People Before Profit blog

New York public schools under attack

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 03:24:00 +0000

On Aug. 12, 2003, an editorial appeared in the titled “Reforming Special Ed.” The paper said New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “has done a tremendous job” in implementing school reform and that “the turnaround in the school system must be fast and furious.”

As an employee of the school system working in Special Education in the South Bronx and Brooklyn’s Flatbush, I can attest to the fact that the changes are certainly furious. However, a closer look at Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s takeover of the public school system and Superintendent Joel Klein’s “reforms” reveals a plan that, according to people who work there, will ultimately “crash and burn.”

The reorganization of this, the largest public school system in the nation, is nothing short of a corporate takeover of a public institution that less than two years ago fought off privatization by the Edison Company. Education, a fundamentally important institution still in the public domain, is now being controlled by a billionaire mayor, a big time corporate executive, and retired military personnel.

Bloomberg’s and Klein’s reforms have nothing to do with helping children, and nothing to do with quality education. Rather, they are about downsizing, layoffs, budget cuts, forced retirements, political maneuvering, replacing Democratic Party patronage with Republican Party patronage, contracting out to private agencies, and granting big contracts to their corporate bedfellows. They are also about union-busting.

The reform was supposedly aimed at trimming down bureaucracy, but instead Klein has hired high-salary regional directors, assistants to superintendents, and assistants to assistants at the same time that he has laid off hundreds of the school aides who interact directly with children in the schools.

Paraprofessionals, who assist teachers in the classroom and work directly with children, are also being laid off. Education evaluators (special education teachers), who function as case managers and evaluate children, have been forced out of their jobs due to the elimination of their title. The Special Education clerical staff has been whittled down so drastically that services for children with special needs will not be in place in September.

Highly qualified administrators, with solid education credentials who know the ins and outs of special education as well as those of their specific schools and communities, have been downsized, and those who have reapplied for their jobs are being sent to communities other than their own.

Bloomberg’s and Klein’s hidden agenda is to break the unions that serve the hundreds of thousands of people who work for the Department of Education, beginning with the principals’ union Council of School Supervisors and Administrators (CSA), the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and AFSCME DC 37.

Perhaps most shocking is that Klein’s educational “program” was devised without any consultation with the United Federation of Teachers. Bloomberg and Klein have refused to meet with UFT President Randi Weingarten on a single issue, educational or contractual. The idea that a huge public school system could be reformed without the involvement of the very people who make it work is absurd.

Parents and the community have also been completely locked out, despite the much-vaunted hiring of paid parent representatives. This was first done by dismantling and closing the district offices around the city in the name of ending political patronage. But these are the very offices where parents and the UFT meet with superintendents to resolve educational issues. Where are parents to go now?

On Aug. 14, South Bronx parents and others in the community organized a demonstration in front of the former District 7 office. Dealing with Bloomberg’s and Klein’s “reform” is going to take more demonstrations like that one.

Teachers and, in fact, almost all municipal workers, are in contract negotiations with the city now. It is going to take a citywide, united mass movement of parents, community and the unions to take back public education in New York.

Maria Ortiz is a special education consultant with the NYC Department of Education and UFT delegate. She can be reached at

Reject Bushs attack on Medicaid

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 02:15:00 +0000

At a June 13 New York forum titled “Ending the safety net as we know it? Assessing the new federal block grant proposals,” leaders of the Community Service Society (CSS) and the Brookings Institution tackled probably the most important issue facing health, social welfare, and economic policymakers (and average citizens) of our time: the role of the federal government in administering health and social welfare programs.

This issue has been debated for many years, especially since the Reagan administration. Conservatives have been outspoken in their calls to get the federal government out of the social welfare business. One of the Right’s major ideologues on this question, Grover Norquist, once told National Public Radio, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Needless to say, Norquist was thinking about social programs, not the Pentagon.

Reagan pushed this agenda hard, as did the first Bush administration. But even under Clinton there was a willingness to dump federal programs into the laps of the states. This was Clinton’s and the Democratic Leadership Council’s (DLC’s) horrendous concession to the Gingrich Revolution.

