People Before Profit blog

Specter haunting the GOP

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:02:00 +0000

A specter is haunting the Republican Party. The specter of marginalization.

Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Arlen Specter triggered political shockwaves by announcing he is switching parties, and will run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary.

Specter has evidently decided to cast his lot with the tide of American history rather than with the shriveled puddle of right-wing extremism embodied by the Republican Party.

Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, one of the tiny remaining group of GOP “moderates,” put it this way: 'We're heading to having the smallest political tent in history, the way things are unfolding.'

Saying he had “carefully examined public opinion” in his state, Specter declared, “I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. I have not represented the Republican Party. I have represented the people of Pennsylvania.”

His support for Obama’s economic stimulus drew attacks from Republicans who, deaf to the public mood, foam at the mouth over “government spending” except when the spending helps their fat-cat friends.

A Rasmussen poll showed that as a Republican, Specter was trailing his right-wing primary opponent, Pat Toomey. Pennsylvania is a closed-primary state, meaning that Specter was having to woo a narrow, conservative Republican base. The poll found that “79 percent of Pennsylvania Republicans have a favorable opinion of the ‘Tea Party’ protests against big government spending and higher taxes.”

Since his election in 1980, Specter said, “the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats.” He called his political philosophy now “more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

That may be, but he also said he “will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture,” and insisted he would not change his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.

If Specter wants to be “more in line with Democrats” and with Pennsylvania’s working class majority, he will need to reconsider that stance.

The Democratic sweeps in 2006 and 2008, and especially the election of Barack Obama as president, were propelled by a broad and growing progressive coalition, with the labor movement at its core. It is now fighting to advance a people-before-profits agenda, including expanding worker rights. If Specter wants to avoid being marginalized like his former party, he will need to get on board the people’s ship.

Extinct 'hobbits' defy placement on the human family tree

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:19:00 +0000

Real scientists unafraid to say, “We don’t know.”

The nice thing about scientists, as opposed to right-wing Christian fundamentalists, for example, is the way they react when they don’t have all the answers. The good scientist, when faced with a piece of reality that doesn’t seem to click with existing theory, relishes a new opportunity to dive back into that wonderful pond again where he or she thrashes around, swims and explores until he or she can come out with a little more knowledge.

The Christian fundamentalists miss out on all that fun because, of course, they already have all the answers and have no need to ever jump into any kind of place where something might be discovered.

There was an article in the New York Times this week about extinct little people called hobbits who once inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores. They were discovered six years ago, and their discovery, rather than answering a few more questions about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family, instead opened up a whole series of new questions. Scientists got together last week to review research at a symposium in Stony Brook, N.Y.

The “hobbits” were very small, about three feet tall but bear no resemblance to modern pygmies. They had short legs and walked upright. The one skull that has been found is the size of a grapefruit, a size that would support a brain about one third the size of a human’s. Despite this, they made stone tools similar to those produced by other hominids with larger brains. They lived isolated from the rest of the world on the island of Flores as recently as 17,000 years ago. Humans were already living in nearby Australia at that time.

The name for modern humans is homo sapiens. The immediate ancestor of home sapiens was homo erectus, known to have lived in Asia and the islands surrounding Flores for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet the hobbits were not simply a smaller version of home erectus.

When their discovery was announced, scientific critics said that homo floresiensis, as they are called, were merely modern dwarfs afflicted with genetic or pathological disorders. Scientists came away from the Stony Brook gathering with an emerging consensus that H. floresiensis, as originally proposed, is a distinct hominid species around far longer than and much more primitive than homo sapiens. Researchers showed images of hobbit brain casts in comparison with those of human brains, refuting the “sick dwarf” hypothesis. A few were more skeptical and said they need to find more skeletons at other cites, particularly a few more skulls.

This is all as it should be.

It is the reasoned, documented arguments of scientists going back to Charles Darwin and before that revealed and advanced the theory of natural selection and enabled our understanding that species were not created all at once by a divine hand but started with a few simple forms that mutated and adapted over time.

It is fashionable today for the fundamentalist churches to point to the controversy around issues like the hobbits who don’t “fit” or missing layers of fossils in the Grand Canyon as proof that evolution and natural selection should be replaced with theories of “intelligent design.” That’s because a world created by a God who they define for us is a world they can better control.

The right wing hooks up with these folks because a world full of liberated scientists would be a lot harder to control than a world full of people living in fear of a God who wants us to follow the rules of the fundamentalist Christians, who claim they already know what the world is all about.

True scientists, on the other hand, reward and praise those who ask questions and those who discover flaws in the established “rules.”

Among the many things we can celebrate at the end of the first 100 Days of the Obama administration is its defense of science, from its support of stem cell research to its reversal of the Bush administration’s attack on the teaching of science in our schools.

If we allow “intelligent design” into science textbooks, classrooms and laboratories we risk destroying the chances of making discoveries about things now on the outer edge of science.

It is many of those discoveries that we will need to drive the economy of the future.

If forcing the teaching of intelligent design results in even one less student equipped to make the next breakthrough in renewable energy resources, it will have been a disaster. Teaching intelligent design is nothing less than abuse of our children.

A student who grows up believing that anything he or she does not understand or that no one else yet understands is divinely constructed and therefore beyond his or her intellect is a human being who has been robbed. Sitting in amazement of what we don’t know is no substitute for boldly going where we have never been before.

Why did Susan Boyle become a global phenom?

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:44:00 +0000

I first saw the headline on Google. Something about “Britain’s Got Talent ‘never been kissed’ Susan Boyle attracts wide viewership.” Yes, the never been kissed part perked my interest.

I had to know: who was Susan Boyle and why is she headlining entertainment news?

At the time the YouTube video had only 5 million viewers. It’s now up to more than 100 million.

Britain’s Got Talent is a lot like American Idol or America’s Got Talent. There are the same two male judges Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan. The third judge – a woman – is Amanda Holden, who makes the best statement after Boyle’s performance.

The well-produced segment starts out with bits and snatches of shots of Susan Boyle: eating, and talking about how she’s never been married (-- or kissed), she’s unemployed and she lives with her cat Pebbles. Already they are leading the audience down a certain stereotype-path.

Then she comes out on stage. A rotund middle-aged woman who jokes around with Cowell in a way that doesn’t go over with the audience.

I reacted negatively to the judging-a-book-by-its-cover attitude pervasive in the scene. I took it personally. After all I’m a middle aged woman – and perhaps even “frumpy-esque” although it wouldn’t be something I’d want to admit.

The faces on some of the audience members when she comes on stage and answers judge Simon’s questions – from the rolling eyes to the snarky whispers – showed how they were expecting, no, perhaps hoping for, failure.

What does this “old maid” who lives with her cat, Pebbles, says she has never dated or been kissed, have to offer us? How could she even want to be star? the collective expectation seemed to say.

Always pulling for the underdog, and realizing she must blow their socks off or else she wouldn’t be this media phenom, I waited patiently for the pudding.

Then it comes. Boyle sings. And something extraordinary happens.

Her song selection is exquisite, “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables.” She handles the stirring music with a strong, clear tone. Not at all like the Broadway-esque singers with the big voice and vibrato. But something much more earthy and real.

However, it wasn’t only her truly beautiful voice. It was what she accomplished with it. Her singing, like a trumpet at Jericho, blew down the wall of cynicism and snobbery. At that moment we all re-learned Mom’s moral lesson “don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Yet, it wasn’t only serving up a big piece of humble pie and yelling hooray for a working-class, small town older woman. It went beyond.

In its place, something more satisfying than humble pie was created. It was a collective recognition of humanity. That we are all – or at least know -- a Susan Boyle.

Don’t we all wish to be recognized for some talent beyond our looks? To have our talents come shining through, like our “True Colors” ala Cyndi Lauper?

Or don’t we all have a lifelong dream, like Boyle, that we can – when the pressure was on – see that dream come true.

Perhaps, just as importantly, isn’t finding something hidden away among the ordinary, fun and exciting too? It’s like finding some hidden treasure among the ordinary flotsam and jetsam of life.

Boyle gave us a collective gift that together we all discovered a treasure. (Kudos to the director/producer of Britain’s Got Talent for really playing that to the hilt. It was on one level so contrived, but I – and it seems millions of others – really wanted to be carried away in the real life fairy-tale.)

One of my favorite childhood stories came from Pippi Longstocking and her “thing-finding” expeditions. The idea of finding small treasures in your daily walk to and from school gives a sense of wonderment to the rote.

The middle-aged “frumpy” woman or “Old Maid” or “cat lady” has been such a constant stereotype in many cultures. When such characters become the heroines it is a life affirming story.

The blowing away of such a stereotype has also been a subject in literature and film. Who can forget when Kathy Bates, in the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” smashed into the car of two taunting young women who “stole” her parking spot near Winn-Dixie.

Set off by the younger women saying, “Face it lady, we’re younger and faster,” Bates turns into “Towanda,” her feminist superhero alter-ego, and rams the sporty VW convertible repeatedly, destroying its bumper. When the high-heeled, mini-skirted, well-coiffed youngsters came running back Bates delivers the line, “Face it girls, I’m older and I have more insurance” and drives away laughing. A great movie with a great scene, but you do want to bash these younger women.

Boyle’s performance, however, replaced that feeling – at least for me -- of cynicism with celebration, which was a much more pleasant delivery of a lesson in dignity.

Hopefully, Boyle will be able to ride this wave of adoration with the dignity and grace she showed on the show. I hope she will be able to withstand those in the entertainment industry that feed on cynicism. Starting with those who want to completely change her. And I’m not talking about makeovers. What woman (or man) would turn down a day at a salon?

