in advance? Nonetheless we are again, despite ALL recent historical evidence and advice to the contrary, being SUCKED into another war, in another oil rich, failed state.

What is important is having a clear wartime objective. In Libya, however, President Obama and Secretary Clinton have given two, both of which are very ambiguous, and one of which flatly contradicts any short duration to the US commitment.

1) The Administration, plus Britain, France, most of NATO minus Germany (for reasons obscure) and the Arab League, want a "no-fly" barrier to protect the anti-Gadafi rebels from being slaughtered. Of course US air power is not quite so surgically accurate as claimed. It turns out most of urban Tripoli and all suspected air defense and command and control locations are fair game in establishing the country wide "no-fly" zone. Why this should surprise anyone over the age of 40 is astonishing. Nonetheless, within hours after the air attacks began the Arab League (whom Secretary Clinton had labored to bring on board in support of the the UN resolution enabling the attacks) backed off their endorsement, leaving the 'West', once again, swinging in the wind in the court of Arab public opinion while launching another war;

2) The administration wants Gadaffi removed from power because "he has lost all legitimacy" according to Secretary of State Clinton. Statements regarding how long the regime change might take have little credibility, if Iraq and Afghanistan are any example. And of course Mrs Clinton has no answer to the follow up question "who DOES have legitimacy?"

Further, Dennis Kucinich is asking all the right questions about who has the power to declare war. The constitution says Congress. But I cannot even count the number of wars fought since WWII – and NONE of them seem to have deserved a constitutional declaration of war. Even the alleged "super constitutionalists" on the right wing of the Supreme Court can't seem to muster up a challenge to any of the 10 presidents since Roosevelt, of both parties, who have decided to skip that step.

Despite a lot of rhetoric on the subject of distancing US energy from global oil politics, the Obama administration seems barely less hostage than previous ones to the ever more powerful forces of globalization (in this case, oil politics, primarily) that seem to overwhelm nearly everyone's common sense understanding of what our current national interests are. Yes, the administration is committing itself to a more multi-lateral policy around the world. No, they are not "going it alone" and giving the finger to world opinion in the manner of Bush and Cheney. But the forces drawing our country ever deeper and deeper into chaos of the global economy and consequent struggles seem unstoppable.

Like it or not, the UN and other, perhaps new, international institutions MUST become stronger, not weaker. Do we have to pass through the gates of hell again, as in the first half of the 20th Century, and give up another 60 million dead, to get this done?

Photo by jetalone/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Foundry Workers Strike to Save Healthcare

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:52:00 +0000

BERKELEY, CA 3/22/10 -- A strike of over 450 workers in one of the largest foundries on the west coast brought production to a halt Sunday night, at Pacific Steel Castings. The work stoppage, which began at midnight, has continued with round the clock picketing at the factory gates in west Berkeley.

Local 164B of the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union (GMP) has been negotiating a new labor agreement at Pacific Steel for several months. The old agreement expired on Sunday night.

The strike was caused by demands from the company's owners for concessions and takeaway proposals in contract negotiations. Those include:

- requiring workers to pay at least 20% of the cost of their medical insurance, amounting to about $300 per month per employee.
- a wage freeze for the first two years of the agreement, and tiny raises after that.

- eliminating the ability of workers to use their seniority to bid for overtime, allowing criteria including speedup, discrimination and favoritism.

"All eight other foundries in the Bay Area have agreed to a fair contract," said Ignacio De La Fuente, GMP international vice-president. "Workers at Pacific Steel haven't had a raise in the last two years, in order to help the company pay for increases in health plan costs. Pacific Steel is now alone among the rest in trying to make its workers give back $300 a month."

The $300/month would mean an approximately 10% cut in wages for most workers at the foundry.

Joel Soto, a member of the union's negotiating committee, has worked eight years at Pacific Steel, and has a wife, 2-year-old child and another on the way. Soto said, "We've been trying to save money for a house. If we have to give up $300 a month, we'll have to continue renting. My wife and I both support our parents, and that $300 cut is what we're able to give them now that they're old. And with my wife pregnant, we can't do without that medical care."

Benito Navarro has ten years at the foundry, and a wife and son. "That $300 is what I pay for my car to get to work. I'm the only one in my family working, so if we don't have that money, I'll have to give up the car. But I'd rather eat than drive."

On both Monday and Tuesday dozens of Berkeley police, with helmets and face shields, shoved and hit strikers as they attempted to help the company bring trucks full of castings out of its struck facility. On Tuesday, one striker, Norma Garcia, who is seven months pregnant, was struck in the abdomen and taken to a hospital.

"It is inexcusable that Berkeley is spending precious municipal resources on providing protection for this business, and opening the city to liability through these unprovoked actions by police against strikers," said De La Fuente.

"That violence isn't necessary," added Soto. "We're just struggling for our rights. I wouldn't be so surprised to see this in other cities, but Berkeley?" Another worker showed the swelling on his arm he said was caused by a blow from a police baton.

Workers feel additionally betrayed by the company because they and their union testified before the Berkeley City Council three years ago. They urged the city to draft environmental regulations that would allow the foundry to continue operating while installing needed pollution control equipment.

Pacific Steel Casting Co. is a privately held corporation, the third-largest steel foundry in the United States. Its large corporate customers include vehicle manufacturers, like Petebilt Corp., and big oil companies, including BARCO. The company has been very productive in recent years, despite the recession. It chose not to comment.

(All photos by Dvid Bacon)

One More War and Another Collective Silence

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:49:00 +0000

I assume that to some, I dare say, to the majority of Western citizens, it must be a relief to see that ‘our’ force for good has not lost its momentum – that humanitarian benevolence which characterizes the self-portrait we paint of our societies as we ponder on our own exceptionalism, our magnanimity.

What would the world do without ‘our’ greatness, without ‘our’ kindness, without ‘our’ Altruism? It is in asking ourselves these kinds of moronic questions, that we carry forth the full force of our dogma – our collective delusion, the lie, which once again has facilitated the dropping of ‘our’ bombs on the citizens of another part of the planet. This time it is happening in Libya, and just as with all other wars of aggression initiated through the barrel of Western guns, the submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and missiles of all kinds, are only engaged in a ‘humanitarian’ mission.

The late Howard Zinn, would often remind his audiences around the world, of the definition of modern warfare – “war is the indiscriminate killing of civilians” he would say. Perhaps it would serve us well to ponder on this thought, as we embark as citizens on some kind of collective response to this new and illegitimate war, this crime against humanity, which once again is being perpetrated in our name.

We can choose to be distracted by the narrow-mindedly articulated debate on the illegitimate repression inflicted by Kaddafi on his people, on his despotic ways, his criminal behaviour, and flamboyant mannerisms. This is the sure way to guarantee a sleeping mass of ignorant and manipulated Western citizens, supportive of the criminal acts Western governments are in the midst of carrying out. Alternatively, we can say enough is enough, and we can begin to arm ourselves with the powerful nonviolent weapons of non-cooperation and civil disobedience, in order to mount a joint, citizen-led, coordinated and extensive campaign, for peace, and against war.

Yes it is true, Kaddafi is a criminal who oppresses the people of Libya and steals the country’s wealth. I sure hope he is brought down, but this toppling of corrupt leaders must spread across the region and throughout the globe, in the form on nonviolent popular uprisings – revolutions. Through Israel, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Spain, the UK, and US. Through these countries and others, hopefully, ‘we’ the people, will learn to say stop to the perpetual militarization of our societies and to the stealing of our collective wealth.

If we do not say stop, then we can continue listening to the propaganda, minding our own business as we wait for a new war, a new financial collapse, or another nuclear disaster, as those who can afford to, continue to eat away at the planet’s natural resources. But lest not forget, that as Western bombs pound on Tripoli and Libya’s civil war becomes another US-led Western imperial invasion, the people of Libya are no safer, and are certainly not gaining the kind of democracy they had in mind when their uprising began.

So with Afghanistan flattened, with Iraq completely destroyed, with Pakistan being hit by drones, and with the people of Gaza forced to live in their open-air prison as millions of refugees from these war torn countries suffer the consequences of previous Western humanitarian missions, it would serve the western critical thinker well, to oppose any kind of military intervention, and to show serious scepticism towards the humanitarian and caring words stemming from the mouth of current Western government representatives. Listening to the benevolent messages from people like Obama and Sarkozy, would seem ironically comical, if it were not for the dangerous quagmire in which we find ourselves. Yet, since while they continue to blurt out mighty words, which often invoke God, innocents die, this is no time for comedy. The time has come to break our silence and judge them and their allies for crimes against humanity. Only when we have wiped clean the blood spilled in the name of our false morality, by confronting the crimes committed in our name, might we find ourselves in a position from which to ethically judge the crimes of the foreign petty dictators our leaders often called friends.

Photo by Omar Chatriwala/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Chasing the Chinese Dream

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:24:00 +0000

Original source: Beijing Review

People’s pursuit of better lives pushes the nation forward

The belief that anyone can live a better life in the United States through hard work is called the American Dream. Many European settlers were drawn to the new continent by the American Dream.

