People Before Profit blog

What to do about global warming

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:37:00 +0000

That global warming is a major threat to life on the planet is finally receiving universal acknowledgement. Last month’s UN report from hundreds of scientists concluded that global warming was “very likely” caused by mankind. The report was approved by 113 nations, including the United States, and will be presented at a summit meeting in June.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this has been the warmest winter since records were first kept in 1880. The 10 warmest have occurred since 1995, with global surface temperatures increasing approximately 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1976.

Countries respond

What has been the response of the industrially developed nations? Leaders from 27 European nations met in Brussels in March and agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (which cause global warming) by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and could “go to 30 percent if other countries join” — an obvious poke at the U.S., which accounts for 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

The Blair government went even further by proposing mandatory reductions in carbon emissions in the UK by 26 percent to 32 percent by 2020, investing $12 billion in offshore wind-generating capacity to meet this goal.

Last week in Congress, former Vice President Al Gore testified that legislative changes are needed to forestall potentially irreversible global warming. Gore suggested a ban on all new coal plants that lack technology to contain carbon dioxide emissions and urged Congress to mandate a freeze on the nation’s carbon-emissions levels and then start a plan to roll those back significantly. Steps to take on global warming face significant obstacles in the U.S.

Energy, car interests dominate

Meanwhile, an internal draft from the Bush administration projects that the U.S. will emit 20 percent more (that’s right, more) greenhouse gases in 2020 than it did in 2000! The original Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration refused to sign, agreed to a modest 5 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2012. Bush claimed signing the pact “would harm the U.S. economy.”

Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist at NASA, said the White House has tried to silence him. As reported on “60 Minutes,” the Bush administration began editing climate science reports to make global warming seem less threatening. Editing was done by lawyers and politicians like former Chief of Staff on Environmental Quality Phil Cooney, who had been a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute and has since left to work for Exxon Mobil.

Why are the other industrial nations far ahead of the U.S. in meeting this planetary crisis? The European nations and Japan also have profit-driven capitalist economies, but the direction of our economy is driven largely by a few giant mega-industries: the military-industrial complex, which devours hundreds of billions of dollars per year of public funds, and the fossil fuel industries, being joined now by the new ethanol industry, which feed into dozens of subsidiary industries in our automobile “driven” society. With record profits last year, the oil industry can afford to influence elections and gain legislative support using scores of lobbyists.

Developing green niche industries

Most other nations cannot compete in these areas, but the same inhibition to controlling emissions within the Goliath of the industrial world has provided space for progressive niche industries in smaller capitalist nations. Denmark, now the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter of wind turbines, obtains 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy and aims at 50 percent by 2030. Spain, a leading manufacturer of solar panels, and aiming to become the world leader, requires rooftop solar heaters on all new residential and commercial buildings. In Iceland, 93 percent of homes are heated by geothermal energy.

This is not to minimize the importance of people’s movements to influence economic policies. One of the most progressive nations with respect to the challenge is Germany, which has had a strong Green movement. It has the highest production of wind energy, is a close second to Japan in solar generation, and is phasing out coal subsidies.

In the U.S. there are also strong business interests calling on the government to support clean energy projects. In January, 10 major U.S. energy, chemical and manufacturing companies, including Duke Energy Corp., Merrill Lynch, The Capital Group (which manages $850 billion in mutual funds) and General Electric, called for a national limit on carbon-dioxide emissions. They may be motivated by a vision of the future for long-term profits, but if their goal is for renewable energy solutions, it deserves our support.

The level of public input will probably determine the direction our country takes and with it, the earth’s future.

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

Millions face early death from hunger, thirst

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:02:00 +0000

More than 3 million people in the world are condemned to premature death from hunger and thirst.

That is not an exaggerated figure, but rather a cautious one. I have meditated a lot on that in the wake of President Bush’s meeting with U.S. automobile manufacturers.

The sinister idea of converting food into fuel was definitively established as an economic line in U.S. foreign policy last Monday, March 26.

A cable from The Associated Press, the U.S. news agency that reaches all corners of the world, states verbatim:

“WASHINGTON, March 26 (AP) – President Bush touted the benefits of ‘flexible fuel’ vehicles running on ethanol and biodiesel on Monday, meeting with automakers to boost support for his energy plans.

“Bush said a commitment by the leaders of the domestic auto industry to double their production of flex-fuel vehicles could help motorists shift away from gasoline and reduce the nation’s reliance on imported oil.

‘“That’s a major technological breakthrough for the country,’ Bush said after inspecting three alternative vehicles. If the nation wants to reduce gasoline use, he said, “the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice.”

“The president urged Congress to ‘move expeditiously’ on legislation the administration recently proposed to require the use of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017 and seek higher fuel economy standards for automobiles.

“Bush met with General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner, Ford Motor Co. chief executive Alan Mulally and DaimlerChrysler AG’s Chrysler Group chief executive Tom LaSorda.

“They discussed support for flex-fuel vehicles, attempts to develop ethanol from alternative sources like switchgrass and wood chips and the administration’s proposal to reduce gas consumption by 20 percent in 10 years.

“The discussions came amid rising gasoline prices. The latest Lundberg Survey found the nationwide average for gasoline has risen 6 cents per gallon in the past two weeks to $2.61.”

