People Before Profit blog

The dogs of war wreak environmental havoc

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:44:00 +0000

Opinion

“Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war;”

– Julius Caesar (III.i)

It would be easy to take this quote at face value. But, Will Shakespeare had much more in mind. He tells us so in Henry V. We find in the prologue, Henry, the drunken “waster” who becomes king, that “at his heels, leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire crouch for employment” and “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.”

While crying “havoc,” the Bush administration has “let slip” much on our distracted citizenry. The PATRIOT Act is one dangerous example.

But there is more. The following is being foisted on our environment and people.

* In the fall, the Bush administration announced proposals that would radically effect our 155 national forests. These would allow forest managers to adopt plans without environmental impact statements, limit information to the public and decrease citizen involvement.

* Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, who once argued that the Endangered Species Act was unconstitutional, is now attempting to remove Yellow Stone and central Idaho wolves from its protection. This would allow the hunting of hundreds of wolves, including those animals recently released under the wolf recovery program.

* In February, the Tongass and Chugach National Forests came under attack. Addendums were added to the Fiscal Year 2003 Omnibus Bill that would allow road building and logging in these forests.

* The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska is once again under siege by the oil twins in the White House. Soaring gasoline prices and war are the cover for this latest attempt to despoil this pristine arctic ecosystem. The Bush administration lost this vote in the Senate on March 19. But the House gave its approval recently.

* The Department of Defense is the country’s largest user of the carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE) and ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbon (CFC). The latter has been connected to soaring rates of skin cancer throughout the world.

* Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows a nearly 50 percent drop in enforcement actions against polluters. Much of this has to do with air quality and is having deleterious effects on populations that can least afford it – the poor, the elderly and those with respiratory problems.

* Willing accomplices on the state level are following this lead. In Connecticut, Governor Rowland, along with his vicious attacks on state workers, has proposed eliminating funding for open space. This is particularly daunting, as utility companies are unloading watershed property and much environmental degradation could follow without strong open space protection. There are also now “user” fees when entering state parks; a clear example of double taxation on those least able to pay.

Rowland has used campaign ads that showed him in a canoe on a placid Connecticut lake. Hypocrisy is too weak a word!

It is incumbent on the environmental movement not only to raise the alarm about these attacks, but to also bring these issues into the massive peace movement sweeping our country. It is equally important that peace activists work to have environmental organizations become full and active partners in anti-war coalitions.

The crass, pro-war policies of imperialism must be matched by greater voices and actions of those who defend our work places and those who defend our forests, water and the very air we breath.

All movements connect to peace.

Nick Bart is an environmental activist in Connecticut and can be reached at pww@pww.org

100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:26:00 +0000

Opinion

This is the centennial year of the publication of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois’ classic The Souls of Black Folk, first published April 18, 1903. The centennial takes place at a time when the Bush administration has come out openly against affirmative action and is simultaneously flouting immigrant rights, democratic rights, and the rights of working people overall. Furthermore, the centennial takes place at a time when the Bush administration is playing the role of global military outlaw with its pro-corporate doctrine of permanent aggression against sovereign nations, starting with Iraq.

These aspects are interconnected. The Bush doctrine of unilateral aggression takes its place alongside its attacks on affirmative action in fanning chauvinism and racism. The Bush administration crudely demonstrates the proposition that the Bush global war is also war on the rights of the American people.

Ranged against this syndrome of imperialist grab is the life and work of Dr. DuBois, including his great contribution, The Souls.

This book, a collection of fourteen of his essays, some published for the first time, sings with his dedication to the African and African-American people, with an outstretched hand to all people. Frequently quoted, it has stood the test of time and has many lessons for us 100 years later.

Souls is a book of superb beauty, rooted in the life, culture, history, aspirations, and struggles of the African American people. At the same time it is not only a beautiful piece of literature. It is also a call for struggle. It can be seen as touching off the modern civil rights movement.

Roy Wilkins, former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said, “This volume established [DuBois] as the voice of the twentieth century civil rights movement.”

For example, not long after Souls came the Niagara Movement, which led into the founding and building of the NAACP. DuBois played a leading and founding role in both.

The greatness of DuBois’ contribution comes through when we realize that it was published in the repressive “Nadir Period” – a low point for the rights of African-American people. This was the period after the betrayal of Reconstruction by the industrialists of the North in league with the plantation lords of the South. It was the period of the onset of disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings. With no action by the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court codified this white supremacist rule with its Plessy v. Ferguson segregationist decision. DuBois, as in the essay on Booker T. Washington, rejected accommodation to white supremacy. He gave support for such demands as voting rights, higher education, and equality in citizenship for all avenues of life.

With DuBois, his thorough scholarship went hand in hand with his championship of and deep ties with his people. In the exquisitely beautiful essay “Of the Sorrow Songs,” DuBois showed that these ties were many-sided. African American folk songs, or spirituals, he said, were songs which stemmed from both enslavement and the collective will to survive. Providing both words and music, DuBois showed these songs expressed both the sorrow and oppression of an enslaved people but also their unquenchable humanity, peoplehood, and confidence that a better world would be achieved both through faith and struggle. For example “Steal Away” spoke not only of heaven but possible flight from the plantation, similarly “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”

He showed these songs, passed on from generation to generation have been a tower of strength to people, including himself. He ends this essay with the forward-looking note, “... that sometime and somewhere” people “will be judged by their souls not by their skins.”