Not it’s the vultures who feed on the current big thing and take it to its maximum private profit making ability, about whom I worry.

Yet this sensible, solid Scottish woman – with all her life’s experiences, friends, church and community – seems a formidable force against such negativity. She’s already conquered it once.

Restoring reason at the FDA

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:12:00 +0000

It's official. Seventeen year-olds now get a second chance to prevent pregnancy as easily as older women do. The FDA, per order of the White House, extended over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, also known as the morning after pill, to 17-year-olds April 23.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow, the morning after, to find out whether society as we know it ends. That's long been the prediction of groups like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America who view the move to make contraception more available as something like a mandatory draft for Girls Gone Wild.

Wendy Wright, President of CWFA, wrote in USA Today in 2005 supporting a widely lambasted decision by the Bush FDA to reject all scientific arguments about the effectiveness and safety of the drug. Instead the Bush FDA sided with ideological and religious extremists to deny over-the-counter access to emergency contraception for every woman. (The decision was later revisited and emergency contraception access OTC was granted for adult women but denied for minors).

In the piece, Wright accused women’s health advocates of conspiring to promote a culture of promiscuity with the intent of boosting sales of emergency contraceptives. She wrote, “In pursuit of more sales, advocates encourage multiple sex partners and frequent use, without concern for putting women at risk of STDs.”

Of course, emergency contraception (EC) has been widely available in other countries for years and so we have ample experience on which to evaluate Wright’s predictions.

A 2005 study published in the British Medical Journal found “Making emergency hormonal contraception available over the counter does not seem to have led to an increase in its use, to an increase in unprotected sex, or to a decrease in the use of more reliable methods of contraception.”

Behind all of the arguments against EC over-the-counter access lurks a persistent notion that women, and now in particular teens, are engaging in irresponsible behavior. Wright and her anti-contraception colleagues, though, talk themselves into a corner (the problem when you reject reasonable answers). On one hand they appear to view teens as completely unable to make responsible decisions for themselves i.e. the availability of contraception will make them run wild.

At the same time, teens apparently have it so together that they will be both determined and quick-acting in order to prevent an unintended pregnancy. Seems like those teens most likely to use emergency contraception are, by definition, taking responsibility for their actions.

In a statement released today, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood of America summed up that view perfectly, “The U.S. has the highest rate of teen pregnancy among the most developed countries in the world. Providing birth control, including emergency birth control, to young women helps them make responsible decisions and avoid unintended pregnancy.”

Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council have clearly huddled on talking points. Another thematic in their press statements about the Obama decision is emergency contraception is unsafe.

Yet, the 2003 application to the FDA to grant the over-the-counter access to emergency contraception -- or -- Plan B -- won unanimous support from all leading medical groups, including the most prestigious medical groups representing adolescents such as from The Society for Adolescent Medicine, the American Pediatric Association not to mention all women's health groups.

Even Bush's own FDA panelists noted that Plan B was the safest drug they had ever considered to grant to over-the counter status.

No matter. According to Concerned Women for America, in a statement released today, 'Parents should be furious that the FDA is putting their minor daughters at risk.'

The Family Research Council continued the refrain, 'Furthermore, the FDA-approved label for Plan B gives no clear indication that repeated use of Plan B in a short period of time is not safe.'

The era during which the likes of the religious Wright (pun intended) held sway on what should rightfully be medical and scientific decisions are, thankfully, over. And no group seems more relieved than the non-ideological researchers who’d watched years of hard earned effort for scientific integrity wasted in a matter of months.

It’s telling that no one at the FDA has voiced a problem with the unprecedented mandate from the President Obama to overturn the decision. Conversely, senior staff resigned from the FDA over the political/ideological handling of the application during the Bush years and the Christian right’s destructive influence on agency policy.

A new day is at hand. Vindication is the order of business. Today we have prevailed and 17 year old women are the victors. We’ve always known Wright is wrong. The sweetest victory is her new found irrelevance.

May Day -- Born in the USA

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:57:00 +0000

Many of us never learned in school that May Day, the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, was born here in the USA.

On May 1, 1886 Americans across this great land left their jobs to go on strike for the eight-hour day. At the center of this upsurge were the workers of Chicago who fought and died for that eight-hour day. The leaders and some who were not leaders were rounded up and put to death. It was too late for the bosses, however, because news of the heroism of the Chicago workers spread like wildfire around the world and May Day, all over this planet, became the day for the working class to both stand up to those who exploit it and to celebrate what has become a parade of working class victories.

Since its birth there have been many attempts to make us forget the meaning of May Day. They’ve tried everything and anything, from turning it into a day for picnics on the nearest Sunday, to turning it into a “holy day,” (Feast of St. Joseph the Worker), to substituting a September Labor Day instead, to eliminating it altogether.

All of these attempts and, most important, the attempts to crush the movements celebrated by May Day, have failed.

This year, once again as always, millions march on May Day in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Hong Kong, in Germany, in South Africa and in Brazil.

And this year the meaning of May Day rings louder and clearer than ever right here in America, the place of its birth.

Hundreds of thousands will take to the streets of American cities. Many of them, like the Chicago martyrs who were the first to lay down their lives, will be immigrant workers demanding equal rights. They will march side by side with native born workers, all of them backed in their cause by a national labor movement now united behind a program for immigrant rights. That program strengthens the rights of all workers, native born and immigrant. Those who march will demand the right to form and join unions. Those who march in America’s cities will celebrate labor’s role in electing our first African American president.

Together with their brothers and sisters all over the world, perhaps more than ever, Americans, this year, proudly celebrate May Day – the special holiday born in the USA.

Immigration reform welcome news

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:59:00 +0000

We welcome the news that both of the nation’s major labor federations have agreed to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system. They are backing the Obama administration’s call for a path to legalized status for each of the 12 million undocumented people now living and working in the United States.

Legalization of undocumented immigrants living here is the only path that makes sense, both from a humanitarian and economic vantage point. Immigration raids and the human suffering they cause are beneath where we want to be as a country. Dollars-wise — national, state and local economies would suffer damaging, if not irreversible dislocation, if the immigrant population were suddenly to disappear.

Legalization is also the first step that must be taken if we are ever to make it impossible for unscrupulous employers to use low-paid immigrant workers as a means to drive down the working and living conditions of all workers. When all workers can enjoy the rights of citizenship or legal residency, the labor movement will be in a much better position to fight for them on the job and to organize those who are not yet organized.

We also agree with the part of the accord that warns against extension of the H-2B visa program or any other similar type of “guest worker” program. Big business would like to keep and expand the “guest worker” approach because it essentially supplies companies with indentured servants whose stay in the country can be terminated at the whim of the company that employs them. The guest worker programs are also effectively used to keep down the wages and working conditions of everyone else.

Labor unity on the issue of immigration is good news because it helps demonstrate to all workers that a rational solution will benefit everyone. After seeing labor leadership take up this struggle, growing numbers of additional workers will better understand how it is the greedy and self serving corporations, not immigrants, who have ruined our economy and who threaten the recovery.

Letters: Nukes, Berenson, Travel to Cuba, free speech, J.H. Franklin

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:57:00 +0000

Nuclear sense

Finally! A president who lives in the real world. By extending the hand of friendship and mutual respect and sweeping away the Cold War tactics of arrogance, confrontation and peace through strength, Barak Obama was treated in kind both by world leaders and citizens of the world.

The effort to deal squarely and honestly with the nuclear question, whether civilian or military, marks a break with past administrations. Not only are his proposals realistic, doable and necessary, but their implementation would be the first step on the road to a world free of nuclear weapons.

This July the presidents of both Russia and the United States will begin negotiations to further reduce their nations’ nuclear stockpiles. If these negotiations are successful in dramatically reducing both nations’ arsenals, a convincing argument can be made to the other nuclear nations that the two nuclear superpowers’ efforts should be followed by their own reductions.

A positive outcome on this front would give other nations second thoughts on pursuing their own development.

In his call for an international fuel bank where countries that renounced nuclear weapons could purchase fuel to power their reactors, Obama is in essence asking all countries to unite regardless of politics, in order to mitigate the looming consequences of climate change.

Whatever one’s feelings about nuclear power as an energy source, it is going to be part of the mix, and Obama’s proposal marks the first step toward a less threatening, more peaceful, less confrontational and more cooperative world.

Bill Mackovich Chicago IL

Fujimori and Berenson

The news of the recent sentencing of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori resurrected memories of yet another forgotten political prisoner. I couldn’t help but remember when Fujimori visited President Bill Clinton at the end of Clinton’s tenure. Clinton mentioned nothing of the case of American journalist Lori Berenson, no pressure, the same way he did nothing on pardoning Leonard Peltier.

Lori Berenson is a U.S. citizen currently being held as a political prisoner in Cajamarca, Perú. After serving nearly five years in harsh Peruvian jails high in the Andes, her conviction for treason against Perú and her life sentence were overturned.

In June 2001, she was cleared of terrorism-related charges but convicted of collaboration, and sentenced to 20 years in prison in a trial that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claims completely violated her rights.

What will Barack Obama do for Ms. Berenson or for Mr. Peltier for that matter?

In the case of Fujimori, what goes around … comes around?

For more information on Lori Berenson, visit www.freelori.org.

John Gallagher Providence RI

Dangerous speech

Please check out this piece on the increasingly shrill and dangerous rants by the extreme right wing media, actually issuing calls for murder on the public airways. (“Glenn Beck and the Rise of Fox News’ Militia Media” — the article, by Media Matters, can be found at www.pww.org.)

There have been attempts to draw connections between phenomena like violent video games and actual gun violence. But there can be absolutely no doubt that there is a very clear connection between outright calls by right-wing fanatics to murder their political opponents and an increasing number of murderous attacks by mentally disturbed people.