I believe that reducing and moreover recycling all motors that run on electricity and fuel is an elemental and urgent need for all humanity. The tragedy does not lie in reducing those energy costs but in the idea of converting food into fuel.

It is known very precisely today that one ton of corn can only produce 413 liters of ethanol on average, according to densities. That is equivalent to 109 gallons.

The average price of corn in U.S. ports has risen to $167 per ton. Thus, 320 million tons of corn would be required to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol.

According to UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) figures, the U.S. corn harvest rose to 280.2 million tons in the year 2005.

Although the president is talking of producing fuel derived from grass or wood shavings, anyone can understand that these are phrases totally lacking in realism. Let’s be clear: 35 billion gallons translates into 35 followed by nine zeros!

Afterwards will come beautiful examples of what experienced and well-organized U.S. farmers can achieve in terms of human productivity by hectare: corn converted into ethanol; the chaff from that corn converted into animal feed containing 26 percent protein; cattle dung used as raw material for gas production.

Of course, this is after voluminous investments only within the reach of the most powerful enterprises, in which everything has to be moved on the basis of electricity and fuel consumption. Apply that recipe to the countries of the Third World and you will see that people among the hungry masses of the Earth will no longer eat corn. Or something worse: lend funding to poor countries to produce corn ethanol based on corn or any other food and not a single tree will be left to defend humanity from climate change.

Other countries in the rich world are planning to use not only corn but also wheat, sunflower seeds, rapeseed and other foods for fuel production. For the Europeans, for example, it would become a business to import all of the world’s soybeans with the aim of reducing the fuel costs for their automobiles and feeding their animals with the chaff from that legume, particularly rich in all types of essential amino acids.

In Cuba, alcohol used to be produced as a byproduct of the sugar industry after having made three extractions of sugar from cane juice. Climate change is already affecting our sugar production. Lengthy periods of drought alternating with record rainfall barely make it possible to produce sugar with an adequate yield during the 100 days of our very moderate winter; hence, there is less sugar per ton of cane or less cane per hectare due to prolonged drought in the months of planting and cultivation.

I understand that in Venezuela they would be using alcohol not for export but to improve the environmental quality of their own fuel. For that reason, apart from the excellent Brazilian technology for producing alcohol, in Cuba the use of such a technology for the direct production of alcohol from sugar cane juice is no more than a dream or the whim of those carried away by that idea. In our country, land handed over to the direct production of alcohol could be much useful for food production for the people and for environmental protection.

All the countries of the world, rich and poor, without any exception, could save millions and millions of dollars in investment and fuel simply by changing all the incandescent light bulbs for fluorescent ones, an exercise that Cuba has carried out in all homes throughout the country. That would provide a breathing space to resist climate change without killing the poor masses through hunger.

As can be observed, I am not using adjectives to qualify the system and the lords of the earth. That task can be excellently undertaken by news experts and honest social, economic and political scientists abounding in the world who are constantly delving into to the present and future of our species. A computer and the growing number of Internet networks are sufficient for that.

Today, we are seeing for the first time a really globalized economy and a dominant power in the economic, political and military terrain that in no way resembles that of Imperial Rome.

Some people will be asking themselves why I am talking of hunger and thirst. My response to that: it is not about the other side of the coin, but about several sides of something else, like a die with six sides, or a polyhedron with many more sides.

I refer in this case to an official news agency, founded in 1945 and generally well-informed about economic and social questions in the world: TELAM. It said, and I quote:

“In just 18 years, close to 2 billion people will be living in countries and regions where water will be a distant memory. Two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in places where that scarcity produces social and economic tensions of such a magnitude that it could lead nations to wars for the precious ‘blue gold.’

“Over the last 100 years, the use of water has increased at a rate twice as fast as that of population growth.

“According to statistics from the World Water Council, it is estimated that by 2015, the number of inhabitants affected by this grave situation will rise by 3.5 billion people.

“The United Nations celebrated World Water Day on March 23, and called to begin confronting, that very day, the international scarcity of water, under the coordination of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with the goal of highlighting the increasing importance of water scarcity on a global scale, and the need for greater integration and cooperation that would make it possible to guarantee sustained and efficient management of water resources.

“Many regions on the planet are suffering from severe water shortages, living with less than 500 cubic meters per person per year. The number of regions suffering from chronic scarcity of this vital element is increasingly growing.

“The principal consequences of water scarcity are an insufficient amount of the precious liquid for producing food, the impossibility of industrial, urban and tourism development and health problems.”

That was the TELAM cable.

In this case I will refrain from mentioning other important facts, like the melting ice in Greenland and the Antarctic, damage to the ozone layer and the growing volume of mercury in many species of fish for common consumption.

There are other issues that could be addressed, but with these lines I am just trying to comment on President Bush’s meeting with the principal executives of U.S. automakers.

March 28, 2007

Fidel Castro is president of Cuba. This is his first article since his July 2006 surgery. Translated by Granma International .

German union backs U.S. Chrysler workers

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:53:00 +0000

The 2.4-million-member IG Metall union, representing German blue- and white-collar metalworkers — including autoworkers at Daimler-Chrysler’s German plants — is opposing the company’s move to jettison its U.S. Chrysler division, and calling for a solution that benefits both the company and U.S. workers.