Perhaps the greatest attack on people’s well-being was the Clinton administration’s efforts to “end welfare as we know it.” Remember, Clinton’s key appointees to the highest positions in health and human services agency, responsible for welfare rights, resigned when Clinton agreed to gut the federal welfare program. The human devastation that has ensued has been documented by organizations such as the Community Service Society.

The Bush administration now aims to drive the final nail in the coffin of the federal role in Medicaid, a true medical safety net for unemployed and poor people. Under Bush’s program, the federal role in Medicaid, which is 50 percent of the cost of the state Medicaid programs, would be transferred, via block grants, to state governments. State governments could then use that money as they wish.

You can imagine the potential abuses resulting from such a transfer. State governments might decide to use the money for something else, or to distribute it in an inequitable way. As bad as this sounds, the larger implications of such a transfer are even more alarming.

Mark Levitan, senior policy analyst at the CSS, placed the issue squarely: “Block grants change the balance of power. … This is being sold as a technical change. … Well, it’s not just that. This is a shift not just in program design, but in underlying structures, fundamental relationships of power between those, on the end of the spectrum, who really believe that government aid to the poor fosters dependency and those on the other, who feel that poverty is something that public policy should be committed to ending.”

Levitan said that redefining the federal role in Medicaid funding will have the effect of shifting the battleground to the states. “Rather than fighting in Washington, we will do most of our fighting in Albany [state capitals]. Rather than fighting where there are more resources, we will be fighting where there are less resources.”

Levitan directed attention to those time periods where we made the most advances on behalf of people: “The great eras of social progress in our country, the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1970s, were about enlarging the federal role in guaranteeing human, labor and civil rights, and sustaining the poor. That was well understood by the reformers and their opponents in Washington, and it was understood by the activists at the grassroots.”

As we approach the 2004 elections, it is heartening to listen to some of the Democratic hopefuls set aside the Clinton/DLC strategy and move toward a more progressive agenda. Such a shift is probably the reason for the success of Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, for example. His antiwar and pro-people message, urging a strong role for government in social programs, is resonating with the electorate.

Clearly, he has struck a nerve that needs to be built on by all candidates for office. Aggressive, mass pressure on all the Democratic Party candidates can yield a program to defeat Bush and his corporate clique.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org

The global attack on pensions

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 02:11:00 +0000

People Before Profits

Wall Street seeks it. George W. Bush is eyeing it. The managements of Bethlehem Steel and LTV have done it. Those of United and Northwest Airlines are pushing it. Japanese insurers are doing it. France’s government is pressing it and Germany’s is calling for it. Italy’s is flirting with it. The occupation forces in Iraq are implementing it. The counterrevolutionary governments of former Soviet republics have done it. Turkey and Argentina’s masses have already suffered it.

“It” is attacks on workers’ pensions and savings. Companies and governments around the world are cutting, slashing, sometimes even completely canceling contractual pension debts to active and retired workers. “Fixed” interest rates on savings are being slashed. Retirement ages are being raised. Length-of-service requirements are being stretched. Pension funds are being looted, as banks push bum loans or investments on them.

In recent months, the Bush administration and federal courts have worked hand-in-hand with airline management to cut the pensions of unionized employees, in some cases by over 60 percent. Indeed, a condition of federal loan guarantees to airlines has been that employees’ wages and benefits, including pensions, be cut. This is in an ultimately doomed effort to ensure debt service by an industry drowning in “overcapacity.” Just last week, the Labor Department approved a blatant violation of federal pension rules to help Northwest Airlines’ management cover a billion dollar shortfall in employee pension plans.

U.S. steelworkers are also suffering sharp cuts in pension and health benefits. The federal government, through the misnamed “Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation” (PBGC), has taken over the retirement obligations of several unionized steel companies, slashing pensions and benefits in the process. The PBGC’s own finances are shaky.

In Japan, the government passed a law this year allowing insurance companies to break their interest-rate contracts with policyholders, effectively slashing millions of workers’ savings. In France, the government rammed through pension “reforms” that cut public workers’ pensions, and increase the length of service required to achieve full pensions. In Germany, the government is attempting the same.