While we have a right to free speech in our nation, a right that liberals and progressives have fought to protect, it is a well-established legal precedent that there is no right of free speech to yell fire in a crowded theater.

It is certainly time that the great majority of the American people, who truly want a civil, decent and respectful atmosphere for political dialogue in our nation, again take control of our airways. These airways are public, and are owned and regulated by our elected government.

At the very least, we should, in my opinion, begin discussing calling CNN, Fox and the stations that allow these maniacs to poison the public airways and demanding that they be removed.

Sponsors for these programs can also be lobbied or boycotted.

Please discuss this growing danger. Our very lives may depend on it!

Bruce Bostick Columbus OH

Travel to Cuba

The following comment was a letter to the editor printed in the Tri-City Herald newspaper here, April 13.

The debate to “Open Cuba to Travel” is not a radical idea. Many people are knowledgeable about how the status quo and conservative political fringe manipulate the U.S. mainstream media “to obstruct, cajole and frustrate” the hopes and expectations of working Americans.

Fifty years of reactionary political and economic attacks on the Cuban Revolution have left almost as much confusion as when the Eisenhower administration ordered top secret U.S. government interference and intervention in the internal affairs of a new sovereign and independent country. This neurosis around revolutionary change in the Americas had grown so disproportionately that Cuba was accused by the Bush II administration as a state sponsor of international terrorism (2002).

Could the reason for an unjustifiable, obsolete policy be fear of the example set by Cuba that poses an imaginary threat as an excuse to deny U.S. people their constitutional right to travel to witness the Cuban reality?

Call your congressperson to support long overdue change to restrictions on travel and trade with Cuba.

Richard Grassl Pasco WA

John Hope Franklin

For historians of every stripe, the name John Hope Franklin (1915-2009) is one that cannot be ignored. This is, in part, because he was past president of the American Historical Association, a group of scholars that has been in existence since 1884. That his classic work “From Slavery to Freedom” is still in print today, over half a century since its initial publication, is a testament to his historic brilliance.

We The Poets Are dying one after the other and we are dying little by little every day. We are dying Legally Conscientiously and convinced that it was worthwhile to live.

Teresinka Pereira Via e-mail

Love your mother

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:22:00 +0000

Earth Day, April 22, is sandwiched between Tax Day, April 15, and Workers Memorial Day, April 28. Just around the corner is May Day, May 1, the international workers day and a day for flower baskets and maypoles. What do they all have in common?

An economy powered by two toxic pollutants: oil and corporate greed. Misplaced priorities that send more than half of our tax dollars to military spending that kills people, ruins lives, pollutes the planet and wrecks our economy. Damaging foreign policy driven by a quest to secure oil. Workers’ lives lost and health destroyed because of corporate greed. A system that puts profit before people and ravages the earth along the way. And the need for workers and people of the world to unite, to love and preserve our planet and to build a better world.

It’s clearer than ever that the present system can’t continue. It’s not sustainable, either economically or environmentally. Vast parts of our country are industrial wastelands —empty factories, mills, warehouses and storefronts testify to jobs gone forever. In too many places, military bases and industries, or prisons, are the best or only jobs around. Toxic “brownfields” and Superfund sites dot urban and rural landscapes. Open green space, family farms, woods and wetlands have been plowed under for wasteful exurban sprawl and industrial “parks” — many now sporting “for lease” and “foreclosure” signs. Industrial agriculture has brought degraded and tainted food, pollution and toxic working conditions.

Turning this around means getting our economic system in sync with Mother Nature — greening our economy. It means a massive national undertaking to invest in sustainable, non-polluting energy, industry and transportation systems; in well-planned, vibrant and sustainable “green” cities, towns and rural communities; in education, health care and culture to produce an informed and involved citizenry. Of course, that means putting people, and nature, before profits. This won’t happen without a fight.

Earth Day and May Day remind us to breathe the beauty of the flowers of spring and the roses of summer and struggle. “Love your mother” — planet Earth, and, in the words of labor organizer Mother Jones, “fight like hell for the living.”

Unemployment -- not a lagging indicator of economy

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:01:00 +0000

It is conventional wisdom pontificated ad nauseam on business channels like CNBC and Bloomberg that employment figures are “lagging indicators” of the state of a country’s economy.

Their argument is that as recessions begin businesses start to contract the labor force in order to “hedge” against expected declines in revenues and profits, even if they are not at that time losing money. This “streamlining” and “cost-effective” measure is designed to keep businesses profitable even as the economy as a whole slides into crisis. The result is that those employers who take proactive measures by dismissing their workers in advance of a deepening economic crisis will be the healthiest coming out of it. They will have surplus capital available to capture market share and swallow their competition. Such activity is a sign of economic health, so the argument runs, an indication that the “natural functioning” of the business cycle is working and the markets are “correcting themselves.” The result is that healthy businesses that continue to lay off workers as the economy bottoms will invest in new technology, improve efficiency in production, and prepare the ground for the next stage in the economic recovery. That means unemployment is likely to continue increasing even as businesses’ balance sheets get healthy, the stock market rises in value, and productivity rates improve. Those workers still employed are likely to receive better wages through working longer hours (not necessarily wage increases), which improves their purchasing power, thus contributing to the overall expansion of the economy – even as millions continue to languish on unemployment lines and more join them month after month.

The argument outlined above is flawed and reflects the perverted standards used by capitalist economists to measure economic vitality. As is obvious, the perspective outlined above to determine whether an economy is expanding or contracting is taken entirely from the standpoint of corporate balance sheets. A business is deemed “healthy,” i.e. profitable, even as those workers it lays off have seen their lives disrupted if not destroyed through loss of income along with health care and pensions attached to their place of employment.

The balance sheet of the unemployed worker is far from healthy, though. Since the current economic crisis began over 5.1 million jobs in the U.S. have officially been destroyed. This masks a bigger picture of many more millions who have lost their jobs then found part-time or lower wage work. In other words, the official tally is a net of total jobs lost in the economy, not a running tally of the number of workers displaced in the crisis.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy must create at least 100,000 jobs a month to account for new entrants into the labor force. In the last year, the economy has lost an average of 400,000 jobs a month, a total shortfall of 500,000 jobs a month for a year. That means as of March 2009 the U.S. economy has failed to generate the 6 million jobs necessary just to keep the employment level even with the earliest period of the current economic crisis, much greater than the total jobs lost figure would indicate.

Moreover, such figures do not take into account those workers who have retained their jobs by taking unpaid leaves, pay cuts, steep benefit reductions, and contraction of their hours worked. The carnage among the working class in the U.S. as a result of this crisis is much greater than the official 8.5 percent unemployment rate (as of March 2009) or the total unemployment rate of 15.6 percent, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time who sought full-time employment. This amounts to 24.3 million people unemployed in the U.S., the highest since records have been kept.

Many leading economists have also pointed to the jobs picture as particularly worrisome in the current crisis. Roger Altman, former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, warned in an essay published by the Financial Times on April 5 that this economic contraction should not be measured against previous post-World War II downturns. The difference this time is the extent to which U.S. households have become leveraged in order to maintain their standards of living even as real wages declined.

As Nobel Prize winning-economist Paul Krugman argues in his book, “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008”, the post- 9-11 Greenspan Bubble of artificially inflating housing prices, maintaining excessively low interest rates to provide easy credit to banks and brokerage firms, and promotion of shady refinancing programs in order to expand the balance sheets of mortgage companies set the stage for the current global meltdown, bringing many of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism to a crisis level. More importantly, it led to a catastrophic debt burden on average working people who now find themselves in homes with mortgages worth far more than the market price for their houses, buried under mountains of credit card debt accumulated to buy necessities when wages were insufficient for a minimum standard of living, and facing joblessness or contracting income as corporations try to save themselves by throwing the people overboard.

Altman argues that the average household saw its net worth plunge by 20 percent in the past two years even as real wages fell, compounding the crisis. He states that as a result, “household debt reached 130 percent of income in 2008,” and likely has worsened since then. This situation has forced working people to radically curtail spending even as banks have also reigned in credit. Those two factors have produced a rapidly contracting economy plunging the country (and much of the world) perilously close to a deflationary spiral for which no capitalist economist or politician has ever found an answer. A rapidly rising unemployment rate, therefore, indicates a sick and declining economy. It does not lag; it reveals the state of economic health in a society.

Karl Marx long ago recognized the fundamental importance of employment levels and wages as a measure of the relative strength or weakness of an economy. Writing in The Theories of Surplus Value, Marx notes that “[The] relative diminution in the reproduction of variable capital, however, is not the reason for the relative decrease in the demand for labor, but on the contrary, its effect.” In other words, falling profits does not cause rising unemployment, rather declining employment causes a reduction in socially available capital since it is labor power that generates capital. As fewer people are working shorter hours, the amount of “wealth” generated in society declines forcing a contraction in consumption, availability of goods, and shrinking balance sheets. To save themselves, businesses throw more people out of work, compounding the problem, leading to another cycle of economic retrenchment.

This is the process identified by Altman in the piece discussed above and by Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA, in an address to the Party’s National Committee on March 21. (see for the full speech.)

The dimensions of the current crisis, though, are far beyond those of earlier periods in capitalism’s history because real wages for working people have declined steadily and sharply for better than 35 years. This gap between purchasing capacity and real wages was compensated for by an explosive expansion of credit to all sectors of society (by some accounts even to family pets!). Marx warned of this process as early as 1849 when he described the escalating crises of capitalism. Noting the insatiable appetite of capitalists to expand their capacity to accumulate wealth, Marx recognized that eventually they “set in motion all the mainsprings of credit to this end, [as a result] there is a corresponding increase in industrial earthquakes, in which the trading world can only maintain itself by sacrificing a part of wealth, of products, and even of productive forces to the gods of the nether world.” That is the process outlined above and cheered by capitalist ideologues on U.S. business channels as a marker of economic “recovery.”