“We don’t have any interest in seeing Chrysler sold to a locust,” said Joerg Hofmann, IG Metall leader in the German state of Baden-Wuettemberg. (Locusts are known for ravaging their surroundings.) “There should be a solution for our colleagues in the U.S. which benefits the Chrysler brand. A purely financial investment with the aim of making a quick buck doesn’t do much in this respect.”

So far, Cerberus, Blackstone Group and Magna investment corporations are the leading contenders to buy the U.S. Chrysler division, which employs about 80,000 U.S. workers.

The 1998 Daimler-Chrysler merger created the world’s fifth largest vehicle corporation. At that time, the new company had 420,000 workers. Today, worldwide, the workforce has declined by nearly 60,000. In 2006, Daimler Chrysler increased revenue by 1 percent to $7.3 billion. The company said it lost money in the Chrysler division, but other divisions met or exceeded projections.

The powerful IG Metall union has signed agreements with the U.S. Steelworkers and Machinists unions and with British unions to resist layoffs and prevent transnational corporations from pitting workers in one country against workers in another.

dwinebr696 @ aol.com

The Party of Hope

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 04:32:00 +0000

This is an edited version of my remarks at the Opening of the CPUSA papers at the Tamiment Library of New York University on March 23, 2007. I will write on this really important and joyful event more in the near future. But I thought that I would present here an edited version of the remarks that I made at it. Actually, because of some sound problems and other factors, I didn’t really complete my prepared remarks, and this is a significantly larger version of what was said.

Let me say that I am happy and proud to speak today at the opening of the Communist Party, USA’s papers at the Tamiment Library of NYU. I hope I do well because this really important collection deserves it. Given the value of this collection, this is the most important talk I have ever given.

I have titled my talk “party of hope.” That is a term that an historian whose work I first read when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan used for the reformers the before the Civil War, who challenged the “democracy” of Andrew Jackson, which excluded slaves and Indians, flattered the Common Man, supported slavery. The party of hope wasn’t a party, but its partisans fought for free schools, prison reform, asylums for the mentally ill, and most of all the abolition of slavery, the principal contradiction between “exclusionary democracy,” what another historian later called Herren Volk (Master Race) democracy and real democracy in that period. Although they were repressed and persecuted in the name of protecting American Liberty, the contributed to the eventual destruction of slavery and the advance of real democracy in the United States

The Communist Party USA was born in the struggles that followed the Russian Empire Socialist Revolution of 1917, the invasion of Soviet Russia by 500,000 foreign troops of both the victorious and defeated World War I states in 1918-1919, and the revolutionary upsurge and Red Scares that followed globally from these events.

The Marxist Socialist parties of the Second International had been the parties of Democracy in many European countries. After the Democrats in the United States, the first parties to use the term democracy in their names where the Marxist Social Democratic parties of Europe, who led the campaigns to gain voting rights and civil rights and civil liberties for the working classes and the whole people in many countries. The Socialist Parties of the Second International had become large mass parties in a number of important European countries. But they had no clear strategy for advancing socialism, for understanding the role of the existing state, or for understanding and resisting the development of imperialism. And they were divided, faction ridden, and unable to prevent their own ruling classes from manipulating them.

Those from their ranks who became Communists took first and foremost the theoretical breakthrough of Vladimir Lenin the theory of the revolutionary vanguard party to coordinate and advance the struggles of the working class and develop party and class unity, his theory of the state and its relationship to revolutionary socialist transition, and his theory of contemporary imperialism and its role in the world. They applied this theory to connect the struggles of those in the advanced capitalist countries to the struggles of the colonize masses of the world, to make socialism a movement of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Latin Americans, the most comprehensive global mass movement in human history. It addressed the central contradiction in U.S. society between an exclusionary democracy, and a real democracy, the contradiction between capital and labor.

In response to the this new revolutionary left, both in Soviet Russia and globally, the victorious capitalist states at the Versailles Conference of 1919 (the conference whose ostensible purpose was to write the WWI peace treaty) had embarked upon a policy of quarantine, or cordon sanitaire, the French word for quarantine, setting up a ring of frontline states, dictatorships of the right in Eastern Europe to quarantine or contain the Soviet Revolution and the Communist movement and defend also the colonial empires that anti-colonial movements in India and China and other countries, inspired by the example of and support from Soviet Russia, were challenging

In the U.S. the brutal Red Scare of 1919-1920 was accompanied by a “Red Summer” of racist terror against African Americans. In the U.S. those who initially or eventually became Communists, including the labor Syndicalist William Z. Foster, the anti-war Left Socialist Earl Browder, the IWW activist and heroine Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the radical socialist African American William Patterson, and many others took up the challenge and in the process of the decades of struggle that was to follow, both changed themselves and with all of their defeats changed the United States and the world for the better and developed themselves, even with the repression that they experienced as far greater human beings.

This rich and essential story is known by a great many throughout the world and taken far more seriously than the stereotypical comic book history of evil Jesuitical spy rings, serving as the agents of a transnational power in the Kremlin, beholden to a Red Pope named Joseph Stalin. That comic book history has its backers and its fans, and continues to be used against those who this collection amply shows, dedicated their lives and with all the repression lived and live full lives to making the U.S. an actual democracy

Most of us have been bombarded all of our lives with exaggerated and distorted views of the failures and defeats of the Communist movement and the CPUSA. I am here today to speak about the victories.