Through currency devaluations, pensions in countries, such as Argentina, have been cut to fractions of their original values. By printing money, governments such as Turkey’s have done the same. And hundreds of millions of “informally” employed and self-employed around the world have no pensions at all to rely on.

Perhaps nowhere has capitalism looted old-age guarantees – and the entire population’s wealth – more completely than in former Soviet republics. Since capitalism was restored, pensions have been effectively cut by 90 percent or more, while housing, health care and nursing facilities have been left to crumble.

It was not too long ago that the monopoly media were pushing the myth that social conditions were declining because of world population growth. But then growth declined dramatically. Now the new myth is that the world is getting worse because the population is not growing fast enough, and there are not enough young workers to support the old! This in a world with leaping technology and more than one billion working-age people officially unemployed or severely underemployed. The productive capacity exists to provide full economic security for everyone around the world, from birth through death.

At least the media are getting one thing right – social conditions are declining. But they are declining not because of population changes, but because of capitalism’s incapacity to deal with advances in science and technology. Talk about a social system with no future!

And perhaps no class is more conscious today of the bankrupt future of their social system than the capitalists themselves. So they are seeking old-age security for themselves, in part by targeting the pensions and savings of everyone else.

The Communist Party fully supports the struggles of U.S. steel, airline and all union and nonunion workers to regain the entire retirement benefits once promised them. Mass struggles in Italy, led by unions and workers’ parties, have put a partial brake on efforts to cut pensions. As we have seen, the capitalist attacks on pensions are worldwide. To be most effective, labor’s defense of economic security for all must extend to the international arena.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org

New thinking on global warming

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:49:00 +0000

According to a report issued by a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2002, severe change in the earth’s climate can take place in less than a decade. This runs counter to the belief widely held as late as the 1980s that any significant change in average temperature over the earth’s surface would need centuries to be noticed.

The necessity of such a revision in our thinking about climate change first became apparent in the last decade of the 20th century. In the 1990s an analysis of cores drilled from the Greenland ice cap showed variation of the ratios of different isotopes of oxygen – a reliable measure of temperature – consistent with rapid temperature changes at the end of the last Ice Age (about 14,000 years ago).

Other types of data gave results that were consistent with this conclusion. Meanwhile, other data indicated that the earth’s average temperature is rapidly rising as the probable result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

A United Nations panel of scientists, meeting in China in January 2001 (before the National Academy of Sciences report was issued), predicted that the earth’s average temperature would rise as much as 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years.

This would cause sea levels to rise by as much as 35 inches, possibly causing catastrophic flooding in high-population, low-lying areas such as China, Bangladesh, and Egypt. This change could also induce crop failure, famine, and a spread of diseases such as malaria.

As a result of the earlier alarming indications, most of the world’s nations agreed on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This agreement, when implemented, would force industrialized countries to help reverse the global warming trend by significantly cutting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning.

But in 2001, barely three months after he took office, George W. Bush announced that the United States (which accounts for 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions) was pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol.

Of course, it makes perfect sense for George W. Bush, a scion of one of the world’s wealthiest oil and gas families, to put the desire for short-term profits for his oil and gas buddies ahead of the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population (including those of the U.S. working class).

A socialist USA (or even an enlightened capitalist USA) would have no economic interest in opposing measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Thus the problem of global warming becomes an argument for socialism or, in the short term, getting rid of George W. Bush in November of 2004.

Our work is cut out for us. In the interest of the survival of humanity, we must show Bush the door in 2004!

John Pappademos is a retired professor of physics. He can be reached at pww@pww.org.

The Rosenbergs and the Cuban Five

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:27:00 +0000

Political frameups of pro-labor, antiracist and antiwar activists are nothing new in U.S. history. The Haymarket martyrs, Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelo Herndon, Angela Davis: these are just a few of the most celebrated cases where government authorities used trumped-up evidence to railroad innocent people to jail or to the death chamber.

Two additional cases are the 1950s frameup of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged atomic spies of the Cold War era, and the 1990s frameup of the Cuban Five, five Cubans who tried to thwart terrorist attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil. While there are significant differences between the two cases, there are also undeniable parallels.