Those propagandists for capital assert that “money makes money,” or that businesses with access to credit and surplus capital invest those resources in the economy creating jobs. This is the basis for their claims that the key to economic salvation is massive tax cuts for the rich and for businesses in general. It is an assertion that wealth in society is generated by “putting money to work.”

Yet, as Marx noted, this fetishizes money and obscures the production process that created that money in the first place. In the Grundrisse, Marx outlined the source of wealth in society and the processes whereby labor power (workers making things) becomes transformed into exchange value (money) that is then circulated back to the worker in the form of alienated labor (commodities).

“Production,” he writes, “thus appears as the starting-point; consumption as the final end; and distribution and exchange as the middle; the latter has a double aspect, distribution being defined as a process carried on by society, exchange as one proceeding from the individual.”

Without workers making things – transforming raw materials into finished goods by adding their labor power to the product – there is no wealth generated in society. The fact that under capitalist relations of production surplus labor value is seized by the private corporate owner and sold for individual profit on the open market does not negate the fundamentally social nature of production or the source of society’s wealth.

The fact that Western capitalist economies embraced the global and massive expansion of credit as the mechanism to compensate for their seizing ever larger shares of the surplus value generated by workers around the world only delayed the day of reckoning for the contradictions inherent in capitalism while exacerbating them at the same time. Thus, when credit could no longer be absorbed by the productive classes of the world and their debt burden forced a retrenchment in spending – or default on their mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, etc. – this caused a decline in consumption. It was the beginning of an accounting of the decline of real purchasing power by workers that had been accumulating for more than three decades. As consumption slowed, businesses began to lay off workers outright, accelerating the decline in consumption, which led to further layoffs as capitalists sought to protect their profit margins. Simultaneously, we began to witness immense pressure on workers to work shorter hours, take pay cuts, work for free, eliminate benefits, take early retirement (even as their retirement accounts evaporated in the stock market crash), and their credit lines were cut from underneath them as their income dried up.

The result has been mounting unemployment and a corresponding massive contraction in the wealth-generating capacity of the U.S. and global economy even as banks like Wells Fargo announce record profits (thanks to money at 0 percent interest from the Federal Reserve).

Rising unemployment does not tell us what is in the rearview mirror of the economy, it tells us what the current state of the economy is and its trajectory tells us of what things are likely to be in the future for the people of a given society. In each of the last several months the U.S. unemployment rate has jumped by half-a-percent, suggesting a rapid deceleration of the job market and, hence, of socially-available wealth generation capacity. This portends a further contraction of consumption as those without work drop out of the economy and those with work gird for troubles ahead. Such a contraction will furnish the justification for additional employment cutbacks and the rationale for battering workers into deeper concessions. This is not an indication of a “healthy” economy returning to normal activity.

Rising joblessness and mounting public debt are symptoms of a decrepit system that is in the throws of crisis, one which the working people are being made to pay for even as corporations shore up their balance sheets through tapping the public treasury, and at the expense of destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of working class households around the world. This is a system collapsing from its own internal contradictions. It is a process that is being fought vigorously by workers around the world, whether through strikes (as in France, Guadeloupe, Italy, the U.K.), factory occupations (as in the U.S., France, Belgium), mass street protests (everywhere and growing larger), and building grassroots coalitions to force their governments to provide real economic stimulus and reign in the financial sector and greedy corporations who are feeding at the public trough.

This is the working out of the materialist dialectic so brilliantly elucidated by Marx 150 years ago. The result of this struggle will shape the society of the future. It is a struggle and a future that we shape through our own collective actions.

Editorial: Seeking a nuke-free world

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:41:00 +0000

President Obama told a crowd of 20,000 in Prague April 5 that the U.S., the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons, has a “moral responsibility” to lead the way in seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

He acknowledged the difficulty of achieving total nuclear disarmament but added, “We must insist, Yes we can!”

Obama’s speech was far more than a rhetorical exercise. He outlined a very specific agenda of measures to lay the groundwork for nuclear disarmament. It includes:

Negotiations with Russia on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to replace the START Treaty that expires next Dec. 5. Both Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama are seeking another round of deep cuts in nuclear arsenals in that treaty, which could be signed in Moscow this summer. Obama’s ultimate goal is to draw other nuclear powers into the arms reduction effort.

Ratification by the U.S. Senate of the long-stalled Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty crucial to curbing the nuclear ambitions of both existing nuclear powers and nations seeking to develop these weapons.

Diplomatic efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

A new treaty to ban the production of weapons-grade fissile material.

Obama signaled a shift in U.S. military doctrine when he said, “To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same.” Consider that for more than half a century, the actual or threatened use of nuclear weapons has been the “big stick” of U.S. foreign policy.

By contrast, Obama speaks of “engagement” and resolving conflict based on “mutual interest, mutual respect.” What a breathtaking change from the Bush-Cheney doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive war.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) greeted Obama’s Prague speech but cautioned that “Obama cannot do it alone.” He will need strong grassroots support such as FCNL’s petition to the Senate, urging every senator to support Obama’s agenda.

This initiative deserves the support of all who seek peace and justice in a world free of nuclear arms.

Editorial: In defense of equality

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:38:00 +0000

All people who cherish liberty, justice and equality have something to celebrate after Iowa’s Supreme Court and Vermont’s Legislature added those states to the short list of places in America where gay marriage is recognized as legitimate and legal. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont have now taken the step that must be taken by our nation as a whole.

We have a long way to go in securing full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and until we get there the rights of all Americans will be less secure.

It is unacceptable that only 16 states and the District of Columbia have domestic partnership laws that formally recognize same-sex relationships.

It is unacceptable that equal benefits ordinances, which require government contractors to provide equal benefits to their LGBT workers, exist in only a handful of cities and towns.

It is unacceptable that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender couples are not included in the Family and Medical Leave Act, and only seven states have corrected that injustice on the state level.

It is unacceptable that even lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers who do have access to domestic partner benefits are the victims of discrimination by the Internal Revenue Service, which denies them the tax benefits everyone else is eligible for.

In all too many locations across this land the only protection these workers have is a union contract that forbids discrimination in wages and benefits. Many more, however, have no unions and no such protection.

Workplace benefits constitute up to 40 percent of overall compensation. Without the full access to these benefits which would be guaranteed if gay marriage were legalized throughout the United States, gay people are being denied a large portion of the earnings to which they are entitled. Denial of marriage rights, and therefore these benefits, deprives gay people of the ability to care for and provide for their families — one of the main reasons workers go to work in the first place.

The time for equal rights is now. Contrary to what the merchants of fear would have us believe, when two more states came out in defense of equality this month the earth continued to spin on its axis and a nation moved a little closer to justice.

LETTERS Banks, pensions, G20, drugs, and more

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Banks

What to do with the banks? Turn them into credit unions!!

Jo Forman Via e-mail

Pension theft

A recent article from Raw Story on how our pension money was shifted into stocks just before the crash is a “smoking gun” showing the outright theft of workers’ retirement monies by the Bush regime.

Along with over 3,000 Republic steelworkers, I had the majority of my pension and my health care stolen by these thieves. Instead of taking over the pension plan and then paying the pensions out to the workers affected, the PBGC (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation), under Bush, refused to correctly pay the workers their pensions, as the ERISA law calls for them to do in the event of a bankruptcy or shutdown. Unfortunately, this type of theft of worker’s pensions was repeated in numerous areas after that. They were “saving PBGC funds” according to them. However, we now find out that these outright thieves have taken hundreds of billions of PBGC funds, without public authorization or approval, and gambled it on Wall Street, losing massive sums.

The article states that 23 percent of PBGC funds were lost as of September 2008. That was when the stock market had a cold. Since then, it’s become a cancer, suffering massive losses. We need to demand that these Bush appointee thieves be prosecuted, and the workers’ retirement monies be replaced and guaranteed!

Please check out this important piece and let others know about it!

[The full story is at rawstory.com/blog/2009/03/pension-fund-shifted-billions-into-stocks-just-before-crash/]

Bruce Bostick Columbus OH

G20 protests

All week, I have been reading about the protests in London and around the world about the G20 summit. I have seen very little media coverage, except those on YouTube who post videos from Fox News, showing how the right skews facts. I read about it first ... on AP!

I read about the protests that were held ahead of the G20 summit. Wednesday, riots broke out against the banks and thousands were screaming for an end to capitalism!

You Tube has videos of it. CNN has a video of some of the rioting. From the looks of it, the police let some of it happen.

So why didn’t PWW have anything about it?

Brandon Ivey Lewisville TX

Editor’s note: Check out pww.org and search for G20.

Guns and butter again

Here’s President Obama on his “new” Afghanistan policy:

“At stake in taking on our adversary is nothing less than the safety of people around the world. We are increasing U.S. forces and training so the Afghan military can defeat the Taliban and take control. This is how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.”

Afghan President Karzai embraced the additional U.S. help.

Sound familiar? Why not? It’s not so new.

Substitute South Vietnam for Afghanistan and you will hear the ghostly voices of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the original “guns and gutter” exponent, 44 years ago, and his war-hawk spokesmen Dean Rusk, secretary of state, and Robert McNamara, secretary of defense. And, of course, the South Vietnamese government “embraced the additional U.S. help.”

Well as we all know, we were forced to bring our troops home after defeat by the National Liberation Front at a cost of 53,000 U.S. and 3 million Vietnamese dead.

