People Before Profit blog

Two Koreas agree to cooperate for peace

Fri, 27 May 2005 07:10:00 +0000

Bush administration divided on policy

NEW YORK — South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) have been moving forward towards cooperation and peace, while the Bush administration seems to be divided over its policy toward the Korean peninsula.

The two Koreas completed their first direct talks in 10 months on May 19 in Pyongyang with an agreement to “cooperate for peace on the Korean peninsula” and another agreement on ministerial-level meetings in the near future.

High-level delegations from the north and south will attend a “great festival for national reunification to be held in Pyongyang,” reported the DPRK’s news agency, KCNA. “Both sides also decided to have the 15th north-south ministerial talks in Seoul from June 21 to 24 and push ahead with cooperation from a humanitarian and compatriotic stand.”

Meanwhile, cracks are beginning to be seen in the Bush administration. Five days after the DPRK announced that it would not return to the six-party talks unless American officials addressed the north directly, Joseph DiTrani, the U.S. special envoy on North Korea, met on May 13 with the north’s ambassadors at the DPRK’s UN Mission here. According to reports, the U.S. officials said they recognized the DPRK as a sovereign state and would not attack it.

The six-party talks include Russia, the U.S., People’s Republic of China, DPRK, South Korea, and Japan. They were designed to resolve the Korean nuclear issue after the U.S. refused to discuss the problem with the DPRK bilaterally.

The May 13 meeting contrasts with the U.S. policy of attacking the legitimacy of the north’s government and alluding to a possible “regime change.” While the Bush administration has repeatedly refused bilateral talks with the DPRK, analysts say that the meeting could signify a split in the administration and a possible change in policy.

“The New York meeting,” said an op-ed in the (south) Korea Times May 23 edition, “revealed what the neo-cons still refuse to concede in public, that the North Korea policy heretofore coming out of the White House has been a miserable failure, hobbled with strategic myopia punctuated by the Bush administration’s childish and unproductive name-calling.”

The Korea Times article argues that the DPRK is considering changing its stance because “Bush’s team changed their approach, and did what many diplomats and U.S. partners in the six-party talks, as well as Democrats in the U.S., have been urging all along — they negotiated one-on-one.”

However since the May 13 meeting, administration officials have made contradictory statements. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, suggested that the U.S. might ask for sanctions on the DPRK by the UN Security Council.

“If the U.S. has a sincere stand to settle the issue through the six-party talks, it should opt for creating conditions and an environment for resuming them,” said a spokesman for the DPRK foreign ministry on May 22. Referring to statements made by Rice and others, he said, “This only creates confusion in guessing the U.S. stand.”

Why are we making the same mistakes?

Fri, 27 May 2005 07:06:00 +0000

On April 30, 1975, the last U.S. helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. This marked the end of an unjust war that damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. Our leaders lied to the American public to gain support for the war. And as the body counts piled up and the war budget ballooned, it became clear that there was no winning strategy and no exit strategy.

Sound familiar?

If our leaders had only learned from past mistakes, we would not now be occupying another country, spending billions of taxpayers’ money, confronting a determined guerrilla opposition, and bringing death, injury and illness to thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

Members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) recognized the signs of “Vietnam – Part 2” as the Bush administration began targeting Iraq with its rhetoric of stamping out terrorism in 2002. In the lead-up to the current Iraq war, Americans were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was a danger to his neighbors, and had ties to Al Qaeda.

Since then, these assertions have all been proven false. As a result over 1,500 troops [editor’s note: now over 1,600] have died and the number is steadily rising. Our sons and daughters are sniped at, blown up and mortared.

Like Vietnam, the administration went into a war with no winning strategy and is now stuck in a war they can’t win. Because the Iraqi civilian population regards U.S. forces not as liberators but as occupiers, they refuse to report insurgent hiding places or weapons stockpiles. Abuse of prisoners, detention of innocent people, and continuing civilian casualties increase the hatred of Americans among Iraqis.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to the Bush administration, as we saw these events and consequences unfold over 30 years ago in Vietnam.

And as the insurgency grows, American troops are wearing down. In Vietnam, our tour of duty lasted 365 days and then we were home. Over 40,000 of today’s soldiers in Iraq are no longer volunteers but are being held on active duty against their will through the administration’s “stop-loss” program. Soldiers are being sent back for second, third, fourth, and fifth tours in this never-ending war. At the same time, military re-enlistments are way down, and National Guard and members of the Army Reserve are being sent to Iraq to fill in the gaps. These weekend warriors were never meant to be full-time soldiers. As a result, veterans of the Iraq war will face psychological and stress problems qualitatively worse than many Vietnam veterans.

The billions that we are spending on the Iraq war represent a tremendous human and financial cost. Our economy is weakened, and our educational system and our health care will be worsened for lack of resources. The quality of all our lives will be harmed. In addition, the costs will go on for years to come, as our money continues to pay for the Iraq occupation and to meet our responsibility for reconstructing Iraq.

Millions of dollars will need to be directed to help deal with the serious, lifelong disabilities of our soldiers whose wounds, both psychological and physical, will prevent them from living a normal life.

But these injuries aren’t just caused by bullets and bombs.

In Vietnam we faced malaria, dioxin poisoning from various defoliants, and hepatitis C. In Iraq they are facing worse dangers. Of the troops who served in the first Gulf War, already more than 50 percent have received or have applied for disability, predominantly resulting from exposure to toxins. Today our service people are contaminated by our own government.

In addition to local diseases the U.S. is not prepared for, our government has exposed the troops to serious side effects from anthrax vaccinations, and to depleted uranium, which is used to make U.S. weapons more effective in penetrating tanks and armor but causes cancer and other serious illnesses.

In 1969, there were 33,000 fatalities from Vietnam. We could have ended the war then and achieved the same peace agreement agreed upon only a few years later. But the war continued for six more years, and the Vietnam Memorial wall now contains almost 60,000 names.

And now we must ask ourselves and our government: How many names are we willing to add to a future Iraq war memorial?

Barry Romo is a national coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He served as a lieutenant in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 in the Americal Division and was an infantry platoon leader. This article originally appeared in the Chicago-area Daily Southtown, and is reprinted with permission of the author.

Realities of the class struggle

Fri, 27 May 2005 07:01:00 +0000

More about the Communist Party’s draft program

The following are reader responses to “Upholding Theoretical Foundations”(Tillow, Godwin, Kenny) which appeared in this column in our 5/14-20 issue.