Both trials were held in an atmosphere poisoned by political hysteria.

In the Rosenberg case, anti-communism was rampant. The trial took place as the U.S. government was launching its Cold War against the USSR. This campaign sought to demonize the Soviet Union and Communists, to cancel out the great prestige of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and to turn back the worldwide surge toward national liberation and socialism.

On the domestic front, anti-communism reached a fever pitch in the Rosenberg trial and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. A concerted effort was made by McCarthy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and others to paint U.S. Communists as Soviet spies seeking to overturn the “American way of life.” The real goal was to wipe out the gains made under the New Deal in social legislation and to weaken the labor movement.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were victims of this anti-communist hysteria, a hysteria that made it impossible for them to get a fair trial. Affirming their innocence to the end, the Rosenbergs were cruelly executed on June 19, 1953.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. While anti-communism in the U.S. has greatly subsided, pockets of it are still very much alive. One such pocket is Miami, Fla., particularly among the Cuban American population.

The Cuban Revolution, while achieving enormous gains for its people in the form of free education, health care, housing, employment and racial and social equality, gave rise to a host of bitter enemies. Among these were (often wealthy) counterrevolutionary Cubans who fled the country and set up shop in Miami, hoping one day to return to a “liberated” Cuba.

While today’s Miami includes many Cuban Americans who favor normalizing relations with Cuba, there remains a hard-core anti-communist, anti-Fidel group of fanatical elements that promotes paramilitary training and terrorism, frequently

aided and abetted by the CIA.

For over 44 years the Cuban people have been subjected to acts of right-wing terror emanating from Miami-based anti-communist groups like Alpha 66, Omega 7, and Brothers to the Rescue.

These acts include biological warfare; the 1976 bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner carrying 73 people, killing them all; bombings of ships, harbors, and hotels; hundreds of attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro; and countless other acts of provocation and sabotage.

As a consequence, Cuba has taken steps to protect itself. At some point it decided to have five of its citizens infiltrate terrorist groups in Florida to notify Cuba of their plans. The work of these five heroes – Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and Rene González – no doubt saved many Cuban and U.S. lives. But in 1998 they were arrested, charged with spying against the U.S., an absolute misrepresentation of their role.

Lawyers representing the Cuban Five immediately sought to have the trial venue changed from Miami to somewhere else, arguing it would be impossible for the Five to get a fair trial in Miami.

The judge denied the motion for a change in venue. Evidence about the terrorism perpetrated by right-wing exile groups in Miami was ruled inadmissible. The FBI, the prosecuting attorney, and the judge were hell-bent on twisting the facts and determined to get a conviction. Attorney General John Ashcroft (much like Attorney General Herbert Brownell in the Rosenberg case) added greater vengefulness to the prosecution.

The sentences were outrageous, with three of the five getting life-plus sentences, and the two others getting 15 to 19 years.

The media has been strangely silent about the trial and the harsh treatment the Cuban Five have received in prison, including frequent bouts of solitary confinement and cruel denials of family visitation rights, again reminiscent of the Rosenberg case.

But the truth will out. Bush’s lies on Iraq are becoming unmasked. So, too, will the lies about the Cuban Five. Their imprisonment must not be allowed to stand.

An appeal for a new trial is pending in Atlanta. Write and e-mail letters to your congressperson. Write letters to the press. Once the American people learn the truth about the Cuban Five, the truth will demand their freedom.

John Gilman chairs the Milwaukee Committee to Defend the Cuban Five. In the 1950s he chaired the Milwaukee Committee for the Defense of the Rosenbergs. He can be reached at johngilman@aol.com

Freedom Ride building solidarity and unity

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 07:13:00 +0000

Opinion

As the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride travels through 81 cities across the country, the impact is sure to reverberate far and wide. Already, organizing rallies are creating new bonds among a broad cross section of those angered by the cynical use of the Sept. 11 tragedy by the Bush administration to scapegoat recent immigrants and trample on civil liberties.

