People Before Profit blog

Texans face school crisis

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 09:02:00 +0000

Opinion

If disastrous trends in Texas portend bad developments in the rest of the nation, as they have since George W. Bush became governor, then Americans should prepare to fight if we want to save public education. Texas schools, like others throughout the nation, are afflicted. The proposed cures being peddled by the GOP, though, are considerably worse than any illness.

Having already rigged the November elections in Texas through redistricting, the state’s right-wing legislative majority awaits the March 9 primary elections, in which incumbent officeholders will hide their intentions for the much-delayed special session on school finance. Rampant speculation on their “remedies” is nourished by almost daily “smoke and mirrors” pronouncements from Republican Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick.

None of the proposals being dangled before the public includes significant increases in public school funding. None of them would equalize per-pupil expenditures. All of them divert funds into privatization schemes. All of them shift the tax burden even further onto the poor and working class.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Topeka held public schools remiss in their constitutional duty to provide equal education. The American ruling class, its politicians, and a handful of spokespersons in the education field have used the ensuing decades to muddy the issue.

In Texas, an impoverished school district near San Antonio, Edgewood, brought the basic issue of disparate per-pupil expenditures into focus in the early 1970s.

Under pressure from the courts, civil rights organizations and public opinion, the Texas Legislature fumbled until the 1990s, when they mandated that the richer districts had to share their property-tax incomes with the poorer districts. The solution, which was much more fair than any that had preceded it, calmed the legal fight, but brought on a storm of orchestrated propaganda from the corporate-controlled media. They dubbed the new school finance procedure “Robin Hood” and denigrated it at every opportunity.

In the 2002 state elections, both Democrats and Republicans ranted against “Robin Hood” and swore to exterminate it. Both said that more state aid to the districts would replace the disparity in local property-tax income. Well, after the election, the right-wingers changed their tune. “No new funding,” said the governor. “Increase state sales taxes and cut local property taxes,” said the lieutenant governor. “No new taxes,” said the speaker of the House. “Divert tax money away from public education” they all sang.

Many progressive Texans have been drawn into quibbling over relatively minor points. They point out, for example, that money for schools could come from taxing the corporations who do business in Texas but register their taxable activities elsewhere, most notably in Delaware.

They also point out that both local property taxes and statewide sales taxes regressively overburden the poorest Texans, and that the proposed increase in sales taxes would make them even more regressive. They observe that the old private schools, the new charter schools, the privatization efforts, and the ongoing home-schooling schemes have failed to improve on the public schools.

But the corporate news sources and their news editors control the public “debate;” consequently, it mainly revolves around how much to cut the schools, how much to award the privatizers, how much more tax-and-tuition burden can be heaped onto the backs of the poor, how much to penalize educators, and how much more meaningless and misleading testing can be added to the burdens of Texas students.

Recently published “solutions” exacerbate the problem: vouchers, doing away with requirements for teaching jobs, textbook cuts, weakening teacher unions, merit pay for test scores, more tests, increased sales tax rates, sales taxes on basic necessities, cutting extracurricular activities, tuition for preschoolers, increasing classroom sizes, removing funds from other state social services, and a babble of senseless proposals that would have no meaningful effect one way or the other.

We progressive Texans, and all Americans, must clear our heads of the flimflam and unite to fight for our children’s rights. Public education is being undermined and attacked. No increases in tuition! No regressive tax schemes! No privatization! Real money and real educational solutions for our children!

Jim Lane is a World correspondent, labor activist and former teacher from North Texas. He can be reached ator via the web site tx.cpusa.org.

A choice for Maine: war and Bush, or health care?

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 06:38:00 +0000

Opinion

Independence – or crankiness – comes naturally for some of us in the Northeast. An active separatist movement is on the move in Vermont. And at a Lewiston, Maine, forum Jan. 11, proponents of universal health care showed no enthusiasm for being part of a national campaign for universal health care, none for reaching out to the labor movement. They spoke of their pride in Maine’s leadership role in the fight for health care reform.