The current president promised that the U.S. would hold itself and others accountable by using “benchmarks.” How about the “benchmark” of previous invasions by the British and Soviets who were eventually forced to leave Afghanistan?

Lawrence Geller Via e-mail

Looking for a Tom Foley article

People’s Weekly World people, I love you! You keep me alive and with my fighting spirit.

It occurred to me that among your readers might be one who could help me find a Tom Foley article because I remember neither title nor date of its appearance.

Its content was a historically founded description of the developments that led different religions to celebrate their holidays at about the same time. Dating this development to “heathen” observances of the seasonal changes, he fascinated me with his simple clarity and his insight on a subject little discussed.

When my daughter asked me if I could find something for her daughter just starting school that explained the development of religions, I immediately thought of Tom Foley’s wonderful article that had impressed me so deeply.

Miriam Pandor Berlin, Germany

Editor’s note: Thank you! Try the Tamiment Library at New York University, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 10th Floor, 70 Washington Square South, New York City. Visit their web site .

Story on drug cartels

Great story on the Mexican narco wars (see pww.org).

The United States still fails to admit that it is the money from the U.S. and the laundering of that money //in// the U.S. by American banks that is the root of the problem. America’s “war on drugs” pushed up the price, made greater risk seem feasible and shifted much of the importation from the East Coast to the Mexican border. So long as rich CEOs and celebs can snort the price of a Mercedes each night and only have to go to “rehab” when caught, the money will flow and brown people will continue to die, all for the illicit pleasure of the elitist rich.

Juan Miguel Herrera Scottsdale AZ Guadalajara, Mexico

It’s a struggle

It’s 8:09 a.m. here at the Dixie Lodge and breakfast has been served. There are 75 other people living here so I’ll have to cut it short to make room for the rest of us. This is the dining room of the Assisted Living Facility (ALF) where I live.

It’s been hard for me to get a job in the last six years. I haven’t been able to find one job in that time and believe me, I’ve been looking. Just try to get a job when you have to go to dialysis three times a week.

Since it has been impossible for me to get a job, I have to resort to growing food here. I’ve been growing citrus, mainly at the ALF and at another location also.

I’m very fortunate to have money to subscribe to the People’s Weekly World, while very few of the other disabled people here can afford a subscription to the paper.

Daniel J. Bromberg Deland FL

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Advice for G20 and ourselves, via Facebook

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:30:00 +0000

Last week’s G20 meeting — of leaders of the world’s big and developing economies — sparked a Facebook conversation between Toby Chaudhuri of the Campaign for America’s Future and Vijay Prashad, who teaches international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. We enjoyed their back-and-forth and they kindly agreed to share it with PWW readers.

Toby Chaudhuri: The G20’s added global stimulus is dramatic and vitally needed, but leaders decided to let the crisis decide if more steps are necessary.

Vijay Prashad: Dramatic? Tax havens, CEO compensation, and a mild reassessment of the IMF....

Remarkable that the U.S.-European Union come as debtor countries and are yet treated as the powerful ones. China, India, the sovereign funds, the rest of the G-77, etc. — they still can't determine the rules! Why not cancel all global debt obligations that stem from the Volker high interest rate regime of the 1980s, and then talk?

Bailout for AIG, but not for the bulk of the African, Asian and Latin American economies....

For shame!

Chaudhuri: We need more blood in the economy. The G20 agreement on resources — over $1 trillion — for the developing world in this crisis was a dramatic and vitally needed initiative. Otherwise, the G20 chose to agree to agree. The Europeans avoided bold new stimulus commitments. The British and Americans avoided bold new regulation of the financial community. Clearly the leaders decided to let the crisis decide whether new steps are necessary.

Prashad: What do we mean, 'we,' kemo sabe? The so-called 'developing countries' are stuck with a debt of over $3 trillion, with debt servicing now close to $600 billion per year — this is the great global accumulation by dispossession. If that money, since the 1980s, had been deposited in a Global Bank of the South, and if that capital had been used to build infrastructure in the South, (a) so much capital would not have come Northward, to flush the stock markets, and (b) much good could have come in terms of social development. And more, the 'more blood' now being put into the economy is being used by the big banks to consolidate their own power in the shrinking banking market (they are increasingly buying each other up): they are using taxpayer money to consolidate their own class power…. Not a process that will be good for the people in the long run.

Or so I think....

Chaudhuri: No question, chief. There's much work to be done. The inequality gap is growing more and more stressed by unsustainable trade imbalances. We have to put the world on notice that the old ways are gone. We can't go back to an economy in which the U.S. borrows $2 billion a day from abroad, while serving as the world's consumer of last resort either. The Chinese, Japanese, Germans and other nations have to move away from export-led growth. The unsustainable trade imbalances — with the U.S. absorbing 70 percent of the world's savings — provided the flood of cheap capital that eventually capsized the global economy. That world is over.

Prashad: I'm with you. In lieu of the peanuts on your upcoming flight to Chicago, I would be happy to send you the recommendation paper from the UN Expert Commission on the financial crisis (chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, who'd have made a super Treasury Sec).

Chaudhuri: The is a great read. Thanks for passing it on. Stiglitz's fingerprints are throughout. The Preamble's first point sets the stage well, 'The rapid spread of financial crisis from a small number of developed countries to engulf the global economy provides tangible evidence that the international trade and financial system needs to be profoundly reformed to meet the needs and changed conditions of the 21st century.' One can hear the music playing — the old way is over and the fight for the new system has begun.

Binghamton and beyond: A deeper look at those who just snap

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:02:00 +0000

A series of mass killings in recent weeks has given some the impression that things are falling apart in this country.

On March 29, eight people were murdered in a nursing home in Carthage, N.C. There followed the killing of 13 people at an immigrant service center in Binghamton, N.Y., last week, in turn followed immediately by two other violent incidents: the murder of five children by their father, whose wife had told him she was leaving him, and the murder of three policemen by a man in Pittsburgh who was reportedly worried that Obama was going to take away his guns and also angry because his mother had complained about his dog not being housebroken.

In reality, this kind of incident is not new and is not by any means confined to the United States, having happened within the last couple of decades on every continent and multiple times here. We have seen the following similar incidents over the last several decades:

* The murder of six people at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, in 2008.

* The murder of 32 students and faculty by a deranged student at Virginia Tech University in April 2007.

* The Westroads Mall shooting in 2007 in Omaha, Neb., leaving 9 dead.

* The Capitol Hill Massacre in Seattle in 2006, in which a 28-year-old man killed seven young partygoers because he didn’t approve of their lifestyle.

* The 2005 murder of seven people at the Church of the Living God in Brookfield, Wis., by a man upset by the preacher’s sermon.

* The 1991 murder of 23 people in Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas, by a man said to be angry with women in general.

* The 1984 murder of 21 people in a McDonald’s restaurant in the San Ysidro section of San Diego by a man who had lost his job because of physical problems.

* The shotgun murder of nine people in a welding shop in Miami in 1982 by a man who was unsatisfied with work they had done for him.

* The famous “Texas Tower” murder of 14 people by Charles Whitman in Austin, in 1966.

Readers may think of other incidents; my point is to show that this is not a new phenomenon, but a recurring pattern.

Blaming ‘capitalism’ is too simple

Some on the left may be quick to blame these incidents on “capitalism” or “capitalist alienation.” This is too easy and too simple. Countless millions of people are alienated and oppressed by capitalism, and vast numbers of people hate their bosses, but they don’t, as a result, go and slaughter their relatives, neighbors, co-workers and themselves. They organize, march, demonstrate, vote and go on strike. They may even organize revolutions, but all these things are sharply different from the very individualistic acts that have shaken communities such as Binghamton.

Nor is there a clear pattern of political or ideological motivation in the killings, other than a fascination with firearms and war on the part of many of the killers (but they are not alone in that fascination). Jiverly Wong, the Binghamton murderer, killed immigrants but was himself an immigrant who had become angry at the United States because he lost his job and he thought people were making fun of his accent. Most of the killers have been white and have killed other whites. Exceptions to this were the shooting of a number of minority people by a follower of the racist Creativity Movement, Benjamin Smith, in 1999, and the massacre of 14 women students at the University of Montreal in 1989 by a man opposed to women participating in higher education. The 1984 incident in San Ysidro involved mostly Latino victims and an Anglo killer, so we may suspect a racist motive there too.

To find any social patterns, we have to delve more deeply into the individual cases. Biographies of these mass murderers, gleaned from news reports, suggest a few commonalities.

Institutional, social, personal failures

* They all had psychological troubles before the final, catastrophic incident. In case after case we see individuals who might have been perceived as “quiet” or “polite” by outsiders, but who were saying and doing things within their intimate relationships which indicated that they felt themselves persecuted and were in danger of exploding. In many cases they or their relatives had been calling for help for quite a while.

Some, such as the man who killed two security guards at the U.S. Capitol in 1999, were clearly psychotic, in his case with bizarre delusions about cannibals invading the world. Another example would be the killer of seven people at California State University in Fullerton, in 1976, who believed that pornographers were forcing his wife to act in porno films; this is a frequent type of psychotic delusion. Almost all could be called “mentally ill” in the broader sense.

But either there were no institutional systems in place to give them the help they needed, or the institutions utterly failed to understand the danger until it was too late. Intake procedures in mental health institutions they or their relatives contacted did not respond with sufficient alacrity. Their families felt overwhelmed and unable to cope with their escalating problems.