“Does denying basic due process rights make us safer from terrorism?” Maria Elena Durazo, Freedom Ride leader and vice president of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union asked at a rally in New Haven, Conn. “Sept. 11 does not give the Bush administration the right to take away our civil liberties.”

That packed rally was remarkable for its multi-racial, multi-national character. Low wage workers, students and scholars, peace and civil liberties activists, religious leaders, and elected officials from around the state stood united in defense of the right to organize, the right to due process, the right to family reunification and a clear path to citizenship.

At a spring conference on the USA Patriot Act, HERE President John Wilhelm emphasized the common struggle for civil liberties and immigrant rights, warning that precedents against immigrants without documents will soon be used against “legal” immigrants and then against all citizens.

Wilhelm’s leadership in the labor movement has been key to turning the tide from immigrant bashing to solidarity with recent immigrant workers. Aggressive organizing campaigns have made these workers perhaps the largest growing section of the labor movement.

The Bush administration’s all-out campaign to destroy organized labor and curtail an organized, pro-worker vote turnout has a sharp anti-immigrant edge. Immigrant workers seeking citizenship and union representation are a potentially powerful force that could help defeat the right wing in 2004.

“When we mobilize and march and vote together we win,” emphasized Durazo at the Connecticut rally. “We’re going to show the politicians and the right wing that immigrants deserve and demand the right to be citizens and have the same rights on the job as all Americans. We protect the civil liberties of all Americans when we fight for the civil liberties of immigrants in this country.”

The Freedom Ride is strengthened by its ability to connect to local struggles everywhere. In New Haven, where a quarter of the population now depends on Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital for employment, the Freedom Ride is drawing support from unions preparing for a possible Aug. 27 strike and their community allies.

Unidad Latina en Accion, a local grass roots immigrant rights organization, has linked the Freedom Ride to an ongoing campaign to win the right to drivers’ licenses for immigrants. Immigrant workers seeking union recognition at Chefs Solutions in North Haven and Cintas in Branford have also embraced the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride as a key tactic to shine a light on the violations against undocumented workers’ wages, benefits and health and safety on the job.

The peace and justice community has enthusiastically responded to the outreach from the labor movement, and is linking the Freedom Ride to the campaign to repeal the USA Patriot Act, aimed at stifling opposition to policies of war and aggression.

The New Haven Board of Aldermen will hold a special public hearing on issues faced by new immigrants in September in the Fair Haven neighborhood, home to many immigrants from Latin America.

In every city, the Freedom Ride will embrace the struggles of immigrants and all working people for human rights, dignity and justice.

The Most Rev. Peter A. Rosazza endorsed the Freedom Ride because its goals are consistent with the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a recent pastoral letter between the U.S. and Mexican bishops. Rosazza quoted the letter in his endorsement: “Making legal the large number of undocumented workers from many nations who are in the United States would help to stabilize the labor here, to preserve family unity and to improve the standard of living in immigrant communities.”

Securing the human rights of immigrant workers to organize without the threat of deportation and imprisonment will enable the entire labor movement to grow. The unity being forged along this road is key to building the kind of powerful coalition that can defeat Bush and the right wing in the 2004 elections.

Joelle Fishman is chair of the Connecticut Communist Party USA. She can be reached at joelle.fishman@pobox.com

War theater of the absurd

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 10:51:00 +0000

Opinion

According to Senator John Warner (R-Va.), the new Pentagon “terrorism futures market” will be “immediately disestablished.” This is a reassuring thought, given the idiocy and ridiculousness of the idea in the first place.

The Pentagon was contemplating establishing a betting pool on where terrorism threats would come from, in order to let the “free market” help gather intelligence. “Investors” would bet on the likelihood that the next big terrorist attack would come from one or another region of the world. Somehow, this was supposed to help figure out the likelihood of where an attack really would come from.

When the plan was first disclosed, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans. How would this actually work? Would they send a prospectus to Osama Bin Laden, asking him to “invest” in his forces being the ones to attack next? Or would the Pentagon pitch it to arms dealers around the world, so they could look at their sales figures and use them to make the right bets? Or would “defense” contractors use the fund, to hedge against their being based in the wrong part of the world, spreading the risk that they’ve bet wrong?