For the last five years, we have analyzed the fascist danger of the Bushites and their corporate backers. We have understood that their basic attempt is not only to dominate the world, but also to take back every gain our working class has won since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

When Bush says, with a 51 percent victory margin, that he now has capital to spend for his agenda, this is the same trick that the Nazis performed in 1932, when they capitalized on a narrow victory as leverage to gain total power.

The ultra right is, for now, operating within our constitutional traditions, but their effort is still to grab total power. We are, correctly, committed to do our maximum to keep this from happening.

How does this fit in with the class struggle today? Is the class struggle just workers on a picket line, or is it workers in their communities and their unions trying to stop privatization of Social Security, denial of women’s rights, appointment of reactionary judges, tax cuts for the rich, cuts in health care and education, and so on?

Building coalitions to stop the Bush ultra-right corporate drive is part of the class struggle, and another part is, at the same time, where appropriate, to indicate that these are only stopgap solutions and that we have to go forward to a more advanced struggle against capitalism.

To claim today that fighting the Bush administration is not the main focus of the class struggle, and that we must instead focus on more advanced goals, is to isolate ourselves from the fighting coalition.

The authors of the May 14 article seem to equate the tactics that we should follow with those of countries like Venezuela or Cuba, with very different conditions and levels of class struggle and consciousness. That is a mistake. The struggles in these countries have developed according to their historical conditions. Where communist parties enjoy the confidence of the masses, it is because they have defended first and foremost the people’s immediate needs. We must do the same — fight for the immediate concerns of the U.S. working class. We must make every effort to reach workers who mistakenly voted for Bush, and to form a common bond with them around the bread-and-butter issues of the day. If we do this, reaching out beyond our left and progressive “choir,” we will be able to stop the Bush/corporate drive towards a fascist state, and build the movement for progressive change and socialism.

I believe the Communist Party USA draft program has correctly characterized the way forward. We can’t just yell “class struggle,” but have to get down and dirty to fight it with real people and the real issues they are ready to move on.

Emil Shaw is chair of the New Mexico Communist Party.

Dying in Iraq is not a career choice

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:56:00 +0000

Military recruiting has to be one of the most demanding and stressful jobs in America today. Try as they may, the 7,500 military recruiters are hard-pressed to sign up even two-thirds of the 80,000 quota they have been given this year by the Defense Department to meet the demands of the current and planned operations.

The New York Times has reported that many recruiters are on the verge of nervous breakdowns, experiencing bouts of depression and/or marital troubles, and some have contemplated suicide. Some have signed up recruits who do not meet the requirements of the service and many have been known to omit information they should have told the potential recruit, or stretched the truth to get a youngster to sign up.

At least 37 recruiters have gone AWOL since October 2002, while a great many have requested other assignments. Some even volunteered to go to Iraq rather than recruit.

All of this despite raising the age limit for volunteers from 34 to 40 and offering cash bonuses of many thousands of dollars to entice possible recruits.

As the news from the war zones becomes more dire and with no end of the carnage in sight, recruiters head to more fertile grounds and focus almost entirely on minority and rural schools and colleges, knowing full well these students are more vulnerable to their sales pitch that the military is the very best choice given their uncertain future at home after graduation.

Stressing only the benefits offered, such as travel, doing exciting things, learning job skills and getting money for college when they end their service, the recruiters’ pitch all sounds so good to immature youths.

Completely unknown to these young people, and never discussed by recruiters, is the fact that of the 580,000 U.S. troops who served in the six-week 1991 Gulf War, 11,000 are now dead, and by the year 2000, 325,000 were on permanent medical disability from the depleted uranium weaponry and the many other toxic and horrifying conditions they were exposed to.

Also unknown is the fact that over half of those who served in that war are now parenting children who are born with some birth defect when previous children were born normal.

The Veterans Administration reports that due to the extremely stressful conditions being experienced by our troops serving in the Mideast, almost a quarter of those returning home are now being diagnosed with serious emotional problems called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That percentage is expected to increase as time goes on. Some experts estimate that before the Iraq operation is ended, there could be as many as 100,000 veterans who will require mental health treatment for the rest of their lives.

The Marine Corps reports that suicides rose by 29 percent in 2004, with 31 ending their lives out of 83 attempts.

Close to 25,000 troops from Iraq and Afghanistan have already been airlifted back to the states for wounds or mental reasons, while military hospitals struggle to meet the need.

The GI Rights Hot Line, a not-for-profit organization with an 800 number set up to offer information, received over 32,000 calls last year from soldiers who do not want to go to Iraq, or go back to Iraq for a second or third deployment. Many of the calls were from some of the 5,000 troops who have gone AWOL (absent without leave) since the Iraq invasion in 2003, and are desperately looking for some legal way to leave the service.

As more of these truths become known to the public, especially the young of military age, filling the military’s recruitment quotas becomes ever more difficult and the possibility of a draft ever more probable.

If this were to occur, we can be certain more draftees will be seeking conscientious objector status with help from organizations like Veterans For Peace (www.veteransforpeace.org), American Friends Service Committee (www.youth4peace.org), and Alternates to Military Service (www.AMSNetwork.org).

Bud Deraps (peacebud@earthlink.net) is a member of the Bi-State Chapter of Veterans For Peace in St. Louis, Mo.

Editorial: Stop the real Star Wars now!

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:52:00 +0000

While the attention of moviegoers is riveted on the latest “Star Wars” release, a potentially catastrophic real-life space drama is playing largely behind the scenes. It could come to a head very soon with the proclamation of a new presidential directive calling for U.S. military superiority in space.

Since George W. Bush took office in 2001, the military-industrial complex has greatly intensified its longstanding drive to fundamentally change U.S. policy to permit the aggressive weaponization of space.

In January that year, a commission headed by soon-to-be Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommended that the military “should ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space.”

In 2002, Bush cleared the way for this by unilaterally destroying the Anti- Ballistic Missile treaty which for 30 years was the bedrock barring an arms race in space.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the arms industry have been hard at work developing potential new ways to rain Armageddon down on Earth.

Among items on the drawing boards:

• a military space plane bristling with precision-guided arms that could strike in 45 minutes from halfway around the world.

• a program nicknamed “Rods from God” that could fling cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium to strike targets on the ground with the force of a small nuclear weapon.

• a system of space-based mirrors to focus laser beams on ground targets.

Many experts question whether these systems will work, citing the persistent difficulties that have plagued efforts to build ground-based anti-missile systems.