* In many cases, they ran into difficulties on the job, or lost their jobs, which led them to believe that not only bosses and supervisors, but also co-workers, were against them, were laughing at them or trying to humiliate them. (In cases of youth who commit mass murders, their fellow students in school are often seen as the persecutors. This opens up the whole other topic of the dynamics of bullying and social cliques, which we don’t have space to go into here, but which urgently needs attention.)

* In some cases the triggering incident is the breakup of a marriage or a love relationship, and the target is the lover or spouse along with his or her kin and friends, who are perceived as having interfered with the relationship. Crimes of passion in the context of love triangles are the stuff of literature, but what is distinctive about these cases is the effort to massacre a whole group of people seen as somehow to blame for the problem.

* The act of mass murder also is often basically suicidal, as more than one of the mass murderers has suggested, done in order to go out in a blaze of glory and “take some of the bastards with me.” The killers either commit suicide by shooting themselves after their killing spree, or commit “suicide by police” by creating a scenario in which it is nearly inevitable that they will be killed by law officers.

* There are very few cases of multiple murderers, the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 being an exception. Despite the number of fire-eating extremist right-wing cults in the country who may, in a general way, contribute to some individuals’ paranoia, the killers are generally loners. Thank goodness, mass murderers are not roaming around in packs yet.

* The vast majority of the murders are carried out with firearms, often of the most sophisticated type. The killers, who are not career criminals and may not even have a criminal record, have found it very easy to get hold of pistols, rifles and even automatic weapons. They have shown up at the site of the planned mass killing armed to the teeth, dressed in camouflage or black “ninja”-style clothing, and in the case of Jiverly Wong, wearing body armor.

We can’t simplistically say that “capitalism” drove these people to kill, because many other people have suffered worse oppression under capitalism and have not lashed out in this outrageous individualistic way, but have rather sought the solution in collective struggle. These are atypical, mentally ill and socially isolated people who react in a way that is destructive to themselves and others. They may think of themselves as “rebels against the system,” but they are not.

But capitalism is an enabler

But we can say that capitalism makes this sort of thing possible, for several reasons.

First, the individualistic ideology of capitalism makes it hard for such people to find the kind of social support that they need as their mental processes begin to spiral out of control. In our society, it is nobody’s business but their families’ to deal with the early stages, and families are not equipped to handle such individuals.

Second, the mental health institutions that should be the “first responders” in these cases are in total disarray. Thanks to the attacks of the right on the social welfare budget, these institutions also are unable to bring to bear the resources that would take such persons off the street and make sure that they get treatment (a difficult thing in itself) and do not become or remain dangers to themselves and others.

Violence in TV, films, games? Right-wing agitation?

Does the prevalence of violence in TV, film and games play a role? It may, but again, millions of people have watched the “Rambo” and “Death Wish” type of movies without going over the edge. So if violent entertainment plays a role, it is most likely through triggering an already developed predisposition to violence, not through making people violent in general.

How about right-wing agitation against minorities, immigrants, gays, “liberals,” etc? There have been incidents of attacks on these groups clearly related to agitation by the ultra-right, but none of the bigger massacres fit this pattern, up to now, though evidently the Pittsburgh police shooter may have been influenced by media ravings about the 'New World Order.' It is easy to imagine a scenario, for instance, of the ranting of people like Lou Dobbs or Bill Hannity driving some mentally unstable person over the edge and producing a mass killing, but this is so far mostly a potential.

Guns, guns, guns

But finally, the gun culture and the easy access of all kinds of people to powerful firearms is a factor in almost every single case.

The gun lobby (the National Rifle Association and its political stooges) makes two absurd claims. First, they claim that if such people did not have guns, they would use some other weapon, such as clubs or knives. But you can run away from someone who comes after you with a knife, but much less easily from someone who attacks you with an AK47 or a Glock automatic pistol. Nobody can outrun a bullet. So the availability of guns facilitates the murders and ups the casualty level.

The second claim of the gun people is that if everybody were armed at all times, there would be less violence because nobody would be able to get a shot off without being instantly riddled with bullets himself. First of all, many or most of the mass murderers do not mind being shot dead themselves, as their intentions are suicidal as well as homicidal. I’m betting that distributing guns to everybody in the country, including small children as some seriously suggest, will greatly increase the incidence of violence.

What is to be done? Make it far easier to find psychiatric help for people who are going off the deep end, and far harder for them to get hold of guns. Right now, it is easier to get a gun than to get help for a serious mental health problem, so what do we expect?

OPINION: NATO is not the answer

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:32:00 +0000

NATO vs. democracy

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, who is often quoted as having said: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

The many people who protested in Strasbourg, France, and Baden-Baden, Germany, where the NATO festivities took place, as well as around the world, aim to make sure that Lincoln's saying is validated. For NATO has been, throughout its existence, an entity which has tried to fool the world by operating under the false flag of “protecting” its member countries’ freedom against an imaginary “red menace,” while in reality it has served to crush the freedom of people not only in countries outside NATO, but within the NATO countries themselves.

This was shown by the fact that within a short period, NATO’s structures began to participate in activities within many of the member countries and beyond that were in direct opposition to any meaningful notions of democracy and freedom.

Under the guise of creating clandestine “stay behind” structures to combat an (imaginary) impending Soviet invasion, NATO provided the cover for new and old fascists to organize against member countries’ workers’ and people’s movements and to destabilize left-leaning democratic and bourgeois democratic governments by carrying out acts of sabotage and terrorism which would then be blamed on the left. Especially in Italy, this involved the “strategy of tension” in which right-wing forces committed multiple acts of terrorism against the civil population which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. The purpose was to keep the Italian Communist Party from getting a foothold in the Italian government.

If and when all NATO’s files are opened, it will be very interesting to find exactly what the links were between NATO structures and the fascist colonels’ coup in Greece, the Grey Wolves organization in Turkey, and many other such shadowy groupings in the NATO countries, as well as exactly how deeply involved the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 were in these crimes.

Also a matter for future historians is the relationship of NATO’s structures to the stoking of ethnic or national tensions within the USSR and the Eastern European countries. In the United States, vast amounts of taxpayers’ money were handed over to various expatriate right-wing figures from national minorities in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the other socialist countries for the purpose of inciting ethnic tensions that would threaten the unity and integrity of these countries.

Keeping the Cold War going

The idea that NATO was a defensive alliance against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact was immediately shown to be a lie when, instead of dissolving or shrinking NATO when the Warsaw Pact disappeared, its state sponsors moved speedily to vastly increase it and expand its geographical scope.

NATO’s U.S. and Western European sponsors quickly began recruiting new members from former constituent republics of the Soviet Union and former socialist Eastern European states. By 2008, NATO had 26 member states. At present there is debate about Ukraine and Georgia being incorporated into NATO, which Russia sees as a hostile move.

Thus NATO, an instrument of fighting the Cold War from 1949 to 1991, became, thereafter, a mechanism for keeping the Cold War going when the supposed rationale for its existence had disappeared.

This was shown in the NATO intervention in the Balkans, especially in the case of the Kosovo war. In an article in the People’s Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada, Rick Rozoff reminds us of the role played by the NATO alliance in destroying socialist and multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and especially the willingness of U.S. imperialism and NATO to work hand in hand with outright fascist and criminal elements of Albanian Kosovar separatism. The damage has been huge.

As Rozoff says, “At the beginning of 1991, Yugoslavia was a unified country, a member and founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, with no foreign bases on its soil and no troops stationed abroad. In the intervening 18 years it has been torn to pieces and its fragments turned into little better than NATO military occupation zones and recruiting grounds for foreign war — the prototype for what awaits much of the world if the developments of 1991 aren’t soon halted and reversed.”

Imperialism quickly found that NATO could also be useful for doing end-runs around the United Nations and international law. Using NATO as a sort of substitute UN, the U.S. government, especially under George W. Bush, has been able to conceal from many of its own citizens that its actions in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan are of an illegal, rogue nature. Public opinion surveys in the U.S. show a high level of support for the United Nations, and a worry about the U.S. barging into other countries without international support and the sanction of international law. NATO gives a “multilateralist” fig leaf to brutal buccaneering expeditions.

Bush went on to promote a truly grandiose concept of NATO that would have expanded its role to encompass the entire planet, and whose mission was now not to repel foreign invasions but to assure imperialism’s control of the world’s major supplies of vital resources, especially energy from natural gas and oil.

Conn Hallinan, in an article originally published on the Foreign Policy in Focus website and reprinted in the People’s Weekly World last year, quotes Bush, speaking at a NATO conclave, as saying “NATO … is no longer a static alliance focused on defending Europe from a Soviet tank invasion. It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world to help secure a future of freedom and peace for millions.”

There has even been talk of extending NATO’s operations into the South Pacific and the Western Hemisphere.

NATO in Afghanistan

The U.S. public is told that the reason the United States is interested in getting more U.S. and NATO troops into Afghanistan is to protect the Afghani people against a return to power by the reactionary Taliban, and to stop Al Qaeda from building up its strength through its social base in the Pashtun-speaking areas of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Bad as the Taliban and Al Qaeda are, defeating them was certainly not the real, only or major purpose of the Bush administration’s push to expand NATO operations into Central Asia. Rather, the vital importance of the oil resources of the Caspian Sea area, and of pipeline projects to bring this oil to Western markets through Turkey, is the clue. The efforts by Bush to isolate Iran by blocking Iranian-Indian cooperation on pipeline development reveal this.

The people will reject NATO expansion

Fortunately, the idea that NATO should become the expeditionary army of the U.S. and the European Union is being rejected, both by the non-NATO countries and by wider and wider mass segments within the NATO countries, including the U.S.