Reactionaries have been busy for the last few decades reifying the “market” as the repository of all wisdom. Somehow, the “market” knows, just like The Shadow. They’ve been busy ascribing human characteristics to this inhuman and inhumane thing. It’s the “Return of the Invisible Hand,” the myth created by Adam Smith that the market mystically and magically works to transform human greed into human benefit, without any of the investors, capitalists, gamblers who are actually involved having to do anything other than be greedy and avaricious.

But a “market” doesn’t know anything. A “market” doesn’t have knowledge or intelligence or judgment or any other human characteristic. A “market” is a gambling operation, with the percentages rigged for those who already have the most money and/or the most inside information.

How would a “futures market,” in which gamblers bet on whether or not Arafat would be assassinated or Israel subjected to a biological weapons attack, collect information? Would it be a bullish or bearish market? Would it take into account which terrorist factions the CIA is currently supporting or building?

What would be next? A futures trading market on how many U.S. casualties? Betting on the date of the first U.S. pre-emptive nuclear strike? Betting on the length of the next Bush war? Why not a betting pool on the next presidential race – we could turn the elections over to private gambling industry and save lots of money – we wouldn’t even have to run the elections, just let the market take care of everything!

That such idiocy could pass for serious analysis, and garner federal spending to the tune of over $600,000 already is astounding. They were getting ready to ask for $3 million next year!

It seems to me we’ve reached new heights of stupidity in governmental circles. As Big Daddy would say, this is evidence of “mendacity, son, mendacity.”

Maybe the New York Stock Market could set up a futures trading program to predict the next stock market crash? Maybe a betting pool on how much unemployment will increase during the rest of the Bush administration? If the market really knows it all, why can’t the market predict itself?

Why not skip the market entirely and go straight to the Psychic Friends Network?

Marc Brodine is the Washington state chair of the Communist Party and can be reached at marcbrodine@comcast.net.

Bushs clear sky lies

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:52:00 +0000

Opinion

It might seem like a long way from the dangerous streets of Baghdad to the smog-laden cities of the United States, but the two share one thing in common: both have been the subject of massive misinformation campaigns by the Bush administration.

In each case the White House has tried to mislead the American public through a pattern of deceit, deception and distortion. As “national security” became the stated rationale for the invasion of Iraq, now “energy security” has become the Bush administration’s alleged reason to gut the Clean Air Act.

We are learning daily how information about Iraq was manipulated. The White House now admits President Bush’s drum-beating State of the Union speech was inaccurate when he claimed Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. A key retired State Department intelligence official now concedes “the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq,” according to The New York Times. Who could forget the president’s allegation of a connection between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda? That was yet another cynical attempt to dupe the public.

And where are those weapons of mass destruction?

Just as President Bush doctored information on Iraq, he and key administration spin controllers are doing the same in their quest to destroy the nation’s flagship environmental law, the Clean Air Act. The president highlighted his dirty-air crusade during the State of the Union speech (the same speech that included the erroneous claim about Iraq and Africa) as he promoted what he termed his “Clear Skies legislation” – a misnomer if ever there was one.

The president’s real goal here, of course, is to help his college classmate and Edison Electric Institute head, Tom Kuhn, and his other big campaign contributors from the electric power industry, which is now lobbying ferociously for passage of the Bush dirty-air bill. The president’s chief propagandist in this effort is Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer who formerly represented the power industry and is now Assistant EPA Administrator in charge of air pollution policy.

In recent testimony to Congress, Holmstead asserted that the Bush plan would reduce pollution “in a way that is much faster and more efficient than under current law.” Separately, Holmstead released a new “analysis” which purported to back up his claim.

The “analysis” was as specious as the Bush claims about Iraq. It created a false comparison by asserting – incorrectly – that the air would remain polluted under the current Clean Air Act.