They were referring to Gov. John Baldacci’s Dirigo Plan, which will extend basic health insurance coverage to almost all Maine residents over the next five years. Indeed, the package does represent a unique and innovative attempt to address inequalities, and according to one speaker, insurance companies and hospitals view the plan as dangerous and are plotting retaliation. Reportedly, the Heritage Foundation is setting up an outpost in Maine.

Three days earlier, critics of Baldacci’s plan to cut Medicaid spending by $22 million had weighed in at a public hearing in Augusta. The cuts are part of the governor’s plan to make up for a $110 million state budgetary shortfall. The hearing resounded with predictions that poor people and the disabled would suffer because of the cuts. The governor’s spokesperson cut off any suggestions that certain tax exemptions enjoyed by large companies might be withheld in order to forestall the cuts.

No one at the hearing referred to recent national developments in health care coverage. In a Dec. 22, 2003, news release, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reported that up to 1.6 million low-income people in 34 states – including 500,000 children – are losing health coverage because of state budget cuts. The cuts are in response to combined state budget deficits of $40-$50 billion that are projected for the coming fiscal year.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program – enacted in 1997 to provide coverage for low-income children not eligible for Medicaid – has provided 4 million previously uninsured children with insurance coverage. But six states with budgetary shortfalls have recently closed the children’s insurance plan to new enrollees.

The atmosphere at this hearing and similar ones throughout the nation might have been different had the story been told of how money is going for war and the military rather than for people. A perverted federalism that reduces citizens to vying for crumbs dispensed by the states surely represents another example of the politics of division. In that arena, people do not easily arrive at a common language to describe humanity’s work.

Here are some words that, spoken in public venues like these, might have been relevant: “We hear that the federal government no longer has much to do with humanitarian rescue. Our leaders tell us that on account of war without end, hundreds of billions are already spoken for. A deficit now stretches out into the trillions. There is no money left. They are gloating; the New Deal ‘beast’ they hate so much is starving, it’s on life support. We ask this: what if there were no war, no militarism? Answer: a few months of no Iraq war would return health care to millions, allow for decent schools – a few months more, vaccines for the world’s children.”

Michael Parenti suggests that an effective resistance to the Iraq war will center on the people themselves, who will beat back the warmakers: “The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socioeconomic development of the many.”

Health care reformers in Maine will recognize contradictions. The governor’s health program is a testimony to good intentions. Health care coverage is expanded, but then an objective reality takes over. Indeed, while the rule of money and corporations holds sway, while the people’s resources and emotions are mortgaged to a regime of war and fear, the needs and hopes of regular people get short shrift. The job now, of course, is to block the plans and darken the prospects of the regime in Washington, and that means beat Bush in November.

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

The Bush budget

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 06:21:00 +0000

Opinion

The Bush administration has come forward with a $2.4 trillion budget, which includes a $521 billion official budget deficit, and a $401 billion military budget that doesn’t count the cost of the occupation of Iraq, “balanced” by significant cuts in funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and social services. With a straight face, Bush also calls for 50 percent budget deficit reduction over the next five years and boasts that tax cuts will spur large job growth.

John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff who now heads the Center for American Progress, a moderate liberal think tank, called Bush’s statement that he would cut the deficit in half “simply laughable.” Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, and the Committee for Economic Development – all ruling-class institutions – project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, “assuming strong growth.” Podesta noted the huge net job loss and concluded that even if Bush’s figures are correct, “it will not be until May 2007 that this president would have created his first net job. President Bush is well on his way to having the worst job creation record since the Great Depression.”

Actually, the $5 trillion deficit projection is quite conservative. Bush has already broken the previous record for the largest single-year deficit, and will break his own record this year. It is also a very safe bet that a second-term Bush administration would, like the first, see a large net loss in jobs and an even higher loss in skilled, well-paying jobs.