But whether or not any of the weapons would work, these programs will be catastrophic.

At the very least, they are further boondoggles for the giant corporations in the far-right section of the U.S. ruling class that backs the Bush administration. They will move new trillions of dollars from human needs to feed already obscene military-industrial-complex profits.

And should the proposed space weapons actually work, the consequences promise to make even the most gruesome science-fiction spectacle look like child’s play.

Don’t wait — rush to the nearest mailbox-phone-fax machine. Tell your representatives in Congress: No real-life Star Wars!

CAFTA: privatization at gunpoint

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:45:00 +0000

ACAJUTLA, El Salvador — Long before the current debate over the Central America Free Trade Agreement, workers throughout the region were under attack from economic reforms that have broken unions, privatized workplaces and lowered wages. One reason unions throughout Central America oppose the agreement so strongly is that CAFTA cements that reform policy into place. The treaty would require dismantling the public sector to encourage private, especially foreign, investment, regardless of cost.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the model for CAFTA, Mexican unions lost tens of thousands of members in huge privatization scandals during the 1990s. Labor contracts were ripped to shreds, wages plummeted, and some unions even disappeared. Central American trade unionists view this experience as a fearful warning, pointing to what may lie in store for them. But in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica, unions also have had their own bitter experiences with privatization. These give them an even stronger reason to oppose the new free trade regime.

Few of the privatization assaults in Central America have been as sustained and sharp as those against the longshore workers of El Salvador.

Echoes of NAFTA

Their experience echoes that of the dockworkers in Veracruz, Mexico, who in 1991 became the Americas’ first victims of privatization at gunpoint. In El Salvador’s main port of Acajutla, as in Veracruz, soldiers occupied the wharves. Using direct military force, new private operators took over the terminals. The Salvadoran dock union was smashed. Efforts to reorganize it since have not only been broken, but the workers involved fired and blacklisted.

Acajutla employs approximately 1,200 workers, including 480 longshoremen. Until September 2001, their employer was the state port authority, CEPA, which owned the port property and administered terminal operations. The union for port workers, the Sindicato de la Industria Portuaria de El Salvador (the Union of the Port Industry of El Salvador), had a 50-year history of fighting for a fair standard of living in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.

As a result, longshoremen employed by CEPA had a union contract with a set wage for every job. Working two shifts a day, four days a week, dockers could make $125 per day or $25,000 a year. “The sons and daughters of people who couldn’t themselves read or write, humble people, were able to go to the university,” says Carlos David Marroquin, secretary-treasurer of the old longshore union, and a former warehouse worker.

“During the civil war we worked 12-hour shifts,” he adds, “unloading bombs and ammunition in very dangerous conditions. The government never complained about our willingness or ability to do the work.”

Union busting and privatization

Nevertheless, on Sept. 11, 2001, within hours of the attack on the twin towers in New York, the Salvadoran government moved troops into the port and the airport. El Salvador’s ruling party, a descendent of the rightwing ARENA party responsible for numerous death squad atrocities during that country’s civil war, cited the New York attacks as evidence of a terrorist threat that made the move necessary. Both port and airport were placed under military authority for the first time in Salvadoran history.

Sending soldiers to assure the port’s physical security was just the beginning of a much more ambitious plan. At the moment of the militarization, 38 port guards were immediately terminated. The following January 600-700 workers were fired. By May the last 240 workers were also terminated. On Jan. 23, the union was officially dissolved by government decree and thrown out of its office in the port. Union members haven’t been permitted back into their building since then.

When the union sought to protect the jobs of port workers, their union contract, and its own existence, Francisco Flores, then-president of El Salvador, called members “terrorists” and “guerrilleros.” That language may seem extreme in any country, but from 1978 to 1989 in El Salvador people so labeled were often picked up on the street, imprisoned, or just “disappeared.” The country has formally been at peace for over a decade since, but political killings still take place, and these epithets produce an atmosphere of fear and terror.

Port operations were privatized. Dockworkers are now employed by seven private companies who operate the terminals: OPSSA, COPESE, OyM, Neparsa, Remarsa, SYCSA and ServiPacific. Privatization was a gift from the Salvadoran government to at least one of the country’s wealthiest families — terminal operator OPSSA is owned by the family of Francisco Flores.

The government told workers they could reapply for their old jobs, but with the new private operators. “The told people they’d be liquidated, but they’d get jobs with the private operators,” Marroquin says. “But they didn’t say how much they’d be paid.” The new wage was $12 per day — cutting the daily income of longshoremen by more than 90 percent.

Workers organize, again

Following its gunpoint expulsion from the port, and its official dissolution, the longshore union made three attempts to reorganize.

On May 7, 2002, its leaders called a meeting of all former members working in the port. Salvadoran labor law stipulates that if 25 percent of the former members had attended, the union would have regained its legal status. But an atmosphere of fear had already been created by the presence of soldiers, the firings, and the dark implications of labeling activists as “terrorists.” To intensify the fear, the union’s former members were told by CEPA officials that if they went to the meeting, they would no longer be allowed to enter the port area, and would, therefore, lose their jobs.

Workers found the threat easy to believe. After disbanding the former union the port authority refused to permit 25 leaders to enter the port area, including Marroquin and Eduardo Fuentes Ordoñez, former chief grievance officer and dock worker. In this climate of intimidation, the required number of workers did not attend.

The next reorganization attempt was made in September 2003. During the election campaign that year, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), El Salvador’s left-wing electoral party and former guerilla movement, made a public commitment to demilitarize the port and recognize the union. FMLN deputies in the Salvadoran Congress tried to get these changes adopted by the National Assembly. The party publicly denounced the violations of labor rights in the port. But their proposal was only supported by the party’s own delegates, who were not a majority. After the election, no further effort was made to introduce legislation reinstating the union and its members.

“That’s when we decided to organize a new union,” Ordoñez explains.

On Dec. 6, 2004, 41 workers, all employed at the time by the terminal operators, signed a notarized document stating that they were constituting a new union, the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Portuaria de El Salvador (the Union of the Workers in the Port Industry of El Salvador). They had a meeting to officially form the union. Under Salvadoran labor law, if 35 workers in the same industry sign such a statement, the union has the legal right to exist.

On Dec. 7, the workers presented the documents to the Ministry of Labor. On Dec. 13, the ministry notified the terminal operators that the legally required number of employees had signed documents forming a union.