Consider how the Holmstead “analysis” treated toxic mercury, which has contaminated lakes and streams throughout the nation. Holmstead assumed there would be zero cleanup of mercury in the future. In reality, the EPA is under a court order to issue standards by next year that would require every electric power plant in the nation to reduce its mercury emissions by late 2007. In a private meeting with the electric power industry, the EPA predicted it could require as much as a 90 percent cleanup of the toxic pollutant.

The Bush dirty-air plan would eliminate the current mercury cleanup requirement and replace it with a much weaker plan that would permit power companies to emit high levels of mercury pollution well into the 2020s. When grilled about this by members of Congress like Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine), Holmstead promptly changed the subject, arguing that Congress should look “not just at mercury.”

Taking up that challenge, other members of Congress have noted that the Bush administration has either failed to analyze other cleanup proposals, including those sponsored by Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), or tried to suppress internal EPA analyses which showed that competing plans would do a better job of protecting public health.

Almost in desperation, Holmstead and the Bush administration now argue their dirty-air bill is needed for “energy security” – under the bizarre claim that we’d be more “secure” by using more home-grown coal rather than natural gas from a foreign threat ... like Canada?

Laughable as that argument may seem when put to scrutiny, it is now part of the Bush mantra.

So let’s consider what else is in the fine print of the Bush dirty-air bill. Deadlines for achieving public health standards would be postponed, possibly indefinitely. Protections for local communities would be repealed. Coal-burning power companies would be given the right to pollute. The air we breathe would become private property. State authorities would be curtailed. National parks would be under siege.

These and other protections of current law would all be sacrificed in return for a Bush promise that a “market-based” system would do better. No wonder the campaign-contributing power companies favor the Bush dirty-air plan. And no wonder Rep. Waxman refers to the Bush plan as “a faith-based idea of how we’re going to clean the air.”

Congress, the media and the public shouldn’t take this proposal on faith, any more than they should trust President Bush’s justification for invading Iraq.

Leon G. Billings is president of the Clean Air Trust. As staff director of the Senate Clean Air Subcommittee, he wrote the 1970 Clean Air Act. This article originally appeared at www.TomPaine.com

Some modest advice for the Democratic candidate

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:48:00 +0000

Opinion

I’d like to offer some friendly advice to whoever ends up as the Democratic Party candidate for President – a word or two to the wise, so to speak.

First off, a history lesson: In 1984, running against Reagan, a month before the elections Walter Mondale was behind, way behind, in the polls. In a last-ditch effort, he finally began to talk directly, forcefully and energetically about issues facing working people. He began, if you will, to campaign more on class issues.

What happened? Mondale started to rapidly pull up in the polls. There was more excitement being generated by his campaign, people started to listen to what he had to say, and he started to make clear the real differences between him and Reagan.

He ended up about two weeks short of success; if he’d had two more weeks to campaign, and he kept gaining in the polls at the same accelerated rate, he would have defeated Reagan.

What does this one example mean? By itself, it might only be an example of 20-20 hindsight.

But then, four years later, Michael Dukakis, running against Bush the First, found himself trailing badly in the polls a month before Election Day. Up to that point, he had been running as a technocrat, a fiscally conservative liberal, a good administrator. His poll numbers were sinking – in fact, with his lackluster campaign approach, he’d squandered what had been a commanding lead in the polls. Due to his own bumbling, and to the viciously racist Willie Horton ads orchestrated by Bush campaign manager Lee Attwater, Dukakis was far behind and slipping.

What happened? Dukakis started talking in a much more forthright fashion, speaking directly to the issues of concern to working people. He aggressively attacked Bush’s record and program that benefited the ruling class. He talked about wages, working conditions, family leave, and the sense that the rich were ripping off the rest of us.

And, lo and behold, his poll numbers started to improve, rapidly. By the time of the election, he had almost pulled even with Bush. If there had only been another two or three weeks, he might have pulled off a victory. But no, he didn’t start soon enough.

So here’s my advice: Don’t wait until the last minute to start campaigning for the working-class vote by talking directly and seriously about the issues facing working-class people.