What would the world be without the Communist movement, and what would the United States be without the CPUSA? Let me summarize very quickly. Communists became the leading force in the development of an inclusive and powerful labor movement in the United States, taking the policy of building industrial unions which Socialists and others had advocated and implementing it. After many defeats in the 1920s and early 1930s, Communists joined with non-Communists to found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Of the original 200 CI0 organizers more than a fourth were Communists with a big C, and that group was made up of the most experienced and successful. In 1937, Communist literally planned and led what is still the greatest victory that American workers have won, the Flint General Motors Strike, which in turn had something of a domino effect in American Labor, leading to huge advances for industrial workers, including by 1938, the establishment of industrial unions at GM and U.S. Steel, the two largest corporations in the world at that time.

Between 1933 and 1945, the number of workers in unions grew from under three million to nearly 15 million, an increase of five times. Nor was it merely numbers. The industrial unions of the CI0, while numerically weaker than the AFL, not only organized on an industrial union basis but created a new “social unionism, inclusive in its approach, actively political on issues as against the AFL’s narrow business unionist approach and most of all militant.

On the question of the rights of the African American people and the struggle to unite the working class by eradicating racism in all of its forms, the Communists brought something new to the movement for socialism, both applying the insights of the world Communist movement and its struggle against the racist policies of imperialism and connecting African American liberation with the struggles for socialism and the liberation of the working class in the United States as a whole. As this collection will show, the CPUSA abandoned the “color blind” approach of the old Socialist Party and others on the left and committed itself to work for the organization of African American workers, specifically the struggles against formal and informal, segregation, formal and informal discrimination in employment and housing, lynching that was often celebrated rather than punished in the South, and the crude racist ideology which permeated the popular media.

Without the CPUSA and the world Communist movement, the Scottsboro Nine would have been dead men. With the CPUSA and the world Communist movement, the Scottsboro Case reached a world audience and after a long struggle whose negative effects I won’t minimize, the Scottsboro political prisoners were released. In this collection scholars will discover the insights and sensitivities of African American Communists like Henry Winston, James Jackson, John Pittman, and their comrades, William Patterson, and many others, as the built the first real integrated political party in American history, as they developed mass organizations like the National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Civil Rights Congress, which, in spite of defeats and subsequent political persecutions, nevertheless made a central contribution to the placing of civil rights on the political agenda.

One could go on. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose papers will also be at Tamiment, and whose history was interlocked with the CPUSA: that group of premature fighting anti-fascists, who were the fully integrated non-governmental military group in U.S. history, the opposite of the private security forces fighting in Iraq today. The Communist-led United Electrical Workers Union, which negotiated the first wage agreement during WWII providing for a greater increase for women workers than male workers, because of the long history of past discrimination, and the CPUSA’s commitment to integrate leadership in the unions and all other peoples organizations along with membership, prefiguring what two decades later would be called affirmative action.

And then there was World War II, the war one might say to make the world safe for different definitions of democracy, capitalist and socialist.

It was 27 million Soviet people more than any other people on earth who defeated Hitler fascism. It was a global center-left coalition, an international peoples front of the conservative British Empire on the right, the New Deal liberal U.S. in the center, and the Communist Soviet Union on the left that defeated the fascist Axis. It was French and Italian and Yugoslav and Vietnamese and Chinese Communists who led underground forces, partisan armies against the forces of the Axis and their legions of nationalist rightwing corporate collaborators in Europe and Asia.

“We have two enemies,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce noted in 1946 in a famous pamphlet, “Labor at Home and Communism abroad.” For the capitalist class of the United States that was true. The international cold war abroad, which would produce “hot wars” in Korea and Vietnam that would claim millions of lives and many “little wars” that would claim millions more, was the first part of their response. The domestic cold war at home, called McCarthyism after the alcoholic border-line crazy junior Senator from Wisconsin and his very sleazy associates, was the second part. These two cold wars were aimed at labor and communism by the ruling class of the U.S.

This collection will provide for scholars and students valuable materials concerning the ongoing struggles of the CPUSA, its efforts to maintain its roots in the working class and peoples movements as its leaders were being imprisoned, its members harassed, and the mass organizations that it had played a leading role in developing destroyed by a relentless state and private campaign to bankrupt those organizations, and terrorize members into leaving in droves.

After WWII, Communists and the broad left in the U.S. were excluded from the rights of other citizens (those on the left who refused to toe the line) and in the new exclusionary democracy “manifest destiny” became a global policy, in defense of the “free world,” which led to the nuclear arms race, literally thousands of U.S. military installations and missions through the world and trillions of dollars in military spending. The analysis of CPUSA activists, living in this cold war colossus is a valuable part of this collection, as are the materials related to the CPUSA’s struggle against laws that were passed to destroy it, laws that violated both the bill of rights and centuries of Anglo-American legal precedent against laws aimed at specific groups (bills of attainder) denying them the rights possessed by other groups in the society.

From the postwar campaigns for the Stockholm Peace petition in the attempt to slow down the right-wing blitzkrieg in the U.S. which threatened during and after the Korean War to turn the cold war into a nuclear war, the CPUSA was and is part of the ongoing struggle for peace in the United States.