On Dec. 14 the employers responded that the workers who had signed the petition were not employed by them. That morning, when those workers had presented themselves as usual, they had been denied work. The companies told them this was because they’d formed a union.

Finally, on Feb. 14, the Ministry of Labor denied legal status to the union, saying that the workers who signed the documents were not employed by the terminal operators. Since the firings, 36 of the 41 have been blacklisted by the terminal operators.

Conditions deteriorate

According to both current and former port workers, conditions have deteriorated, along with wages. In the course of eight hours, a crew of workers will unload 120 shipping containers, with a crew of four longshoremen, two lashers and one crane driver, who uses the crane on the ship. They say they don’t receive overtime pay, despite a law requiring an overtime premium after seven hours. There’s no fixed payday, and workers get paid 20-30 days after they work. Dockworkers are told they can’t eat during the workday, despite the requirement that employers provide a half-hour meal break. They sometimes have to work three straight shifts without eating, if the operator is in a hurry to unload and load a ship.

Salvadoran employers are also required to make payments to the social security health care system, including money deducted from workers’ wages. According to dockers, however, when they get sick and go to the social security hospital, they discover that the terminal operator employing them hasn’t made the payment, and instead has pocketed the money. Workers injured on the job have discovered they don’t have health insurance even for emergency, workplace injuries, and have to cover the doctor bills themselves.

The wharves are a high-risk environment, but dockworkers labor without gloves, hardhats, masks, safety belts, nets or even ladders. When they have to climb a stack of containers, they have to clamber up the sides of the boxes themselves, or a machine called a spreader hoists them up. They have to work in this dangerous way even when it’s raining. According to the blacklisted workers, one man, Manuel Manzilla, broke his leg while working on a Sunday morning in March. He wasn’t taken to the social security hospital, because, they say, the companies try to hide the people who get injured.

International solidarity

Jamie Newlyn, South Australian branch secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia, interviewed the blacklisted longshoremen while investigating labor conditions in Central America for his union. “What has happened to these leaders, and to the rights and conditions of workers in Acajutla, would be a shock to longshore unions internationally, if they knew what has taken place,” he said. He predicted that the international network of dockworkers would take up the Salvadoran case. If other wharfside unions refuse to handle cargo bound to or from Acajutla, the government and terminal operators would feel enormous pressure to restore labor rights in the port.

This kind of international support is one answer unions are finding to the globalization of the free trade system. In the meantime, however, unions in El Salvador and Central America continue to look at Acajutla as a signpost, pointing to their own possible fate should CAFTA go into effect. That practically guarantees their opposition to the agreement will grow angry and increasingly desperate.

David Bacon is a California photojournalist, who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book, “The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border,” was published last year by University of California Press.

Airline pension hearing in cyberspace

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:40:00 +0000

Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) launched an online hearing May 24 into United Airlines’ decision to dump $6.6 billion of its pension obligations. The first ever e-hearing by the House of Representatives was called, Miller said, “because the Republican majority will not hold hearings into these crucial matters.” Miller’s office has solicited testimony from United retirees and employees, from United management, from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (the federal pension insurer) and from experts on retirement issues. The hearing website is http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/unitedhearing.html.

Miller and Schakowsky have introduced HR2327 which would prevent bankrupt companies — including United — from unloading their workers’ pension plans onto the federal government for the next six months.

“The impact of multiple pension terminations — first at the airlines and then across America — is designed to make all pension plans radioactive while allowing corporations to pocket billions in benefits that rightfully belong to U.S. workers and their families,” said the International Association of Machinists in an internet bulletin.

The bulletin urged support of HR2327.

Dont blame workers for refinery deaths

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:38:00 +0000

The 15 worker deaths at the British Petroleum Company refinery in Texas City, Texas on March 23 could have been prevented according to a preliminary report by the United Steelworkers, the union that represents many of the workers at the facility.

“If the company had taken the union’s advice to pipe the atmospheric vent — where the hydrocarbons were released — to the flare system,” there would have been no fire, said USW Region 6 Director Gary Beevers, “And if the company had not violated its own policy and issued themselves a variance in order to place the trailer [where many of the victims were working] in a dangerous unit” there would have been no deaths, he continued.

The Steelworkers union is raising serious questions about the thoroughness of BP’s interim report on the explosion, challenging its focus on blaming employees. “As a union we will do everything in our power to ensure that our members who were disciplined by BP are not blamed for mistakes made by their supervisors or higher level BP management,” said USW President Leo Gerard.

“Blaming workers doesn’t solve the problem of unsafe conditions in that refinery,” added Beevers.

American Indian and Alaska Native health struggles

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:36:00 +0000

The Bush administration does not care about low- and middle-income Americans, and they certainly don’t care about the nation’s indigenous peoples. The Indian Health Service (IHS) recently announced plans to dramatically reduce vital services at its Albuquerque, N.M., facilities using the excuse of “budget deficits,” yet Albuquerque has one of the largest concentrations of urban Indian populations in the United States. Worse yet, the per capita health care funding for reservation-based populations is less than half of what is provided to those on Medicaid or in prison. Even Senate Indian Affairs Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) recently charged: “The federal government has continually reneged on its trust and moral obligations to meet the educational, health care, and housing needs of Indians, and these needs far outweigh the imperceptible contribution that the proposed cuts will make to reducing the deficit.”

The federal government has a unique relationship with American Indians and Alaska Natives that is defined by the U.S Constitution, treaties, Supreme Court cases, and legislation. The historic contract was that in exchange for tribal lands, the U.S. government agreed to provide health care to members of federally recognized tribes. The IHS, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was supposed to have fulfilled that responsibility since 1955, but in reality, it has failed miserably.

American Indians/Alaska Natives are among the fastest growing populations in the United States. In the 2000 Census, 4.1 million people (about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population) identified themselves as American Indian and/or Alaska Native, solely or in combination with one or more other racial or ethnic groups. But at the same time, looking at mortality rates, American Indians and Alaska Natives die sooner than whites at each stage of the lifespan, with persistent disparities in infant mortality, life expectancy, and mortality from a variety of conditions including chronic diseases. There are also serious disparities in health care financing, access to care, and quality of care.

When the IHS was established in 1955, more than 95 percent of Indian people lived on or near their home reservations. Now, despite the fact that more than 60 percent of members of U.S. tribes reside outside their home reservations at least part of the year, only 1 percent of the IHS budget is earmarked for urban Indian health care — and even that meager care is being slashed.

