People Before Profit blog

Letter from Brazil: One year of Lula

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 10:07:00 +0000

It is one year since Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former metalworker and leader of Brazil’s left-wing Workers Party, was elected president of the country. I am in Rio de Janeiro, trying to find out what the people think about the country today and the president after his first year in office.

I have interviewed 30 people from a variety of backgrounds. All of them say they would vote for Lula today, including those (about a third) who did not vote for him the first time around.

I asked, “What is the most significant thing Lula has done in his first year?”

Most said that retirement reform was the most important thing he’s done. This was a contentious move, involving the curtailment of some pension benefits to newly-hired civil servants. The measure was largely forced on the government by the International Monetary Fund and Brazil’s $240 billion debt burden.

A retired schoolteacher, Dona Mimi, said, “The securing of our retirement and health insurance allow us to enjoy our lives as well as helping our children.”

All said that the campaign to feed Brazil was the government’s biggest failure, but most support the continuing campaign against hunger. The northern part of Brazil, especially, has a large unemployment problem as well as a huge hunger problem.

A taxi driver by the name of Carlos said, “The campaign to end hunger is a good idea but jobs are the most important thing today.” Isis, a member of the steelworkers union, said that “power in the hands of labor will move Brazil into the 21st century,” but if the power remains in the hands of international investment capital, “Brazil will stay in the past and people will have nothing.”

All were proud of the foreign policy of the country, a policy characterized by refusing to go along with the U.S. war on Iraq and the advocacy of a stronger, more independent regional bloc of South American states.

All asked if I would return to the United States and work to defeat George W. Bush. They believe that if the U.S. were not so bogged down in the Middle East, the Bush administration would be working even harder to defeat Lula’s efforts to build a better and independent Brazil.

Joao, a shoe-shiner on the Copacabana Beach, said, “Brazil is a better place today after Lula became president and my business is better, but I do not vote at all. I just work to feed my children. It takes me one-and-a-half hours to get here to work everyday. I have no time to vote.” But Lula has helped Brazil, he said, and “if the USA will just let us live, we will live better.”

Most people agree that Lula’s government has stabilized the government and the economy. He has made the country governable again. He created a standardized taxing system and returned faith in the central government. He has given ordinary people a pride in the country as well as the government. People in general believe the country is better today then before Lula’s government.

The national celebration of the end of slavery 150 years ago is happening all year. Lula’s government is running a campaign against racism in a series of television ads and programs. On top of that, advertisements against wage slavery are all over the television.

The Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) is an important part of Lula’s coalition government, and its members are striving to provide leadership on both domestic and foreign policies.

The political power of the party can be seen in its growth. Marco Costa, PCdoB secretary of finance, tells us that the party has grown by 35,000 new, consolidated members in the past four months. The party may be able to elect a new mayor in Rio de Janeiro in 2004.

Fear of the Bush administration is very much on the minds of the working class of Brazil. On the other hand, hope for the future is great and belief in Lula is solid.

Gary Dotterman is a peace and solidarity activist in Massachusetts. He can be reached at pww@pww.org.

Bush's new educational eugenics

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:59:00 +0000

Go ahead, George, and lie to me. Lie to my dog. Lie to my sister. But don’t you ever lie to my kids.

Deep into your State of the Siege lecture last night, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. “By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” you said, “we are regularly testing every child ... and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

You said it … and then that little tongue came out; that weird way you stick your tongue out between your lips like the little kid who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snakey tongue dart out and I thought, “He knows.”

And what you know, Mr. Bush, is this: you’ve ordered this testing to hunt down, identify and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.

Here’s how No Child Left Behind and your tests work in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago. Millions of 8-year-olds are given lists of words and phrases. They try to read. Then they are graded, like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many failed.

Once the kids are stamped and sorted, the parents of the marked children ask you to fulfill your tantalizing promise to “make sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

But there is no “better option,” is there, Mr. Bush? Where’s the money for the better schools to take in the kids getting crushed in cash-poor districts? Where’s the open door to the suburban campuses with the big green lawns for the dark kids with the test-score mark of Cain?