Furthermore, countries threatened by the NATO expansion are organizing responses. The Shanghai Cooperative Organization, Hallinan tells us, is among other things a counter-organization that brings together Russia and China, as well as the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The Collective Security Treaty Organization interlocks with it and adds Armenia and Belarus to a potential alliance. Although these interlocking blocks are not explicitly anti-NATO, they effectively bar the way to further NATO expansion in Central Asia.

NATO and the U.S. working class and left

The two questions about NATO that face the left and the working class in the United States are:

* What will be the policy of the Obama administration toward the aggressive expansion of NATO, as well as specific NATO involvements in Afghanistan and other present conflict situations?

* What is the best strategy to following in combating NATO-based imperialism?

Obama’s election was made possible by the rejection, by the majority of the U.S. working class and people, of the Bush policies both in both domestic and foreign affairs. Public anger over the exploding financial crisis and disgust with the Bush war policy in Iraq were major factors.

Obama is faced with a looming economic catastrophe, and his first moves have been to use the money-raising power of the U.S. government to rescue businesses, small property owners and workers from the enormous interlocked mortgage, financial, stock market and general economic crises. To this end, he has won support for an economic stimulus package of unprecedented size. This represents a sharp turn away from the neo-liberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and in a sense a return to the policies of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s.

finds himself in a classic “guns or butter” dilemma, and this opens up possibilities for the left to demand drastic cuts in the military budget, including the part that goes for overseas adventures with or without NATO cover. The parallel political demand is for NATO to be dissolved, starting with an end to its expansion and moving quickly to its withdrawal from countries into which it has been pushed since 1991, including especially Iraq and Afghanistan.

On military policy, Obama has announced a withdrawal of most combat forces from Iraq in 2010, and almost all the rest in the following year.

On Afghanistan, as soon as Obama took power the generals demanded that he commit to sending 30,000 new U.S. troops. So far, he has agreed to send 17,000, but many people in the U.S. do not want him to send any. Most recently Obama has said that he does not want a long-term occupation. It is clear that there will be ongoing rethinking of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, with pressure on the Obama administration from both left and right.

During last year’s election campaign, much of the U.S. left, including the Communist Party USA, while supporting Obama as a great improvement over Bush, strongly opposed his idea of increasing U.S. — and NATO — intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As an editorial in this newspaper put it:

“Sending more U.S. troops is like pouring gasoline on a raging fire. Three decades ago Washington laid the foundations of Al Qaeda and the Taliban when it built up Afghanistan’s most backward, violent elements, destroying a progressive government in its rush to counter Soviet influence in this strategic region. The civil war that followed pitted extremist against extremist and turned to ashes the faint green shoots of democracy, women’s rights and economic and social development. … Prompt withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces, and ending air strikes on Afghan and Pakistani targets, would be a good start.”

The Obama administration says it wants to move toward a multilateral approach toward solving world problems. But “working with our NATO allies” is not a form of multilateralism at all, but rather an enhanced unilateralism. We must fight for an approach that includes all nations and peoples and strengthens rather than undermines the United Nations and other genuine international organizations, as well as international law.

There are some positive developments in Europe. The Obama administration has been cautiously moving away from Bush’s plan to place anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, which Bush promoted with the pretext of protecting Europe from a supposed Iranian nuclear threat, but which most of the world sees as an anti-Russian geopolitical maneuver. Now the reactionary Czech government has fallen, and its replacement is likely to oppose such bases.

The world situation is very different now from what it was in 1991, when NATO was seen as a mechanism for world conquest under U.S. leadership. In the United States’ own “backyard,” there is a full scale rebellion against imperialism, which has encompassed the popular masses — workers, peasants, indigenous people, urban poor and intellectuals — in every Latin American country (and Cuba is still socialist!).

Humanity is writing a new chapter, as it always does, and NATO will eventually end up as a tiny footnote.

A trillion dollars for the banks: How about a second opinion?

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:18:00 +0000

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants to have the government lend up to a trillion dollars to hedge funds, private equity, funds and the banks themselves to clear their books of toxic assets. The plan implies a substantial subsidy to the banks. It is likely to result in the disposal of these assets at far above market value, with the government picking up the losses.

As much as we all want to help out the Wall Street bankers in their hour of need, taxpayers may reasonably ask whether this is the best use of our money. After all, the $1 trillion that is being set aside for this latest TARP variation is equal to 300 million SCHIP kid years. Congress has had heated debates over sums that were a small fraction of this size. To give another useful measuring stick, the Geithner plan could fund 1 million of the Woodstock museums that were the main prop of Senator McCain's presidential campaign.

The core problem is that many of our big banks are bankrupt. If they had to acknowledge the losses that they have incurred on their housing related loans (and increasing their loans in commercial real estate) Citigroup, Bank of America, and many other large banks would be insolvent. Thus far, they have avoided reality by keeping these loans on their books at inflated prices.

The Geithner plan is an effort to rescue the banks by using government funding to prop up the price of these bad loans to levels that will allow the banks to stay solvent. It is not clear that the plan is big enough to accomplish this goal, but that is the basic intention. If it doesn't work, then presumably Geithner will come out with another TARP permutation that involves giving the banks even more money.

There is an alternative. Rather than using government money to keep them alive, we could force the banks to go through a type of managed bankruptcy process like the one that is currently being proposed for General Motors and Chrysler.

Geithner has supposedly ruled out the bankruptcy option because when he, along with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, tried letting Lehman Brothers go under last fall, it didn't turn out very well. Of course, it is not necessary to go the route of an uncontrolled bankruptcy that Geithner and Co. pursued with Lehman.

The government could set up an arranged bankruptcy under which creditors have accepted conditions in advance. While this may not be easy to negotiate, the government does have enormous bargaining power in pursuing such a deal. The creditors (other than insured deposits, which will be paid in full) of these banks may end up with nothing if the government just let the banks sink.

The prospect of even an arranged bankruptcy of a major bank will undoubtedly shake up markets, but many safeguards have been put in place since the Lehman collapse. If the stock market goes down for a few weeks or months, who cares? Running the economy to serve the stock market is a sure recipe for disaster; if President Obama fixes the economy, the stock market will do just fine in the long run.

Anyhow, the Geithner crew insists that there are no alternatives to his plan; we have to just keep giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks. Perhaps Geithner is right. But before we throw such huge sums away, further enriching the bankers who wrecked the economy, maybe we should get a second opinion.

Suppose that Congress appropriated a modest chunk of money to have independent economists put together teams to construct alternative plans. Why not give M.I.T. professor Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, $5 million to hire a crew to outline his preferred path? Congress could give Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner and one-time chief economist to President Clinton, who is also a harsh critic of the Geithner plan, a similar sum to put together his own team.

These economists could develop their best plans and put them out for public consumption. Geithner's crew can then tell us why their plans are unworkable and we must instead hand over the money to banks.

Given how much money Geithner wants to spend - putting it in the hands of the folks that brought on this economic crisis - it would seem appropriate to first examine all the alternatives.

After all, we could find out what our options are in this case for the price of just a few A.I.G. executive bonuses. That has to be a good deal in anyone's book.

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research .

No to nuclear power

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:02:00 +0000

ST. LOUIS — It has been more than 30 years since the last nuclear power plant was licensed for construction in the United States. Environmental and cost concerns have held the nuclear lobby in check, but public awareness of climate change from burning of fossil fuels has provided an excuse to consider nuclear as an alternative energy source. Now Ameren — the largest electric utility in Missouri and the second largest electricity provider in Illinois — is lobbying for permission to build a second nuclear energy plant near Fulton, Mo., alongside its first nuclear facility.

However, in 1976 by an overwhelming majority, Missouri voters passed a law that utility customers should not have to pay for new plant 'construction work in progress' (CWIP). Ameren is campaigning vigorously for the Missouri Legislature to overturn this law. So far, the bill to do so, SB 228, has passed a Senate committee with a favorable recommendation and will be presented to the full Senate today.

It is estimated that the cost will be $9 billion (ignoring cost overruns) and that the plant will take 10 years to build. Consumer rates would increase 29 percent to 40 percent during this period before a single watt of energy is delivered, according to the Missouri Public Counsel's office.

SB 228 would allow any electric company that builds a new power plant to get automatic rate increases every three months without time to have hearings to justify those increases, weakening the traditional oversight role of the Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC). Mistakes in the construction of such a complex facility would cause increased costs to be passed on to the customers, and if the project were abandoned, all the costs to that point. More than half of previously proposed nuclear plants have been scrapped before completion.

As in other important issues, for example, embryonic stem cell research, a broad coalition has emerged. In this case, consumers and industries opposing higher rates, environmental groups, and lead editorials in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, are campaigning to defeat SB 228 with TV ads, recorded telephone messages, and an extended open teleconference with over 10,000 participants on April 2 following the committee vote.

While the emphasis of the coalition revolves around the injustice of charging consumers for construction of a company's facility (as well as ignoring the democratic vote of the people), a more long-term and important issue concerns the environmental impact of using nuclear fission to boil water to drive turbines.

The inherent danger of a nuclear accident is recognized by the Price-Anderson Act, which forces taxpayers (not the company) to be responsible for any major accident. Even if no accidents occur, or if plutonium-239 (half-life of 24,110 years), created in fast neutron reactors, is not lost or stolen to make nuclear weapons, there is still no known procedure to eliminate the high-level radioactive waste.

More than 95 percent of the waste products are cesium-137 and strontium-90, which have half-lives (lose 50 percent) of about 30 years. They are not the problem. The 'transuranics' (isotopes of uranium and plutonium as well as curium-245) have half-lives of thousands of years. So far, the much touted 'recycling' requires purification of the transuranics and is very inefficient and difficult and has only been accomplished on a small laboratory scale. The planet is accumulating these highly lethal products with no place to put them.