Is there a Chinese dream? Yes, there is one, and there must be one. The Chinese dream is what has propelled more than 1 billion Chinese people to build an independent, prosperous and strong country.

New Countryside

China is transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial society. Hundreds of millions of farmers, middle-aged or seniors, devote all they have to their children’s education so that they will be able to lead better lives, whereas younger ones yearn to live in cities.

Currently, about 200 million rural residents have migrated into cities, and an additional 400 million to 500 million are going to do so. Their dreams are to find well-paid jobs or start up their own businesses. They want to rent a decent place there, and own homes in the city in a few years.

Rural migrants hope to bring their families to cities, and let their children enjoy equal education as urban children. And they hope to be covered by medical insurance and pension programs that are the same as city dwellers.

Middle-aged or senior rural residents staying in their hometowns also dream about a new rural life. They would like to get satisfactory pay for their work, as well as adequate medical and elderly care. They would like to enjoy basic public services and public goods delivered by the government, such as gas, water, electricity, transportation, waste treatment and security.

They would like to be able to chat over the phone with their children living in cities and meet their children every year, and hope to retain some cultural traditions.

Healthy Urbanization

Now, 30 percent of China’s population, or about 400 million people, have urban residence status. As more rural residents move to cities, it is predicted that by 2040, urban population may reach 1.2 billion, or 80 percent of the national total.

These people’s efforts to realize their dreams are a strong driving force for China’s economic and social development over the next 30 years.

- Housing

Owning a cozy and decent home is perhaps the prime dream of every urban household. Currently, there is a gap between the supply and demand for urban housing. In 2010, the total area of urban housing was 11.2 billion square meters, which averages to 17.8 square meters per person, assuming that the urban population reached 640 million at the end of 2010.

If each of the 200 million rural migrants occupies a living space of 20 square meters and each urbanite 30 square meters, they need a total of 17.2 billion square meters. So, housing supply falls short of demand by 6 billion square meters.

The solution for the government is to have the market supply all the housing for high-income people and most of the housing for middle-income people. The government should keep the growth of housing prices below that of income.

The government should also encourage the trading of rural housing, forest and farm land, so that rural residents can make money from their properties, and can use the income to buy homes in cities.

The government should meet the housing demand of the remaining small number of low-income people.

- Employment

There is a large surplus of labor in the countryside. The labor pool continuously flows into cities. In each of the next five years, it is predicated that about 10 million rural workers will flock to cities.

In addition, about 10 million people are added to the urban labor supply every year. These job seekers include laid-off workers and newcomers to the labor market such as fresh graduates from high schools, colleges and universities and demobilized service people.

In 30 years, the number of working people in cities is expected to grow from approximately 300 million to 700 million, with 13.3 million new workers every year.

China’s current employment structure has the following characteristics.

First, it already has a large number of civil servants and people working in public service units. Their payroll is so large that the government system can no longer afford to hire more people.

Second, in industrial sectors, rising wages and stricter requirements on the provision of social security, pension and medical insurance have increased labor costs, and reduced the sectors’ ability to create employment. In the future, some declining industries will even lay off workers.

Third, agricultural sectors are not able to absorb more of a labor force. Instead, it produces a large number of surplus rural workers for cities every year.

Fourth, due to slow urbanization process, as well as lack of institutional incentives for service industries, China’s tertiary sector’s ability to create jobs is not as strong as that of developed countries.

Fifth, due to a penchant for higher GDP and more tax revenues, local governments are more willing to develop large and super-large enterprises, which are usually weak in generating jobs. They often overlook the development of small and medium-sized enterprises that can hire a large number of workers.

In the meantime, micro and small enterprises face institutional obstacles such as rigid registration and entrance thresholds, heavy taxes, random inspections and fines, as well as financing difficulties.

Social Security

Historically, there was not a social security system in China. For a rural household, land and sons were their insurance for the future. China did not begin to study and set up a modern urban and rural social security system until the 1990s.

Experts estimate, excluding unemployment insurance, at least 10 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion) of social security fund is needed. Data from the National Audit Office show as of the end of 2008, the accumulated amount of various social security funds in the country was only 2.5 trillion yuan ($380 billion).

Some people attribute the gap to the previous policy of maintaining low salary and a high employment rate.

There are more reasons for the gap. For instance, social insurance programs have not yet covered all workers and social security funds are sometimes misused for fixed assets investment and production expansion. These are the root causes of the problem.

As China’s economy grows, its fiscal revenues increase and more state-owned assets are allocated to social security programs, the social security shortfall will gradually be patched up and social security level will gradually improve.

Public Services

Both urban and rural residents have dreams about public services and social security.

- Education

Every household wants good and equal education for its children. People expect the government to build more schools, expand compulsory education to preschool and high school students, and lower tuitions in non-compulsory education institutions.

- Medical care

People dream about convenient medical services. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, it set up a basic healthcare system characterized by low cost and broad coverage.

After the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s, the old medical care system collapsed, whereas the new public medical service system under a market economy was not established.

As a result, many rural areas do not have well-developed medical facilities. Medical facilities in cities are very crowded, and it is less and less convenient, and more and more expensive for urban residents to see a doctor.

A good number of rural and urban residents suffer lower living standards because of illness or even become impoverished.

-Transportation

The dream for a private car has come true for more and more Chinese households in the first decade of the 21st century. Roads and highways have also stretched rapidly in China since the 1990s.

When China’s population reaches 1.55 billion in the future, if every household owns at least one car, plus vehicles owned by government departments, organizations and enterprises, a minimum of 13.3 million hectares of additional land will be needed for road construction.

At least 60 percent of the world’s newly increased oil consumption in the future is to fuel vehicles in China.

Car fumes will cause heavier and heavier pollution, shadowing cities’ skies. In cities with large and dense populations, cars will travel slower than pedestrians. People will spend an average of about two hours daily on commuting.

American-styled car dreams are not feasible for such a populous and oil-poor country as China. The government is expected to energetically develop public transit that will enable people to travel economically and conveniently.

Environment

Once Chinese dreamed about modern life, they dreamed of steel factories with tall chimneys, trains belching steam, fertilizers and pesticides, as well as farmlands claimed from grasslands, wetlands, lakes and forests. They dreamed to live in cities with mushrooming steel and concrete block-shaped buildings and asphalt-paved roads.

As the public’s dream about modern life begins to materialize, another dream is born.

People now dream for a beautiful natural environment and a safe social environment. They dream for safe water and food, and for clean air, noise-free nights, unlittered streets, parks, and natural habitats such as wetlands, green mountains and clear rivers.

Social Development

In the 21st century, Chinese people aspire to be in a free, democratic, equal, just, caring and harmonious society in which they can fully use their wisdom and talent.

China not only needs a free, democratic and dynamic society, but also an orderly society. It needs a strong party and a government that follow scientific and democratic policymaking procedures and are able to implement these policies and solve various problems for the people, in order to create a free, democratic, orderly and stable environment for the people to live in and for the country to develop.

The relationship between individualism and collectivism, between citizens’ rights and national interests, and between market competition and social justice must be handled properly.

A society, a community and an organization must protect an individual’s personal and property rights from infringement, respect personal freedom, encourage entrepreneurship and work initiatives, protect legal income and on the other hand, prevent public interests from being damaged by an individual’s behavior.

China has hundreds of millions of religious followers. Protecting and meeting people’s demand for religion is a responsibility of the government.

In the modernization process, while learning from foreign cultures, we should preserve and pass on China’s cultural traditions.

The Con Job of Libertarian "Economics"

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:51:00 +0000

The rise of the so-called "tea party" movement has given a big boost to Libertarian economics, also known as "the Austrian School," a branch of thought that, although it calls itself economics, is better termed a Utopian philosophy. Ever since Paul Samuelson (and even Milton Friedman), academic economics have tried to define a more scientific framework for economics. In general this has meant applying statistical modeling, and formal definitions to various actors in the economy, including both public and private institutions as well as individuals and groups, that can then be applied to surveys and other data. You cannot ever make economics non-political since class and other interests of course also economic interests. But Samuelson hoped to move the economic debate from the realm of mostly ideology, to the realm of mostly evidence driven analysis.

"The Austrian School" is the opposite of a data or evidence driven framework. Texas Congressman Ron Paul is undoubtedly the most influential American advocate. Instead of paying any attention to data, it accepts as given from God (or nature) the transcendental "organizing" power of the market price mechanism. Its name derives from the identity of its founders and early supporters, Ludwig von Mises, and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, both Austrians. the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Virginia based George Mason University are the principle US ideological centers of this trend.