And if I bring up the race of the kids with the low scores, don’t get all snippy with me, telling me your program is color blind. We know the color of the kids left behind, and it’s not the color of the kids you went to school with at Philips Andover Academy.

You know and I know the testing is a con. There is no “better option” at the other end. The cash went to eliminate the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire’s son another million.

But you’ll tell me, you took tests as a youth. I know you did. And you scored on the Air Guard flight test 25 out of 100, one point above too dumb to fly. But you zoomed past the other would-be flyboys. They were stamped, “Ready for ’Nam.”

And you took a test to get into Yale. And though your pet rock scored a wee bit higher than you, your grandpa on the Yale board provided the “better option” which got you in.

Here in New York City, your educational Taliban, led by Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has issued an edict to test the third-graders. Winnow out the chaff – the kids stamped “failed” – and throw them back, exactly where they started, to repeat the same failed program another year. The ugly little irony is this: the core of No Child Left Behind is that failing children will be left behind another year. And another year and another year.

You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program– because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: identify the nation’s loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap.

No Child Left Behind is of one piece with the tax cuts for the rich, the energy laws for the insiders, the oil wars for the well-off. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.

And so we have No Child Left Behind – to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

Greg Palast is author of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” which has returned this month to the New York Times bestseller list. View Palast’s writings at www.GregPalast.com.

Farmers cant live on stoicism alone

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 09:36:00 +0000

Opinion

One of the most enduring figures in American culture is the farmer as Rugged Individualist – sturdy, sunburned, standing proudly in fields among bounteous crops or herds. It’s an image found in the frontiersman of the 18th century, up through the lithographs of John Steuart Curry in the 1940s. Thomas Jefferson believed that such an independent yeoman was and should be the foundation of the Republic.

Yet the reality was often very different.

Farmers have confronted numerous adversities from nature, such as droughts and grasshopper plagues. Yet they faced all such things with stoicism. Curiously, we learn from the encyclopedia that in ancient Greek philosophy, the Stoic was one who firmly believed that all life, including humans, were part of nature. If our farmers may be said to be Stoics, it is probably because of their close dependence on nature and their intimate knowledge of her cyclical ways.

Stoics do not easily give up. They will weather any storm, endure any tribulation. My grandfather, who came to Kansas in 1888 when he was 2, remembered that a terrible drought greeted the family. Essentially, he said, it did not rain for 10 years. But the family stayed. Among farming folk, the land is everything: You hold on to it no matter what.

Farmers were not entirely isolated. They joined to break sod, to raise barns, to help harvest crops in case of sickness. They were individualists, but recognized the need and value of human community.

Furthermore, facing high prices for transportation of grain to market only 15 years after the Homestead Act of 1862, farmers formed the mighty Grange movement, which achieved government regulation of railroads. Similarly, in response to the drought of the late 1880s and low prices for grain, a tremendous groundswell of revolt produced the Farmer’s Alliance, followed by the political expression of the People’s Party, commonly known as the Populists, which the historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls “the largest democratic mass movement in American history.” The only way to deal with the new industrial monopolies of railroads and grain markets was through cooperation. The co-ops were born in that era.

When I was a young man in the 1950s, a co-op was to be found in almost every small Kansas town. It consisted of a grain elevator, a feed store and sometimes a gas station. I learned that farmers could take shares in the co-op similar to shares of stock in a company. The small city of McPherson had a co-op refinery, which supplied farmers with lubricants and gasoline.

In time, this co-op became Farmland Industries Inc., with headquarters in Kansas City, Mo. It expanded to meatpacking and fertilizer production, including overseas plants.

But in the drought of the late 1990s, farmers couldn’t afford fertilizer, and a year ago Farmland declared bankruptcy. Last December, 500 farmers gathered in Kansas City to learn that they “would likely lose all of the millions of equity they have built up in what had been the largest farmer-owned cooperative in North America,” reported the Kansas City Star.

Farmers concluded that there was nothing they could do. It was as if bankruptcy had become a force of nature.