While deficit financing often makes sense in federal social investments in education, housing, health care and other social protections, raising overall living standards and creating a more productive labor force, the spectacular rise in the federal deficit associated with the Reagan and two Bush administrations since 1981 has been connected with sharp reductions in vital social services and has become a material force in undermining American living standards.

Working people should understand that the bigger the federal deficit becomes, the more their tax money goes to interest payments. Further, the most important cause of escalating deficits has been destructive, parasitic military spending, not constructive social spending.

In 1940, the federal deficit was only around $50 billion, even after all the New Deal social welfare reforms. When World War II ended in 1945, it was around $250 billion. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the deficit had multiplied four times to $1 trillion, due in part to the large inflation of the 1970s.

Reagan launched a policy that George Bush I, when he opposed Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, called “voodoo economics.” This policy involved huge increases in military spending with huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and incantations about the need to pass a “balanced budget constitutional amendment.”

When Bush I became president in 1989, he continued the voodoo. Four years later, the deficit had reached $4 trillion. Whatever one may think of Bill Clinton, his failure to restore spending for social programs and infrastructure slashed in the Reagan-Bush I years was at least in part a result of this crippling deficit. Some right-wing pundits even boasted that escalating deficits would ensure that there would never be any money for national health care, public housing, serious federal aid to education, environmental protection and labor law reform.

While the Clinton administration ran budget surpluses in the late 1990s, George W. Bush’s cynical use of the Sept. 11 attacks to provide a blank check for the military, and his tax cuts for the rich, have burdened Americans today with a deficit of $7 trillion and rising.

A recent International Monetary Fund study, lightly reported in the corporate-controlled media, made the point that the Bush deficits potentially threaten international capitalist money markets and the global capitalist investment system. U.S. newspapers skimmed over the IMF assertion that “an immediate and permanent federal tax increase of 60 percent or a 50 percent reduction in Social Security and Medicare benefits” might be needed in the future to control deficits – the kind of austerity policies that the IMF routinely imposes on Third World countries.

Bush’s neo-voodoo economics means that more and more of people’s federal taxes will go to interest payments to finance capital. His policies can only lead to continuing and escalating reduction in U.S. living standards, either through economic stagnation or via austerity policies like those the IMF suggested.

The American people don’t have to limit themselves to a choice between Bush’s robber baron war budget and the regressive policies advocated by the IMF. Once this administration is defeated, it will be possible to roll back deficits by enacting the kind of progressive tax reform legislation already introduced in Congress by Reps. Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, and Bernard Sanders, which re-taxes corporations and the rich. It will also be possible to massively cut the military budget and use the hundreds of billions saved for productive social investments, which will increase our living standards and incomes and further reduce deficits in a positive way.

But the first and necessary step is to get Bush out in 2004!

Norman Markowitz is a history professor at Rutgers University. He can be reached at pww@pww.org.

State of the Union

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 06:14:00 +0000

Opinion

I found the following while rummaging around in my brain.

During the period between WTC and Dubya’s last S-of-the-U speech I had this chronic crick in my neck as a result of constantly looking back over my shoulder à la Butch and Sundance, saying things like, “Who are these guys?” and “These guys are ‘good!’”

Then it all shifted. The end of the speech seemed to mark the beginning of a sea change in the body politic. I’ve been wondering why.

Nothing really new was being said after the speech that hadn’t been said before. And nothing Dubya said was all that diff from what his gang had been saying and doing previously.

I now think what happened is there had been a growing fear in the country about “everything.” Little by little, bits and pieces of doubt had been piling up and hadn’t found any credible answers other than the same – but getting old – “with us or against us” blah blah blah.

Without really knowing it, I think the country was collectively holding its breath and expecting that all would be made whole again with the speech. Kind of like an audience returning to the auditorium for Act Two of a two-act play. Only the second act resolved nothing that was set up in the first. As Dubya walked out of the House chambers, millions of people for the first time saw his bare ass.