Its principles are as follows:

1. The business cycle is a completely virtuous cycle. Slumps are the price we pay for booms. Recessions are the just punishment for the excesses of previous expansions. The fact that the rich reap the rewards regardless, and the poor are the ones punished regardless, is of no importance to the Austrian school. Every graph of the financial crises showing crashes and bubbles is just God's continuing morality play. Government intervention in this "virtuous" cycle prevents God and/or nature from rendering justice with the "tough love" everyone needs – and thus is evil. The Austrians are always in a state of continual frustration because no nation in the world seems to be willing to wait out financial crises and depressions trusting in the "magic of the market" to fix everything – that mirable dictu, keeps crashing and suffering from persistent instability. Instead of waiting for God's judgement, people – to the amazement of the "Austrians" – still resist walking calmly to the grave from starvation or homelessness!! They say: "if this is virtue, then the Devil has ascended Heaven." Nonetheless, the "virtuous business cycle of capitalism" has a certain seductive power. Not because it offers any solutions, but because it explicitly offers nothing: Welcome to God's Plan.

2. The Austrian School rejects a scientific foundation to economics. The failure of any political regime to endorse the virtuous business cycle theory of the Libertarians gives rise to all sorts of political backwardness and numbness to reality in its supporters – listening to them frequently arouses a generous desire to help them with a wake-up "dope slap," after such tortured jewels as: "the people are too stupid to understand," or "the people are entitled to nothing," and other too-vulgar-or-racist-to-repeat sentiments. So few believe them, in fact, that they have become hostile to any group or government or institutional level of analysis at all. Instead they advocate strict adherence to "methodological individualism" – analyzing human action exclusively from the perspective of individual agents. Austrian economists also argue that mathematical models and statistics are an unreliable means of analyzing and testing economic theory, and advocate deriving economic theory logically from "basic principles" – read "divinely inspired principles" – of human action. They have even given their methodology a name, "praxeology." Additionally, renouncing science altogether, the Austrians reject experimental and empirical research altogether. They reject testability and falsification en toto. The great virtue (not!) of a theory that rejects testing and falsification is, of course, that it cannot be disproved!

3. The role of the state in Austrian and now Libertarian theory is more confused than its transparently false propositions on the business cycle. The first Austrian, von Hayek, was actually a social democrat and strongly supported standard social democratic policy on the key role of the state in providing services that were market failures. He differed only on whether the post office should be public or private. But latter day Austrians at the Von Mises Institute take this notion for a ride off the sanity cliff, calling for the end of public schools, roads, post offices, Internet, media of any kind, health care, retirement, fire stations, etc, etc, etc.

4. Like many cultish theories, libertarian economics rise in popularity reflects public dissatisfaction with the performance of large institutions in many areas of economic and public life. They often correctly identify corporate corruption as a source of the decay of these institutions, but rather than reform the corruption, they become captured by an attractive, but ultimately doomed, ideology that – due to its futility as a guide to leadership – strengthens the very corruption they decry.

Here is a "parable of the ship" from Mike Huben – a nearly perfect allegory of Libertarian and Austrian School Economics, that should serve you well in any debates:

The owner of a ship noticed that his ship was filling with water. Being an educated man (if not nautically trained) he knew there were many possible causes for water in a ship: leaks in the hull, the bilge pump being broken, waves washing over, condensation, and even the crew urinating in the hold. He heard the bilge pump running, he saw water from waves pouring in the open hatches, but worst of all he smelled urine in the hold! Being sensible, he ordered the crew to shut the hatches and then gave them a lengthy, stern harangue on hygienic use of the head. While he was lecturing the crew, his ship sank due to a combination of causes: large, unobserved leaks in the hull, a bilge pump that was running but not pumping correctly, and condensation that had shorted out warning circuitry.

Illustration by Alexei Talimonov

Libya, Atoms, and a State Election

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:17:00 +0000

This report was supposed to concentrate on results of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the second in a long string of German state elections in 2011. But outside that East German state itself it got less attention than expected, which wasn’t much to begin with. It was largely overshadowed by the news from Japan and, far more, from Libya.

Despite weeks of propaganda and preparations, the final Security Council decision and the almost immediate attacks left many almost breathless if not in shock.

The abstention by Germany in the UN decision was a great surprise to nearly everyone. It had the weird result of suddenly placing the Left party in the same boat with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Foreign Minister Westerwelle from the right-wing Free Democrats (FDP). But there was sharp controversy not only between the parties but inside nearly all of them.

In the Left, one wing of the party had always insisted that all military actions outside Germany must be rejected, even when the UN called for them. It felt this view confirmed: that the UN rarely represented the true and peaceful interests of people everywhere but stood largely under the sway of the USA and its closest allies. This wing of the party stated that the decision on Libya defied the UN Charter forbidding any intervention in civil wars within a member country and charged that the Council ignored attempts by Venezuela and the African Union to find a peaceful, probably face-saving solution to the Libyan conflict and must have prepared the attacks for many weeks. And while it neither praised nor supported Gaddafi, it asked why no such alleged attempt to rescue a popular uprising was considered or even mentioned when rulers in Bahrain or Yemen resorted to violent repression.

The Left hastily organized a protest demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate to support this position. Only about 200 showed up Sunday morning, among them co-president Gesine Loetzsch and other leaders; it was at least a symbol. But a few prominent party members, reflecting the split on the “no military actions ever” issue, did not join in, while former party president Lothar Bisky, now a member of the European Parliament, had already broken ranks and voted to support the intervention in Libya. Most attention within the party was focused on the state election, but possible disagreement on Libya may play a greater role in coming weeks.

The Greens, almost completely pacifist in their early years, supported the Libyan action, at least the more vocal leaders did. What the membership says on the question, if anything, remains to be seen.

Like the Greens, most Social Democrats (SPD) seemed to believe that being in opposition to the government meant opposing the decision by Merkel and Westerwelle. In the end, only the Left praised their abstention in the Security Council vote, a strange turn of events.

However, most of the media agreed that the abstention did not really mean disagreement with the USA, France and Britain, nor did it reflect previous links to Gaddafi and Libyan gas and oil wells which had been just as cozy as those of the other major powers before the current rupture.

The main motivation, it was felt, was rather the state election next Sunday (March 27) in the extremely important state of Baden-Wuertemberg, where the Christian Democrats have ruled the roost since 1953 and fear its very possible loss this time. Although it is relatively prosperous (with the main Daimler-Benz works), Merkel’s party lost face after the Stuttgart railway station violence and is also aware that most people, regardless of their views on Gaddafi, do not want any more German soldiers fighting and dying in other continents. Merkel probably hoped that a cool response on Libya might win anti-war voters, even though the USA command is firmly welcomed on German soil.

And then there was the other main issue of the day: atomic power. Events in Japan shook the whole country even more than those in Libya. It was partly the shock and empathy with those suffering from the quake and tsunami but also because people, watching the fearful battle with the reactors, also thought of the seventeen atomic reactors in Germany, many of them 30 years old or older and four of them in Baden-Wuertemberg.

Just last autumn it was the Merkel government which insisted on lengthening the active lives of these reactors, reversing even the relatively weak limitations by the Greens and Social Democrats in 2000. Her move was the embarrassingly transparent result of pressure from three or four giant energy companies and caused huge and growing concern in the country, with angry and dramatic demonstrations reaching the 100,000 level. But the government ignored them and extended the deadlines for as much as 20 years, claiming that they were completely safe.

The events in Japan forced the government to shamefacedly climb down, and to do it fast, with those elections looming close. Merkel therefore shut down seven reactors from the 1970s (another one was shut down in 2007 because of leaks and other problems) and issued a “moratorium” of three months on any decisions about the other ten. But even the seven could be opened up again, nothing was really decided, the official in charge came from the atomic industry, and it was crystal clear that the three months were based on getting past the remaining elections (except the one in Berlin in September).

Such shenanigans were expected to hurt the two parties running the national government, while helping the opposition Social Democrats and especially the Greens. The Left called for an immediate suspension of all atomic reactors in light of the Japanese tragedy, but was given, as usual, little media attention.

And so back to the election in Saxony-Anhalt. The state’s name was born in 1945 but its traditions are ancient. It includes parts of old Saxony seized by Prussia after the Napoleonic wars and its two main centers are Halle, where George Frederick Handel was born, and the capital Magdeburg, once famous due to the scientist Otto von Guericke who joined two copper hemispheres, pumped the air out of them and showed that two eight-horse teams could not tear them apart, proving the power of air pressure. That was in 1650, but the Magdeburgers are still proud of him. Also in this state, aside from the Harz Mountains, are Dessau, where the Bauhaus school of architecture and design had its home before the Nazis forced it out, and Wittenberg, where Luther is supposed to have nailed his famous 95 theses against the pope on the Palace Church door.

Up to now the state has been ruled by a so-called “grand coalition” of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats as junior partners. As expected, the Merkel party did lose 3.5% of its former vote, but remained strongest all the same. The Social Democrats neither lost nor gained in strength and it seemed almost certain that this same friendly coalition of the two parties – who seemed such sharp opponents on the national scene – would continue its cozy existence in Saxony-Anhalt.