In fiscal year 2003, the Indian Health Service had an operating budget of $2.9 billion to provide or pay for care for approximately 1.5 million of the 4.1 million people who identify themselves as American Indians or Alaska Natives. This amounts to $1,914 per patient per year, which was about $1,600 less per year than the nation spent on other public health care programs serving the non-elderly. According to one study, an additional $1.8 billion is needed to provide current IHS users with services at the same level as those provided to federal employees.

Despite this history of extraordinary neglect by the federal government of Native American health issues, there is one very hopeful development. Most of the Native tribes, villages, and organizations in Alaska have banded together to form the Alaska Native Tribal Health Coalition, which cobbles together a statewide health care system by adding cash from third-party payers such as private health insurance and Medicaid. This looks a lot like a democratically operated non-profit health maintenance organization.

All Americans have to join with American Indians and Alaska Natives in struggle against the decimation of their health care systems. Moreover, we need to support struggles to get local control of health care where they are taking place. Further, we must make sure that any national health plan takes into account these unique considerations and contributions.

Bush vows revenge against Sith

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:34:00 +0000

Bashes fictitious foe in nationally televised address

Amid reports that the new “Star Wars” film contains not-so-subtle anti-Bush messages, President George W. Bush today took to the national airwaves to vow revenge against the Sith.

Speaking from the Oval Office in the nationally televised address, the president portrayed the U.S.’s conflict with the Sith as a classic struggle between good and evil.

“Now is the time for all of the nations of the world to ask themselves,” the president said. “Are you with us, or are you with the Sith?”

At a time when the U.S. military is considering dozens of base closings across the country, the president’s decision to declare a new war, especially one that would presumably take place in outer space, took many by surprise.

But according to Ret. General Crandall Wheatley of the University of Minnesota’s Defense Institute, there may be a method to the president’s madness: “At a time when the U.S. military is stretched thin, it may make sense to declare war against a fictitious enemy.”

Furthermore, declaring war against an enemy that it not really there is not completely without precedent in U.S. history, Gen. Wheatley says: “There was the invasion of Iraq, for example.”

Andy Borowitz writes a daily humor column at borowitzreport.com.

Esteban Torres speaks out: Regrets of a NAFTA supporter

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:29:00 +0000

The congressman who led the push among Latino legislators for passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement 12 years ago is now calling that legislation “a tragic failure” in an appeal for rejection of the Central American Free Trade Agreement now before Congress.

In a letter to his colleagues, former California Rep. Esteban Torres said that as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, he worked hard to ensure that NAFTA became law because he “thought it would create increased economic opportunity on both sides of the border.” Torres cited assurances of fair wage, labor and environmental standards and better social and economic conditions for Mexican as well as U.S. workers.

“Sadly,” 11 years after the trade agreement’s passage, Torres stated, “nearly a million U.S. jobs have been lost … [and] in Mexico, 1.5 million farmers have lost their farms due to NAFTA while the minimum wage there has dropped severely.”

As the debate on CAFTA takes center stage in Washington, Torres warned members of Congress that the arguments used by the proponents of the Central America Free Trade Agreement “strike hauntingly familiar chords to those used in favor of NAFTA.” He added, “The failure of NAFTA demands that all members of Congress concerned about the fate of workers, farmers and immigrants reject CAFTA.”

Whats behind predatory lending? Too much capital, too much debt

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:25:00 +0000

People Before Profits With too much money on their hands in the early 1990s, Citibank and other big lenders dropped the requirement for parents to co-sign for their children’s credit card accounts, determined to ensnare even teenagers into credit card debt. Young U.S. adults aged 18 to 24 devoted 28 percent of their income to paying off debts in 2001, up from 12.7 percent in 1992, the Boston Globe recently reported. Their average credit card debt jumped 104 percent in the same period, to $2,985. The average student loan rocketed 66 percent just between 1997 and 2002, to $18,900.

Credit cards for 16-year-olds

With credit cards being offered to 16-year-olds, teenagers “are faced with the opportunity to ruin themselves financially before they are old enough to vote,” Harvard bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren told the Boston Globe.

Citibank hired Warren in 1990 as a one-day consultant, she reports in “The Two-Income Trap,” her insightful book on U.S. household bankruptcies. She thought her task was to teach Citi’s executives how to avoid lending to families in financial trouble. But after she finished her presentation, the bank’s senior executive curtly dismissed her, saying, “We have no interest in cutting back on our lending to these people [in financial trouble]. They are the ones who provide most of our profits.” With that, she reports, “I was ushered out.” Citi, Chase and other big banks soon expanded their predatory lending practices from credit cards to mortgages, Warren reports.

Why the recent push on predatory lending? “The country is literally awash in capital,” Babson College management professor J. M. Stengrevics has written. “The problem is that capital has no place to go ... The supply of capital is enormous and the truly good uses to which it can be put are scarce.” (Most of our readers could no doubt think of plenty of “truly good uses” for all that capital in fulfilling human needs, but as far as the capitalists are concerned the only “truly good use” for capital is one that brings in profit.)

Nowhere for capital to go

Stengrevics wrote about the problem of nowhere for capital to go in 1993. The “problem” has snowballed since. There is also “too much” food and “too much” auto production capacity along with “too much” capital. Not too much food for the world’s people to eat, but too much food to produce satisfactory profits.

Too much capital; too much debt. This is the clashing picture the capitalists face as their system inexorably charges toward another general failure

Role of bankruptcy bill

For the capitalists, the solutions to the problem of maintaining profits in the face of “too much” capital include cheapening labor by creating a pool of millions of debt-enslaved desperate workers. The lenders’ bankruptcy bill approved last month was drawn up rather explicitly to press debt victims into virtual indentured servitude, with no escape from the demands of high-interest debt.

At the same time, U.S. bankruptcy courts have moved to cancel billions of dollars in debts that corporations owe to workers. The most recent such outrage was this month’s ruling canceling United Airlines’ obligations to pay the pensions it owes to its unionized workers

For workers, for youth and households increasingly caught in the debt trap, the way out lies in organizing to cancel all debts to capitalists (not to workers or small businesses!), and to socialize large-scale production and capital. That includes canceling all student debts. Education is a social responsibility.

In addition to opening the path to global equality, prosperity and peace, these measures will also free capitalists from their justified worries about what to do with “too much” capital.