This advice goes directly against the proposals of the Democratic Leadership Council, which wants Democrats to campaign like watered-down Republicans. Given the choice between a real Republican and a faux wannabe, why wouldn’t voters choose the real thing? If Democrats offer only weakened versions of Republican programs, why should voters think there is any difference between them? If Democrats refuse to speak up for workers, why should workers campaign for them?

In my view, the only path to victory for whoever is the eventual Democratic presidential nominee is to base his or her campaign on fighting the rich and super-rich, promoting policies that would benefit workers and poor people, and acting like there are real differences with the Republicans, not just cosmetic ones.

Otherwise, the Dems could end up another two weeks short in 2004.

Marc Brodine is chair of the Washington State Communist Party. He can be reached at marcbrodine@comcast.net

The military privatization scam

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 05:05:00 +0000

Opinion

Here in sunny San Diego, a petty officer from Chicago told me sailors now have to pay $7 a day from their basic allowance for subsistence (BAS) for the luxury of eating that good ol’ Navy chow, whether they eat the Navy food or not. Several sailors said (off the record, of course) that although they are entitled to receive a monthly minimum $900 basic allowance for housing (BAH), this is far below what the average single unit rents for. And, when the government raises the BAH, the landlords raise the rent! With the Bush administration speeding up the privatization of military housing, local lenders and developers can look forward to more taxpayer subsidies of their “free” market while they decry government regulation.

San Diego, with its wonderful climate, high tech industry and tourist attractions, is also home to the largest concentration of standing military forces in the United States. With more military personnel than are currently stationed in Iraq, San Diego County is also home to steep energy, housing and food costs and no shortage of corrupt businesses (“Scam Diegans,” as some locals refer to them), white supremacists, and sunshine patriots and right-wing media.

After years of economic restructuring (the local aircraft industry alone lost more than 30,000 jobs in the last 20 years) the local union movement has had to fight waves of union busting and outright chicanery by the political establishment. Likewise, the economic interests of active and retired military personnel are used to whipsaw and put a downward pressure on the interests of all working people, including military personnel themselves.

Increasing privatization of the military means sworn personnel are being replaced by workers with dismal working conditions in companies unregulated by the federal government. Using the privatization mantra of “better, faster, cheaper,” the Pentagon now contracts out to companies involved in everything from handling ships’ stores to food preparation and sanitation. These companies are largely non-union and get a tax break to employ people in the penal system or in welfare-to-work programs. In effect, the federal government is subsidizing exploitation of subjugated peoples whether they be in countries under military occupation or immigrants on the homefront. Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root Services’ use of this system is largely blamed for recent epidemics of food poisoning among troops stationed in Afghanistan and Kuwait. In the now largely privatized shipyard industry, the use of taxpayer-financed cost-of-living allowances to subsidize anti-union activities was condemned by the United Steelworkers of America during a recent strike against Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. This practice led local Congressman Bob Filner (D-Calif.) to say, standing outside the Naval Station here, that he was ashamed to be part of a government that would do such things to workers.

The Navy’s BAS and BAH supplements in addition to basic military pay are supposed to cushion cost-of-living expenses for sailors and their families. But the sailors I talked to feel cheated by a government that gives them an allowance on one hand and then requires their benefits to be subject to the “free” market on the other.

Fighting fraud, sweatshop conditions and environmental degradation is made all the more complicated by the government’s role. A case in point is the battle of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) with Lion Apparel in Beattyville, Ky., and the Defense Logistics Agency over the exploitation of mostly women workers who sew military uniforms. (For details, see the May/June 1999 issue of Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ99/boal.html)

It should compound our outrage that private companies like Blackwater USA are now allowed to take over tactical and weapons training for the military.

While the Bush administration loots the treasury to benefit the wealthy, it trades on the labor of workers and the lives of military personnel, in the name of freedom and democracy, for the highest possible return to its allies in industry and on Wall Street.

Behind waving banners and patriotic appeals this administration and its friends are using union busting, deregulation, privatization and shady accounting to pull off a scam on the American people.

Shouldn’t we craft a democratic political movement that will provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and restore the blessings of liberty and justice for all? What are the consequences if we don’t?

Moe Radd is a shipyard worker and a decorated Navy veteran. He can be reached at pww@pww.org