The Left, which a while ago had been first in the polls, was now back to the same position as in the elections four years earlier, somewhat ahead of the third-place place Social Democrats. A left-SPD coalition was possible, but the Social Democrats always refused to form a state government as junior partners, with the Left holding the post of Minister President. So, once again, they preferred to be junior partners with the right-wing Christian Democrats.

The only real winners in terms of votes were the Greens, who returned to the legislature after a thirteen year absence with 7 percent, almost double their vote in the last election. The Free Democrats of Foreign Minister Westerwelle missed the required five percent, and get no deputies.

Luckily, in perhaps the most important result of all, this also applies to the neo-Nazis in the National Democratic Party (NPD). The unexpectedly large number of voters in a state election (52%) kept them down to 4.7 percent, close but not quite enough to get into the legislature.

In other words, there were no big changes. The Left held its own with 23.8%, making no gains but losing only 0.3 percent since the last election. Its big trial is next week in southwestern Germany in both Baden-Wuertemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, where it hopes against hope to get past the 5 percent hurdle. Aside from Bavaria, where it could not quite make it, these are the last two states where it is not yet represented. It will be no easy matter; the polls give it 4% in both states.

Perhaps I may end on a sad note, an item which probably gained the attention of more Berliners than events in all the other continents. Their beloved polar bear Knut, whose growth and amazingly close relationship with his extremely popular, handsome bearded “substitute mother” fascinated the city, was found dead in the water of his enclosure, only four years old. His human friend died just as suddenly two years ago, and countless Berliners mourned the two as if they were part of their own families. They were closer to home than other events and headline news for much of the media.

Anhalt-Saxony Election results:

Christian Democrats 32.7 (down 3.5); the Left 23.8 (down 0.3), SPD 21.5 (up 0.1), Greens 7.0 (up 3.4), FDP 3.9 (down 2.8), NPD 4.7 (up from 0.0).

I Don't Advocate Class War, But...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:10:00 +0000

And I'm glad to be speaking with you at this moment—a time when the breath-taking attacks on working people are matched only by their incredible courage and historic activism.

Who would have predicted six weeks ago that every time you turned on your computer or radio or television, or picked up a newspaper--for weeks on end now--the news would be focused on a term that defies the brevity of the sound bite -- collective bargaining?

The actions of CEO-backed Republican governors and legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Florida and so many other places have thrust this obscure subject into the spotlight.

We have wanted this debate for years. Now it's here, and guess what? The American people have said Yes to collective bargaining!

By its name alone, the definition of collective bargaining seems apparent enough. But lately, the term is gaining meaning from its context, its enemies and its champions.

Just why are the politicians, whose campaigns were funded by corporations and CEOs, fighting so hard to take away collective bargaining rights? They claim it's necessary to close budget holes—but they make this claim after giving huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy.

Just why are firefighters, nurses, teachers, police officers, construction workers and other regular folks willing to march and rally for it, to pack capitol buildings day and night for weeks on end?

It's because of the two things you've gathered here to discuss: the basic legal rights of working people and the fundamental dignity of work.

At the core of the world's great faith traditions is the moral imperative to treat workers fairly, to extend justice into the employment relationship.

That tenet is echoed in U.S. law, particularly in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which unequivocally states: "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining."

Those aspirational lines have been celebrated for generations as an affirmation of the basic rights and freedoms of working people—fundamental human rights necessary to a middle-class economy with shared prosperity.

If the stunning energy and solidarity displayed in cities like Madison, Cleveland and Indianapolis have a historical parallel, it would be the surge of organizing, strikes and legislative and political action across America in the years before the National Labor Relations Act's passage.

But the energy and solidarity and commitment to improve the lives of working people didn't fade away after that 1935 victory. It powered more gains. It powered our successful struggles to win civil rights legislation, to create Social Security, to protect workers' safety and health on the job.

We created agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration because the dignity of work means no one should be forced to risk life or limb for the privilege of having a job.

My grandfather and father were coal miners, and I followed them into the mines near my hometown of Nemacolin, Pa. I'm speaking as someone who has been trapped on the wrong side of a roof fall. Even while you worry about your life, your thoughts are filled with practical concerns. There's nothing theoretical about it. A mine shaft has finite supports. If those supports fail, the roof will fall. The trapped air behind the fall has a limited supply of oxygen.

In my case, the roof fall wasn't deadly, and we escaped. But we had generations of miners to thank, those who had organized and mobilized and won federal laws designed to allow us to come out with our bodies and lives intact.

The rallies and protests we're seeing today from Trenton to Miami and from Sacramento across the Midwest are laying the groundwork for a new surge of justice for workers and a new period of American prosperity. Once again, the operative tool will be workers' ability to bargain collectively for a voice and a better life -- because working people who cannot bargain must beg. And that is not a role we can accept.

Today, it's easy to see each political battle separately -- as a win or a loss. But future generations will recognize the incredible grassroots uprising of this moment as an inflection point – a moment when the arc of history bent toward strengthening the freedoms of working people and ensuring the dignity of work.

Don't misunderstand me. We have a long way to go. Americans desperately need good jobs and economic security, but too many politicians, in Washington and in the states, are hiding behind deficit hysteria.

The farce is easy to maintain, because too often journalists aren't differentiating between political spin and fact. Nobody is pulling back Oz's curtain.

Look at what happened this past December. As re-energized House Republicans waited to take power, Congress passed the extension of unemployment insurance—but only after agreeing to tie it to a broad slate of tax cuts for the super-rich. Journalists and pundits invariably described the deal as a simple compromise, a package of pork for "interest groups." I can see why it's tempting, in some vain effort to appear impartial, to describe it that way—but the package wasn't even-handed in any sense.

The unemployment insurance extension was fair. But the tax cuts for the wealthiest are a danger to our future prosperity and an ugly violation of the American Dream, made all the more apparent by the budget holes federal, state and local politicians are using to attack workers.

Anyone who pays a lick of attention can see that if balancing budgets were an actual priority, we wouldn't act this way. We wouldn't be using budgets to tear down middle-class families, steal workers' rights, undermine job growth and weaken or destroy unions.

Have you taken a look at the budget plan Republicans in Washington are proposing? It would take an axe to services that working families rely on every day—everything from early childhood education and college aid to food safety, job safety, job training, child nutrition, transportation, infrastructure—and more. On its heels is their desire to whittle away any security we might have in retirement by cutting Social Security and Medicare.

And if anyone has any doubts, let me assure you: The AFL-CIO will oppose any and all cuts to Social Security or Medicare—no matter who puts them forward. Destroying economic security for our seniors is bad policy, and it's just plain wrong.

Future generations will shake their heads and wonder why it took so long for Washington to act on the priority concerns of working families across the United States. Thirty percent of the voters in November had a family member out of work last year. The last three elections—in 2006, 2008, and 2010—have all been about jobs. Nearly 15 million people have been searching fruitlessly for jobs for years now. Millions more are underemployed. Accountants working as telemarketers. IT professionals taking jobs as hotel porters.

But still politicians who were elected thanks to CEOs see budget crises everywhere they look—not a jobs crisis. And if their budget cuts cost even more jobs? Well, "so be it," said House Speaker John Boehner.

Until we stop catering to America's corporate CEOs, until we stop trying to drive down working people, until we stop our race to the bottom, then energized, mobilized, united working people will demand that we as a nation affirm the value of work and the basic premise of American life.

And what is that basic premise? It's that each of us, if we work hard and do our part, can earn for ourselves a measure of economic security, an education for our children and some dignity in our old age.

Several months ago, an opinion column in the New York Times carried the headline: "Who Will Stand Up to the Super-rich?"

Now, I don't mind rich people being rich. I don't advocate a class war. But America needs to regain a fundamental balance. We can't have so much at the top that less and less is available for everyone else. We're all in this together, and it is wrong to believe that we can continue to have such huge income disparities without paying a price in terms of our democracy.

The Obama administration has been trying to restore balance in our economy and the rights of workers to organize and bargain for a better life—and one of the best examples is his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. I'd like to take a moment to recognize the leadership of Wilma Liebman, who chairs the board and who speaks here tomorrow. Thank God we now actually have an NLRB that believes in balance and rights.

My friends, America's workers are standing up, standing together. And I'm asking you to stand with us. It's up to us.

All of us who care about our country being its best moral self, all of us who believe in the best America has to offer, must engage with each other, with business owners and public leaders, with faith leaders and community activists to create strong communities to fight for good jobs and justice.

If we need a measuring stick to assess ideas and actions, it should be this: Does it increase or decrease economic inequality? Does it widen or narrow the gap between rich and poor?

And we have to fight not only for principles but for practical measures to help working people in their day-to-day lives—that includes the freedom to bargain collectively, because with it we do much than raise our wages and improve our benefits.

We support our families. We improve our workplaces. We strengthen our communities. We professionalize our jobs with training and standards. Teachers bargain to lower class sizes. Nurses advocate for patient care. Working together, we raise standards for all working families.