Taking action for national health care

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:23:00 +0000

ALIQUIPPA, Penn. — They lent faces, breath and passion to the statistics of pain and crisis in the country’s for-profit health care system. Over 200 workers and their families jammed the Aliquippa Croatian Club here May 21, with one thing on their minds — action to create national health care. Steelworkers, construction trades people and airline workers broke new ground by testifying at the first of a series of citizen hearings, hosted by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Kucinich have introduced legislation into the House, HR676, to create a universal, single-payer health care system. The Aliquippa hearing provided the vital resident clout to secure serious congressional consideration, build a grassroots movement and, ultimately, win passage.

The bill answers the criteria outlined by labor unions and advocacy groups who point out that 45 million working families have no health care in the richest country in the world. HR676 covers everyone without deductibles and co-pays. Patients select their own physician who decides treatment and care, not an insurance company. In addition to primary health care, HR676 provides dental, optical, and mental health services. Modeled on the current system of Medicare, the bill would slash health care administrative costs by 11 percent, and it is estimated it would reduce overall health spending by $50 billion in the first year (more info: cnhpn.org).

Corporate bankruptcy is pouring gasoline on the fires of the health care crisis. Carol McMann spoke for the 250,000 steelworkers across the country who lost their retiree health care. After describing a dizzying maze of insurance company plans to plug the health care hole left when LTV Steel collapsed, a passionate McMann pleaded for a new health care system. “Our health insurance takes it all,” she said. “My husband worked his life away for absolutely nothing in the U.S. of A. We no longer have any money for gifts for family, no longer take vacation, no longer take day trips or get out of the house.”

The skyrocketing cost of medications forces Pat Pudik and her husband, a veteran LTV steelworker, to take half their prescriptions one day and the other half the next, she told the panel of labor leaders and elected officials.

Construction electrician Robert Nixon, a member of IBEW Local 712 for 40 years, has been laid off 10 out of the last 13 months. His cost to keep his family’s health insurance is $1,000 per month, wiping out their savings. They are now in debt.

Ian Thompson, a recent Penn State graduate, said that 18,000 young people die needlessly each year because they do not have health care. Thompson charged that the “perverse” federal spending on the Iraq war and occupation diverts money from life-and-death health care coverage. “Young people are in debt to pay for health insurance, burying their dreams,” he said.

World Notes

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:15:00 +0000

Cuba/Belize: MDs care for over 1 million

A medical brigade of 103 Cuban doctors has cared for over 1,257,000 patients in the Central American country of Belize during the last five years, Granma International said earlier this month. In the last year alone, the Cubans cared for nearly 400,000 patients.

The Cuban health team has been in Belize since 1998. The Cuban doctors work in every district including remote rural areas where health services have never been provided.

A new agreement between Cuba and Belize not only provides for continued work by the medical brigade, but also provides for Cuban experts to work with a literacy program and Spanish classes via the mass media.

Some 160 Belizean students are studying at Cuban universities, including the Latin American School of Medicine.

Finland: Paper workers locked out

Following the May 14 failure of talks with employers, thousands of Finnish paper workers held a two-day strike last week, closing 40 paper mills and 14 board mills in the country. Employers responded by declaring a lockout and threatening to keep plants shut until an agreement is reached.

With two of the world’s largest papermakers affected, and the possible spread of the strike to Sweden, supply problems seemed likely in Europe and the UK.

National conciliator Juhani Salonius, who mediated the talks, said the biggest disagreements concerned the use of temporary employees, and production breaks during national holidays. The paper workers union said workers wanted to be compensated for extra work with more free time, rather than with money as the employers proposed.

Other unions including the Central Trade Union organization backed the strike and raised the possibility of solidarity actions. Swedish paper workers declared a two-day ban on overtime work in solidarity with the Finnish strike and were said to be considering a possible strike.

China:Move to end forced confessions

Chinese law enforcement agencies are taking new measures to eliminate the forcing of confessions by police, People’s Daily said last week. The new measures followed the release last month of She Xianglin, who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly murdering his wife. The supposedly dead woman recently reappeared.

After his release, She Xianglin told reporters that police had tortured him by not letting him sleep for 10 days, and finally made him leave his fingerprint on documents that said an unidentifiable female body was his wife and that he had murdered her. Mr. She is now seeking compensation for his ordeal.

At a meeting last week, top law enforcement officials decided to set up a system to probe and prevent use of forced confessions, including requiring prosecutors to carefully ask the suspect about possible forced confessions, and examination of police records for signs of forced confessions.

South Africa: HIV/AIDS leading cause of death

HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in South Africa, according to a new Medical Research Council report, the UN’s IRIN news agency said last week.

The report, “Estimates of Provincial Mortality,” found that while overall rates and causes of death differed, AIDS was the number one cause in all provinces except the Western Cape.

In Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, AIDS accounted for one-third of all deaths in 2000, while in the eastern province of Kwazulu-Natal, the figure was 42 percent. The Research Council said the free provision of nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission, and the start of the national treatment program, should slow the increase in death rates, but cautioned that in the years since 2000, deaths due to AIDS had probably increased.

Australia: University unions set Day of Action

Higher education unions will cooperate on a June 1 National Day of Action to protest the federal government’s plan to cut public universities’ budgets by $210 million unless their managements agree to harsh changes in workplace relations, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) announced May 14.

NTEU said the government seeks to remove limits on casual employment, roll back staff working conditions, and require universities to offer all staff Australian Workplace Agreements that override existing collective agreements.

The union said it was bringing together a broad coalition of groups affected by the government’s proposals, including other unions and student groups, and indicated there might be strikes at some universities.

“Universities are independent institutions,” said NTEU General Secretary Grahame McCulloch. “While they need to be broadly accountable, they should not be subject to excessive government interference and should have the right to determine their own arrangements with their own staff.”

World Notes are compiled by Marilyn Bechtel (mbechtel@pww.org).

Galloway challenges war lies

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:10:00 +0000

On May 17, British MP George Galloway appeared before hearings held by the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations on charges of corruption in the Iraq oil-for-food program.

After demolishing allegations against him, Galloway lit into subcommittee chair Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and the Bush administration. Excerpts follow.

“Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted …

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction … that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda … that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11/2001.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

“If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today.

“Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own government.”

Antiwar Briton takes Senate subcommittee to task

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:09:00 +0000

LONDON — It’s not often that you hear listeners of BBC London Radio’s John Gaunt phone-in plumping for a socialist. Callers’ positive reaction to British Member of Parliament George Galloway’s barnstorming performance on Capitol Hill last week spoke volumes. Even Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing rag The Sun was forced grudgingly to take a break from bashing “whining lefties” and reflect the public mood.