The importance of the stand against white supremacy taken by DuBois is brought out by the incisive question he asks in the book: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” He went on in the essay “Of the Dawn of Freedom” to make the question of racism central in the famed formulation that has rumbled through the century: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Souls, DuBois rounded out his formulation in terms of the socio-economic roots, the colonial and national liberation struggles and the momentous struggle for world peace.

Eight years later, he joined the Communist Party USA. On joining, he issued a statement that put the roots of racism directly in capitalism and the solution in socialism. He said: “Today I have reached a firm conclusion. Capitalism cannot reform itself. It is doomed to self-destruction. Communism – the effort to give all (people) what they need and ask of them the best they can contribute – this is the only way of human life.”

From oppression in Souls to the solution in social ownership of production and the needs of people first – what an awesome example Dr. W.E.B. DuBois has set.

George Fishman is an independent historian and a member of the American Federation of Teachers retirees. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

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People united can preserve the Bill of Rights

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 06:39:00 +0000

News Analysis

We currently live in extremely challenging times and it doesn’t look like it will become easier anytime soon.

The tragedies of 9/11 happened two months after I started as Executive Director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union. From that day until the present, the erosion of our civil liberties has been frightening. The traditional battles of the ACLU have expanded tenfold, and in the name of national security and the war against terrorism, we have witnessed the stripping away of the principles and freedoms that our country was founded upon.

We can all recognize the chilling historical fact that our government overreacts and overreaches in times of crisis. Pres. John Adam’s support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, the racist resettlement of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the abuses of McCarthyism during the Cold War, the repressive and illegal conduct of the FBI and CIA during the Vietnam War – our history bears vivid witness to the readiness with which our government has sacrificed fundamental liberties in the name of national security.

Now, with the “war on terrorism” the government is relying on all of us to forget our history. The ploy to make us all believe that first raised its ugly head with the introduction and passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001.

This Act undermines the system of checks and balances, which protects everyone from overzealous law enforcement by restricting the role of the courts, it creates a new broad crime of domestic terrorist, it allows for sneak and peak searches and gives the government the opportunity to monitor your library, financial and medical records.

The ACLU is fighting the shroud of secrecy that now hides much of the government’s actions. Attorney General John Ashcroft continues to fight release of the names, charges and where the more than 1,200 people who have been detained since Sept. 11 are being held. And regardless of an appeals court rebuke of the administration (“Democracies die behind closed doors”) in one of the ACLU’s lawsuits, the attorney general continues to fight to conduct secret immigration and deportation hearings.

In addition, since Sept. 11, race and religion have become proxies for suspicion. The government has treated thousands of innocent Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims as suspected terrorists. Visitors from specific countries have been fingerprinted, the government has tried to ban the employment of any non-citizen as an airline screener, and it has interrogated thousands of young men around the country who were not suspected of any crime.

Since Sept. 11, the government also has unleashed a new wave of spying on law-abiding citizens. With a stroke of the pen, Attorney General John Ashcroft loosened guidelines that limit FBI spying, allowing agents to infiltrate political meetings and houses of worship without any evidence of criminal activity.

When will the government stop its grab for power? No time soon. It was recently revealed that the attorney general’s staff has secretly drafted new legislation – the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, a USA Patriot Act II. Despite the lack of congressional inquiry into how the powers already granted in the USA Patriot Act I have been used – or abused – by the administration, the draft legislation contains sweeping new law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers.

Patriot Act II would authorize the government to create a DNA database of “suspected terrorists,” strip citizenship from any American who supports even the legal activities of any group the attorney general labels “terrorist,” and nullify court-approved orders that limit political surveillance by state and local law enforcement. The restrictions on political surveillance were hard-fought victories for civil liberties during the 1970s.

In the name of fighting terrorism, we are witnessing the destruction of the Bill of Rights and the other foundations of our democracy. We must to stand up to those, like our attorney general, who are trying to convince America that freedom needs to be curtailed in order to make us safer. A false choice if there ever was one! Not unlike our nation’s beginnings, patriotism means resistance.

Every good line of resistance requires educating and organizing. With that being said, over 25 organizations across the state of Connecticut have come together to sponsor a day-long conference on Preserving the Bill of Rights. Workshop topics include privacy and technology, immigrants in America, censorship of free thought on the campus and the First Amendment.

Teresa Younger is the executive director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union and can be reached at tyounger@cclu.org

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Why five Cuban heroes are U.S. political prisoners

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 04:01:00 +0000

Opinion

The People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo has reported recently on the grim circumstances confronted by five Cuban men convicted of spying and imprisoned in the United States. (See PWW Feb. 22 and March 15.) Their trial and sentencing marked them as political prisoners, a status now confirmed by cruel treatment at the hands of U.S. prison authorities – weeks of solitary confinement.