That’s what they got for a second act.

But not only did he “flash” the country, he delivered a State of the Union address that was the kick-off for his re-election campaign. And here he “stepped on his appendage” by attacking point by point the positions of his main opponent … Howard Dean. Oooops!

The next day, the people of Iowa tore up his speech and threw it in the garbage, and instead of the sound of a sigh of relief from all that anxious breath being held there was an explosion of voters’ pent-up frustration that sounded a little like, “You bastards!”

Things haven’t been the same since!

Bill Appelhans is a Chicago hospital worker. He can be reached at pww@pww.org.

The sheriff who issues pink underwear

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 07:25:00 +0000

Opinion

Meet Joe Arpaio, husband, father, grandfather and the toughest sheriff in America, as he calls himself. Elected in 1992 to run the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in Phoenix, Ariz., the fourth largest sheriff’s office in the nation, he runs a jail system which houses approximately 8,000 individuals. Many of them are there awaiting trial because they could not afford bail; those convicted are serving sentences of less than a year.

A sterling example of the prevalent “get-tough-on-crime” policies, Arpaio requires chain gang prisoners to provide thousands of dollars of free community services such as cleaning streets, painting over graffiti and burying the deceased indigent in the county’s potters’ field. He boasts that one of the gangs is the nation’s only women’s chain gang. The women often choose to serve there because it is preferable to the alternative: lockdown, where they are confined, four women to an 8- by 12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. All prisoners on chain gangs wear black-and-white striped uniforms. Arpaio introduced this measure in 1997, as he says, to make examples of the prisoners.

Last month Sheriff Arpaio ordered the approximately 500 undocumented immigrants in his jails to register for the draft.

No coddling of criminals in Maricopa. After all, he says, jails are not country clubs. Smoking is forbidden as are coffee, salt, pepper and ketchup; reading material is monitored; there are no movies nor is any recreation provided; unrestricted television is banned. Should a prisoner need to see a nurse he or she must pay $10 for the privilege.

Apparently because, by his own testimony, he is slightly overweight and on a restricted diet, Arpaio does his prisoners the service of restricting theirs as well: he recently cut the daily caloric intake from 3,000 to 2,500. He boasts the average prisoner meal costs the state but 20 cents; prisoners get only two of them a day. The food is often reported to be old and rotten. Small wonder: it is often surplus food. By contrast, food for the department’s dogs costs $1.15 a day per dog.

Shortly after Arpaio took office in 1993 he expanded the state’s policy of housing prisoners in tents. According to former department employees, he emptied an entire floor of one jail to accomplish this. He is thus able to say, and does say, that he will always be able to house anyone picked up or condemned to his jail system. The tent cities, as they are called, oblige their over 2,000 inhabitants to live under the broiling Arizona sun year round. In the summer the temperature can reach 120 degrees. Even in the fall and winter it is close to 100 degrees during the day. At night it can become very cold.

The Maricopa County posse program has been in existence since the ’30s. It is a volunteer system that provides community services such as search and rescue operations and enforcement support. Or that is what it did prior to the arrival of Arpaio, who expanded the posse to 3,200 individuals. Their duties now include rounding up “deadbeat” parents, patrolling malls during holiday season and, in the county’s “red light” districts, fighting prostitution. Just how these are accomplished Sheriff Arpaio does not specify. He justifies the expanded duties saying they are essentially free services to the community.

The MCSO web site (www.mcso.org) enables one to see mug shots (in full color!) and details about the arrest of anyone held in the jail system. There is a “Crime of the Week,” which displays all those arrested for a particular offense. When this writer last accessed the site that offense was DUI – Driving Under the Influence (of alcohol). The viewer can pick and choose offenses and see mug shots and details on any prisoner held for that particular infringement of the law. Some of the more questionable offenses listed are “family offenses,” “insurance violations,” “interfere with judicial processing,” “profession and occupation violations,” “transportation violations,” and “watercraft violations.” Mug shots and details can also be obtained for particular prisoners by supplying a prisoner’s booking number or name.