For some Britons, admiration for Galloway following his TV roasting of right-wing Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) and friends at last week’s Senate Investigations Sub-Committee hearing probably had more to do with jealousy of the U.S. knocking Britain off the global power top spot than agreement with his politics. But for millions of progressives here and across the world, it was a rare opportunity to get their side heard loud and clear.

Galloway, a Scotsman with a deserved reputation as a passionate public speaker, has a polarizing effect on people. His fiery rhetoric has made him enemies on the left and the right, but, despite his showman character, his loyalty lies firmly in socialist ideals.

In 2002, he was kicked out of the Labor Party after he condemned Tony Blair and George Bush as “wolves” over their illegal invasion of Iraq. Following his expulsion, he joined forces with key players in the antiwar movement from the Trotskyite Socialist Worker Party and the Muslim Association of Britain, as well as smaller groups, to form the Respect Coalition.

Though under the UK electoral system it is near impossible for parties outside the big three – Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labor – to get MPs into Parliament, that’s what Respect set out to do. Galloway, Respect’s most high-profile candidate, ran in the east London district of Bethnal Green & Bow – traditionally home to immigrant communities and where Communists scored victories early last century.

His opponent was Labor Party darling Oona King, a Black woman who was a supporter of the leadership policy and who backed the war in Iraq – a risky act in an area with both a sizeable Muslim population and plenty of non-Muslim progressives.

Galloway won by just 823 votes.

Following the Scotsman’s return from Washington last week, a packed meeting of over 1,000 Respect supporters welcomed him with rapturous applause. Echoing comments made by other Respect speakers, he warned that the party would now be targeted by an Establishment smear campaign.

It was no surprise to see newspapers imply the following day that his victory had come on the back of fraudulent votes. In fact, King could just as easily have been the beneficiary and Respect said it had been calling for an investigation for weeks.

However, smears aside, equally damaging for Respect’s future prospects is the UK’s winner-takes-all electoral system.

Richard Bagley is a journalist for British-based socialist daily the Morning Star www.morningstaronline.co.uk

Bring the terrorist to justice vindicate the Cuban Five

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:08:00 +0000

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said May 22 that his country would consider breaking diplomatic ties with the U.S. government if Washington refuses to extradite Luis Posada Carriles.

Since Posada’s arrest May 17 for illegal entry into the United States, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has held the terrorist without bail in El Paso, Texas. A hearing is scheduled for June 13 to decide whether he will be extradited to Venezuela, sent for trial in another country or remain in a U.S. jail. His lawyer maintains that as a longtime CIA agent, Posada deserves U.S. asylum.

Posada is a citizen of both Cuba and Venezuela. In 1985, he escaped from jail in Venezuela, where he had served nine years on charges relating to a bomb attack that brought down a Cuban airliner in 1976 and killed 73 people. Twenty members of Congress sent President Bush a letter May 18 demanding Posada’s extradition to Venezuela. The LA Times has called for a quick extradition. “If Washington disregards its extradition treaty with Venezuela,” the paper said, “other countries will feel free to disregard their extradition treaty obligations with the U.S.”

On May 18 National Security Archives of George Washington University posted declassified FBI files on its web site that clearly demonstrate Posada’s guilt and U.S. complicity in the airliner attack. Before the attack, U.S. Embassy personnel in Caracas knew that one of the men who planted the bomb was Posada’s employee, that he may have bombed the Guyanan Consulate in Trinidad, and that he was headed for Barbados, the site of the bombing. U.S. officials suspected he “may have been trained in the use of explosives” by Posada and they knew that his team had previously tried to bomb two other Cuban planes. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was informed that Posada had boasted at a party: “We are going to hit a Cuban airliner.”

President Fidel Castro, speaking before 200,000 Cubans elaborated on the connection between the U.S. tolerance of Posada’s crimes and its cruelty to five Cuban anti-terrorists jailed in the United States. He detailed how hotel bombings in Havana staged by Posada in 1997 set off a sequence of events that led to the “Five’s” victimization. It’s a story marked by deceit and arrogance.

Castro reported that while the hotel bombings were going on, U.S. officials provided the Cubans with useful intelligence information about other possible attacks originating in Florida. Cuban leaders began talking with U.S. officials to develop a united front against terrorist attacks. They met several times in early 1998.

Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, serving as Cuba’s unofficial emissary to the Clinton administration, met with high officials in Washington on May 7, 1998. “We have common enemies,” one of them affirmed.

The two countries developed plans for sharing intelligence and Cuba was to provide the FBI with information gathered by its anti-terrorist agents working in Florida. Cuba handed over reams of material on June 17, 1998. Then there was silence. The FBI arrested the five Cubans Sept. 12.

Castro charged that Miami FBI chief Hector Pesquera single-handedly broke up the joint anti-terrorist venture. Four months ago Pesquera, now retired, admitted in an interview that the Cuban Five had done the U.S. government no harm. In addition, Castro noted that at the same time the five were being investigated and prosecuted, 14 of the 19 men responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were living and training in South Florida.

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel last week condemned the U.S. double standard. “What is the final position of the American government, and particularly President Bush, with respect to terrorism?” he asked. “It seems that for some there is a good terrorism and a bad terrorism.”

Africa Day can help prevent repeat of history

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:07:00 +0000

News Analysis

May 25 is celebrated throughout the African Diaspora as African Liberation Day (ALD) and African countries commemorate it as Africa Day.

Founded in 1958 as Africa Freedom Day and changed to ALD in 1963, this day was inspired by the popular struggle of African people throughout the world to free themselves from oppression and exploitation. ALD mainly focuses on the plight of continental Africa.

A Ghana conference in 1958 was significant primarily because it marked the end of pan-Africanism as a Diaspora-led movement. In the words of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, the conference had “returned home.”

The conference was attended by representatives of nationalist movements, independent African states, and many in solidarity from around the world. It pledged solidarity and garnered support for all liberation movements on the continent. ALD continued over the decades as a forum of pan-African solidarity in an era when political independence and ending apartheid were focal points of continental African struggles, a heightening U.S. civil rights movement, and Caribbean political independence.

It speaks to the great success of this phase of struggle that today most African countries have attained political independence. Apartheid in South Africa and Pretoria’s occupation of Namibia are no more.

Today, the main problem facing post-colonial Africa is that of political liberation absent of economic and social emancipation.

ALD and the pan-African movement that inspired it are not monolithic. There are distinct and varying political tendencies within. Those of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Nkrumah and continued by the South African liberation movement are class-based.