By adopting the corporate idea, expanding and spreading itself too thin, Farmland had laid the basis for its own demise. The cooperative idea of the 1890s, which had survived droughts, plagues, wars and depressions, finally succumbed to its old enemy, The Market.

Early in the 19th century, the English writer William Hazlitt wrote that “corporate bodies have no soul.” He argued that they are “more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.”

Now, as a hundred years ago, America has a choice between Cooperation and the Corporation. Whatever its virtues in the past, stoicism is now no solution. Farmers should arm themselves with the facts, discard what Goodwyn called “the politics of deference,” and prepare to reclaim the cooperative ideal.

Fred Whitehead, who lives in Kansas City, Kan., has published extensively on Midwestern cultural history. He is a member of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan. This article is reprinted from The Land Institute web site: www.landinstitute.org.

Washington, not Miami, calls the shots on Cuba

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 09:23:00 +0000

Opinion

On Oct. 10, 2003, George W. Bush gave a Rose Garden rundown of a hard-line position on Cuba made even harder. It’s election time, and the prevailing wisdom is that the president is currying favor with right-wing Cubans in Miami so that, if need be, Florida can once again be used to select a president.

While many right-wing Cuban Americans in Florida have indeed advocated a “tougher” attitude toward socialist Cuba, and while these same elements are by no means blameless in the dirty deeds department, it’s the U.S. government itself that has been the driving force to bring down the Cuban revolution.

Yes, the top dogs in Washington do tend to look the other way when the Miami bunch misbehaves – terrorism out of Florida being the prime example. Such thuggish behavior by ultra-right Cuban Americans serves as a useful sideshow to divert attention away from the real nerve center of the U.S. assault on Cuba, which is located along the shores of the Potomac.

Tough guys in Miami take the heat, and Washington has a cover. Were this not the case, the image of the world’s only superpower beating up on a tiny, once-dependent island with the gloves off would come across as a bit unseemly, a little out of control. The U.S. attack on Cuba is far more usefully perceived as a matter of intra-Cuban “domestic” politics than as a matter of official government policy.

The Cuban revolution’s ideals, achievements, and survival are an enormous embarrassment to the United States, a money-obsessed superpower. Thus, from the very beginning of the revolution, Washington’s political operators and corporate chieftains have never been inclined to leave the important work of “regime change” in Cuba to chance.

Suffice it to set forth a couple of images of what Cuba represents to the poor people of the world, and then speculate on how the revolution’s stature and drawing power has weighed on the imaginations of political leaders in the United States. For them, Cuba’s achievements are a recurring nightmare.

Cuba has long set a positive example of social development and justice to other peoples of the world, including people in the United States.

Historian Avi Chomski describes how putting economic and social justice into practice poses a threat to ruling circles in the United States: “The U.S. travel ban and the distorted portrayal of Cuba in both popular and scholarly media ensure that the majority of North Americans do not learn that a poor, Third World country, gripped by economic crisis, and under constant attack from the most powerful nation in the world, is still able to achieve health standards higher than those in the capital of that powerful nation, Washington, D.C.”

Socialist Cuba’s existence also means there is unfinished, anti-communist business left to do.

Oxford historian Robert Young notes Cuba’s starring role on the world stage, a role that, of course, continues to infuriate Washington and Wall Street: “The active business of developing Marx’s legacy in the past fifty years (took place) in the course of the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. … Against huge odds Cuba has survived, with its sovereignty intact and its dignity ever increasing. Its survival into the 21st century marks it out as one of Marx’s great legacies, as a nation that continues to function as an example of a state dedicated to values of humanity to which ordinary people aspire. Cuba … has survived as a phenomenon that increasingly … stands for the most significant alternative to the globalized culture of Anglo-America, namely Hispanic America, the America of Jose Marti. (Cuba is) a living socialist society that is confident, energetic, and youthful.”

Cuban-American right-wingers in Miami will continue their hostilities toward Cuba. But make no mistake: the power behind them lies in Washington.

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

2003s stinkiest media performances

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 09:20:00 +0000

Opinion

The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established more than a decade ago to give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year.

As usual, I have conferred with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, to sift through the large volume of entries. In view of the many deserving competitors, we regret that only a few can win a P.U.-litzer.

And now, the twelfth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media performances of 2003:

• Media Mogul of the Year – Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel

While some broadcasters care about their programming, the CEO of America’s biggest radio company (with more than 1,200 stations) admits he cares only about the ads. The Clear Channel boss told Fortune magazine in March: “If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be someone from our company. We’re not in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.”

• Liberating Iraq Prize – Tom Brokaw

Interviewing a military analyst as U.S. jet bombers headed to Baghdad on the first day of the Iraq war, NBC anchor Brokaw declared: “Admiral McGinn, one of the things that we don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”

• “The More You Watch, the Less You Know” Prize – Fox News Channel

According to a University of Maryland study, most Americans who get their news from commercial TV harbored at least one of three “misperceptions” about the Iraq war: that weapons of mass destruction had been discovered in Iraq, that evidence closely linking Iraq to Al Qaeda had been found, or that world opinion approved of the U.S. invasion. Fox News viewers were the most confused about key facts, with 80 percent embracing at least one of those misperceptions. The study found a correlation between being misinformed and being supportive of the war.

• “Clear It with the Pentagon” Award – CNN

A month after the invasion of Iraq began, CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted on his network’s “Reliable Sources” show (April 20) that CNN had allowed U.S. military officials to help screen its on-air analysts: “I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance – ‘At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’ – and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

• “Conservative Times for the ‘Liberal’ Media” Award – ABC News

Over the years, ABC correspondent John Stossel became known for one-sided, often-inaccurate reporting on behalf of his pro-corporate, “greed is good” ideology. He boasted that his on-air job was to “explain the beauties of the free market,” received lecture fees from corporate pressure groups, and even spoke on Capitol Hill against consumer-protection regulation. In May of this year, when Stossel was promoted to co-anchor of ABC’s “20/20,” a network insider told TV Guide: “These are conservative times. ... The network wants somebody to match the times.”

• “Coddling Donald” Prize – CBS’s Lesley Stahl, ABC’s Peter Jennings and Others

On the day news broke about Saddam Hussein’s capture, Stahl and Jennings each interviewed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In step with their mainstream media colleagues, both failed to ask about Rumsfeld’s cordial 1983 meeting with Hussein in Baghdad on behalf of the Reagan administration that opened up strong diplomatic and military ties between the U.S. government and the dictator that lasted through seven years of his worst brutality.

• Military Groupie Prize – Katie Couric of NBC’s “Today” Show

“Well, Commander Thompson,” said Couric on April 3, in the midst of the invasion carnage, “thanks for talking with us at this very early hour out there. And I just want you to know, I think Navy SEALs rock.”

• Noblesse Oblige Occupation Award – Thomas Friedman, New York Times

In a Nov. 30 piece, Times columnist Friedman gushed that “this war (in Iraq) is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the war as “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.” Friedman did not mention the estimated 112 billion barrels of oil in Iraq ... or the continuous deceptions that led to the “noble” enterprise.

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, www.accuracy.org, and writes a syndicated column on media and politics.

The raid on civil rights at Goose Creek

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:24:00 +0000

Opinion

Suppose the police in one community staged, with guns drawn, a drug raid at a high school and rounded up more than one hundred students to search and arrest – but found no drugs.

Suppose they staged that drug raid at a predominantly white school – but staged it at a time of the morning when most of the students in the school they would round up would be African American – but still found no drugs.

Suppose during that drug raid the school’s principal, who is white, in at least one instance directed police officers to specific groups of students; and those officers then proceeded to put plastic handcuffs on their wrists, and train guns on them and allow a police dog to prowl among them as the principal and other school officials searched inside some students’ pockets.

But still found no drugs at all.

Wouldn’t you have questions?

Wouldn’t you have questions about what was really behind such a so-called drug raid?

What was behind the so-called drug raid at Stratford High School is the issue facing the Charleston, S.C., suburb of Goose Creek. There, the principal’s call for and participation in a police raid at the school on Nov. 5 has raised questions about the reliability of tips gained from police informants, about a principal’s interpretation of activity he thought he saw occurring in his school, and – as it should – about the role individual and communal racial attitudes played in the disturbing affair.

Part of the aftermath has been the filing of two federal class action lawsuits – one by several private laws firms, the other by the American Civil Liberties Union – on behalf of parents of students who were detained, and a flurry of meetings by the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.

The videotape drawn from the school’s surveillance cameras that has been playing on national television since the story broke shows such actions are warranted. On it are the shocking images of more than 100 young people – three-quarters of them Black – who had done no wrong, being forced to kneel on floors with their hands held high or behind their backs.

But no trace at all of drugs was found on any student, or in any student locker, or anywhere in the school.

Local news reports have said that the Goose Creek police department’s rules require that police dogs be used in searches for drugs only after an area has been cleared of people.

Yet, the Stratford High videotape shows a police dog, its leash held by an officer, passing close to kneeling students, barking and sniffing their backpacks and grabbing one backpack and shaking it.

What was the reason for this astonishing behavior by adults toward these schoolchildren – none of whom, let us remember, were found to have done anything wrong?

The reason – apparently – lies in the words, caught by the school’s videotaping system, one officer directed at the kneeling students.

“If you’re an innocent bystander to what has transpired here today,” the unidentified officer barks, “you can thank those people that are bringing dope into this school. Every time we think there’s dope in this school, we’re going to be coming up here to deal with it, and this is one of the ways we can deal with it.”

There’s the reason, then: Intimidation of the innocent out of a frustration at not catching the guilty.

Supposedly, the 17 surveillance cameras in Stratford High had picked up activity in the past that seemed to indicate drug transactions were occurring. Supposedly, there was “intelligence” that some students were dealing drugs in the school.

But, said local attorney Marlon Kimpson, the raid represented a dramatically wrong way of trying to confirm and root out drug dealing in a school.

“Students don’t shed their rights when they cross the schoolhouse door,” said Kimpson, whose firm represents 17 parents of students detained during the raid and is also the lead counsel with several other law firms in one of the class action lawsuits.

The lawsuit charges that the raid violated students’ Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure and their 14th Amendment rights of due process.

“Those responsible (for the raid) were either ignorant of students’ rights, or they deliberately intended to provoke extreme emotional distress in these students,” Kimpson continued.

“Remember,” he added, “these were teenagers just sitting and talking with their friends, or trying to get some last-minute studying in, when, suddenly, they were looking down the barrel of a gun held by an armored police officer and being pushed to their knees. This was a terrible blow to their psyches, to their feelings about their reputation among their peers, and to their sense of belonging in that community.”

Those words put in haunting perspective the appalling breach of students’ civil rights in Goose Creek by the adults charged with their care.

Mark Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League. This article originally appeared at www.civilrights.org.

Enola Gay: the Smithsonian edits history

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:19:00 +0000

Opinion

The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945 – a marvel of technology? A worthy subject for a historical exhibit, rather like Disneyland’s Robot Lincoln? The Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum seems to think so.

Near Washington’s Dulles Airport (named after John Foster Dulles, whose nuclear brinkmanship in the 1950s made nuclear war into a game of chicken), the Smithsonian has opened a new exhibition hall that features the Enola Gay as part of its centennial celebration of the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight. According to news reports, the plane is displayed with a plaque that calls it “the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II” and mentions without comment that it dropped the bomb. Many historians, this author included, signed a petition to protest the museum’s uncritical and ahistorical portrayal of the Enola Gay. The Smithsonian simply brushed the petition aside, as it did protestors who challenged the exhibit’s opening.

The exhibition raises many issues. First, it can be seen as an expression of the Bush administration’s arrogant and dehumanizing militarism. Scholars and citizens have long debated the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the waning days of World War II, but even those who have steadfastly defended the attacks have seen them as acts necessary to “save” both American and Japanese lives, not something to be hailed the way the present administration hails “smart bombs,” heat-seeking missiles, and other military-industrial-complex products.

It is important for all Americans to know that the best and most serious scholarship over the last 40 years has shown that the Japanese were seeking to negotiate a settlement to end the war, asking only to keep their emperor, and that the Truman administration was well aware of this. Scholars have also shown that Truman and his advisers saw the use of the bomb as a warning to the Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the war against Nazi Germany – “a hammer,” as Truman called it at one point, to intimidate the Soviet Union from supporting revolutionary movements anywhere and from opposing the restoration of capitalism in the East European countries that it liberated from the Nazis.

But this important and ongoing debate is entirely absent from the Enola Gay exhibit, which seems to say that this was “our plane” which dropped “our bomb,” and we should be proud of “our power,” because technologically enhanced might makes right.

For Marxists, the plaque hailing the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, is a classic example of the fallacy of false concreteness. The B-29 was the most sophisticated propeller-driven plane of World War II and the Enola Gay did drop the bomb on Hiroshima, but anyone who believes that those two true statements tell us what we need to know about the dropping of the atomic bomb has no analytical sense or moral compass.

Having put the Enola Gay on exhibit, perhaps the Smithsonian will also show the technological achievements of napalm and Agent Orange in the defoliation of Vietnam, and the information gathered by the high-flying U-2 spy planes, even though they helped to create international crises that intensified the Cold War.

For Marxists, science and technology are never neutral, not part of an independent “scientific and technological revolution,” as Mikhail Gorbachev, the gravedigger of the Soviet Union, was fond of talking about. Science and technology can never be separated from their social uses and the class forces that determine those uses. To say nothing about the social meaning of the Enola Gay is to make a statement celebrating it and creating a mindset that will celebrate future “military marvels” regardless of the devastation they cause.

To ask only how things are done, which is what the Smithsonian has done in this exhibit, and not ask why and to what effect, is yet another example of the Bush administration’s immoral worldview and the mindset it is seeking to impose on the American people.

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

A fairy tale

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:13:00 +0000

Opinion

All right, children, sit still while I tell you a fairy tale, one with heroic heroes, evil villains, and an unbelievably happy ending.

Our tale starts with a king (after all, he was anointed and appointed, not elected). This king was opposed to evil—he told us so many, many times.

This king waged a war against an evil villain, who tried to assassinate the king’s daddy, invaded other countries, killed innocent civilians, and developed weapons of mass destruction. (Any similarities between the “good” king and the evil villain are purely coincidental, right?)

Once the troops of the “good” king won a victory over the evil villain (as the king told us many, many times), the evil villain hid in a cave, thinking evil thoughts.

Finally, after months of being unable to find those nasty weapons of mass destruction, the troops of the “good” king found the cave and captured the evil villain.

This represented the triumph of “good” over evil, and everybody lived happily every after, especially after the next election, when, if all his calculations are correct, the “good” king will be elected without having to steal the election.

Isn’t that sweet, children?

There’s only one problem with this fable — it’s a fantasy.

George W. Bush, who keeps assuring us (though we are not reassured) that he is the President, wants us to buy this concoction. He wants to smile and pretend to be strong and accept everybody’s congratulations. He wants us all to vote for him. Since his residency has been an economic, moral, political, and international failure, he has to create a fairy tale he hopes enough people will believe.

He is similar to The Magnificent Arnold, that outsider, poor struggling immigrant, decisive leader, who sold enough Californians on his fable that he got elected to govern, which has already proven more complicated than reading a script or lifting weights (or keeping election promises).

Fairy tales get some of their attractive power from their oversimplified worldview, and that also makes them attractive for those who want to use them to maintain power. Their great failing is that fables aren’t reality, fairy tales conflict with facts, and fantasies can’t satisfactorily cope with difficult truths.

Saddam Hussein is an evil villain, but so is George W. Bush. Hussein tried to build weapons of mass destruction in the past (though apparently the UN inspection process worked!). Bush is building and using them. Saddam Hussein wasn’t elected in a fair and equal election process; neither was George W. Bush. Hussein ruled by giving contracts and favors to his closest supporters while threatening, demonizing, and attacking his opponents; so does Bush. Saddam Hussein tried to sell the people of his country a bill of goods that they had to pay way too much for; that’s the same tactic that George W. Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are using. Hussein invaded other countries without provocation for his own power-hungry reasons; so have George W. Bush and his minions, who keep threatening even more countries with attack.

The real heroes are the people of both the United States and Iraq. The people of the U.S. have the power to reject fantasy and deal with reality, to re-defeat Bush in 2004 and change the direction and priorities of the U.S. The people of Iraq have the power to build a new society, which rejects foreign military intervention as well as home-grown dictators and demagogues. The main obstacle for both peoples is the corrupt, lying administration of George W. Bush.

If you think I exaggerate about the corruption and lying of Boy George, check out a few books from the best-seller lists: “Dude, Where’s My Country” by Michael Moore; “Bushwhacked” by Molly Ivins and Lou DuBose; and “The Great Unraveling” by Paul Krugman, to name a few. They detail some of the reality that Bush doesn’t want you to know or understand.

Bush would rather have you buy his little fantasy, with himself as the dragon-slayer. Don’t buy it — the fairy tale may sound nice, until you have to deal with the realities of an economic recovery that doesn’t provide any decent paying jobs; a security policy that takes away civil liberties and constitutional protections; a foreign policy that alienates the entire rest of the world; a health policy that benefits only the pharmaceutical and insurance companies; an environmental policy that makes it harder to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and escape cancer-causing chemicals; and a labor policy that eliminates overtime protection for millions. And that’s no fairy tale.

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

Capitalism and human misery a 2003 report card

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:10:00 +0000

Opinion

We are living in an era of highly developed means of production, high-speed communication technology and sophisticated transportation systems.

Thanks to the accelerating progress in science and technology and in spite of the hindering effects of capitalism, we as human beings are able to afford a safe and secure life for all the people around the world. But, this has not happened. War, killing fields, disease, famine, hunger, poverty, corruption, injustice, environmental destruction and other horrors make life hard and even intolerable for the majority of the world’s people.

The discrepancy between our extraordinary accomplishments in science and technology and our awful way of life is illogical, irrational and, of course, harmful. There is no doubt that the base of this madness is the ruling economic system, capitalism, which uses all our human achievements for the purpose of grabbing more and more profit at the expense of more and more human misery.

Today, if we look back at the year that just ended, 2003, we get a quick look at what is happening around our fascinating planet. Besides profit-driven wars and killing fields that took the lives of hundreds of thousands in only this one year, 3 million people died from AIDS, a dramatic increase over the year before. This preventable disease is also the main cause of death among young African American women in the U.S.

About 700,000 children died of measles in 2003. Measles is easily avoidable by vaccination.

Each year around 1 million people die of malaria, according to the World Health Organization. Malaria is preventable and curable, and was supposed to have been eradicated many years ago.

About 12 million children (34,000 per day) die of starvation every year, the United Nations reports. They have nothing to eat, not even grass or insects.

Now let’s talk about poverty. I am not even hinting at the plight of the people of less developed “backward” countries, but just looking at the poverty that can be witnessed in the everyday life of developed metropolitan areas like the ones in the United States and Canada.

In the U.S., 47 million people live below or near the poverty line. About 1.2 million were added to this number in 2003.

Canada’s child poverty rate has increased constantly in recent decades. Presently, more than 1 million children are living in poverty there.

There was a 19 percent increase in the rate of homelessness in the U.S. in 2003, and apparently this trend is continuing.

Finally, about 1 million young girls are sold in the sex industry around the world each year. Trafficking of children has become easier than trafficking drugs, says UNICEF. There is an open market in Bucharest, Romania, in which young girls are being sold. There, BBC News reported in November, when a young girl is sold for about $400, she kisses her new owner and begs him not to beat her.

So, before everywhere turns into a Bucharest slave market, we need to dump capitalism!

H. Salari is a doctor and a member of the Communist Party of Canada (Quebec). He can be reached at pww@pww.org.