And one final humiliation: the sheriff requires all prisoners to wear pink underwear.

What this regime of torture accomplishes is to make this kind of treatment an acceptable part of the national get-tough-on-crime policy. Arpaio explains it in detail on the MCSO web site, bragging that it teaches wrongdoers the evil of their ways. To the prisoner who expresses dissatisfaction he says simply, “Well, don’t come back.” Is it any wonder that human rights groups regard his jail system as the harshest in the country?

Sheriff Arpaio is running for re-election this year with his policies as his platform. He says he welcomes suggestions from the public. You can send your comments to Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, 100 West Washington, Suite 1900, Phoenix, AZ 85003, or call 800-352-4553 (in state) or 602-256-100 (out of state). You can also submit comments online at www.mcso.org. As a start you might suggest he tender his resignation – effective immediately.

Julia Lutsky is a reader in New York City. She can be reached at blaine.jack@prodigy.net.

Beyond rebel flags and pickup trucks

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 07:19:00 +0000

Opinion

It was too bad that Dr. Dean backed away from his stated desire to become the candidate of the bubbas sporting rebel flags in their pickup trucks. It would have been better if he had stood his ground and insisted that he equally desired to become the candidate of the brothers sporting their whatever in their SUVs. Bringing the bubbas and brothers together under the same political tent could turn out to be the first step toward a very serious dialogue about race in our time.

A “very serious dialogue about race” has to go beyond discussion of the impact of the sight of the rebel flag on the feelings of slave descendants – it has to go all the way back to slavery itself and the lingering effects thereof on those descendants even in our time. It has to investigate all the alternatives to resolving these lingering effects, ultimately including the old bugaboo: reparations.

Reparations is the oldest and least discussed unfinished business in the nation’s history – so old and so little discussed in fact that for many Americans the failure to settle the dispute after so many years has become their main reason for opposing any discussion or attempts to settle it now.

It’s like if you rape and rob a whole race for 245 years, and get away with it for 138 years, then that makes you innocent – never mind that the victims are still bleeding from the bludgeoning. Almost all whites and most Blacks refuse to talk about reparations for the same reasons they refuse to talk about rape – one trying to deny and repress the guilt and the other trying to hide and deny the shame.

It is this “see no evil speak no evil” frame of mind coupled with this double denial of guilt and shame that has turned this malady into a dangerous aneurysm deeply buried in the brain of the nation. Just as afflicted individuals foolishly ignore systematic headaches and risk of strokes and death, so it is with the national body politic. This aneurysm grew out of the “peculiar institution” and has been lodged in the country’s psyche for 138 years – bubbling up only a few times in widespread public view – as in 40 acres and a mule.

Surgeons cure a physical aneurysm by opening up the skull and dealing directly with it and this of course scares the heebie-jeebies out of the patient, but the fear and anxiety usually dissipates when the patient understands the great danger of doing nothing and just letting the condition linger. This is also true for the nation patient, which is currently refusing to recognize its condition – hiding behind such nonsense as “it’s too divisive,” “there’s a statute of limitations – case closed” and “your daddy’s dead anyway” – rather than opening up the national skull and honestly dialoging about what we see.

Dialogue and argument out in the open between Black and white Americans is the only sure correction for what is lodged in our collective skull. This we must do before we can understand what this aneurysm is about and why we must prepare to take the surgical treatment of open, out-front interracial communication. And we are not just talking about making people feel better. We are talking about defusing a time bomb in the national brain.