It is up to us to bridge the disconnect between political leaders and the needs and priorities of working families.

We must seize on the momentum from Madison and transform this moment into a movement.

In Madison, I saw students and Steelworkers who had been sleeping in the capitol building for what felt like forever. I saw teachers and snow plow drivers with their families. I saw people from all walks of life---people who had no direct personal stake in the Wisconsin fight.

The crowds swelled that first weekend—by the tens of thousands. Then we topped 100,000. And the rallies spread—to Ohio, to Indiana, to every single state in the nation.

This wasn't one union calling on members to turn out. It wasn't the AFL-CIO making the call. It wasn't the Democratic Party, or the Obama organization. This was a bottom-up, grassroots movement, a true spontaneous outcry against our disastrous winner-take-all political culture.

One legislative setback is only a chance for us to galvanize our will. The protests in Madison haven't stopped. A victory can never be more than a starting point for more organizing, more activism.

All across our country, the labor movement and hundreds of our allies, and hundreds of thousands of workers—in numbers not seen in ages—are turning their energy into real action.

In dozens of states, they're pushing for legislation to solidify our rights and save our communities. In Wisconsin, they're collecting recall petitions to oust CEO-funded politicians. And after Gov. Scott Walker zeroed in on workers' collective bargaining rights, more than 20,000 Wisconsinites joined Working America, the AFL-CIO's community affiliate for people without a union. Faculty members at two University of Wisconsin campuses just voted to join AFT-Wisconsin. More than 40,000 officers of the Transportation Security Administration are voting right now on whether to join AFGE, the nation's largest union of government employees. These are just a few examples of what the nationwide interest in collective bargaining is sparking.

Nationwide, working people will mobilize on the days surrounding April 4 to continue to build this powerful movement for the future we must have.

Join with us. Be a part of April 4th. On campuses, students and professors are holding teach-ins. In worksites, in diners and coffee shops, in homes and in congregations, working people will gather to talk about the attacks on workers, the right to bargain and what we can do to prevail. Together.

Why are these events being scheduled around April 4? Because on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. He gave his life helping 1,400 Memphis sanitation workers—public employees—win the basic right to have a union and bargain collectively for a voice on their jobs and in the economy. That was their cause. That was what those powerful "I Am a Man" signs they carried were all about. Dignity. Respect. A voice.

We remember that day. We remember that cause—it's burned into our memories. And my friends, if we do what we must, the future will remember our actions and our movement in just the same way.

Photo courtesy of AFL-CIO

Libya: Anti-intervention voices must be heard

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:05:00 +0000

Original source: Global Times (China)

Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa criticized the US, Britain and France for their air raids in Libya on March 20. The coalition operations are facing increasing opposition from global public opinion. The veil of this military intervention under the banner of humanitarianism is rapidly being stripped away.

In this complex world, the situations in this region are much more complex than the description given by Western media. The US, Britain and France attempted to create a simple end in Libya that was beneficial to Western values, which, however, is contrary to reality. It means this military action cannot be as accurate and clear as a Tomahawk missile's trajectory.

Within 24 hours of air strikes, the African Union, China, Russia, India and many other emerging countries stood out to oppose them. German displeasure has also been made clear. Moussa's criticism indicates the dissatisfaction in the Arab world.

It is easy for the US, Britain and France to defeat the military power of Gaddafi, but the final outcome of military action in the Islamic world does not depend on the success or failure of military action alone. The Iraq invasion in 2003 went smoothly at first, but several thousand Americans died after the eradication of the Saddam regime. The war in Afghanistan has now lasted more than twice as long as World War I.

During the Iraq war, anti-American sentiment in the Arab world was severe, but the regulatory constraints in Arab countries limited the release of the discontent. But now with open public opinion, the people in Arab countries will soon understand that the real purpose of the Western air raids in Libya is not as pure as claimed.

Western supremacist interest has become more prevalent these years. In the current Middle East revolutions, Western governments rashly interacted with public opinion and hastily concluded Gaddafi would step down quickly. Now in order to maintain the authority of the West, they have to take the risk of military intervention.

China and Russia do not need to help the West find a way out in Libya. With anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, the West cannot launch a ground war like in Iraq. The Arab world's dislike of Gaddafi and aversion to the Western powers would balance each other out. Regardless of the fate of Gaddafi, a chaotic Libya will become an irremovable burden of the West.

China should unite dissenting countries in uniting reactions against the air strikes. China should dare to do so, because the US, Britain and France first violated the no-fly zone resolution and the anti-military intervention camp can now occupy the moral high land.

Making full use of it, the West will give more respect to China's opinion.

Wikileaks Cables Show Bush Administration Interference in India

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:01:00 +0000

Original source: People's Democracy (India)

Wikileaks Indian Cables: UPA-I Culpable

Pre-Script: AS we go to press, further revelations have come in the WikiLeaks India cache relating to the Congress-led UPA-I campaign to buy votes in order to win the crucial vote of confidence after the Left parties withdrew support due to the UPA government’s unilateral decision to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal in July 2008.

These exposures constitute a humongous indictment of the UPA-I government and the desperate depths to which it stooped to ensure the so-called “strategic partnership” with the USA. These exposures represent both, a gross moral degeneration and crass political opportunism of the Congress-led UPA-I government.

This entire episode, seen by the whole country and the world with the display of wads of currency notes in the Lok Sabha, grievously undermines parliamentary democracy itself. The then Speaker of Lok Sabha had constituted a committee to investigate this `cash for votes’. The committee had tabled its report where it is reliably learnt that it had recommended investigation into the criminal culpability of those involved by appropriate agencies. Nothing, however, emerged so far. The WikiLeaks exposures also suggest the active involvement of sections of the BJP with specific reference to the son-in-law of former prime minister Vajpayee. There are direct references to a Congress MP who is “a close associate of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi considered to be a very close family friend of Sonia Gandhi.” Thus, both the ruling and the principal opposition parties would have been very embarrassed if the investigations proceeded properly. Does this explain why the recommendations of the parliamentary committee were not implemented in right earnest by the UPA government.

The prime minister and the UPA government must be made answerable to the country through the parliament. The UPA government must immediately be forced to urgently investigate the criminal culpability of those whose names have been in the public domain as principal actors in this sordid drama that crippled parliamentary democracy. This is the bare essential needed to restore the credibility of our parliamentary democracy by bringing the guilty to book.

(March 17, 2011)

IF any reconfirmation was ever necessary, it has now come in the exposure of the `Indian cables’ of the WikiLeaks. The 5100 cables containing six million words in this WikiLeaks Indian cache, unambiguously expose the fact that the UPA government under Dr Manmohan Singh was pursuing both a substantive shift in India’s foreign policy in aligning as a "subordinate ally" of the USA and also increasingly succumbing to US pressures on various issues. This, once again, establishes that the UPA-I government, on the one hand, endorsed the Common Minimum Programme that spoke of India pursuing an independent foreign policy (an issue that was necessary, amongst others, to enlist Left support) and, on the other, deceitfully pursued a policy of strengthening the strategic relationship with US imperialism.

In September 2005, India, for the first time, decisively broke rank with the Non Aligned Movement and the developing world solidarity and voted against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency under pressure from the USA. The WikiLeaks cables clearly show the linkage between India’s vote and the US pressures on the fate of the India-US nuclear deal. This is a point that the UPA government continuously denied but this exposure nails the lie. Clearly, the backing off from the India-Iran gas pipeline, which has a tremendous significance for India’s energy security at the most inexpensive cost, was also under such pressure. The cables reveal that while India had no illusions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or, its capabilities for nuclear weaponisation, or, its support to terrorism, it, however, subordinated these to pursue a pro-US policy. The September 2005 vote was described in the cables as India’s “most important signal so far of the UPA’s commitment to building a transformed US-India relationship.”

That the USA was not merely interfering but directly influencing vital decisions of the Indian government becomes all the more apparent in the exposures contained in the cables. Following the controversial vote on Iran, there was a cabinet reshuffle in January 2006. In this reshuffle, the then petroleum minister Manishankar Aiyer was shifted on grounds that were widely alleged those days of his active promotion of the India-Iran gas pipeline. The cables explicitly named newly inducted individual ministers with “strong pro-US credentials.” A full two years before the UPA-I’s rupture with the Left parties in July 2008 following its unilateral decision to go ahead with the India-US nuclear deal, the US ambassador to India says in an early 2006 cable, “the undeniable pro-American tilt of the cabinet reshuffle has infuriated the Left, which will view it as a throwing down of the gauntlet and an invitation to open warfare.” The US design was, thus, very clear: consolidate this pro-US UPA government but without the need to seek support from the Left. Its role in snaring up non-Left allies to support the UPA in cementing the nuclear deal will be exposed in future revelations.

The US ambassador, in one of the cables notes: “The UPA inducted a large number of serving MPs …..who have publicly associated themselves with our strategic partnership”. Further, he says: “To ensure that there are no foreign policy ripples before the president’s (George W. Bush) visit, PM Singh retained the critical MEA portfolio and is likely to hold on to it until after the next session of the parliament concludes and Congress has weathered crucial assembly elections in Kerala and West Bengal in May” (2006).