In the activities against the brutal racist dictatorship that historians still call segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, doubly oppressed Communists, both black and white provided often in anonymity great assistance to triply oppressed African Americans through a wide variety of activist and support groups, while J. Edgar Hoover, did everything in his power to destroy the Civil Rights movement, and its most important mass leader, Martin Luther King, just as it did the CPUSA. The history of CPUSA activists and allies role in advancing the struggles of the Civil Rights movement during the period of McCarthyism is still largely unwritten and this collection will help both scholars and students understand it

After the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the capitalists of the world proclaimed smugly that Communism was dead, which only showed their arrogance and their blindness. Their strategy since the Russian revolution had been to quarantine and eventually destroy the great power of socialism in the world and then divide and conquer the others.

This collection shows that such views are a profound distortion of reality, that the Communist the working class movement itself, here and abroad, the Communist Party lives. The Communist Party is of the working class and its history, its victories and defeats have both influenced mightily and followed the history of the working class in the United States and one might say in all nations.

Joe McCarthy died of the complications of his alcoholism at the age of 47 in 1957. J.Edgar Hoover died in 1972, after heading the FBI for 48 years, which made him by my reckoning the longest lived political police chief in the history of the world, free or otherwise. Richard Nixon and the co-star of Bed Time for Bonzo, aka Ronald Reagan, although Bonzo was a better actor, is also gone.

The Communist Party continues, while others on the left whine and moan and/or seek escapist and utopian solutions to the present crisis, to seek to organize and coordinate progressive movements and labor to move step by step to win back lost ground and make gains, realizing, in the words of Lenin, that the first virtue of a revolutionary is patience and in the words of Mao Tse-tung, that the job of revolutionaries is to Unite the Many and Defeat the Few.

This enormously important collection for scholars, students, and activists will help do that. For those who are pessimistic about the lack of socialized medicine in the U.S., the existence of homeless people on the streets of the richest country on earth, and the $500 billion dollar military budget, who remembering Friedrich Engels statement before he died, that the future will be one of either the triumph of socialism or barbarism, and see barbarism today victorious, let me say that many advocates of public education, moderate anti-slavery people and reformers of all kinds who belonged to the first “party of hope” died before the Civil War as they saw governments representing the interests of slaveholders enact the monstrous Fugitive Slave Act (1850) tear up the Missouri Compromise, try to force a pro-slavery constitution on the people of the Kansas territory, and proclaim in the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that the freedom and “property” of slaveholders could not be interfered with by governments, felt the same way. They helped to forge an anti-slavery national political coalition which through the new Republican Party and its first elected president, Abraham Lincoln, fought back, preserved the Union and abolished slavery. In the 1930s, Communists, the second party of hope helped forge a New Deal Coalition which advanced real democratic rights and made a major contribution to the victory over the Fascist Axis in WWII.

Karl Marx once wrote famously that “Philosophers have hitherto sought to understand the world. The point however is to change it.” This collection, through its illumination of the past and the present, gives us insights into building a humane future, will help scholars, students, and activists both better understand the world and change it for the better.

Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him at pa-letters @ politicalaffairs.net

Originally published online at

North Korea condemns Japanese governments attempt to white-wash history

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:23:00 +0000

The declaration by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Japan will renounce its 1993 apology for his country’s forcing of Chinese, Korean and other Asian women into becoming sex slaves — euphemistically called “comfort women” — of the Japanese army during World War II has provoked outrage around the world, especially in countries most affected.

Currently, the U.S. House of Representatives is debating a resolution that would call upon Japan to fully admit and apologize for its past crimes. During the debates, former Japanese sex slaves have held the floor.

The Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to the United Nations said in a statement, sent to the PWW, that Japan has been thrown into an “awkward situation” by U.S. Congressional hearings where the “comfort women” have testified. “Japan,” the statement continued, “is resorting to a desperate lobbying operation to stonewall Congressional passage of the resolution.”

The DPRK statement noted that imperial Japan’s aggression “brought only untold hardships and misfortune to many countries and nations. Their harsh colonial rule over Korea for nearly half a century deprived it of a precious period of development and prosperity.”

The Imperial Japanese Army forced over 200,000 Korean women into sexual slavery, killing most of them. This is on top of the thousands of women taken from China, the Philippines and elsewhere.

“This was the most hideous crime against humanity,” said the DPRK statement.

The sex slavery system Japan set up was “unknown in history up to that point,” the statement said. Japan “forcibly drafted, lured and abducted foreign women and took them to battlefields to satisfy the carnal desire of its servicemen.”

Though there are few survivors of those atrocities, “their scars unhealed and their towering grudge unsettled despite the flow” of time, Japan’s leaders “are still trying hard to evade [their] responsibility, refusing to admit its crime-woven history even today.”

Korea condemned the politicians in Japan who are “brazen-faced enough to busy themselves with shuttle-diplomacy to cover up their despicable true colors.”

If they are honestly willing to settle past crimes, North Korea said, “there is no reason for Japan to be upset by any hearing or the adoption of any resolution.”

Japan should settle the situation for its own sake, Korea said, because “any sleight of hand played by Japan to cover up its past wrongs” would cause the nation to never “gain a responsible post in the international community.”