Henry Winston, former Communist Party USA chairman, wrote that by “blurring class distinctions … with regard to the oppressed peoples and their oppressors” neo-pan-Africanism diverts the black liberation struggles in Africa and the Diaspora.

Likewise, imperialism has attempted for decades to distance African liberation from the struggle for socialism. However, the critical role played by the socialist countries, particularly Cuba, in the liberation of African countries from colonialism and apartheid is hard to ignore. So too is the central role of socialist and communists in African liberations struggles. And, many African states owe their independence to military aid and other assistance from socialist countries.

Today, capitalist globalization is causing tremendous hardship for Africans. Mass poverty, corruption, civil wars and AIDS are all symptoms of the new forms of colonialism and imperialism.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) has put out the challenge for ALD to be a day in which Africans seriously reflect on progress made toward the goals that the heroes and heroines of the continent have set for Africa — national liberation and genuine social emancipation of African people.

“It is a challenge to advance the struggle to resolve the class, national and gender contradictions in an interrelated manner,” the SACP has said, “to free our continent from the shackles of imperialism.”

A concern of African countries for many decades is the negative perception of Africa and African struggles in the capitalist media. This found expression in the international community in the struggle for the New International Information Order advanced primarily by the Non-Aligned Movement and socialist countries. This is as true today as it was more than half a century ago, which attests to the need for a reinvigorated African liberation movement that the SACP is advocating.

The imperialist-dominated news sources give the perception that nothing positive is taking place on the continent. A recent study of coverage of African affairs in five prominent U.S. publications found that it concentrates on bad news to the exclusion of positive developments. The survey found that there is little mention of the fewer civil wars, South Africa’s economic growth or increased access to education, for example. The panel of 11 former African presidents reported that “disasters [dominated], while transitions to democracy in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and elsewhere were ignored.”

With the metamorphosis of colonialism into neo-colonialism (political independence without economic independence) many see the danger of re-colonialism. Pan-Africanism and ALD is, therefore, more than ever a necessary tool of international solidarity in resisting the re-colonization schemes of capitalist globalization for the true African liberation.

Massillon memorializes murdered strikers

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:02:00 +0000

MASSILLON, Ohio — A solemn crowd watched as Mayor Francis Cicchinelli Jr. dedicated a plaque on the town square here to the three steelworkers killed during the historic “Little Steel” strike of 1936.

The strike kicked off a tough battle by steelworkers and other industrial workers to achieve union recognition in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Those honored here April 28 were killed when national guardsmen and company thugs fired into a peaceful rally in front of the Republic Steel plant as the strike began.

Paul Santilli, leader of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees, who was an organizer of the event, said he was “proud to see these working-class heroes finally get the recognition that they earned, at the cost of their lives. Only because these brave men, and others like them, put their lives on the line do we have a labor movement today that can fight for us.”

The best way to “honor these heroes,” Santilli said, “is to fight to stop those that are today trying to destroy our unions, steal our Social Security and wipe out our hard-won gains.”

Cicchinelli stressed the need “to be aware of the great sacrifice that it took by workers like those being honored. Without it, the steel industry wouldn’t be the vital industry that it is today and our community wouldn’t have the living standard that working people have enjoyed for years.”

Bill Burga, the fiery Ohio AFL-CIO president, spoke emotionally of his pride in being a long-time member of the United Steel Workers of America and his Massillon heritage.

“Their sacrifice made it possible for us to have unions, to have some level of dignity, for us to be able to support our families and our communities,” he said. Never more than now, Burga said, “has the courage, dignity and strength of these great heroes been so needed. We must draw strength from their sacrifice in order to build the united fight needed to protect Social Security from corporate claws, and fight to turn our nation around again.”

The Massillon event is one in a series of memorials being held around the nation to commemorate martyrs and heroes of labor’s bloody and difficult struggles to organize.

End funding inequity

Fri, 27 May 2005 06:00:00 +0000

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Thousands of students, educators and community leaders filled the Capitol rotunda here May 18 to protest the deepening crisis of state education funding. The protesters came from all over the state.

More than 80 percent of the state’s school districts are in the red, especially working class, poor and majority African American, Latino and other minority districts. Recently, the Chicago Public Schools announced plans to lay off 1,000 teachers to cover a $175 million deficit.

“This is a sorry state of affairs,” said Michael Scott, president of the Chicago Board of Education. “The system is structurally broken and you will fix it,” he told the cheering crowd.

School districts are forced to rely heavily on local property taxes. The state funds 30 percent of local school revenues compared to the national average of 50 percent. Illinois, 7th in per capita income nationally, ranks last in education spending.

The funding formula creates huge disparities between districts, ranging from $4,300 per pupil in the poorest to more than $18,000 in the wealthiest. Nearly 40 percent of the state’s schoolchildren come from low-income families.

Sally Newman, a student at Chicago’s Jones Prep High School, had just finished touring seven cities and towns with Chicago educators. “There are sad stories across the state. Classes cut, schools closed. This is not a Chicago issue, it’s a statewide issue,” she told the crowd.

“I’m here for the third time to break the shackles of inequitable funding,” said John Bradley, a parent organizer at Chicago’s Thorton High School. “It’s going to take some courage on behalf of the legislators to stand up and do it.”

Many rally sponsors supported SB 750, which would have raised the regressive state income tax from 3 to 5 percent, reduced property taxes by 30 percent and given a tax credit to renters.

It would have also increased the minimum per-child amount the state pays to $6,100 from the 2004-2005 level of $4,964 and guaranteed yearly increases; fully funded all mandated special education programs; and provided additional funding for state universities and community colleges.

However, the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. James Meeks, withdrew the legislation a day after the rally, conceding it didn’t have enough support, including from Gov. Rod Blagojevich and House Speaker Michael Madigan, both Democrats.

In a statement the Communist Party of Illinois blasted the Bush policies of militarization and corporate tax breaks, which are bankrupting cities and states across the country. Over $11 billion has been drained from Illinois to pay for the illegal Iraq war, the statement noted. In addition, the state has been shortchanged more than $400 million from the federal mandates in the No Child Left Behind law.

Rather than raising taxes on working families, the Communist Party urged taxing the corporations and wealthy and transferring funds from the military budget to education and social needs. That $11 billion from Illinois could have funded: 154,000 teachers; 1.1 million children in Head Start; insurance for 5 million children and 432,000 four-year scholarships at public universities, the statement said.