The first installment of these exposures promise a lot more in the coming days on USA’s pressures on India’s foreign policy and domestic affairs. It is, however, already clear that the USA is interfering in very many areas of India’s public life and policy making processes. This is being actively aided by the UPA’s naked desire to be treated as a subordinate ally of the USA.

To many patriotic and well-meaning Indians, these exposures will, surely, come as a shock. These columns, however, have been continuously warning of a rightward shift in India’s foreign policy and a pro-US shift in economic policy matters. These exposures strongly reconfirm such apprehensions articulated by the Left. This UPA-II government must answer to the country and the people on how it is surreptitiously eroding our sovereignty and allowing mighty India to end up as a subordinate ally of the USA.

(March 15, 2011)

China's Labor Movement: A Bigger Role to Play

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:58:00 +0000

Original source: Beijing Review

Trade unions face heavy tasks of better representing and safeguarding employee interests

According to Chinese tradition, all debts should be paid before the New Year. However, two recent cases of migrant workers being forced to go to extremes to ask for their wages highlight rising tensions between labor and management in the country.

A post with photos of dozens of migrant workers kneeling down in front of the gate of the government compound in Zunhua City, Hebei Province, quickly became popular shortly after appearing on the Internet on January 6. According to the anonymous post, these workers, after toiling for a local construction project under a low-level subcontractor for almost a year starting in November 2009, weren’t paid 95 percent of their total wages. Their former boss, who paid just half of their salaries, said there was nothing he could do because the subcontractor above him paid only half of the overhead.

He Dongping, one migrant worker, later told Sichuan Daily, around 290 migrant workers working for the project were owed wages totaling around 3 million yuan ($455,000) and more than 200 workers were, like himself, from Sichuan Province. According to the report, the workers regarded petitioning the local government as a last resort to quickly retrieve their unpaid wages in time for their Spring Festival (February 3 this year) family reunion, which was one month away.

The workers’ three-month odyssey to get their money back ended after the local government ordered the developer pay all of their wages on January 14.

However, not every story of recovering overtime salaries has a happy ending. On January 29, 45-year-old Liu Dejun, a farmer from Hebei Province, died in a hospital 13 days after drinking highly poisonous pesticide in front of his former boss after he was refused his unpaid salary of 3,200 yuan ($485) for a third time.

Liu was hired by a private coal transportation business as a truck driver’s assistant in November 2010. On January 14, he quit his job after his boss threatened to give him a fine.

“I was so angry when he (Liu’s former boss) refused to pay me again. He said if I dared to kill myself, he would give my family double pay as compensation,” Liu told the police shortly after he was admitted to the hospital.

After Liu’s death, his former boss paid Liu’s family 260,000 yuan ($39,000) as compensation.

On December 17, 2010, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) issued a circular to trade union organizations at all levels, urging them to help migrant workers get their wages before the Spring Festival. Concrete measures include conducting field surveys to find out whether migrant workers have such complaints and address them quickly; publicizing the hotline numbers of local trade unions so that migrant workers can have access to their services, and offering emergency legal aid to workers who are owed wages or work injury compensation.

Migrant workers

According to the ACFTU, at the end of September 2010, trade unions had a total membership of 239 million in China, increasing by 13.61 million compared with one year earlier. Around 8.4 million new members are migrant workers. According to Central Government’s white paper Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2009, the total membership of China’s trade unions has been surging by more than 15 million every year since 2005.

Apart from the growing labor disputes and the quickly enlarging membership needing help, trade unions in China also face the tasks of better representing worker rights during conflicts and establishing a collective salary negotiation system in most industries.

The average monthly income for the new generation of migrant workers, amounts to only 1,748 yuan ($266), which is half the income of enterprise workers having an urban hukou (permanent residence certificate), according to a report released by the ACFTU on February 20.

The new generation of migrant workers refers to rural residents aged between 16 and 30 years who are doing non-agricultural jobs in cities. Currently, their number is estimated at 150 million in China.

The new generation of migrant workers encounters difficulties not only from economic pressure but also from insecure legal rights. Only 85 percent of them work with a legal contract, which is 4 percentage points lower than enterprise workers having an urban hukou and 68 percent out of the contracts signed do not indicate concrete amount of monthly income. And 17 percent do not hold the official hard copies of their labor contracts.

They change jobs more frequently, 2.9 times more than their parental generation, and 38 percent of them quit jobs because of “little chance for career development.”

The social security system caters little to their needs in forms of endowment insurance, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, employment injury insurance and maternity insurance, respectively 24 points, 15 points, 30 points, 9 points, 30 points lower than urban enterprises workers.

The report says young migrant workers are also paid 167 yuan ($25.3) less per month and receive worse social security compared to their parents.

According to another ACFTU survey, whose results were released in March 2010, 23.4 percent of workers said they hadn’t had a pay raise for five years; 75.2 percent said the income distribution was unfair and 61 percent believed the poor pay of ordinary workers is the most outstanding problem in China’s income distribution system.

Union’s role

The ACFTU’s work plan for 2011 says the coverage of collective salary negotiation systems among enterprises with trade unions should reach 60 percent by the end of the year and should come to 80 percent by the end of 2013.

The Beijing Federation of Trade Unions announced on December 28, 2010, its efforts to establish collective salary negotiation systems would focus on enterprises that give some employees a minimum wage, enterprises with frequent labor-management conflicts, labor-intensive enterprises, private enterprises and foreign companies.

Although China’s Labor Law, which stipulates collective contracts shall be signed by and between the trade union on behalf of the employees and the employer, has been in effect for 16 years, the trade unions in China have not acted strong enough to fight for member interests during the negotiations with employers.

Talking about the difficulties met by the trade unions in promoting collective salary negotiation system, Xu Xiaojun, a professor at the China Institute of Industrial Relations, told Beijing-based Insight China magazine trade union leaders were not used to participating in the decision of salary levels and didn’t have experience in such negotiations.

Xu said the leaders also lacked the courage to stand up against management to protect employee interests.

According to a report of Insight China, the fate of trade union leaders has been subject to company management, which can easily fire employees using the excuse dereliction of duty. The report said most trade union chairs were not elected by employees and were instead selected and recommended by company mangers.

Tang Xiaodong, a former employee of a Japan-China joint venture in Beijing, was the first trade union chief in the country who was fired during his tenure. In August 2003, Tang was elected to be his company’s trade union chairman at the self-organized employees’ assembly. The Federation of Trade Unions of Haidian District ratified the election results in the same month. On September 9, on behalf of the trade union, Tang required management to sign labor contracts with workers without a contract. Less than two months later, the company fired Tang, accusing him of revealing false information about the company to the media.

Over the next few years, trade union leaders with similar experiences as Tang were reported in other Chinese cities.

“I think trade union chairs should become independent from companies, which will give them more freedom to fight for employees’ interests,” Zhang Yujing, an official with the Beijing Federation of Trade Unions, told Insight China.

In 2010, the ACFTU injected a total of 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) to federations of trade unions in 10 provinces to finance pilot projects for company trade unions to hire salaried staff members.

By the end of September 2010, 5,121 people had been hired in areas with pilot projects.

Incomplete rules

The Salary Regulations, long regarded as a landmark code for China’s income distribution reform, failed to come out in 2010 as many people expected. China Newsweek magazine quoted people participating in the drafting of this code as saying a core issue they had debated was whether a collective salary negotiation system should be the basic way to decide salaries.

An anonymous drafter told China Newsweek if the draft stipulated the company should agree to conduct negotiations on salary levels whenever the employees have such a requirement, it would be infeasible.

Professor Lin Yanling at the China Institute of Industrial Relations told China Newsweek that a more realistic approach is to “establish an institution enabling labor to negotiate with the management collectively and let the labor market decide the final salary level.”

The World Bank and the Environment

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:52:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
E - The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: The World Bank is often cast in a bad light by green groups and in the press. What are their eco-crimes, and are there any reforms in the making? -- J. Bloch, Newark, NJ

Originally created to finance the rebuilding of Europe after World War II, the World Bank later took on a larger mandate to try to alleviate poverty around the world. Unfortunately, many of the Bank’s policies and practices in intervening years clashed with conservation priorities. But the more recent onslaught of global warming threats, along with greater overall public environmental awareness, has forced the World Bank to factor sustainability concerns into how it encourages development moving forward.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a non-profit think tank, the World Bank has been widely criticized for funding a series of environmentally damaging projects in the 1980s, including the building of dams on the Narmada River in India, road building into the Brazilian Amazon and transmigration (re-settlement) efforts in Indonesia. “These projects have led to a variety of adverse impacts in borrower countries, including deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples,” reports the group.

In response to the criticism, the World Bank adopted a set of policies and procedures in the late 1980s to better assess the potential adverse environmental impacts of its projects. The Bank further developed a series of polices to guide investment in such areas as forestry and energy. “For example, the bank’s forestry policy prohibits the institution from financing logging in primary tropical forests,” adds IPS.

Other highlights of the Bank’s first round of greening included the creation of a special unit to oversee environmentally and socially sustainable development, and the recruitment of staff with technical environmental credentials to supplement its professional core of economists. IPS reports that with these changes in place, the bank has been able to start developing a portfolio of environment-sector projects “ranging from support for national environmental agencies to investments in national parks.”

But an independent internal review of the World Bank’s sustainability impacts between 1990 and 2007 found that even these new sustainability-oriented policies fell flat. Researchers found that the bank’s private-sector funding arm, the International Finance Corporation, was still promoting the expansion of livestock herds, soybean fields and palm oil plantations—all which accelerated deforestation in the tropics, hastening the pace of climate change for the rest of us.

“They need to begin to see the inextricable link between sustaining environment and reducing poverty,” said Vinod Thomas, director of the World Bank group that performed the review. “It is clear now from the Amazon to India that if environmental sustainability is not raised as a priority, then all bets are off.”

The World Bank tried to address many of these concerns with the release of a beefed up Environment Strategy in 2001, but analysts remain critical of the organization’s performance and general commitment to sustainability. In June 2011 the World Bank will release a new Environment Strategy which it will use as a sustainability roadmap for its projects over the coming decade. The focus of the Bank’s sustainability work will be mitigating climate change through the promotion of clean energy technologies.

CONTACTS: World Bank, www.worldbank.org; Institute for Policy Studies, www.ips-dc.org.

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Photo courtesy International Rivers, courtesy Flickr

Women and Agriculture

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:23:00 +0000

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has revealed that if women in rural areas of the planet had the same access to the land, technology, financial services, markets and education as men do, the number of hungry people would have been reduced in nearly 150 million.

Statistics show that the output of the land controlled by women is less than men in the world. However, this does not mean they are worse; women’s access to resources is not the same as men’s.

Cuba, for example, has 1 million 309 thousand 548 women (43.3 percent of the population) living in rural areas. Many of them use the land, utilize different types of agricultural cooperatives or work in state entities. There is enough work in which, in certain productions, women are superior to men.

FAO General Director Jacque Diouf has demanded for gender equality in this economically active sector because “it is also crucial for agricultural development and food security (…) We must promote gender equality in favor of sustainability and against hunger and extreme poverty.”

According to statistics, if women had the same access as men in agriculture, the exploitation of the land could increase from 20 to 30 percent and the agricultural production of the economy could hike between 2.5 to 4 percent.

It is believed that this would make it possible to cut between 12 to 17 percent the number of hungry people in the planet (some 150 million people). It is believed that there are 925 million malnourished people, according to UN statistics reported at the end of 2010.

“We must eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and assure that access to resources is equitable (…). They must be seen as equals to sustainable development”, said Diouf.

Women represent 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in the developing nations: from 20 percent in Latin America to almost 50 in eastern Asia and Southeastern Asia and Sub Saharan Africa.

FAO studies reveal that when a rural woman is employed they tend to receive worse jobs and frequently less stable employment like temporary labor and in the majority of the cases lower salaries.

In any region of the world women has less access to the land that their male counterparts. In developing countries the percentage of women in the context of agricultural labor force are between 20 to 50 percent.

In Cuba’s case, there are just policies that promote gender equality in particular in the agricultural sector and other vital sectors of the country’s economy.

From the Cuban News Agency/Photo: The UN reports that women represent 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in the developing nations. (McKaySavage/cc by 2.0/Flickr)

Amnesty International Warns U.S. States Against Passing Anti-union Laws

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:06:00 +0000

Originally posted at Amnesty.org

Amnesty International has urged several US states to abandon planned legislation that would drastically restrict workers' rights.

States including Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee have proposed bills severely limiting the collective bargaining rights of trade union members. A similar bill was passed in Wisconsin on Friday.

"State governors must withdraw support for these measures which, if adopted, would violate international law," said Shane Enright, Amnesty International’s trade union adviser.

“The US has an obligation to uphold the rights of American workers - including the specific right to organize and bargain collectively."

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a bill on Friday that undermines the ability of unions in the public sector to protect workers. The legislation also takes away nearly all collective bargaining rights for most public employees, limiting their negotiation rights only to wages.

As well as restricting collective bargaining rights, union activists say legislators in as many as 37 states have introduced hundreds of anti-union bills. Some affect negotiation of healthcare benefits, restrict freedom of association, place caps on the minimum wage and deprive workers of the right to strike.

Similar measures being promoted in Congress would affect federal public employees.

"The Wisconsin bill is symbolic of a wider attack on unions in the USA, where workers and are facing an onslaught from the authorities," said Shane Enright.

"Many employees are already struggling because of the economic crisis and these laws will undermine fundamental human rights and labour rights protections, which are sorely needed to ensure that employees do not bear the brunt of the crisis. It will also jeopardize the delivery of vital public services that these employees deliver."

“This is also a struggle for migrant workers’ rights, for education and health rights, for wage security, for workplace health and safety. We are seeing communities insisting on social justice, economic rights and personal liberties against powerful vested interests. Fundamental human rights are at stake, and we stand in solidarity with the US labour movement in this struggle.”

Under international law, all workers have a human right to organize and to bargain collectively.

These rights are an essential foundation to the realisation of other rights, and are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, as well as conventions adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

As a state party to the ICCPR and a signatory to the ICESCR, the USA has an obligation to respect the human rights under these instruments and treaties.

As a member of the ILO, the USA also has a commitment, through the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, to respect, promote and realize the fundamental rights set out in the organization’s core conventions.

Moves to limit such rights in the USA are also at odds with commitments made under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) as well as numerous subsequent trade agreements negotiated and ratified over the last 15 years.

Photo by PeoplesWorld.org

Workers Rights in the Era of Globalization

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:28:00 +0000

Editor's note: Excerpted from a speech delivered by Trumka at the Council on Foreign Relations, March 17, 2011.

In Washington, the globalization debate – like everything else – is partisan and polarized. You are either a free-trader or a protectionist, and the two "camps" don't speak the same language.

Instead of having the same old debate again today, I want to try a new angle. Rather than asking: "Is globalization good or bad?" Let's ask instead – "What would it take for the United States to engage in the global economy in a way that is good for working people, the middle class, and democracy – both here in the United States and around the world?"

We are living at a time when young people all over the world are demanding good jobs, a voice at work and a voice in the decisions that impact their economies. It is no accident that newly triumphant young protestors in Egypt sent pizza to young union activists in Madison, Wisconsin last month, just as U.S. union members had protested outside the Egyptian embassy days earlier.

Workers and young people look at each other across the world and see the same goals, the same values, the same digital culture and the same tactics of non-violent protest.

These global cries for democracy challenge governments and international institutions to refound our global economic and political order on a more democratic, transparent – and equitable – basis.

There are two distinct issues here. First, what must we do at home to ensure that our international economic policy will create good jobs in sufficient numbers to offer hope and a viable future to our young people? Second, what kind of globalization should we pursue to create a better future for all of the world's young people?

Here in the United States, we need a single, stream-lined, coherent national economic strategy that is about good jobs first, if we are going to rebuild our core national identity as a middle-class society in our time and in our children's time.

The road to a successful global strategy for the United States will require deeply rethinking our trade policy – and how it interacts with the other relevant policy levers, including currency, taxes, immigration, government procurement, education, infrastructure, energy, and technology.

For a generation, we have made the mistake of orienting our international economic policies around the profitability of U.S. corporations abroad, rather than the quantity and quality of jobs at home or sustainable and democratic development around the world.

The results are in: Large U.S.-based multinational corporations have thrived as global enterprises, but the United States is suffering from massive job loss and unsustainable trade deficits—masked by one ultimately ruinous bubble after another. The sad truth is that for decades our trade and economic policies have not served the interests of the United States as a world power by delivering the good jobs or competitive edge that we must have. And around the world, inequality and strife are expanding, even as trade and investment flows grow, and trade agreements multiply.

Let's step back and look at the weak spots in the U.S. economy today. We can probably agree on several key problems: rising inequality, unsustainable debt, lackluster job growth, crumbling physical infrastructure and under-investment in skills and education.

These problems have multiple causes, but each has been exacerbated by our wrong-headed approach to globalization—and their cumulative impact now threatens our ability to compete globally as a high-wage society.

Start with the fact that we have failed as a country to invest in schools, bridges, high-speed Internet and highways, while our competitors have surged ahead.

In most countries, the business community is allied with labor in calling on government to make these investments to ensure its own success. The AFL-CIO has worked with the Chamber of Commerce to revive such an alliance here in the United States. But there is no question in my mind that large U.S. corporations are less focused on U.S. infrastructure and education than they were a generation ago. As Ralph Gomory, former President of the Sloan Foundation, has argued, their competitiveness as firms is simply no longer tied up with our competitiveness as a nation.

It's too easy for business to campaign for lower taxes and less government spending if most of its production and workforce are located somewhere else. Some other government will foot the bill for high-speed rail, engineering degrees and universal broadband, while we tie ourselves in knots arguing about the deficit and taxes. This may be a highly profitable short-term corporate strategy, but it is ruinous for our country and for our children.

We need our allies in business to stand shoulder to shoulder with us to demand that we refocus on America's fundamental needs.

Let's look at the rapid growth in income inequality, which threatens our identity as a middle-class society. Fully 56 percent of all income gains in the last 20 years have gone to the richest one percent of Americans. There is a growing consensus among academic economists that trade liberalization and the offshoring of jobs have contributed heavily to that trend.

Worldwide, trade and capital mobility have undermined the bargaining power of workers and made all workers vulnerable to competition from countries without democratic protections or basic human rights.

In Sunday's Washington Post, Steve Pearlstein summarized new research by Nobel laureate Michael Spence. Spence found that most U.S. job growth over the last couple of decades came in the non-tradable sectors of the economy – mainly government and health care. Meanwhile, most of the output and income growth came in the manufacturing or tradable sector. These trends, in Pearlstein's words, are "a recipe for increasing inequality and social and political polarization."

The result is that the U.S. economy can't seem to get itself out of its deep slump – partly because consumers – who are workers – are deep in debt, don't have good jobs and have seen their real wages stagnate for a couple of decades now. But global corporations are booking record profits. Is this really a surprise?

So let's build a new U.S. global strategy, one founded on rebuilding our competitive position in the full range of high-end economic activity. We can start by improving the woeful state of our infrastructure and investing in our educational system. And we need to use our tax dollars to support and strengthen domestic job creation, get serious about addressing currency manipulation, invest in renewable energy technology and production and eliminate loopholes in our tax system that reward offshoring.

The key is to change the incentives facing U.S. corporations, to encourage more domestic investment in cutting-edge manufacturing jobs– instead of gearing all of our trade, investment, and tax policies toward pushing jobs to other shores.

If we want an economic future that is better than our past, we need to use a jobs lens to look honestly at the specific rules in our own trade laws and trade agreements, the partners we choose and their values. This is a large subject, so I will just mention three areas that we have gotten fundamentally wrong, and are about to get wrong again.

First, there is the foundational issue of human rights. Trade agreements, whether they are global like the WTO or more limited like NAFTA, integrate economies and societies. Trade agreements with countries that do not respect workers' rights make the United States a party to the abuse of those rights and turn U.S. workers into secondary targets.

This is why we fundamentally object to a free trade agreement with Colombia, where 51 trade unionists were murdered with impunity last year. Just as the business community would object to a trade agreement with a country where investment and intellectual property protections were blatantly disrespected, we believe it is premature to sign a trade deal with Colombia when the government is unable or unwilling to enforce the rule of law and protect the security, dignity and safety of workers trying to exercise their right to organize for a better life.

Second, with respect to the Korea trade agreement, while we appreciate President Obama's efforts to address concerns in the auto provisions, on balance we believe this agreement will put at risk too many good manufacturing jobs. It's a last-generation trade agreement, not a next-generation one.

Third, we need new investment provisions in our trade agreements. We keep negotiating new "investment chapters," which are loosely based on the NAFTA model, which was based on our Bilateral Investment Treaties. But nobody has answered the question that Congress and other critics keep asking – "Why do foreign investors have the right to sue our government over regulations they don't like, when our own domestic companies DON'T have that right? Why are investors the only parties that can bypass government-to-government dispute resolution?"

If these concerns sound familiar to you, you are right. Obama raised them in the 2008 election campaign when he called for a new trade model.

Today President Obama has an opportunity to put his stamp on a major trade agreement--the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Here is a chance to make good on the President's commitment to craft a new trade policy for the twenty-first century that makes sense for working people and not just for multinational corporations.

The AFL-CIO is ready to work with the President and his team to make the TPP a new model for America's trade policy. But this will require new thinking on investment, services and government procurement, and the will to move forward on the labor and environment front -- by strengthening commitments, streamlining dispute settlement, building new institutions and improving enforcement.

Ultimately, we must change both the details of our trade policy and embed that policy in a coherent national economic strategy -- if we are going to close our current account deficit and quit borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from the rest of the world every year.

The key steps to a successful high-wage economic strategy in a globalized world are not a mystery. Just look at Germany, Japan, Denmark, and Sweden – these countries all run a trade surplus, have high wages and heavily unionized manufacturing sectors, and invest multiples of what we do in lifelong skills development, education, and infrastructure. And they all have lower unemployment rates than the United States.

High wages, strong unions, and well-trained workers are not the problem in a globalized economy – they are the solution.

We live in a world today where hundreds of millions of people lack the very basics of life. Just as the New Deal brought basic security to all Americans, a Global New Deal could see to it that everyone on this earth has the minimum necessities of a decent life.

And imagine the dividends on this investment, not just in terms of economic growth and demand for U.S. exports, but in terms of global security and stability. I was heartened to hear President Sarkozy speak at the World Economic Forum about his commitment to a global development agenda and the need for a global financial transaction tax to help fund these investments.

We must understand that we cannot have either an end to the jobs crisis in the United States or solutions to poverty worldwide if the United States and the world community go down the path of competitive fiscal austerity and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Yet here in Washington, in Brussels, and in London that is exactly where policy makers are going. Next month, the AFL-CIO will host a meeting of all the world's labor movements to release a report on global economic strategy that is focused on jobs and development. Policymakers should be listening—because all around the world, people are in motion demanding investment in good jobs, as well as democratic accountability.

Democracy and workers' rights are not a means to some greater good—they are part of the fabric of the good life itself. Silencing workers—no matter for what purpose—undoes our common future. And when workers reclaim their voice, we reclaim our common global democratic future—a future where all of us can prosper.

Photo by PeoplesWorld.org

Tax the Rich: Democrats Introduce Deficit-cutting Bill

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:16:00 +0000

According to recent public opinion polls, more than eight in 10 Americans want the rich to pay a fair share to cut the deficit. With Republicans poised to cut everything from Social Security benefits for seniors, to education and food safety inspections, congressional Democrats have introduced a bill that would cut the deficit by $78 billion by creating a new tax on millionaires and billionaires.

In introducing the measure, its author, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., a member of the president's fiscal commission, said, “In the United States today, the richest one percent owns 34 percent of our nation’s wealth – that’s more than the entire bottom 90 percent, who own just 29 percent of the country’s wealth.”

This vast wealth and income inequality needs to be addressed, she said. "It’s time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, which is why I introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act."

"It’s about fairness," she added. "It’s about avoiding budget cuts that harm middle class families and those who aspire to it. We can choose to cut education, job creation and health care, or we can choose to ask those who can contribute more to do so.”

According to United for a Fair Economy, the current top tax bracket begins at $373,000 in income and fails to distinguish between the “well off” and billionaires – like the top 20 hedge fund managers whose average income last year was over $1 billion.

According to analysis of the bill, the proposal would create several new tax brackets for income earners between $1 million and $1 billion ranging from 45 percent to 49 percent. The bill would also restore capital gains tax provisions for incomes over $1 million annually.

Aside from 80 percent of Americans, the proposal is getting support from some unlikely sources. Katharine Myers, a millionaire from Pennsylvania whose income comes from royalties from a company her mother started, praised the measure. “I think very wealthy people like me should pay substantially higher taxes, since we have done exceedingly well in the last few decades,” she said. “Our taxpayer-funded government contributed to my success.”

The bill has been cosponsored by both progressive and fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Ariz., who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “It’s time we treated multi-millionaires the same way we treat working families – by creating a tax bracket to match their income."

“There’s no reason to treat the wealthiest one percent of the country any more specially than anyone else," Grijalva added. "And right now that’s exactly what our tax system is doing."

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters, “The middle class is shrinking and deficits are rising because Republicans are giving a pass to special interests who aren’t paying their fair share. This bill is part of a plan to level the playing field.”

United for a Fair Economy, Citizens for Tax Justice, Citizen Action Illinois, U.S. Action, Campaign for America’s Future, Wealth for the Common Good, and The Agenda Project have all endorsed Schakowsky's bill.

Steve Wamhoff, tax expert from Citizens for Tax Justice, praised the tax bill's progressive character. “Millionaires have benefited disproportionately from the tax cuts enacted over the past decade, so it seems entirely reasonable that they share in the sacrifices needed to get our fiscal house in order.”

“The budget cuts being debated in Washington shamefully require middle class families to pay the price for the recklessness of the Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who broke our economy,” said Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy. “Instead of punishing middle class families and de-funding America, the Fairness in Taxation Act asks those who have benefitted so heavily from the economic bounce of Wall Street to share responsibility for getting our nation's finances on track.”

For their part, Republicans have fought to protect tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires above all other priorities.

Photo by keegstra/cc by 2.0/Flickr