Japan “can win confidence only through its good conduct,” the Korean statement concluded.

On a mission for justice: School of the Americas Watch travels to Colombia and Panama

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:22:00 +0000

On return from our SOA Watch delegation to Colombia and Panama, I traveled by bus to Caracas with my son, Pachi. I took advantage of the long ride to sift through my notes from the trip.

Maybe it was the bumpy road or perhaps my wandering heart, but the statistics I kept reviewing on Colombia seemed jumbled. Was 3.4 million the number of internally displaced people there, as one set of my notes said, or 4 million as another said? Did it really matter which one? The sheer enormity was overwhelming.

In the Colombian jungle

I closed my eyes with the blur of numbers, and as the bus sped forward I recalled the motion on a canoe a week earlier, cutting through a river in the Colombian jungle. Slowly, the images of two of those 3 or 4 million faces came into sharp focus. One was of a young woman who shared the rickety bench on the canoe with me. Her daughter sat between us. Her name was Juliet, such a regal name for a little girl living on the edge of a river in a jungle immersed in war. She was 3 years old and had pink sandals. Much to Juliet’s delight, her mother spent much of the canoe trip pointing out the cows along the riverbank, acknowledged by Juliet’s squeals of joy. They were much more interesting to Juliet than the parrots, eagles, egrets and crocodiles that delighted us. Given the nature of our trip — a delegation to a local military outpost to denounce recent paramilitary attacks and military harassment — and the risks of speaking out in Colombia, I was touched by the spirits and bravery of Juliet’s mother.

Latin America initiative

The visit to the small jungle military outpost wasn’t really in our plans. Our small group of four was in Colombia as part of the Latin America initiative of the SOA Watch to visit the countries that send students to the School of Americas. We had already visited seven countries of South America where we met with several government leaders who agreed both to the immediate removal of their troops from the SOA (Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay) and to a gradual withdrawal (Bolivia). In the other countries we met with civic organizations and members of Congress who joined forces in calling for withdrawal of their country’s troops from the SOA. We knew that as we moved north it was unlikely we would encounter the same openness.

And of all countries yet to visit, Colombia would be the most challenging. Not only does Colombia hold the record for most SOA graduates — over 10,000 — it also has the largest current enrollment.

More importantly, the abuses by SOA graduates in Colombia are taking place in the present tense.

Indeed, our formal requests to meet with government officials went unheeded. Our main purpose in Colombia, however, was to hear first-hand the stories of those living in conflict zones, and to understand what role the United States was playing, especially that of its School of the Americas.

Questions on Plan Colombia

That is why we found ourselves on that canoe, deep in the lush river area of northern Colombia called the Magdalena Medio, in the company of our guides from the Christian Peacemaking Team. The previous evening they had brought us by canoe to the village of Puerto Matilde, a community of 25 displaced families whose new wooden houses huddled together at the river’s edge.

Unlike the majority who had fled the rural violence for the city, those in Puerto Matilde were determined to remain on the land. Many nearby villages had been drastically reduced in population due to the armed conflict. Their land has been usurped by large landowners and converted to the production of African palms. Some 8 million hectares of land have been abandoned by the fleeing displaced, much of it now in the hands of multinational corporations.

Several human rights organizations suggest that the real motivation behind the billions of dollars the U.S. spent for Plan Colombia might be to turn over to multinationals the country’s rich natural resources, e.g., oil, gold, water, jungle, etc.

Indeed, the purported reason for Plan Colombia, the “war on drugs,” just didn’t make sense when looking at the results. After billions of spent dollars, millions of displaced citizens, thousands of lost lives, and dozens of ecosystems destroyed by fumigation, drugs are more available than ever on the streets of the U.S. and coca is now grown in 23 departments (provinces or states) of Colombia, almost double the 13 departments where it was planted at the onset of Plan Colombia.

Visiting Puerto Matilde

That night we had gathered around the only light bulb in the village, and were each served a different plate of food, collected from a different household. It was a communal way of hosting us, and in the same way, mattresses and mosquito nets were later collected and neatly laid out for us. Over dinner we batted mosquitoes and considered the request the community had made to us. They wanted us to accompany them the following morning to visit a military battalion that had installed itself in a nearby town.

Colombian President Uribe boasted that tens of thousands of paramilitaries were laying down their arms and returning to civilian life (which includes free housing, several years of a fixed salary and almost complete impunity for their crimes). Yet the lives of the people of Puerto Matilde spoke to the contrary.

Weekly, neighbors were being killed for crimes such as buying food. In the port city of Barrancabermeja, the paramilitary openly demanded regular “vaccinations” or war taxes for every kilo of rice and beans that was taken by boat. Too many kilos meant death, upfront and outright.

How could we say no to their request? The next morning we boarded the canoe with Juliet and others.

Canoeing to Sgt. Ruiz

After the morning’s journey past cows and crocodiles, we docked at the little town of San Francisco, met by soldiers armed for what looked like an assault on Guadalcanal. After having us frisked upon arrival, the commanding officer, Sgt. Ruiz, smiled and said that he would be glad to meet with us, and that he personally thought that all guns should be converted to guitars. It was a bit hard to believe given the amount of hardware draped from his shoulders, but we managed to smile.