On March 16, appeals attorney Leonard Weinglass visited Gerardo Hernández at the Lompoc, Calif., federal prison. Hernandez’ bed was concrete, and lights in his cell burned continually. Deprived of clothes and shoes, he was reduced to underwear. No visitors, reading material, or telephones were allowed. Weinglass designated the windowless cell with a length of three steps as a punishment cell.

Weinglass reports that Antonio Guerrero, whom he visited on March 19, arrived in “leg irons and handcuffed … The visiting facility … was a very small cubby with a thick glass between us and a telephone, which we had to use to communicate … There was no slot for passing documents … The visiting conditions were much worse than those I experienced with Mumia [whom Weinglass represented] on death row.”

Interviewed in Miami on March 25, Weinglass stated that an anti-terrorism regulation established after Sept. 11 had been used to authorize solitary confinement. It requires that an intelligence chief certify that the prisoners threaten national security. An appeals court hears the prisoners’ case on April 7. Their contacts with attorneys have been cut back markedly. Sharon Lee of Amnesty International recently charged that the U.S. government was interfering with the appeals process. In a March 14 letter to the head of federal prisons she also reminded the jailers that, according to international accords, “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person”.

Their long sentences identify the Cuban men as political prisoners. Hernandez is serving two life sentences, two others are each serving a single life sentence, and two are serving terms of 15 and 19 years each. By contrast, Ana Morales last year was sentenced to 25 years, even though she was convicted of spying at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The Cuban men had infiltrated private, non-governmental organizations. When they were arrested in 1998, five other Cubans were prosecuted for espionage, along with the prisoners. Through plea bargaining, those men will serve only four to six years.

The Cuban political prisoners’ prosecution and trial were grievously flawed. Their homes had been wiretapped and searched without warrant. They were held three days without charges, arraignment, or legal representation. They languished for 17 months in solitary confinement before their trial. One thousand four hundred pages of information used by the prosecution were never made available to defense attorneys. Jurors faced intimidation from the media and courthouse crowd. The prosecutors interfered with the appeals process by depriving the Atlanta appeals court of essential materials.

The five prisoners were defending their nation against assaults by Cuban counter-revolutionaries living in Florida. The U.S. government knew about the attacks and condoned them. Government complicity gave federal trial officials a stake in the trial’s outcome. At issue was the toleration of terror matched up against the prisoners’ patriotic duty. It was a political trial with competing defendants.

Unspoken charges against the U.S. government added a political dimension to the trial and contributed mightily to converting the five Cuban men into political prisoners. For decades Cuba has endured cannons and bazookas fired at ships and buildings, 100 other bombings – with at least six dead in the United States, cattle poisoned, hotels bombed, fires set, and buses destroyed. The mastermind responsible for 73 deaths in 1973 from an airplane bombing lives comfortably in Miami. Cuban air space has been repeatedly violated. In recent years two assassination attempts have been directed against Cuban President Fidel Castro as he visited foreign countries.

Yes, the “Miami five” are political prisoners. They offended Washington sensibilities by defending both their nation and the Cuban revolution. They are as innocent of criminality as children dying from U.S. bombs in Iraq. They and the children too are victims of an imperial war, and a worldwide, anti- imperialist resistance movement is coming to their rescue.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a part-time pediatrician in rural Maine. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

Making war is making money

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 03:52:00 +0000

Am I hallucinating, or is it really happening? Is it possible that Bush Inc. is now so pumped up on its own hubris that Bush, Cheney & Co. no longer care about how things look, that they can engage in blatant conflicts of interest, public opinion be damned? But it is happening – what I’m seeing is not a hallucination ... it’s Halliburton.

Yes, Dick’s old company! You might recall that Cheney had been head of the Pentagon during Bush the First’s war against Saddam Hussein. In that job, he oversaw the destruction of much of Iraq’s infrastructure, including in its oil fields.

After Bush the Elder lost his re-election bid, Cheney parachuted safely to Halliburton, Inc. – the huge oilfield and military construction giant. As CEO, he tripled the amount of government money flowing into Halliburton, and he even got Iraqi contracts to repair some of the damage to the oilfields that he helped cause.

Then came George W., and Uncle Dick signed on as the Veep for Bush Inc., accepting a payout of some $40 million from Halliburton – sort of a sweet goodbye kiss.

Inside the White House, Cheney was an early and zealous proponent of whomping ol’ Saddam some more, including the use of heavy bombing to destroy this hapless country’s infrastructure once again.

Not to worry, though, say the Bushites to the Iraqi people, for we’re going to spend billions to repair all of your oilfields, schools, hospitals, roads, and other basics. In fact, we’ve already awarded the first contract for rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields. Guess who got it? Yes! Believe it or not, Bush Inc. shamelessly awarded the first pile of Iraqi reconstruction money to Dick’s old company.

It’s not a hallucination ... it’s Halliburton.

The Pentagon refuses to disclose how much of our tax money Halliburton is getting, and it won’t say how Halliburton was chosen, asserting that such information is classified.

In Bush Inc., you never really leave CorporateWorld; you just find new ways to serve.

Radio talk-show host and author Jim Hightower is a former Texas agricultural commissioner.