About half the U.S. nuclear waste is at Hanford, Wash., in nuclear 'sludge' acquired from our nuclear weapons program. The other half is from our 103 nuclear power plants. The Hanford waste is beginning to leak into the Columbia River.

As an aside, the unknown cost of waste disposal by currently unknown means is never considered when calculating dollar costs.

But the real costs cannot be measured in dollars. We are saddling future generations, hoping that future technology can solve the problem that has not been solved during the last 60 or so years.

There are alternatives to meet the energy crisis. In 2005, Missouri used 13 percent more electricity per person than the national average and twice as much as California, which has led the nation in energy efficiency. Other nations are making rapid progress with renewable energy sources. Denmark now gets about 25 percent of its electricity from wind, and Spain, Germany, China and others are making good progress trapping solar energy.

Using nuclear fission to boil water is not only absurd — it could be the greatest folly of all time.

----- David Kennell (kennell @ borcim.wustl.edu) is professor emeritus of molecular microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

LETTERS On taxpayers, Special Olympics, change, hope and life

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:01:00 +0000

On taxpayers

Your March 28 headline in English refers to “the taxpayers’ dole.” The Spanish headline is more accurate, referring to “the workers’ funds.” The difference is important. Once taxes are collected they belong to the whole people equally, not by how much you paid in as if government were a joint stock company. To speak in terms of taxpayers’ money encourages an individualist, mean-spirited attitude of why my money should go to “Them,” and is used for the various tax caps that are killing our cities. “Them” is usually the poor, unemployed, immigrant and homeless. Even though in this case it refers to corporations, please don’t fall into the language trap of the ruling class.

Richard Levins

Cambridge MA

Special Olympics

Just a note to thank Lawrence Albright for the commentary on Obama and the Special Olympics gaffe, on pww.org. My son is in Special Olympics bowling (he averages 130, and occasionally scores over 200, but that’s Canadian 5-pin scoring!) as well as soccer and floor hockey. I don’t know how it works in the United States, but up here the Special Olympic participants are all adults, with a wide range of intellectual and/or physical challenges. Some are excellent athletes — my son, for example, is a terrific soccer player.

None of them are “precious” as the appalling Sarah Palin calls them. They are simply ordinary human beings who enjoy doing sports with their friends in a supportive atmosphere.

Kimball Cariou

Vancouver, Canada

Kimball Cariou is editor of People’s Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada.

Fed up and looking for change!

Coming from Newark Airport on my way to New York City, I was sitting in the bus traveling down the expressway when, lo and behold, what do I see: a sign on top of a building with the letters “LAZ.” It immediately reminded me of the letters on the newly privatized Chicago parking meters — now leased for 75 years by LAZ and now costing lots more for drivers.

I thought about all the frustrated drivers, including myself, looking for dozens of quarters during the worst economic crises since the Great Depression.

Columnist Carol Marin hit the nail on the head when she wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 25, “In 1979 lousy snow removal sparked a voter rebellion and booted out a mayor. Could the parking meters be the new snow?”

I totally agree with her statement, thinking about our mayor, Richard Daley, and I would add, “King Richard II is about to be dethroned. The dynasty is over!”

Lance Cohn

Chicago IL

Hope rising

Greetings friends, from a warm and sunny Venezuela! I hope that springtime is also coming your way!

As I write this note, I look out the window of my mud home to take in the view from the south. In that direction lies a majestic mountain called La Fumarola. If I squint I can see the waterfall which runs down the mountain face, many miles away. In recent months, the neighbors of my small rural community hiked to the top, bringing cement and shovels and pipes on their mules and donkeys, to bring fresh water to our town. This spring much of the water will be used to water fields of potatoes, and cabbage and tomatoes on land that has been fallow for decades.

This activity may seem like “small potatoes” in a world that is hurting in a mega scale, but I think it’s colossal. Scenes like this are being repeated by the thousands, throughout Venezuela and other points south. Communities are coming together, looking at common problems, and are being empowered to create alternatives. Such as growing food for local consumption instead of export crops. Such as using the resources of a nation to feed and heal and house and educate its citizens.

Profound social change is sweeping throughout Latin America via the ballot box instead of the bullets of past decades. New constitutions, new leaders and new economic models are all bringing new life to the continent and new hope to the world.

SOA Watch will be sponsoring three delegations to Latin America in 2009 together with the Marin Task Force on the Americas. SOA Watch will also be offering a retreat in Venezuela this summer. E-mail me for more information: lisavenezuela@gmail.com.

Join me and come and see for yourself! Please help to spread the word.

Abrazos,

Lisa Sullivan

Venezuela

Lisa Sullivan is Latin American coordinator for the School of the Americas Watch..

I need your help

I am going to take on the challenge of trying to build a Chicago and maybe even national campaign against Clear Channel for their removal of the Tom Joyner Morning Show from the V103, 102.7 FM, radio lineup here in Chicago. Tom Joyner has been extremely helpful over the years in promoting democratic causes including voter registration, support for civil rights, and mobilizations against social injustice. He has also raised millions of dollars for Black students and historically Black colleges and universities. He was truly phenomenal in promoting active support for Obama through his radio show every morning, and he promotes active support for President Obama’s agenda now.

I need help in figuring out how to reach far and wide to mount such a campaign. I have already called and emailed Clear Channel, but I think an avenue for the mass expression of outrage and to convey the mass demand that the Joyner show be reinstated is what is needed.

I am going to begin to research Clear Channel. Anything you can do to help in any capacity would be greatly appreciated.

Clear Channel’s e-mail address is chicagolandcommunity

@clearchannel.com. Let’s storm the barricades!

Dee Miles

Chicago IL

Good month for life

March was a good month for people, like myself, who oppose the death penalty. The government of New Mexico did the right thing and repealed the death penalty in their state. The New Hampshire state House did the right thing and voted to abolish executions in their state. Hopefully the state Senate will follow their lead. And Gov. Timothy Kaine vetoed a bill that would have expanded the death penalty in Virginia.

The death penalty hasn’t deterred crime, war, spying or murder. Innocent people have been put on death row, and I believe that innocent people have been executed over the years. Plus the death penalty appeals process costs more money than sentencing defendants to life in prison.

No government should have the legal right to strap people down and take their lives.

Chuck Mann

Greensboro NC

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At issue: role of government

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:55:00 +0000

At issue: role of government

Government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Today’s Republican right wants us to forget this concept. They persist in the discredited mantra, going back to Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” that what’s needed is to shrink government, deregulate Wall Street and corporate power, and have us all pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

President Obama has put forward a budget that includes major national spending for job creation, health care, public education and green energy, and pays for it by, essentially, taxing the rich and curbing corporate prerogatives.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) says Republicans don’t like these measures because they “dramatically grow the size and cost of government and move it to the left.”

Size and cost of government? These are the same folks who applauded and approved the enormous expansion of military spending, and its related corporate gravy train, under Republican presidents from Reagan to Bush II. Remember those no-bid contracts for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton friends?

Obama said in his budget message: “It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or to generate long-term growth. Ours is a market economy, and the Nation depends on the energy and initiative of private institutions and individuals.”

“But,” he emphasized, “at this particular moment, government must lead the way.”

It must “make long overdue investments in priorities—like clean energy, education, health care and a new infrastructure,” he said, to “jumpstart our economy” and transform our economy … to give our children and grandchildren the fruits of many years of economic growth.”

The president said his budget “begins to restore a basic sense of fairness to the tax code, eliminating incentives for companies that ship jobs overseas and giving a generous package of tax cuts to 95 percent of working families.”

No wonder the super-rich, the corporate elite and their Republican front-men are screaming.

A basic sense of fairness. People before profits. This is what the American people are looking for. This is what we need government for.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

Car talk: whats wrong, whos to blame?

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:45:00 +0000

President Obama’s auto task force is giving Chrysler 30 days to finalize a merger with Fiat, and General Motors 60 days to further consolidate brands, reduce debt and show additional plans to produce fuel efficient “green” cars. If they fail to comply, bankruptcy is left as the option.

The president’s declaration that the auto companies’ problems are “not the fault of the workers” is correct.

GM and Chrysler, as well as Ford, have exported jobs and fought government fuel efficiency standards that would have made their products more competitive. The U.S. and Canada have the lowest fuel efficiency standards in the industrialized world! Interestingly, regulation helped make GM’s operations successful … in Europe.

Meanwhile, GM is a major player in the National Association of Manufacturers, which is leading the fight against the Employee Free Choice Act. Auto manufacturing in our country is now heavily non-union.

Autoworkers have repeatedly given concessions demanded by the auto CEOs. Now the workers’ employer-based health and pension plans are being put in jeopardy. Health care and pensions should not be bargaining chips. It’s another reason why we need national health care and a beefed-up Social Security system.

Three and a half million auto and auto-related jobs are at risk. Their loss will have a horrible impact on working people, with a particularly devastating effect on Black and Latino workers. With so many lives and livelihoods at stake, it’s essential that the workers’ union, the United Auto Workers, be added to the task force.

While autoworkers are losing jobs and life-and-death benefits, cities throughout the country have multi-year waiting lists for mass transit vehicles — because so few are domestically built. The task force should mandate retooling of closed plants to build such vehicles, along with wind turbines, solar panels and other green energy products.

Before additional money is given to the auto companies, we ought to know how that money will be spent. At one point GM tried to spend stimulus money on projects in Brazil!

To help working families, as we believe the president wants to do, we cannot keep cutting their pay and benefits. Their purchasing power is key to stimulating the economy. Autoworkers have agreed to many concessions while wealthy bondholders have refused to budge, thereby moving GM closer to bankruptcy. There’s something very wrong with this picture.