As we sat down in the reprieve of shade, Ruiz ceremonially took off his machine gun and laid it on the table, but his young soldiers stood armed and alert.

One of our hosts, Don Rayo, spoke first of his neighbor who had gone to buy food and had never returned. His horse was found hung from a tree.

Juliet’s mom told of the paramilitary showing up to threaten members of the town, who then had to escape. One was a nurse and her skills were missed. The sergeant indicated that he could not guarantee her safe return because of her crime: she had tended a wounded guerrilla.

And so have we all, Juliet’s mom said. Who can turn down a request when a gun is being pointed at one’s child?

I looked around the circle and wondered. What would happen to these people of Puerto Matilde who were being so forthright?

Almost reading my mind, they added, “We are able to say these things today because of these visitors from the U.S. They are our guarantees that nothing will happen to us. Do you agree, sergeant? Can we be sure that we will be safe?”

“Why of course,” said the sergeant, who clearly wanted to be on our good side and kept talking about converting guns to guitars.

U.S. people can help

Three things became clear to us in this and all or our visits in Colombia:

1. The main victims in this conflict are the civilians

2. Plan Colombia, funded by U.S. taxpayers — you and me — has accelerated the violence and displacement.

3. As U.S. citizens we have a large measure of responsibility in the Colombian violence and also a huge potential to contribute to peace there.

Perhaps we can’t all travel to Colombia, to the rivers and sit beside citizens in meetings like this (for those of us who can, please come). But at least we can all make a phone call to our congressman. Or even visit him or her. After all, our dollars keep the conflict going.

Top commanders in the war zones are SOA grads. The SOA is not only in Georgia, but in Colombia as well. Thousands of U.S. military personnel who have passed through Colombia are teaching those same “skills,” far outside the spotlight the movement has shined on SOA.

Different in Panama

Shortly after leaving Puerto Matilde, we traveled to Panama. We found a very different country, yet linked to Colombia by a common border and two sides of the SOA story.

While the strongest presence of the SOA is currently in Colombia, it had its beginnings in Panama. From 1946-1984, the school was located there. We had a long visit with the former president of Panama, Jorge Illueca, who shared with delight his story of booting the school out of the country. He had previously served as President of the UN General Assembly, but is told that he will be more remembered for his role in closing the SOA.

Now in his nineties, Don Jorge shared hugs and congratulations for our efforts to close down this “School of Assassins,” a term he coined when ousting the school.

Shocking news exposed

After its removal from Panamanian soil, the SOA received no students from that country for 18 years. However, slowly and quietly, Panama’s two recent governments began sending police there (Panama has no army). We discovered after meeting with the Attorney General and even the president’s brother and advisor that even they weren’t aware of this, much less the public.

We quickly altered this, providing the public with information via plenty of access we obtained to major media outlets. There, we poked the beehive, sharing what Panamanians discovered to be shocking news that their police were once again attending an institution that was despised in their land. Even after we left, debate continues in the press, and organizations have joined to look at ways to pressure the government to reverse this situation.

Transforming horror into beauty

We knew we couldn’t leave the country without visiting the former site of the SOA, now converted into a hotel. Our tour guide — the former bishop of Colon — showed us how the lobby has been transformed into a peace monument. A huge marble star adorns the floor, surrounded by a marble compass, a call for peace to be spread to all parts of our earth. The beauty of the grounds took our breath away, and we wondered how a house of horrors could have possibly existed amidst such loveliness.

The transformation of a place of violence into a haven of beauty was repeated on our last night in Panama.

The Maryknoll Sisters invited us to visit their project, a retirement home for low-income Panamanians. We found that the sisters’ project was located in the former U.S. military base where tens of thousands of troops were stationed before the canal was returned to Panama.

Upon the troops’ departure, Sister Gerri suggested to authorities that a wonderful use of the land would be that of a new site for the retirement home for needy elderly Panamanians. They agreed, for the sum of one dollar.

As the sun went down and brought a welcome cool to the surrounding tropics, we visited the former bunker transformed into the center for total care. Four-foot walls had been whitewashed and were covered with butterflies painted in all colors.

Inside, gun vaults were converted to closets holding pink and turquoise dresses and straw hats. The lookout room was filled with several dozen brightly dressed elderly who took our hands firmly and kissed our cheeks, and welcomed us to their home.

It was the death of two Maryknoll sisters at the hands of SOA grads 27 years ago that shed light on this School of Assassins, and led to the huge movement which now demands an end to this school. It seems fitting that their fellow sisters were showing us one of the many ways we can transform a place of war and violence into one of beauty and welcome.

Lisa Sullivan of the SOA Watch Latin America office traveled to Colombia and Panama in January with Fr. Roy Bourgeois of SOA Watch, Pablo Ruiz of Chile’s Observadores de la Escuela de las Americas and Linda Panetta of SOA Watch Northeast.

What is the School of the Americas?

The School of the Americas (SOA), in 2001 renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Ga.

During its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, or forced into refuge by those trained at the School of Assassins.

— From School of the Americas Watch

Reflections on returning to Vietnam

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:05:00 +0000

I recently came back from a remarkable return visit to Vietnam.