Those who seek the highest office in the land need to demonstrate their capacity to lead by instigating a real serious dialogue about race in our time. No, no, no! – this does not require that they “line up” either for or against reparations – only that they recognize that this is an issue that affects the lives of a significant number of their supporters and is therefore deserving of serious consideration. They can lend their support for this “consideration” by now declaring their support for House Resolution 40, which Congressman John Conyers has introduced at the beginning of each session of the House since 1989. The bill proposes the establishment of a Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African Americans.

All of us are now called to evaluate the leadership potential of those aspiring to lead the nation. All of us, but particularly African Americans, are responsible for seeing that these would-be-presidents face up to the issue of reparations. Holding their feet to this political fire is the special mission of African American voters – after 138 years of avoidance and trivialization it is time they made reparations stance the litmus test for determining who gets their support. Congressman Conyers says: “America must come to terms with the implications of its history. Fairness and justice for the descendants of slavery, including the question of reparations, need to be dealt with once and for all.”

Dr. Eugene Walton, former coordinator of affirmative action at the Library of Congress, is author of the recently published “From Gratz v. Bollinger to Reparations” (Aventine Press 2003). He can be reached at pww@pww.org.

Learning from Canada

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 07:11:00 +0000

Opinion

I lived in Manitoba, Canada, for 10 years and traveled extensively across Canada. In Montreal I was taken by a group of trade unionists to a monument erected to the memory of Dr. Norman Bethune, a member of the Communist Party of Canada who is widely regarded as having given the initial direction and leadership that eventually led to the establishment of Canada’s present excellent health care system.

After Bethune’s death the struggle for a national heath care system in Canada was carried on by Tim Buck, leader of the Communist Party of Canada, and Tommy Douglas, leader of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). The Canadian government honored Bethune’s memory with a postage stamp. Canadian actor Donald Sutherland starred in “Bethune,” a movie about his life – I encourage everyone to see it.

To try to prove that Canada’s national health care system is a failure, our big-business media constantly point out that the system sometimes becomes “overburdened.” However, what is never stated is that Canadians don’t hesitate to go to the doctor. In Canada you can go to the doctor for free! Canadians go for every little ache and pain – in the interest of preventive medicine. It makes more sense to treat something in its initial stage than to let it get out of control, possibly becoming life-threatening or much more costly to treat.

Another factor related to the “overburdening” is that American recruiters are constantly traversing Canada trying to entice doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals to come to the United States where, they are told, they can make a lot more money. While the problem is not yet a “hemorrhaging” that threatens the existence of the Canadian health care system, it does present a very big problem, especially in the two NDP-controlled provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where higher education is heavily subsidized by the socialist-oriented provincial governments.

They attempt to provide the most affordable, accessible, highest quality health care by making higher education affordable to all youth. So, these provinces pay to train doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, and after these people have been working in their fields gaining valuable hands-on experience – along comes an American corporate recruiter holding out the lure of higher pay to come work in the United States, offering big cash bonuses and perks as the clincher to the deal.

The Canadian government also provides very unique “supplemental coverages” (also free) for all those living in Canada. For instance, every new mother gets one year off of work while receiving half her pay, to care for and bond with her new baby. She can take a second year off with no pay. In either case, the employer is required by law to provide her with her job, or a comparable job, when she returns to work. The Canadian government also provides cash stipends to families for children.

The socialist-oriented provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba are world leaders in the area of assisting workers injured on the job with physical therapy and job retraining programs, again at no cost.

Yes, there remains a problem with paying health care professionals the best wages. But, if you travel across Canada, you can quickly see why Canada doesn’t have adequate resources to accomplish all that it wants to in health care and other social programs. Everywhere you look, American, British, French, and Japanese corporations are stealing Canada’s wealth – from nickel in Sudbury, Ontario, and Thompson, Manitoba, to logs in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, and Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Canada has a national health care system because the Canadian people fought for it. It was not a “gift” from the government. One reason Canada still has the resources for health care is that the Canadian people have struggled hard – not only to defend their health care system, but also for a policy that emphasizes peaceful solutions to world problems. Canada’s prime minister, very reluctantly and under great pressure from a united peace movement, including the Canadian Labour Congress, refused to participate in Bush’s dirty war in Iraq. George Bush made the decision to spend billions of dollars on war, death, and destruction in Iraq, rather than on establishing a national health care system.

Canadian and American workers both have much to gain if we join hands across the border in the struggles for peace and social justice against corporate greed.

Alan Maki is a reader in Warroad, Minn. He can be reached at alanmaki@wiktel.com.

Northern Ireland Racism spiraling out of control

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 04:38:00 +0000

News Analysis

“Race crime shock – attacks now averaging nearly one a day.” This front-page headline in the Belfast Telegraph sent shivers down many observers’ spines last month.

It came just a few days after a pregnant Chinese woman had been evicted from her home, along with two other families.

The rise of racist attacks across Northern Ireland is the highest in the United Kingdom and the biggest rise of any type of crime. Even the Police Service of Northern Ireland seems to be speechless at the 212 reported incidents within the last eight months. In 1997, there were only 25 reported racist attacks.

Obviously, reported attacks represent only the tip of the iceberg. Wherever you go, racist graffiti, posters and stickers seem to be springing up. Many victims are too afraid to report the sickening attacks and intimidation.

South Belfast real estate agent William Faulkner got a “warning” not to rent properties to Chinese or Black people.

He is terrified of going against this threat. “If a Black or a Chinese person tries to rent a property, I would have to tell them it is not safe. If this goes on, someone is going to be burned alive or murdered,” he said.

Just as worrying as the increase in attacks and the climate of fear that they have created is the apathy on the part of both the authorities and the political establishment. Neither Belfast City Council nor the new assembly has done anything to counteract the racists. Even lip-service is a rarity.

And, when looking closer at the situation, a sinister connection between the fascist hate-mongers and “official” politics comes to the surface.

Northern Ireland is the only country in Europe which keeps its asylum-seekers in a high-security prison.

For years, the situation in Maghaberry prison, where Nigerian women with babies have been locked up for up to 20 hours a day, has been branded by human rights campaigners as outrageous. It is far more than a terrible way to treat asylum-seekers – it encourages racist thinking.

Craigavon Ulster Unionist Party Councilor Fred Crowe recently went public with a number of nazi-style statements against the planning application for a mosque in the town. He was applauded by his Democratic Unionist Party peers.

After Crowe’s outburst, attacks and intimidation against Muslims in the area mushroomed and the White Nationalist Party launched a leafleting campaign. Protests and thousands of signatures on an Anti-Racism Network petition to get the DUP leadership to remove the councilor fell on deaf ears.

Links between loyalist paramilitaries, Combat 18 and the White Nationalist Party, which claims to have over 100 supporters in Northern Ireland, have been common knowledge for years.

The police have pointed at this dangerous coalition’s role in trouble surrounding some of the Orange Order marches, but no attempt has been made to stop it from operating.

The way that the fascists operate is not new. They blame foreigners for job losses, lack of housing and all the other problems that working class people are facing.

However, the breeding ground that they are finding in Northern Ireland is exceptionally fertile. The area has the worst housing stock in Europe and its highest and fastest growing poverty.

According to official statistics, almost half of the children in Northern Ireland live in poverty, although the real figure is almost certainly higher.

Along with the rapid decline of traditional industries – textile jobs are disappearing, the shipyard is almost gone and the aircraft industry is facing a grim future – the feelings of devastation, especially in the once “privileged” loyalist areas, has grown hugely. Doors are now open to fascist thinking.

The growth of fascist and racist activities have been ignored by the vast majority of politicians and, indeed, the media for far too long. In this situation, the work of the Anti-Racism Network couldn’t be more vital.

Time is running short. If we don’t act now and act together, we are going to have a disaster on our hands.

Excerpted from the Morning Star (U.K.)