My first trip to Vietnam was in 1972 during the war, when Nixon decided to bomb Hanoi during the Christmas holidays. The contrast with today’s Vietnam was enormous.

At that time Vietnam was completely on a war footing. A Communist Party USA delegation, led by then-CPUSA Chair Gus Hall, had been invited by the Vietnamese Workers Party so that we could witness first hand the harsh realities of the U.S. war against their country. When we returned we brought back the urgency of stepping up the fight to end the war.

At that point tens of thousands of Vietnamese and thousands of U.S. and allied troops were being wounded and killed every month. U.S. planes were dropping bombs, napalm and other anti-personnel weapons. It was a racist, genocidal war not just against the socialist north but against all the people of Vietnam. The reasons given for invading Vietnam were as bogus and contrived as the WMDs that were not there in Iraq.

The U.S. had a scorched earth policy. U.S. planes spread Agent Orange, the cancer-causing chemical defoliant, over thousands of acres of jungle in South Vietnam. The U.S. commanders thought the fighters from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front would no longer be able to carry out their guerrilla war undetected if the foliage was destroyed. It did not work, but it did cause terrible long-term damage to the people and environment of Vietnam.

The peace movement

At that point opposition to the war in the U.S. was at or near a majority sentiment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were marching against the war. In 1972, the Nixon administration, seeking reelection, was using all manner of spying and dirty tricks to undermine the majority desire for peace. This was the time of the Watergate break-in.

The U.S. peace movement was under attack. There were trials, frame-ups and provocations to try to isolate and destroy it. The government was looking for “Communist control.” Peace activists were under surveillance.

The warhawks’ “domino theory” claimed that if the U.S. “lost” the war, freedom would be threatened all over Asia. They talked about a bloodbath in Vietnam if U.S. troops pulled out. They suggested that the Communists would go on a murderous crusade and kill all U.S. collaborators. That did not happen.

In fact, those hysterical predictions were a diversion from the horror that was already happening. Vietnam was already a bloodbath and the U.S. was the culprit. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam by the U.S. than all the bombs dropped by all countries during World War II. In My Lai, 109 civilians (mainly women, children and old people) were slaughtered by U.S. troops. There were many other U.S. atrocities. Whole villages were burned to the ground. People were tortured and put in prison-like “strategic hamlets.” Some 300,000 Vietnamese were missing in action (MIA), compared to 3,000 Americans. All this was done in the name of stopping the spread of communism and bringing freedom to Vietnam.

War propagandists said those protesting were against the troops. In 1968, the peace movement called for withdrawal of our troops but the Johnson administration refused. At that point, 48,000 U.S. troops had perished and many more were wounded. By the end of the war, in 1975, the number of U.S. dead was up to 58,000. If the peace movement’s demand had been heeded in 1968, 10,000 U.S. and countless Vietnamese lives would have been spared. So, who was really supporting the troops?

Lessons for today

Almost exactly 34 years later, in December 2006, our Communist Party USA delegation — Sam Webb, CPUSA chair; Scott Marshall, labor secretary; Pamella Saffer, international secretary; and myself — arrived in Hanoi, the capital of the new, unified Vietnam. It was just a few days after Congress granted Vietnam “most favored nation” trade status, like other U.S. trading partners.

We traveled to four cities in six days and got a glimpse of Vietnam’s “doi moi” (renovation) economic reform program, which is moving ahead at a rapid pace. The standard of living of the people is going up.

We visited the Friendship Village in Ha Tay Province, west of Hanoi. This is a residential facility for those born with serious birth defects due to Agent Orange and for mentally disabled veterans of the war. The village is financed by donations mainly from the U.S., including many Vietnam veterans, and other countries. It is a beautiful place where the disabled, young and old, can enjoy nature, live a dignified life, get appropriate care and learn a skill, including creating beautiful needlepoint and other handicrafts.

It is also a place where international peace and friendship truly reside. This is a project that everyone should support.

When the residents found out that we were a delegation from the U.S., we got wide smiles and big hugs. We stood there with tears in our eyes because we were in the presence of those who had suffered so much at the hands of our government. Yet at that very moment, U.S. corporations were falling all over each other trying to do business in Vietnam. So the question naturally came to my mind, “What purpose did U.S. aggression against Vietnam serve?”

We have to ask, have Bush and company learned nothing from that tragic war in Vietnam? The hardcore neocons say that what made the U.S. lose the war in Vietnam was a lack of will. That idea is so dangerous to the entire world. And that’s the thinking behind the current escalation in Iraq.

But history is a hard teacher. What our government did in Vietnam was wrong, dead wrong. And what it is doing in Iraq today is dead wrong as well. What U.S. warhawks lacked in Vietnam is the same thing they lack in Iraq today: the support of the people, there, here and around the world. That is why these tragic wars are not “winnable.” The majority of the U.S. Congress now understands this thanks to the last election results.

Today the Bush administration aims to control Iraq through a compliant regime there. It wants to control the world’s second largest oil deposits and maintain a permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East. As in Vietnam, this too shall fail.

On Jan. 27 thousands marched in Washington and then hundreds stayed to lobby Congress for peace. If we understand the lessons of Vietnam, we need to keep the pressure on until this war is brought to an end.

Jarvis Tyner (jtyner@cpusa.org) is executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA.