People Before Profit blog

Thankful for Thanksgiving

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 10:28:00 +0000

Editor's note: This is one of several thought-provoking articles we are reposting for your holiday reading. This article was originally published Nov. 25, 2009. Your comments are welcome.

While I don't care much about Columbus Day (except that there's no school, which when my kids were younger was a pain in the ass...), I do like Thanksgiving. As do most people in our country, who gather every year in all kinds of different arrangements and combinations, for an overdose of the four Fs: food, family, friends, football.

I mention these two holidays because they are among the most maligned by some on the left end of the political spectrum (along with the 4th of July), because of their connection to the European colonization of the Americas.

Make no mistake, the arrival of the Europeans, for which Columbus is ostensibly celebrated in October, was disastrous for the millions of Native American people living here.

It was, indeed, genocide, both intended and unintended. In his book, "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," Charles C. Mann argues that the impact of the Europeans was even more catastrophic than previously thought, and that there had existed large, thriving civilizations. He points to new archeological work that hints at how developed and widespread were the accomplishments of the people whose societies were destroyed.

I highly recommend the book -- it's a thought-provoking read.

But does anyone celebrate Thanksgiving because it symbolizes European colonial triumph? Don't millions of Americans celebrate the holiday - simply because it's a day to relax, (over)eat and enjoy the company of others?

And if the Thanksgiving "story" is oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness (Pilgrims are rescued by Indians, and share a meal together), doesn't it also have things to recommend it? The paired images of collective suffering and human solidarity; the celebration of fall, the harvest, nature's bounty; expressing appreciation for comfort and company.

This is what most people would say is the meaning of Thanksgiving (Although many of us are probably preoccupied with other questions: Pumpkin or pecan, or both? Where can I get some folding chairs? Should I go back my diet on Friday or Monday?)

Besides, Thanksgiving, like all of the other holidays celebrated in our multicultural, multiracial country, has been transformed over time, and like the country itself, has expanded and embraced new cultures and traditions. Hence the interesting ways to prepare the bird, like jerked turkey. Or that for some people, Thanksgiving isn't complete without macaroni and cheese, for which I'm pretty sure neither Indians nor Pilgrims had the recipe.

And here's another good thing about Thanksgiving: despite the best efforts of marketing and retail companies, it is still relatively un-commercial. You don't have to buy anything (except the food) and you don't have to decorate (ok, maybe some corn on the door, plus housecleaning if you're hosting). And that's a good thing for struggling families. Thanksgiving is an opportunity - in fact, practically an obligation - to get together and enjoy a day off. And for a lot of people, it's a 4-day weekend.

So I say to those who only see the "glass-half-empty" of Thanksgiving and other American traditions: if we can't point to what's positive in our history and culture, people won't hear us when we talk about what's negative.

And if we can't share the pride that working people have in those things, we won't be effective participants in the social movements that have expanded democracy and rewritten our country's history and traditions, and will do so going forward.

Photo: http://www.macaroni-and-cheese.net/articles/macaroni-and-cheese.html

Jobs, not bombs

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:50:00 +0000

President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan has generated skepticism and dismay among his supporters. And rightly so. We've said it before, and we say it again, joining a wide spectrum of Americans: there is no military solution to the Afghanistan crisis.

The president has inherited a huge problem from the Bush-Cheney warhawks. As Obama correctly implied in his Dec. 1 West Point speech, the Bush administration was so obsessed with grabbing control of Iraq that, after invading Afghanistan and implanting a U.S. occupation and warlord-based client government there, it basically walked away, allowing chaos and suffering to build.

But we know the problem didn't start then. It was U.S. Cold War anti-communism that promoted and bankrolled the rise of Osama bin-Laden and al Qaeda, just as that same policy suppressed democratic, secular and progressive people's governments and movements around the world, helping to fuel reactionary religious extremism and terrorism itself.

War and militarism have been the tools of that Cold War policy, and an entrenched military establishment continues to wield enormous power in Washington. Obama has shown courage in seeking to turn that around, in his efforts, however halting, to promote diplomacy in the Middle East and with Iran, and his important push for global nuclear disarmament, which he mentioned in his speech. In fact, those initiatives have a bearing on resolving the Afghanistan crisis, and they need to be much more strongly pursued.

Obama briefly and indirectly alluded to the ugly Cold War history in his speech, but the fact is, people in the affected regions are well aware of this history, and rightly distrustful of U.S. military actions, and that will include this latest troop surge.

It's good that Obama linked his surge to an exit plan, saying, "After 18 months [i.e., July 2011], our troops will begin to come home." But he gave no end date. He promised to be open and honest about the cost, which he put at $30 billion for one year, but did not give specifics about how it would be paid for. This, at a time of mounting federal debt, with Americans looking for massive federal spending to restore jobs and vital public services, fund universal and affordable health care and green our economy. Those are national security needs of vast importance, and failure to meet them will endanger the entire progressive agenda that Obama was elected to carry out. As the body count rises from the Afghanistan war, prioritizing guns over butter could spell political defeat for the administration in 2010 and beyond, with far-right extremists riding public discontent back to control of Congress and even the White House. And that's an even bigger national security danger for our country, and the world.

Obama was short on specifics about the dynamics of the Afghanistan situation as well. Who exactly will those additional troops be fighting? It's not clear what "al Qaeda" actually is at this point. How will U.S. troops distinguish Taliban leaders from farmers or jobless Afghans helping the Taliban out of fear, despair over their dismal conditions, or anger over foreign occupation? And who are our allies in Afghanistan? The highly questionable Karzai government? Another set of corrupt warlords?

It is significant that even leading moderate Democrats are raising these questions with administration officials now testifying before the Senate. But, as Obama himself has reminded us so often, it's up to us, the people, to bring about the change we need.

Now more than ever, progressive Americans face the challenge of protecting, expanding and deepening the unity of the broad labor-centered people's movement, to fight for a "butter, not guns" policy, at home and abroad. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become the far right's road back to power.

That means pressing Congress and the White House to bring our troops home, to actively pursue peace negotiations involving a range of political forces in Afghanistan and all the regional powers.

It means supporting and pressing the president on nuclear disarmament and pressing him to do more to resolve the festering Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

It means mobilizing millions of ordinary Americans to demand "jobs, not bombs," with massive federal spending, not for war, but for public works jobs.

It means deepening our involvement in the everyday struggles of the people, and helping build a bigger-than-ever grassroots movement for peace, jobs and a secure future for ourselves and our children.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aheram/ / CC BY 2.0

Of tea partiers and tax revolters, who benefits?

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:17:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) -You don't have to dig particularly deep, in the United States today, to find some striking similarities between today's virulently anti-Obama "Tea Party" crowd - and the pols like Sarah Palin who egg them on - and the media darlings who birthed the "Tax Revolt" phenomenon back in the late 1970s.

The Tax Revolters burst onto the national scene amid an inflation-battered economy. They blamed "big government" for what ailed America, and they offered a simple remedy: cut taxes, everywhere. Lower taxes, they promised, would get average Americans back on track.

The Tea Party zealots have, like the Tax Revolters, also coalesced in tough economic times. They attack "big government," too. They and their political enablers even make the same promises about taxes.

What they don't do: Talk about how those original Tax Revolt promises worked out. We do, with the help of two just-released studies that document just how revolting - for average Americans - the "Tax Revolt" turned out to be.

In 1978, in a ballot-box stunner, California voters enacted an unprecedented cap on property taxes known as Prop 13. Within a few years, almost half of America's states followed suit with tax cuts and caps of their own. So did some local governments.

In 1980, at the national level, this "Tax Revolt" surge carried Ronald Reagan into the White House. One year later, a pliant Congress gave President Reagan the biggest across-the-board federal tax cut in U.S. history.

Tax relief had become, in the wink of an eye, America's most potent political creed. Tax cutting and capping would go on to dominate the nation's political discourse for the next three decades, an entire generation. There was even tax relief rhetoric, from both parties, in last year's presidential campaign.

But what do we have to show for all this cutting and capping? In mid-November, researchers produced two new studies that offer up a useful assessment.

The first, funded by the Social Security Administration, looks at the wealth of American families. That wealth, the Tax Revolters assured us, would start amassing again once taxpayers yanked "big government" out of our pockets.

The second new study zeroes in on state and local taxes. After years of tax revolting, this Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report asks, who exactly is paying taxes at the state and local level? Who benefited the most, in tax terms, from the Tax Revolt which the Tea Party zealots now so fervently seek to extend?

The answer: The rich have benefited the most. The Tax Revolt that began back in the late 1970s has, in state after state, let the most affluent off the tax hook.

In fact, notes the new Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis, "nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy."

In the entire United States, this analysis adds, "Only two states require their best-off citizens to pay as much of their incomes in taxes as their very poorest taxpayers must pay, and only one state taxes its wealthiest individuals at a higher effective rate than middle-income families have to pay."

America's most affluent 1% now pay, on average, just 6.4% of their incomes in state and local taxes. But they actually pay even less than that, since they can deduct their state and local taxes from their federal tax bill. The state and local tax burden on America's rich, after taking this offset into account, drops to 5.2%,or one of every $20.

Middle-income families - to be precise, those families who make up the middle fifth of America's income distribution - pay, after the federal offset, 9.4% of their incomes in total state and local taxes. That's one of every $11.

America's poorest families pay even more. Tax collectors take 10.9% of the incomes of households in the nation's bottom 20%, more than double the share they take from the incomes of the nation's top 1%. The poor pay one of every $9 they earn to state and local taxes.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy paper, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems In All 50 States, covers non-elderly households. Incredibly, the study details, some states "ask their poorest residents - those in the bottom 20% of the income scale - to pay up to six times as much of their income in taxes as they ask the wealthy to pay."

Now you could argue that none of this matters. The Tax Revolters, after all, didn't claim their tax cutting and capping would have low- and middle-income people paying taxes at a lower rate than the rich. They claimed, instead, that massive tax cuts, taken as an amorphous whole, would help just about everybody get considerably richer.

That hasn't happened, either, as Brookings Institution researchers Barry Bosworth and Rosanna Smart document in a paper just published by the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, with funding support from Social Security.

Bosworth and Smart "explore the consequences of the housing price bubble and its collapse for the wealth of older households." Along the way, they dive into overall family wealth data the Federal Reserve has been collecting since the early 1980s. Tapping into another federal data set, they bring the family net worth picture up-to-date for 2009. For low- and middle-income families, their numbers tell a depressing story.

All American households - poor, middle, and rich - have lost wealth since the sub-prime mortgage collapse and last fall's financial meltdown. On average, since 2007, Americans have lost 26% of their total net worth.

But low- and middle-income households under age 50 haven't just lost a big chunk of the wealth they held in 2007. These households actually lost all the wealth they gained since 1983, the first year with Federal Reserve family wealth data available.

Back in 1983, the bottom third -- by income -- of U.S. families under age 50 had an average +$24,000 in net worth to their names, measured in year 2000 dollars. The housing bubble helped boost this bottom-third average net worth to +$27,000 in 2007.

Today, in the wake of that bubble's collapse, researchers Bosworth and Smart put average bottom-third net worth at just +$17,000, in those same year 2000 dollars.

Middle-income households under age 50, meanwhile, held an average net worth of $50,000 in 1983. The current net worth of this middle third, after adjusting for inflation: $45,000.

Older households in the bottom and middle income thirds - those over age 50 - have, to be sure, seen their after-inflation net worth increase between 1983 and 2009. But even these households lost at least 22% of the wealth they held in 2007. As older families, Bosworth and Smart note, they now "have less time to recover."

That recovery may take some time.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, governments in the U.S. routinely taxed the rich to pay for the programs that built a vibrant middle class. The Tax Revolt that began three decades ago, by demonizing taxes, gave the rich a free ride and gutted those programs. That demonization today continues, with politicos beholden to that rich class cynically fanning the Tea Party flames. Neither the pols nor the rich nor the Tea Partiers care who gets burned. The rest of us should.

Sam Pizzigati is editor of Too Much. This article is republished by Press Associates. Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group. Office: 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajagendorf25/ / CC BY 2.0

A veteran reflects on the left and the peace movement

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:49:00 +0000

As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and a veteran of sorts of the antiwar movement, I feel that the left as a whole has done a poor job of speaking to veterans. This is unfortunate considering they are an extremely important resource and could be great allies in our fight for democracy and freedom for the people of America and the world. We must find a way to communicate with them without parroting rhetoric that is frankly inapplicable to today's military and today's war.

When we protest war, do we protest the war itself, the warrior, or the people who truly started the war in the first place? Vets feel they are being protested as well as the war. How can we separate the war from the warrior? It's like trying to dissociate a shoe from a shoemaker or an exterminator from their poison. Soldiering requires a high level of training and skill. It also requires a sense of honor, self-sacrifice, courage, duty and loyalty - noble values that we on the left hold in high esteem as we work for peace and justice. However, in our zeal for opposing war, we often have failed to recognize these positive traits in U.S. soldiers. We often generalize and dehumanize them.

However, we can all agree that most soldiers are certainly not psychotic killers who enjoy death and suffering. If this were the case, then why are the VA hospitals filling up with people horribly traumatized with PTSD, their humanity and consciousness scarred? For the rest of their lives, veterans will experience guilt, horror, terror, confusion and anger. And yet, these scars validate their humanity. Soldiers are good people who have gone through hell. By all accounts they should be considered victims, although their pride would never let them accept our pity.

So why do they fight unpopular wars? The reason is simple. Soldiers themselves correctly point out that they did not choose the war, therefore we cannot hold them responsible for the facts of the war. They have no control over where they go, who they fight, and when they return. They can literally do nothing about their lot, and, despite the screeching on the far left, it is delusional for us to believe that soldiers will commit mass disobedience against this or any war. In any case, such disobedience would lead to the military clamping down on civil rights and possibly cutting us off from the soldiers completely. We must face the fact that massive disobedience is simply not practical or possible in an all-volunteer military. Soldiers operate under too many rules and they have been trained too well for this to ever occur. In our rhetoric, we must therefore be sure to separate soldiers from the war.

But what do we tell a soldier who has just come back from Iraq - who has seen combat for three years, has had many friends killed for what feels like no reason, and comes home to a lukewarm welcome and a broken-down VA system that leaves them out in the cold? How do we reach them? How can we gain the trust of those who believe that we hate them because we dislike the war they fight? Who believe that we "hate America" because we dislike some of its leaders and major aspects of its economic structure?

How do we address soldiers experiencing alienation from the society they once belonged to? Their dissatisfaction can be fodder for right-wing extremist groups. Such groups are working to recruit these alienated and troubled soldiers and Marines and twist them into foot-soldiers of hate and death. Or they are tricking them into Quixotic crusades for unrealistic candidates like Ron Paul and his "libertarian" circus. This trend may have terrible consequences for the future of this country. We may be moving toward a similar situation as the one in post-World-War-I Germany when legions of disaffected German soldiers were recruited by fascist thugs to fight progressive reforms and help turn Germany into a fascist state. Today, the myriad "tea party" groups, whose anger at any kind of progressive reform is to some degree fueled by closeted racism, are feeding the feelings of victimhood already present in many soldiers.

To reach veterans, disaffected and otherwise, we must clearly communicate the nature of war, the Iraq War in particular, and their role in it without attacking their honor or dignity, or else we lose their ear. We must separate them from the war without lying to them or talking down to them.

We must explain the truth:

- Soldiers fight and die in wars to secure natural resources and captive markets for capitalists to exploit.
- Most wars fought over the last 200 years have had nothing to do with freedom or democracy.
- As working-class Americans they share a common brotherhood with 90 percent of the world. They share a deeper brotherhood with the average Iraqi than almost nine-tenths of the U.S. Congress by this simple class measure - a Congress that sends young men and women to kill, fight and die so that they can secure profits for large multinational corporations and the "defense" industry.

We must do this without the conversation devolving into superficial liberalism or pacifism. It is not enough for them to think "killing is wrong" and leave it at that. This would be ignoring the bigger picture and doing them a great disservice. They must be told about the nature and origin of war and imperialism truthfully and scientifically so they can decide for themselves about war and why they feel so much doubt and alienation.

We must communicate that we do not hate America when we disagree with policies of its leaders and their marriage to big business. We must communicate the class roots of warfare and the veterans' role in it. We must tell them that it is morally right to use their freedom of speech to talk about their experiences. We must convince them that we are fighting FOR them if not WITH them. Most of all, veterans need to hear that values of honor, self sacrifice, courage, duty, and loyalty - their values - are needed to fight for democracy and freedom here at home. We need them to help us build a better future for America, and to bring peace at last for the rest of the world.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooke_anderson/ / CC BY 2.0

Banking on consumer debt

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:31:00 +0000

As the economic crisis continues to worsen and the official national unemployment rate inches well over 10 percent, more and more Americans are faced with more and more debt. Even more troublesome, though, is the fact that more and more Americans are stuck in a debt cycle - with very little prospect of getting out.

The largely overlooked distinction here is quite important.

The first scenario is a temporary situation where the borrower pays on the interest and principal with the expectation of eventually being debt free. Additionally, most of this debt is secured, i.e. the car, and fixed.

The second scenario is a semi-permanent situation where the borrower primarily pays debt interest without the expectation of eventually being debt free. Most of this debt is unsecured, i.e. the credit card, and adjustable.

Put another way, the debt cycle is a transition from periods of low debt into periods of high debt, eventually resulting in debt spending above and beyond actual income.

Furthermore, working-class folks, especially people of color, are affected disproportionately by high interest rates, making the principal-to-interest pay-off ratio unsustainable. Additionally, communities of color are also disproportionately targeted by pay-day loan and title loan companies, who can charge interest rates as high as the imagination (some charging as much as 500 percent in St. Louis), are largely unregulated and in most states are not required to negotiate debt pay-off plans in good faith.

However, according to an article in The New York Times, we shouldn't be surprised by this. In fact, we should see it as a logical byproduct of a new lender customer paradigm. "Behind the big increase in consumer debt is a major shift in the way lenders approach their business. In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made," renegotiated or defaulted on.

In other words, lenders don't expect to be paid back; they don't expect borrowers to eventually be debt free. Furthermore, they want borrowers who are unlikely to pay back loans because the real money is in the fees and charges accumulated over a lifetime of debt spending. Additionally, high-risk borrowers are targeted more aggressively precisely because they are more likely to default on their loans and accumulate more and more fees and charges - aggravating the cycle of debt borrowing.

As the Times article noted, "Lenders have been eager to expand their reach. They have honed sophisticated marketing tactics, gathering personal financial data to tailor their pitches. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns that make debt sound desirable and risk free."

While businesses comb through an array of sources, including bank and court records, to create detailed profiles of the financial lives of ordinary Americans, banks, credit card issuers and mortgage brokers compete to win over new customers, or as one economist put it, "perpetual earning assets." These companies now see the lender-customer paradigm as a long-term relationship, akin to indentured servitude - of course without the physical chains.

Undoubtedly, says the article, the "marketplace for personal data has been a crucial factor in powering the unrivaled lending machine in the United States. European countries, by contrast, have far stricter laws limiting the sale of personal information. Those countries also have far fewer per-capita debt levels."

Not surprisingly, these lending practices that target at-risk borrowers have generated tens of billions in profits for the nation's financial companies, while helping to send our economy into the greatest recession since the Great Depression.

In fact, bankruptcies are up for the third consecutive year in a row. More than 1.3 million people filed for bankruptcy during the 2009 fiscal year, marking a 35 percent increase in filings from 2008, and business bankruptcies are up 65 percent.

Additionally, the current economic crisis has another unique byproduct. While individual bankruptcies are up considerably, the amount of unsecured debt far exceeds that seen in previous recessions.

Not only did working-class folks have far less debt during the last economic downturn, they had far less unsecured debt, i.e. credit card debt. A 2008 study (which obviously doesn't capture the current crisis in its entirety) found that the typical family who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 was carrying 44 percent more unsecured debt than in 2001. Undoubtedly, that amount has increased through the current crisis.

Plummeting home values, stagnant wages and joblessness - on top of already increased levels of debt spending - have changed the characteristics of who can ride out the storm.

So while banks, credit card companies and retail stores literally mail out billions of loan offers every year, in addition to the thousands of telemarketing calls, e-mails and spam, and while we are bombarded every day with hundreds of commercials urging us to buy, buy, buy, is it any wonder working class folks are in debt?

Fortunately, the Obama administration is taking steps to reign in and regulate financial institutions that target those most in need and profit off of the cycle of debt.

Thanksgiving in troubled times

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:22:00 +0000

Food and family, sharing and fellowship, traffic jams, airport foul-ups, grace and thankfulness - all these are part of the American Thanksgiving holiday. But, especially this year, there is more.

Those of us fortunate enough to sit down to a bountiful meal, in the company of friends and family, do so in the knowledge that too many in our nation are living on the edge, or have dropped off. These are troubled times in our land.

Insecurity is in the air: job insecurity, retirement insecurity, food insecurity (also known as hunger), health care insecurity, housing insecurity, children's future insecurity, environmental insecurity, and, yes, safety and security insecurity.

Amidst all this, there's a good reason Thanksgiving is perhaps our most widely celebrated holiday. It's the coming together, the sharing with others, and the celebration of plentiful food as the long winter begins - age-old themes that are central to human existence.

Many of us, this holiday season, help serve meals at food banks and homeless shelters. Many of us take the occasion to reflect on what more we must do so that food banks and homeless shelters are no longer needed, and all people of the earth have enough food and clean water.

Let's give thanks, this Thanksgiving, for the caring, collective spirit that is alive and well in our country.

It is embodied in the spontaneous movement of millions of Americans who came out and came together to elect Barack Obama and reject the ugly, divisive, reactionary politics of the Bush era. What more powerful emblem of our country's join-together spirit than the fact that, in a nation still scarred by the legacy of slavery and vicious racism, this multifaceted, multiethnic people's movement succeeded in electing our first African American president!

Let's give thanks that we now have a White House that has put out the welcome mat for labor and every segment of this all-people's movement.

And first and foremost, let's give thanks for the collective, caring spirit that is embodied in the men and women of the resurgent U.S. labor movement - which is leading the way on just about every social issue, from jobs to health care, from children's well being to seniors' security, from reviving our communities to greening our world. And increasingly, it is joining forces with community, ethnic, religious, youth, environmental and other groups, to point a way forward for our country, and to fight for it. That is a future of peace and real security, in our jobs, our homes, our communities and our planet.

This Thanksgiving, in each of our small ways, let's keep the spirit going, and pledge to help it grow in the coming year.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/voght/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

New chapter in U.S.-India relations

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:16:00 +0000

There is substantial symbolism in this week's visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the United States. It comes at the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai by a group who allegedly trained and planned the attack in Pakistan.

President Obama is about to announce his plan on the Afghanistan quagmire. The Afghanistan war is linked to a new round of instability in Pakistan. The precariousness of the regional situation worries India. And Obama's China visit fueled fear in some Indian circles that the Obama administration values its relationship with rival China more than its "strategic partnership" with India.

Prime Minister Singh will be feted at the Obama administration's first state dinner, an honor indeed, all of which seems to be aimed at tamping down India's fears and strengthening relations between the two countries.

U.S.-Indian relations have not always been friendly. During the Cold War, India's nonaligned status was perceived as being "unfriendly" by the U.S. establishment, notes Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations. In fact, it was India's friendly relations with the Soviet Union that led the U.S. to build up Pakistan militarily and to aid and abet coups, dictators and terrorist groups in that country.

Haas praised Singh for opening up India's markets to foreign investment and privatization of government-run enterprises when Singh was India's finance minister in 1991. Haas said this decision led to India becoming a major global economic and political power. (However, many critics of these neoliberal economic policies in India, including the left parties, say that decision increased inequality and economic instability.)

The U.S. establishment is trying to begin a new chapter in India-U.S. relations. What that new chapter will look like is not clear.

Last year the Bush administration signed a controversial nuclear energy deal with India, and under Bush there was an increase in joint military exercises and arms sales.

It seems the Obama administration sees India as a global power but is trying to balance tricky relations with it and India's presumed rivals, China and Pakistan.

India is a critical player in many of the Obama administration's foreign policy initiatives, including curbing climate change, abolishing nuclear weapons, tackling pandemics, managing the global financial and economic crisis and eliminating poverty.

But India wants its role to be recognized, not just with a stronger relationship with the U.S. but at the level of a United Nations Security Council seat.

Singh spoke about this and other global challenges to the Council on Foreign Relations, Nov. 23, addressing some of the "sticky" regional issues.

While praising Obama's initiative on a "world free of nuke weapons" and stating that India does not support Iran's "nuclear ambition," Singh also said that as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a "right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes."

On Afghanistan, Singh urged the world to "put its weight behind" the Karzai government as the "only way Afghanistan can meet its challenges." He declined to weigh in on a troop surge, but said Afghanistan "requires a sustained support of global community" for peace and freedom to take root.

India has no interest in any kind of failure in Pakistan, he said. But he warned about extremist forces that if not controlled could have grave consequences for both Pakistan and India.

Singh told the CFR audience that India is interested in getting the world to prepare for a "peaceful rise" of China as a major power, alluding to wars that have been part of the world landscape whenever a class-based empire is forced to cede its dominance to a rising power.

However, India is not ceding its role as a rising major power either, Singh said. "We have tried very hard to engage China. We are major trading partners. We have a longstanding border problem we are trying to resolve through dialogue."

Despite China's superior GDP, Singh said, India's path of development is "superior."

There are other things more important than GDP growth, Singh said - "respect for human rights and multi-cultural rights. There are several dimensions of human freedom that aren't shown in GDP."

On global warming, Singh said India is willing to work for any solution that does not compromise the right of a nation to lift its population out of poverty, a position widely held among developing countries.

A Copenhagen agreement has been "more difficult than we'd have liked," he said. "There are disagreements between industrialized countries and disagreements between developing and industrialized countries. India is a late comer to industrialization. We have contributed very little to greenhouse gas emissions that have caused global warming. But we have a national action plan on climate change. We are affected by it."

Singh said the biggest challenge for India is energy efficiency and producing "clean energy including nuclear power."

"Considerable resources are needed. We can do more if there is global financial and technology support," Singh said, urging U.S. businesses to invest in India.

Photo: India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh talks with President Barack Obama at a London summit in April. White House photo.

Few happy endings, but much food for thought

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:24:00 +0000

Best of the Chicago International Film Festival

CHICAGO - The master of social realism, British director Ken Loach, was outdone last month at the 45th annual Chicago International Film Festival. Known for his penetrating human dramas ("Ladybird, Ladybird," "Riff Raff," "Raining Stones") Loach this year offered a lighthearted fantasy, "Looking for Eric." This is the film Loach pulled from the Melbourne Festival in support of the Israeli cultural boycott. It's about a stressed father dealing with the pressures of a broken marriage and troubled stepchildren. But uncharacteristic of Loach, an apparition appears in the form of famous soccer star/philosopher Eric Cantona, to help coach the troubled father to a happy ending.

Happy endings were nonexistent in most of the festival's other social realist dramas, which seem to be multiplying with the growing pressures of surviving in the new economic climate.

"Don't Let Me Drown" is a touching and realistic update of "Romeo and Juliet," this time with a Puerto Rican boy and an African American girl. Set in New York just after the attack on the World Trade Center, the story takes on added significance as the sister of "Juliet" died in the building. The father of "Romeo" is a janitor who consumes toxic fumes while helping to clean up the debris from the disaster. Both sets of parents carry racist beliefs fueled by the trauma caused by the aftermath of the tragedy. The actors deliver an unbelievably realistic portrayal of people dealing with extreme stress but trying to find life and love.

Move to England and the problems are not much different. In "Fish Tank," the film closest to the Loach style, Mia lives with her sister and mother in cramped quarters in a seedy part of London. Her alcoholic mother brings home a boyfriend who ends up raping Mia. Actress Katie Jarvis delivers an amazing performance as a troubled teen forced to deal with an oppressive environment, and director Andrea Arnold paints a powerful image of the working class in England. The film received top honors at Cannes.

A rare film from the Bahamas, "Rain," tells the touching story of a 14-year-old girl sent to live with her mother in Nassau after her loving grandmother dies. Dropped into a strange and difficult environment, Rain fights to maintain her dignity against the harsh realities of her mother's drug-addicted and crime-infested neighborhood. A school gym teacher takes her under her wings and trains her to be a runner, allowing the child a rare opportunity to escape from the harsh and deadly realities of the Third World. First-time feature director Marla Govan offers a well-acted and powerful film.

"Backyard" is a drama that follows several documentaries that addressed the same urgent story. Hundreds of women have been murdered over the last few years in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from Texas. A new female police captain is the latest charged with the task of solving the long string of murders, but instead she is confronted with government and police collusion and corruption. The hard-hitting action story ties the murders to the harsh economic realities caused by the loss of jobs in this maquiladora town. The city government attempts to cover up the murders to protect the image of the town, but the big factories are leaving for cheaper labor elsewhere.

Highly visible films that were also shown at the Toronto Film Festival and offer themes of harsh realities include "Precious," based on the novel "Push" by Sapphire, about an overweight African American teenage girl struggling with an unbearable mother, a father who has impregnated her twice, and the fact that she is still unable to read or write. The film has received strong attention for its direction and astounding performance by Gabourey Sidibe. "Antichrist," the latest from master Lars von Trier, challenges the viewer to experience the most brutal and gut-wrenching relationship between two parents, devastated by the loss of their child, that has ever been filmed. Progressive director Von Trier, recovering from a long bout of depression, is holding off on the third part of his American trilogy, after making the shockingly memorable "Dogville" and "Manderlay."

Several other films screened in Chicago deserve recognition as ones progressives should see. "Mississippi Damned" is a powerful portrayal of a troubled African American family; the Mexican film "Daniel and Anna" addresses the effects of the criminal world of underground pornography; and all the way around the world in Japan, director Sabu directs the filmic version of the classic 1929 communist novel "Kanikosen," a visual feast in the belly of the beast.

And not to be overlooked is "Videocracy," the scathing exposé of the Berlusconi TV empire; "Cooking History," a unique study of modern wars as seen from the kitchens and the chefs who served the military; and last but not least, one of the great new Woody Harrelson flicks, "The Messenger," an antiwar film with no blood and not one gunshot. It's a tragic drama about two officers assigned to deliver the fatal news to parents of the deceased.

Photo: "Don't Let Me Drown," set in New York just after Sept. 11, 2001.

Workers and oppressed of the world unite, 2.0

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:09:00 +0000

The following are remarks made by Communist Party USA Vice Chair Scott Marshall to the 11th International Meeting of the Communist and Workers Parties hosted by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India in New Delhi on Nov. 20 - 22. The main theme of the international meeting was, "The international capitalist crisis, the workers and people's struggle, the alternatives and the role of the communist and working class movement." Representatives of 56 parties from 48 countries attended.

In this terrible time of global economic crisis it is most timely that the communist, left and workers parties seek ways to expand and broaden our slogan "workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite." While our slogan has been around for many generations, today it has more meaning than ever. Today global economic integration has reached new incredible levels. Today global finance capital roams the world pillaging and profiteering on a scale unimaginable in Marx's day.

First let me say a few words about how the crisis is affecting working people in the United States. Just this month the percentage of workers in our country who are long-term unemployed has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the beginning stages of this crisis we were losing 700,000 jobs or more a month. Today, when some mainstream economists are declaring the recession over, when obscene banking profits are on the rise again, when the stock market is rising again, when finance capital is returning to its unregulated predatory ways with a vengeance, we are still losing around 200,000 jobs a month.

Among young people in the U.S. the unemployed figures are staggering. In the age group of 16 to 24 less than half have jobs. And that number is much worse for African American, Latino and other racially and nationally oppressed youth. Racism in the U.S. takes an even more terrible toll in this kind of an economic crisis. In the communities of the racially and nationally oppressed the crisis strikes with a particular violence and vengeance.

At the same time, experts who follow the housing markets, say that 2010 will see a whole new rash of home foreclosures with workers and their families being evicted and thrown into the streets.

Forty million people are without health care and every month that number rises because in the U.S. many people get their health care through their employer.

In what is supposed to be the richest country in the world, because so much of the world's finance capital is centered there, hundreds of thousands of children go to school hungry every day.

In many hard hit working class communities, the schools and medical clinics are crumbling and closing. The streets and bridges, the sewage and water systems, the basic infrastructures are neglected and decaying. And vital public services at all levels of government are being cut back and stopped.

The list of capitalism's failures in this crisis is very long. And of course we know that the crisis hits many in the developing world much harder than it hits the developed countries.

There are always two sides to the class struggle. Two major events are now turning the tide of working class struggle in a more militant and fighting direction in my country. The first is the rise of the movement that defeated the ultra-right Republican Party in the 2008 election and elected Barack Obama. That same movement also defeated many ultra-right members of the U.S. Congress. I know that internationally there are some mixed feelings about the role of President Barack Obama. Let me be clear, he is not a communist, he is not a socialist, and on some issues he is quite a moderate liberal. At the same time, after eight years of George Bush, the worst warmongering president and administration in U.S. history, the election of Barack Obama opens a whole new terrain of struggle for the working class in the U.S. and in the world. And after 30 years of vicious neoliberal attack on the U.S. labor movement, on the working class and on the people's movements, the election of Barack Obama opens the door for a whole new fight for economic justice, peace and equality.

Barack Obama, as I said, is no revolutionary - it's true. But he doesn't have to be a revolutionary to do some pretty important things to support labor and the working class. I won't go into a whole domestic list but it is significant for those of us who work for a living in the U.S. He did inspire a movement and mobilize a broad coalition of democratic forces to defeat McCain and the ultra right. And, more importantly for our meeting here - he has taken some steps to curb some of the worst features of the international policies that he inherited from the previous administration. As on the domestic scene, in international affairs it will be the mobilization of the peoples forces and labor that will be decisive in shifting U.S. policy even more - the people's forces had very little affect on the Bush administration - but it can help move the Obama administration in a better direction.

The movement that elected Obama was, and continues to be, a broad coalition of social forces including even some sectors of capital. But at its heart is what we like to call the core social forces, the working class and its organized sector the labor movement, the racially and nationally oppressed, women, youth and the gay rights movement.

The other major event that is helping to turn the tide was the September 2009 convention of the AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in our country. I believe history will record that convention as a major turning point for our working class. This convention was the culmination of changes and developments that began in the mid-1990s. The AFL-CIO convention in 1995 was a major break with some of the worst features of class collaboration and the Cold War that began with the anti-Communist witchhunts of the early 1950s. In the mid '90s the labor movement began to develop a more class struggle approach. After the 1995 convention U.S. labor began to develop its own independent political apparatus. It became more militant in the economic struggle. It increasingly began to see the global nature of capitalism. Further it even began to understand that the labor movement had to be more than just the defender of its own members, it had to become the voice and movement of the whole working class.

The 2009 convention of the AFL-CIO deepened these trends and was remarkable in many ways. It elected a new leadership, militant and rooted in the fighting industrial union traditions of my country. Richard Trumka the new president comes out of the militant traditions of the Mineworkers Union. On the day after his election at the convention he went straight to Wall Street and blasted the banking and insurance industries for causing the economic crisis both at home and abroad. He called for strong new regulatory steps to curb their reckless speculation and for breaking up those banks deemed "too big to fail." The federation has vigorously pursued a "break up the big banks" policy and mobilized it's member unions to fight for sharp new limits on finance capital. In another first for our labor movement the convention also elected two women, one of whom is African American, to the other two top leadership positions of the AFL-CIO.

There are way too many examples of labor's new policies for me to list now but I would like to mention one that I think is important to our international movement and illustrates a new direction and new possibilities for international labor solidarity. I have with me a letter, well publicized in the labor press in the U.S. from Richard Trumka to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In it he says that the AFL-CIO believes that the coup government in Honduras to be totally illegitimate. The letter says the coup's repression of the trade unions and democratic movements in Honduras make it impossible for there to be free and fair elections this November. And the letter strongly calls on the U.S. State Department to stop all aid to Honduras until the coup is overturned and President Zelaya is returned to power. The letter also says that the position of the AFL-CIO was taken in consultation with the Honduran labor unions.

This is but one dramatic example of the new thinking in U.S. labor on international questions. U.S. labor also strongly opposes the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The convention also passed a resolution calling for an end to travel and monetary restrictions against Cuba and for better relations. These are examples of U.S. labor breaking with the State Department and U.S. imperialism on international issues for the first time since the Cold War began after WWII. We think this opens a whole new world of possibility for rebuilding and strengthening world labor and working class solidarity.

And we think that communist and workers parties have a critical role to play in helping to take advantage of the new possibilities. It is really time for labor, on all sides of the old Cold War political divide to reconsider and rethink labor unity.

Comrades, in our opinion the global economic crisis continues unabated. According to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund the world nation's produce somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 trillion in goods and services each year. At the same time, according to the International Bank of Settlements, over $515 trillion is speculated in derivatives, credit default swaps and similar forms of exotic finance schemes. Think of it - such incredible imbalance. It's staggering - think of the stolen surplus value represented in this deadest of all parasitic finance capital. Think of the problems of the world's people that could be solved with that kind of money.

We think it is also important to look at the splits in capital in this period. In the U.S. there is growing evidence of splits between manufacturing capital and banking capital. This is not just splits between big and small business. It may open up serious lines of attack for regulating and reigning in some of the most predatory practices of speculative finance capital around the world.

We have much to discuss and think about. But I would like to end with a paraphrase of something Fredrick Engels once said, "an ounce of action is worth a pound of theory," something to that effect. We are most interested in how our parties can play a concrete role in helping to bring about real organized struggle along the lines of "workers of the world unite." This needs to begin with what we can do to help unite and broaden the global labor movement. Marx and Engels did not say, "Workers of the World - unite to share information." It was clear that they meant workers of the world unite for struggle. How can we make that a reality in today's real world. What are our first concrete steps. We hope our meeting and deliberations can move us closer to making it happen.

Why an Afghan surge will fail

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Before the Obama administration buys into General Stanley McChrystal's escalation strategy, it might spend some time examining the August 12 battle of Dananeh, a scruffy little town of 2,000 perched at the entrance to the Naw Zad Valley in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province.

Dananeh is a textbook example of why counterinsurgency won't work in that country, as well as a case study in military thinking straight out of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Strategic Towns

According to the United States, the purpose of the attack was to seize a "strategic" town, cut "Taliban supply lines," and secure the area for the presidential elections. Taking Dananeh would also "outflank the insurgents," "isolating" them in the surrounding mountains and forests.

What is wrong with this scenario?

One, the concept of a "strategic" town of 2,000 people in a vast country filled with tens of thousands of villages like Dananeh is bizarre.

Two, the Taliban don't have "flanks." They are a fluid, irregular force, not an infantry company dug into a set position. "Flanking" an enemy is what you did to the Wehrmacht in World War II.

Three, "Taliban supply lines" are not highways and rail intersections. They're goat trails.

Four, "isolate" the Taliban in the surrounding mountains and forests? Obviously, no one in the Pentagon has ever read the story of Brer Rabbit, who taunted his adversary with the famous words, "Please don't throw me in the briar patch, Brer Fox." Mountains and forests are where the Taliban move freely.

The Taliban were also not the slightest bit surprised when the United States showed up. When the Marines helicoptered in at night, all was quiet. At dawn - the Taliban have no night-fighting equipment - the insurgents opened up with rockets, mortars, and machine guns. "I am pretty sure they knew of it [the attack] in advance," Golf Company commander Captain Zachary Martin told the Associated Press.

Pinned down, the Marines brought in air power and artillery and, after four days of fierce fighting, took the town. But the Taliban had decamped on the third night. The outcome? A chewed-up town and 12 dead insurgents - that is, if you don't see a difference between an "insurgent" and a villager who didn't get out in time, so that all the dead are automatically members of the Taliban.

"I'd say we've gained a foothold for now, and it's a substantial one that we're not going to let go," says Martin. "I think this has the potential to be a watershed."

Only if hallucinations become the order of the day.

Irregular Warfare

The battle of Dananeh was a classic example of irregular warfare. The locals tip off the guerrillas that the army is coming. The Taliban set up an ambush, fight until the heavy firepower comes in, then slip away.

"Taliban fighters and their commanders have escaped the Marines' big offensive into Afghanistan's Helmand province and moved into areas to the west and north, prompting fears that the U.S. effort has just moved the Taliban problem elsewhere," writes Nancy Youssef of the McClatchy newspapers.

When the Taliban went north they attacked German and Italian troops.

In short, the insurgency is adjusting. "To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army's Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments," writes Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post.

Actually, the Afghans have been doing that for some time, as Greeks, Mongols, British, and Russians discovered.

One Pentagon officer told the Post that the Taliban has been using the Korengal Valley that borders Pakistan as a training ground. It's "a perfect lab to vet fighters and study U.S. tactics," he said, and to learn how to gauge the response time for U.S. artillery, air strikes, and helicopter assaults. "They know exactly how long it takes before...they have to break contact and pull back."

Just like they did at Dananeh.

McChrystal's Plan

General McChrystal has asked for 40,000 new troops in order to hold the "major" cities and secure the population from the Taliban. But even by its own standards, the plan is deeply flawed. The military's Counterinsurgency Field Manual recommends a ratio of 20 soldiers for every 1,000 residents. Since Afghanistan has a population of slightly over 32 million, that would require a force of 660,000 soldiers.

The United States will shortly have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, plus a stealth surge of 13,000 support troops. If the Pentagon sends 40,000 additional troops, U.S. forces will rise to 121,000. Added to that are 35,000 NATO troops, though most alliance members are under increasing domestic pressure to withdraw their soldiers. McChrystal wants to expand the Afghan army to 240,000, and there is talk of trying to reach 340,000.

Even with the larger Afghan army, the counterinsurgency plan is 150,000 soldiers short.

An Afghan Army?

And can you really count on the Afghan army? It doesn't have the officers and sergeants to command 340,000 troops. And the counterinsurgency formula calls for "trained" troops, not just armed boots on the ground. According to a recent review, up to 25% of recruits quit each year, and the number of trained units has actually declined over the past six months.

On top of this, Afghanistan doesn't really have a national army. If Pashtun soldiers are deployed in the Tajik-speaking north, they will be seen as occupiers, and vice-versa for Tajiks in Pashtun areas. If both groups are deployed in their home territories, the pressures of kinship will almost certainly overwhelm any allegiance to a national government, particularly one as corrupt and unpopular as the current Karzai regime.

And by defending the cities, exactly whom will U.S. troops be protecting? When it comes to Afghanistan, "major" population centers are almost a contradiction in terms. There are essentially five cities in the country, Kabul (2.5 million), Kandahar (331,000), Mazar-e-Sharif (200,000), Herat (272,000), and Jalalabad (20,000). Those five cities make up a little more than 10% of the population, over half of which is centered in Kabul. The rest of the population is rural, living in towns of 1,500 or fewer, smaller even than Dananeh.

But spreading the troops into small firebases makes them extremely vulnerable, as the United States found out in early September, when eight soldiers were killed in an attack on a small unit in the Kamdesh district of Nuristan province. The base was abandoned a week later and, according to the Asia Times, is now controlled by the Taliban.

MRAP Attack

While McChrystal says he wants to get the troops out of "armored vehicles" and into the streets with the people, the United States will have to use patrols to maintain a presence outside of the cities. On occasion, that can get almost comedic. Take the convoy of Stryker light tanks that set out on October 12 from "Forward Operating Base Spin Boldak" in Khandar province for what was described as a "high-risk mission into uncharted territory."

The convoy was led by the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed to resist the insurgent's weapon-of-choice in Afghanistan, roadside bombs. But the MRAP was designed for Iraq, which has lots of good roads. Since Afghanistan has virtually no roads, the MRAPs broke down. Without the MRAPs the Strykers could not move. The "high-risk" mission ended up hunkering down in the desert for the night and slogging home in the morning. They never saw an insurgent.

Afterwards, Sergeant John Belajac remarked, "I can't imagine what it is going to be like when it starts raining."

If you are looking for an Afghanistan War metaphor, the Spin Boldak convoy may be it.

Dangerous Illusions

McChrystal argues that the current situation is "critical," and that an escalation "will be decisive." But as former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst A.J. Rossmiller says, the war is a stalemate. "The insurgency does not have the capability to defeat U.S. forces or depose Afghanistan's central government, and...U.S. forces do not the ability to vanquish the insurgency." While the purported goal of the war is denying al-Qaeda a sanctuary, according to U.S. intelligence the organization has fewer than 100 fighters in the country. And further, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, pledges that his organization will not interfere with Afghanistan's neighbors or the West, which suggests that the insurgents have been learning about diplomacy as well.

The Afghanistan War can only be solved by sitting all the parties down and working out a political settlement. Since the Taliban have already made a seven-point peace proposal, that hardly seems an insurmountable task.

Anything else is a dangerous illusion.

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. This article is reposted from Foreign Policy in Focus with permission of the author.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

Are we left behind in the ‘green production’ revolution?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:58:00 +0000

Yesterday, the Institute for America's Future, headed by Robert Borosage, a progressive policy adviser to many political and labor campaigns, hosted a conference call to hear a report on President Obama's still ongoing trip to Asia, especially China.

Carolyn Bartholomew, the "moderate" chair of the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, gave a pessimistic review: No movement on exchange. No concessions on the subsidies the Chinese government gives to its "strategic" industries (including "green production"). The commission was established by Congress to assess "growing economic and security concerns between the U.S. and China."

Also commenting was Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a moderate globalization advocate of what he calls "smart globalism" - free markets without cartels and excessive speculation.

The number one message from all is this: China has a national industrial strategy and policy. We do not. And we better come up with one soon.

With the exception of the exchange rate controversy, most objections raised against China are the subsidies it fosters in promoting areas of production where it wants to lead, such as in all areas of "green production and research."

The current controversy over whether to import Chinese-built wind turbines into stimulus- or TARP-subsidized U.S. alternative energy projects is just one example of the advantage strategic planning has given those nations practicing it in the area of environmental technologies and their integration into national infrastructure planning. After pressure from public outrage over taxpayer funds not being used to build domestic wind turbines, the private equity firm and its Chinese partner building the wind farms reversed course and decided to build a manufacturing plant in the U.S.

This kind of incident is the tip of the iceberg, however, say Bartholomew and Prestowitz. There's tons of "green production" going on, and it's screaming ahead of the U.S., especially in China, Germany, Korea and Japan. Tariffs and countervailing duties levied against China can only do so much. Plus, it is difficult to police what domestic companies actually do with the income provided by their tariff protection. There are many scams that merely pay the cost of going out of business in style.

In the current international environment, the only way to really protect jobs and be competitive is to move toward a national industrial economic policy. There was interesting unanimity on this question among Borosage, Bartholomew and Prestowitz. Whether Sen. Charles Schumer, or Steelworker President Leo Gerard, is correct that 100 percent should be spent on employing U.S. labor some may question, since there is also a promise that the stimulus actually deliver the wind farms at an affordable cost and on a meaningful schedule. But no one should question the responsibility of U.S. funds to be spent addressing both immediate and long-term employment opportunity.

One of the reasons why mastering "green production" is so important is that no matter how profitable or useful may be the commodities or services it generates, it is always also generating a side effect of a valuable public good: namely a cleaner, more livable environment.

Transitioning and re-balancing from an overly consumptive society to a more productive one will be a key theme in our relations with China and the rest of the world going forward.

The current battles over China pegging its currency to a (mostly) fixed ratio of the dollar reflects the re-balancing that ultimately must be done on both sides. Chinese consumption must, and will, grow relative to its product. Western economists point to China's 36 percent consumption (which tracks wage or salary compensation) relative to GDP, vs. roughly 60 percent in the U.S. and Western Europe. The rest is reserved as capital. China's export-driven economy, and culture of saving, permits it to make huge strategic capital investments it hopes will catapult it into the leadership of the 21st century world economy. If China allowed its currency to float it would undoubtedly rise, making U.S. and other foreign goods cheaper in China, and China's own exports much more expensive in the U.S. Any sudden shift, however, toward balance would likely greatly aggravate already powerful structural change forces stressing both economies, and the world economy, endangering the fragile economic recovery under way.

Critics hoping for fast redress on China currency disputes should not hold their breath. Nor should they waste it complaining about the advantages of China's socialism to change direction and mobilize the big forces needed in a structural economic crisis - perhaps we should try on a little "more socialism" ourselves, at least to the extent of deciding to DO GREEN RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION IN THE U.S. SERIOUSLY.

Letting the market do its thing works better when the fundamentals are stable. Reducing commodity consumption, in this writer's view, does not have to be a reduction in standard of living. Expanding public goods also adds quality of life - for nearly every class of person too. Improvements in parks, recreation, education, shelter, health, transportation, communication, energy enhance our life every bit as much as a second house at the beach, and 20 new financial services offices may provide considerably less value than 20 new publicly supported venues for the arts, sports and entertainment. Answering the question "What is sustainable economic development" cannot be left to financial markets alone, or even in the main, to decide.

Some may think national industrial policy is "pie in the sky". But - the rest of the world is doing it big time.

Photo: Windmills amid the trees on an Allegheny ridge in Pennsylvania. (PW/Teresa Albano)

Rock and roll, the BBC and dictatorship: a movie review

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Governments, especially repressive ones that are worried about their people getting out of hand, tend to repress art, especially that which may be considered "subversive."

This dynamic is captured, in a feel-good sort of way, in Richard Curtis's "Pirate Radio." The plot of the film is fairly simple: Radio Rock (which is reportedly based on one of the real pirate stations of the day, Radio Caroline) is highly successful with its colorful mix of disc jockeys, most notably Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, and rock and roll. Opposed to this is Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh) a miserably grey cabinet minister who leads an all-out assault on pirate radio stations. (Given that about half the population of the U.K. was listening to pirate radio, the move was highly unpopular and, one would assume, politically ill-advised.)

Thrown into the plot are a few romances, a boy's quest for his father's identity and a few other things of that sort. But really, the plot isn't much more than a vehicle for some well done comedy (Simon, played by Chris O'Dowd, is hilarious as the D.J. on the sex-obsessed boat holding out for "the right one"). More important than any other theme in the movie, as cliché as this may sound, is the spirit of rock and roll.

Human beings have a natural tendency to resist repression, as evidenced throughout history, all around the world; the repression of art tends to be part of the repression of people overall, one of many tools governments use to stamp out dissent. It's no coincidence that Iran's highly unpopular dictatorship banned "immoral" music in 2005; already by that point student demonstrations were commonplace, and now, just a few years later, this movement has thrown the stability of the regime into question.

Iran isn't a unique case. In North Korea, citizens are issued radios that are specifically set to receive only state programming; anyone who commits the "crime" of possessing a real, working radio faces imprisonment. One can see how the leaders, who came to power in a revolutionary movement promising liberation, might worry about the lyrics to The Who's legendary "Won't Get Fooled Again": "The party on the left/is now the party on the right/The men who spurred us on/sit in judgment of all wrongs..." Still, one wonders how Shakira might threaten national security.

In 1960s Britain, rock did express discontent - it was the 1960s after all. About half of the population listened to the illicit rock music that the government was trying to stamp out.

It is this spirit that the movie, with its colorful collection of pirate characters standing against seemingly inhuman bureaucrats, cheerfully portrays.

As we know, attempts to get rid of rock music ultimately failed; many of the real-life pirate radio personalities, like John Peel, became BBC Radio 1 hosts. The lesson of history is in line with that of the movie: that these attempts will eventually always fail. In an ironic twist, I saw "Pirate Radio" almost exactly 20 years after Czechoslovakia disintegrated in the "Velvet Revolution." Of course, we all know that censorship of popular music, most famously the Velvet Underground and the Plastic People of the Universe, was a well-loved practice of the Czechoslovak leadership. This attitude that the people, artists and otherwise, should just keep quiet lest they accidentally act as Western pawns, was at least part of the reason for the nation's collapse.

Aside from the first-rate soundtrack, this message of human irrepressibility wrapped up in a feel good comedy is the best reason to see the movie; it gives one hope. Hope, for example, that one day all of those who want to listen to Jay Z, Jimi Hendrix or some local "immoral" Iranian music (or perhaps, to read "Lolita") in Tehran will be free to do so openly in a secular democratic republic.

Branagh, and his assistant, Mr. Twat, represent governments at their worst: limiting human expression and dignity instead of enhancing them. As the cartoonish-miserable nature of their characters point out, any government or government agency - theocrats, disintegrating socialist states, the BBC - that seeks to clamp down and censor the arts is or has set itself up against human happiness, whatever it purports to represent.

Children go hungry in America

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Children go hungry throughout the United States, the richest country in the world.

What is it about capitalism - or the so-called "free enterprise" system - that it does not fulfill such a basic need: adequate food?

The Department of Agriculture has reported that close to 50 million people in the U.S. are going hungry, the highest number since the agency began tracking what it calls "food insecurity" in 1995. "Food insecurity" is government-speak for empty bellies. The term comes out of the Reagan administration's denial of the existence of hunger in America.

The report is based on 2008 data when unemployment hovered at 7 percent. Today's 10.2 percent joblessness points to an increasing hunger crisis.

Although, the USDA report did not use the term hunger, President Obama did, calling hunger "particularly troubling" as it relates to children. He called for ending child hunger by 2015, and rightly stressed the need for jobs.

"My administration is committed to reversing the trend of rising hunger," Obama said, "The first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day."

We might add that a union job is known as the best anti-poverty measure, and that one more day of hunger is one day too many.

Predictably, Blacks and Latinos suffer the highest percentages, with 26 and 27 percent, respectively, going to bed with empty stomachs. Single mothers and their children are the greatest victims of the crisis.

Rising food prices are another big factor. As with oil prices, food price increases are being spurred by Wall Street commodity speculators seeking quick and high profits. That has helped send supermarket prices soaring. And guess what? Family-run farms never see those profits. They get divvied up among speculators, investment firms and food conglomerates.

This Thanksgiving we can be thankful for a president, who for the first time in 30 years, has called it hunger and is committed to stop it. We can also be thankful for the union, civil rights and community leaders and organizations who are increasingly calling on the White House and Congress for action to create good, green jobs, including public works programs.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maulleigh/ / CC BY 2.0

Thanks for fighting, more nuance needed and other letters to the editor

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:08:00 +0000

Thanks for fighting

Here is a photo of Leo Munoz of Congressman Charlie Gonzales' office accepting boxing gloves to keep on fighting for health care. Congressman Gonzales has been a strong supporter of the public option throughout the summer and has been very outspoken and clear about his message. Representatives giving the award are Health Care for America Now, SEIU, MoveOn, people of his district who have demonstrated for health care reform throughout the 100 degree summer and ever soaking wet days this fall. Events like this were scheduled all over Texas to thank the congressmen who supported the health bill that was just sent to the Senate.

Vivian Weinstein

San Antonio TX

More nuance

I have great respect for Dr. Don Sloan and his long work, on the ground, fighting for health care for all Americans. But I felt the need to write in, touching on his recent letter, where he says many on the left have "huge disappointment with the present administration" and part of the reason for this disappointment is "despite party label and intent [Obama] is still, a capitalist!"

That should not be a revelation to any of us.

He goes on to state "having a Democrat instead of a Republican makes little difference."

Possibly not from where he's sitting, but from where I'm at, the new administration is fighting with us to reverse the theft of pensions and health care the Bush regime forced on us.

There is, unfortunately, no recognition of any balance of forces between progressive and reactionary/pro-corporate forces, no recognition of the very real and substantial differences between Republican and Democratic forces in the Congress or even the differences within the Democratic Party.

Beyond this, what is of central importance and what Sloan is missing in his letter is the key role of the mass organized people's movement in pushing to put forward, and expand, the reform agenda.

As Sloan states, "the struggle is far from over!"

I know that, regardless of his concerns or disappointments thus far, he will continue to fight the good fight, for the people, for health care for all.

I certainly hope that he also will continue this discussion of strategy in this time of crisis. At this crucial time, we need unity of all people's forces to win the present health care fight, as well as push forward toward the goal of a single-payer system for all. I'll only ask that he also take a much more nuanced, educated, look at the present struggle.

Bruce Bostick

Columbus OH

Full circle

Well, we've come full circle since the day I found a copy of the Daily Worker in the hiring hall of the Marine Radio Operators Union in 1946. It was a daily then and a daily now. The king is dead; long live the king. A big round of applause to all of you who brought THE people's paper into the 21st century! Cordially and fraternally,

Ray Davis

Zapopan, Mexico

More, more, more

I am pleased that the weekly downloadable version of People's World is already available; it is very accessible and easy to print out. But at present it is four short pages and hardly measures up to the content and quality of the hardcopy print version of the paper I have been subscribing to for years. I will be able to receive my newspaper much quicker and reliably now; but I hope that when the print version disappears in a few short weeks that the online downloadable version is expanded, including especially the letters from readers and the World Notes section.

Also, I have always been frustrated by my very deficient Spanish and my inability to read much of the interesting-looking articles on the three print pages of the Mundo Popular. Hopefully you will give thought to providing translations of all articles into both languages when you go completely cyber. Your friend,

John LeRoy

Phoenix AZ

Thanks for raising consciousness and doing such wonderful work for People's World. I use it in the Latin American Studies class I teach and never throw away a copy. I leave them at bus stops, universities and libraries. Recycle to a friend!

I particularly enjoy World Notes. I've spent years in Latin America on Fulbright Scholarships and personal travels. As a result, I've written many poems about the workers' struggle for justice.

Keep up the good work. Best wishes,

Brian Fitzpatrick

Lakewood CO

Obama and Bush same on Cuba

Re: "Obama peace prize is wise and timely decision," there is no doubt that Obama is not exactly a follower of the George W. Bush ideologue, but analyze the Barack Obama philosophy of what he has said when running for the presidency.

Author Juan Lopez looks at the Obama election as a break through of the past and a "huge opening for progressive mankind." True, it is a breakthrough and it could be a huge opening for the future, but so far it is not. President Obama has treated Cuba nastily up to now. His actions are still following the Bush line, both in foreign policy and his treatment of Cuba.

The conduct of the U.S. government since October 2008 until May 2009 confirms that the newly elected administration has not taken one step to put and end to the economic trade and financial embargo it has imposed on Cuba. In fact, the U.S. has taken an opposing position voting against lifting the embargo. The general assembly voted 185 to 3 to lift the embargo.

Barack Obama please talk the talk, please walk the walk and "let the Cuban people go."

John Gilman

Milwaukee WI

Photo: Vivian Weinstein

Next steps in Afghanistan

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:01:00 +0000

One of the Obama administration's most important actions has been its decision to thoroughly review U.S. objectives, goals and strategy in Afghanistan. That this is being seriously debated over a period of weeks, with voices heard from all sides and decisions held in abeyance, is a highly significant change from the practice of previous administrations.

As this discussion approaches its end, the call is rising for a decision to consider our country's true security needs and to recognize the need to help the Afghan people rebuild their conflict-shattered lives. Common themes include no escalation of U.S. and NATO troops, a clearly defined exit strategy and support for Afghan-led economic, social and political development.

The latest expression comes from the 300-member executive board of the California Democratic Party, which overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Nov. 15 entitled "End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan." The resolution calls for a timetable to withdraw U.S. military personnel, an end to using "mercenary contractors" and to air strikes causing heavy civilian casualties. It urges President Obama to "oversee a redirection of our funding and resources," increasing humanitarian and development aid. It calls for multiparty talks in Afghanistan to ensure "democratic and legitimate representation," and multiparty regional diplomacy "for safety and stability of neighboring countries."

Wise words from the biggest state organization in the president's own party.

Two bills now before Congress carry a similar message. HR 3699, by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., would bar funds for a troop increase, and HR 2404, by Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., calls for a military exit strategy.

Voices within the administration, including Vice President Biden, have also warned against deploying more troops. Last week U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, who not long ago commanded U.S. troops there, expressed major reservations about increasing troop levels. Obama's call for further clarification of the options he is being offered is also an important development.

A year ago, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose members lost loved ones in the 2001 Al Qaeda terror assaults, called for "a drastically revamped U.S. policy focused on diplomacy, negotiation, aid, reconstruction and international cooperation."

As the administration's review comes to a close, we hope such principles will underlie the president's decisions.

But even if such wise counsel doesn't, inevitably this will be the plan for true security and stability for the region and the United States. And it will continue to be the plan that the U.S. people will continue to embrace and push to fulfill.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0

Yip Harburg, ‘Wizard of Oz’ songwriter & socialist

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:06:00 +0000

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches families across the country will gather around the television and watch one of America's beloved films, "The Wizard of Oz." However there is much to be told about the message of this classic, beginning with its Oscar-winning lyricist Edgar Yipsel Harburg.

In the 1930s, Harburg wrote the hit songs for the film, and added the famous rainbow to the story, which was originally written by L. Frank Baum in 1900.

Harburg co-wrote the tune "Over the Rainbow" with Harold Arlen for the film, which won the Academy Award in 1940. He was also the final script editor and made significant contributions to the dialogue.

But less well known is that "Yip" Harburg was a socialist, and was blacklisted during the McCarthy period.

Harburg was born on April 8, 1896, of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He was raised in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin, and the two began a friendship that lasted a lifetime, helping to shape 20th century American song and culture.

Harburg's nickname "Yip" derives from "Yipsel." He was called "Yipsel" because that is how people pronounced "YPSL" - the acronym for the Young People's Socialist League of which Harburg was a member.

Harburg spent three years in Uruguay to avoid involvement in World War I, which he opposed as a committed socialist. After the war he returned to New York, married and had two children.

He became a master lyricist, poet and book-writer who understood the struggles of working people and dedicated his life to social justice and fighting against poverty. Many recall Harburg as Broadway's social conscience.

In 1929 Harburg wrote, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression and the reality of millions struggling to get by. The song became a national hit and remains an anthem for difficult times, and anger at corporate greed.

The lyrics represented the sentiments of working people: "Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?"

Writer Phillip Bonosky, who was cultural editor of this newspaper's predecessor, the Daily Worker, says "The Wizard of Oz" was based on the atmosphere of the times.

"The book was written by a socialist and the fable highlights some of society's contradictions of that period," Bonosky, 93, said in a phone interview. "The Wizard of Oz" was in many ways a metaphor for what was happening in reality, he said.

In a 2006 interview with Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now," Harburg's son Ernie Harburg said "Wizard of Oz" was about common people confronting and defeating seemingly insurmountable and violent oppression. The Scarecrow represented farmers, the Tin Man stood for factory workers, and the Munchkins of the "Lollipop Guild" were the union members, he said. There was at least 30 percent unemployment at those times, Ernie Harburg recalled. Among African Americans and minorities it was 50-60 percent, he said.

Goodman said, "While academic debate persists over whether Baum intended the story as a political allegory about the rise of industrial monopolists like John D. Rockefeller and the subsequent populist backlash, there is no doubt that Harburg's influence made the 1939 film version more political."

Bonosky said "Wizard of Oz" offers an alternative history of that period. "It's kind of like an unknown part of our history," he said. "It's a very profound part of the American past and its messages could really educate younger generations."

Harburg went on to write "Finian's Rainbow" for Broadway. The musical is now having a successful revival there. It addresses themes that are highly topical today, racial bigotry, anti-immigrant prejudice and mortgage foreclosures. In 1947 the musical was the first Broadway show with an integrated cast. It became a hit and ran for a year and half. The musical had three major revivals (1955, 1960 and 1967), and was also made into a film starring Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, in 1968.

During the McCarthy period, Harburg was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist when movie studio bosses blacklisted industry people for suspected involvement or sympathy with the Communist Party USA. Harburg was banned from TV and film work from 1951 to 1962.

During this period, ironically, CBS broadcast "The Wizard of Oz" on television and it broke all viewership records. It has been airing ever since, gaining global popularity.

Altogether Harburg wrote the lyrics to over 600 songs with a variety of composers. Many of his songs have expressed the universal hope for change and a better life for working people in hard times. Those messages have renewed resonance today in the midst of the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression.

Harburg was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. In 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp recognizing his accomplishments. He died in 1981 at age 84.

Photo: E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, in a 1977 photo. (AP/stf)

Obama, the Karzai brothers & the ghost of Najibullah

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:31:00 +0000

It's said that you can buy photos of Najibullah on the streets of Kabul these days and even cassettes of speeches he made in the 1980s when he was president of Afghanistan. Najibullah's name evokes controversy. Always cited are the condemnation by some Afghans for his ties to the Soviet Union and his previous role as chief of the country's internal security apparatus. However, it is impossible not to acknowledge the country's social gains made during his time in leadership. As soon as his government was overthrown the victors wiped out land reform programs, instituted Sharia or Islamic religious law, cut women off from education, athletics and the professions and banned things like movies, television, videos, dancing, kite flying, and beard trimming.

Quiet as it's kept, for many in the Afghan capital, the Najibullah years were a time of great promise.

But also of great danger. Outside forces were plotting and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was spurring reactionary groups - trained and equipped by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others - to overthrow the Afghan government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, in the words of former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, "thought it a good idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their own Vietnam debacle by baiting them into invading Afghanistan in 1979, the war which was the precursor to the great-power Afghan quagmire three decades later." In 1979, Soviet troops entered the country to defend the Afghan government and remained there nine years. The effort was pre-doomed; the USSR leadership had ignored warnings, coming from even its own military strategists, that history had shown the fiercely independent and resourceful Afghans would never be subdued by the military might of foreign forces.

On March 10, 1992, the New York Times reported that with the Soviet troops having left the country, "Afghanistan's president made an impassioned appeal to the United States today to help his country become a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia." In an interview with correspondent Edward A. Gargan, Najibullah "also pleaded for immediate economic and humanitarian assistance from Washington," which long backed the Afghan fundamentalist guerrillas fighting his government. He also promised that he would release four Afghans who worked in the United States Embassy and were convicted of espionage in 1983. "The Afghan president's praise for the United States and his attempt to enlist Washington in common cause against fundamentalism marked the sharpest departure yet from the open hostility that has characterized relations between Kabul and Washington since Afghanistan's leftist coup of 1978," wrote Gargan.

"We have a common task, Afghanistan, the United States of America, and the civilized world, to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism," Najibullah told the Times, and "described what he thought would happen to his country if Islamic extremists took power in Kabul."

"If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many more years," Najibullah said. "Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism."

Well, all that has come to pass.

I was in Kabul Feb. 15, 1989, when the final withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan took place; they had been in the country since December 1979. Most of the other reporters traveled to Jalalabad for the start of the final retreat, moving with the departing forces back to Kabul on their way out of the country. I remained in the capital and on that day a few of us were taken by our guides from the government to a shop that had been demolished by a bomb attack the previous day. It wasn't a big terrorist attack but the message was clear: this is what is in store for Kabul now.

That, too, came to pass.

Gargan attributed Najibullah's appeal to Washington to his having been "abandoned by his former benefactors in Moscow and cast somewhat adrift in the new politics of the region." That's one way of putting it, but he really had no other choice. The USSR couldn't restrain the Taliban and the various mujahedeen factions and besides it was in the midst of a political upheaval that would about two years hence bring down the ruling Communist Party.

Najibullah had expressed support for a United Nations plan to summon - in Gargan's words - "a wide spectrum of Afghans - including the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas - to a gathering that would lead to a political accord to end Afghanistan's years of civil conflict." There is no question that he persistently pursued a campaign for national reconciliation and reached out repeatedly to tribal and religious leaders across the country and the region. On the eve of the final stage of the Soviet withdrawal, Najibullah repeated his call for compromise and national unity before a large audience of notables and foreigners. But the mujahedeen "freedom fighters" (as they were then called by the U.S. media and politicians at the time) and their benefactors in the region and Washington weren't interested. The Times noted that the State Department refused to even comment on the Gargan interview.

And so the attacks continued. Najibullah and his Watan (Homeland) Party remained in office until April 1992 when a major warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum decided to switch sides and the government - affected by severe economic difficulties (made worse by punitive sanctions undertaken by the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin) - fell to the combined forces of mujahedeen and various tribal groups ("warlords"). But that hardly ended the country's travails. The victorious groups soon began to fight each other over the spoils. The greatest damage to the country's infrastructure and the city of Kabul came not from the Soviet invasion but from the internecine rocket attacks following the government's ouster. In 1994, the recently organized Taliban made its appearance on the scene.

Last week's attacks by the Taliban on targets in Kabul carried with them a grave symbolism. After Najibullah's overthrow his family was able to flee the country but he refused to leave, choosing instead to take refuge in the United Nations compound where he remained for four years. In September 1996 the Taliban took control of Kabul from the mujahedeen and began to bombard the UN facility. Najibullah was taken from the compound along with his brother, his secretary and his bodyguards. They were all hanged. The bloody body of the deposed president was hung from a lamp post, his severed private parts stuck in his mouth.

One Afghan writer suggested Najibullah deserved his fate, having been naïve enough to think the Taliban would recognize the UN center as out of bounds. Last week's attack lay to rest that notion once again.

And so it came to pass that from that time forward to the Al Qaeda attack on the United States Sept. 11, 2001, and beyond, Afghanistan has been and continues to be "a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs" and "a center for terrorism."

Over the years, the left in that part of the world (and a lot of other places) has made a many mistakes that contributed to the advance of right-wing reactionary movements and forces. However, the biggest culprits have been the U.S. and its Western allies. In their zeal to crush communist, socialist and left movements and parties and a desire to control petroleum resources, they have anointed and fostered the fundamentalists over the secular and democratic, and taken advantage of religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions, stirring pots where they could find them from Central Europe to Iraq.

Oh, and that narcotics thing. What short memories we sometimes have. Yes, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sometimes cavorts with drug dealers. It did it in the war in Southeast Asia a few decades ago. Remember the Golden Triangle? "If it sounds a lot like Vietnam when Vietnam started to really come apart, it is - President Diem's grotesquely corrupt brother was a CIA source and a noxious agent of influence," writes Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, in Time
magazine.

"We came into Afghanistan in October 2001 with the same willful blindness. The CIA knew that its ally, the Tajik Northern Alliance, was a paid-up proxy of Iran, just as it was fully aware that another ally, Uzbek General Dostum, was one of Afghanistan's great butchers (though Dostum has always denied the widespread allegations of his brutality). When it came to finding crucial partners on the ground, there were simply no alternatives."

According to Time, "From December 2001 through 2002, according to a former Drug Enforcement Administration official speaking on condition of anonymity, ‘the CIA and the military turned a blind eye to drug traffickers if they thought they could help them against Taliban and al-Qaeda.'"

"We had no problem dealing with Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists, drug dealers and thugs when the Carter and Reagan White Houses waged a proxy war against the Soviet Union in the '80s," writes Baer. "The CIA and the White House turned a blind eye to our proxies' faults because the fundamentalists were the best fighters and happy to take down our Cold War
enemy.

"The claim that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA for the past eight years, as reported in today's New York Times, won't come as a surprise to most Afghans, who have long considered his brother, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, to be an American puppet," wrote Aryn Baker in Time on Oct. 28. "The revamped allegations that Karzai frère is deeply involved in Afghanistan's annual $4-billion drug industry isn't much of a shocker either - on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar the name ‘Wali' has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime because he has friends in the right places. Diplomats, counter-narcotics officials and commanders from the International Security Assistance Force, NATO's military wing in Afghanistan, have all privately (and not so privately) expressed frustration with President Karzai for not reining in his brother. In fact, the people most likely to be shocked by the revelations are Americans back at home, who are already wondering why we should be sending more soldiers and money to a country whose leadership has rarely proved an adequate partner."

As it turns out there are more than two Karzai brothers. Citing a recent study published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, investigative reporter Gareth Porter writes:

"The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses."

"In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government."

The allegation of drug dealing and CIA payoff to Ahmed Wali Karzai "throws into sharp relief the most crucial question the administration now faces in Afghanistan," wrote Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor last Wednesday. "Should America continue its policy of working with warlords and disreputable power-brokers in an attempt to use their influence to advance U.S. interests? Or should it instead focus on protecting the Afghan people - in many cases from the very warlords the U.S. has supported in the past?"

I was sitting around the other day with a group of people whose views, one might say, ranged from center to left. On Afghanistan they appeared to be of the unanimous opinion that U.S. policy had to make a sharp departure from the past. The best option for the Obama administration is neither "counterinsurgency" nor "counterterrorism." Nor is total disengagement desired, they agreed. The answer lies in development. A "Marshall Plan" sized program to tackle poverty and illiteracy in the region could improve the situation. Military escalation will only make matters worse.

Of course, launching such an effort would require an end to the fighting and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. A path to that would likely lie in a proposal widely broached in Europe and hardly mentioned in this country for an international conference involving, first and foremost, all Afghanistan's neighboring states and each of the warring parties in the country with the aim of arriving at a security agreement. It might come through the United Nations like the plan that Najibullah was entertaining back in 1998 - long before Sept.11. Only this way can the conditions arise for the Afghan people to decide their own destiny free of dictates and intrigues from abroad. In any case, the proper path for the U.S. must not involve continuing to bed down with the feudal warlords and the likes of the Karzai brothers. That puts us on the wrong side of history and decency.

Reposted from the Nov. 5, 2009, issue of blackcommentator.com with permission of the author.

Photo: A view of Kabul showing destruction caused by in-fighting of fundamentalist groups after the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992. (commons.wikimedia.org)

Weekly jobless claims and the ‘Jobs Summit’

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:33:00 +0000

This morning the U.S. Department of Labor released its weekly jobless claims figures for the week ending Nov. 7. Coming in at 502,000 new initial jobless claims, the number marked a slight decrease over the previous week (about 12,000) and continued a recent trend of almost microscopic incremental decreases in the weekly claims over the past month or so.

However, the figure is still historically very high - at the depths of the economic crisis earlier this year weekly claims peaked at about 690,000.

Moreover, an economics reporter on CNBC noted this morning that the "lower" tally of 502,000 still indicates that every week in the U.S. as many people file for initial unemployment claims as live in a medium sized city like Atlanta, Ga.,(population circa 567,000). This is a staggering concept - the idea that each week a medium-sized U.S. city joins the ranks of the unemployed. Yet, this is touted as evidence of economic "improvement."

Reflecting on this mornings "improved," but "disappointing" report, President Obama announced that he will convene a "Jobs Summit" in December to explore the means for tackling this seemingly intractable problem of mounting unemployment even in the face of positive GDP (Gross Domestic Product) numbers from the third quarter of 2009. It is unclear from this morning's announcement who will be invited to attend the summit, but it does present something of an opportunity to include organized labor, progressive grassroots movements, and community organizations (including those fighting foreclosures and cutbacks to municipal budgets) in the discussion of solutions to the problem that impacts them directly.

We can be fairly certain that President Obama's leading economic advisers (Larry Summers et al.) will be involved. Since they are the prime architects of more than 25 years of neo-liberal globalization that brought us to this crisis, it is imperative that we have other forces represented to counter what are likely to be decisions badly skewed in favor of big business.

Moreover, President Obama's recent use of the oft-repeated phrase "employment is a lagging indicator of economic growth" reflects a tendency within the administration since March to favor the perspective of Wall Street in economic policy (without, it should be mentioned, reaping any political benefit for doing so).

In thinking about this morning's jobless claims report, combined with the monthly unemployment numbers from October (10.2% official unemployment and 17.5% "real" unemployment), and President Obama's decision to convene the Jobs Summit in December it raises the issue of a second (this time real) stimulus for the economy.

Ever since China announced its stimulus of nearly $800 billion it has been hailed (even among big business) as a successful and even model stimulus. China's stimulus was exclusively directed at creating employment through massive infrastructure development, employment retention in state-run factories, and procurement of natural resources to lower energy costs for the public (the government included generous increases in state subsidies for energy costs as a component of the stimulus plan).

On the other hand, the U.S. stimulus, while significant because it even got passed, was divided into a two-year phased plan that front-loaded tax breaks and added only a small percentage to direct employment programs - road repair, retention of public employees, etc. Many of those tax breaks have, unfortunately, been offset by rising unemployment since the stimulus went into effect. When one loses their income, the benefits of a tax cut go with it.

The lesson from the current U.S. stimulus, the rising unemployment rate since the Spring, and the historically high continuing and initial unemployment claims point toward the urgent need for a new stimulus that is front-loaded with an emphasis on immediate jobs creation.

Study after study going back decades has highlighted the need for repairing the U.S. infrastructure, building and repairing our schools, hiring more teachers for those schools, providing updated educational supplies, and improving (as well as greening) the country's energy grid. Therefore, there already exist sectors of the U.S. economy that await job creation - if only the funding is provided and deliberately directed to those ends.

The Jobs Summit in December must mark a change in direction for the administration in the handling of the economic crisis. It is a change that can only be brought about through the explicit involvement of working people and their progressive grassroots allies in the process of mapping the policies that will lift us out of crisis.

Photo: Last year, building trades and other workers rallied for unemployment compensation in Indiana. http://www.flickr.com/photos/labor2008/ / CC BY 2.0

16 workers killed per day, thoughts on Ft. Hood, ‘Precious’ and other letters to the editor

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:37:00 +0000

16 workers a day

It is time to change the feeble and antiquated rules that fail to protect workers on the job.

Sixteen workers are killed a day in the United States because of reckless negligence on the part of their employers. Under existing laws, these employers get a slap on the wrist, or walk away scot-free. It is time to change the feeble and antiquated rules that fail to protect workers on the job. Sign the petition to demand that Congress pass the Protecting America's Workers Act now: http://16deathsperday.com/

Donna Vincene Puleio

Via e-mail

Thoughts on Ft. Hood

Ever since the tragic Ft. Hood shootings, everyone seems to be asking the question, "Why did this happen?"

Consider that Major Hasan, a devout Muslim, after joining the Army was sent to medical school and graduated as an Army psychiatrist.

His first practice was at the Walter Reed Army hospital where he treated PTSD victims on their return from Iraq and Afghanistan. The most prime mission of these doctors is to improve the victims to the point where they can return to the battles that emotionally disabled them in the first place.

Transferred to Ft. Hood he continued this practice until he broke down completely last week after being told he was being sent to Iraq.

He realized that being there, he would have to treat the patients, so they would not have to be brought home, treated and then returned to battle.

Some here say he cannot claim he has PTSD since he has never been in battle.

Yet, he has treated countless hundreds of our troops who confessed to some of the most inhuman violence they had witnessed, or been a part of, and they could NOT bear it any longer.

Major Hasan has spent his entire professional career healing our own victims to the point they could be returned to kill and maim more of his Muslim family, and he could not bear it any longer.

Bud Deraps

St. Louis MO

Film, book recommendations

I really enjoyed the movie "Precious," even though it points out some degrading cultural experiences of the African American community.

Precious' mother inflicts the pain of rejection from a loveless relationship onto the one person who was the most innocent, her daughter. She is unable to protect her daughter and excuses the father's role in an incestuous relationship.

Despite it all, Precious is able to separate herself from all of the unpleasant and hurtful situations by imagining herself as a diva, shining in the spotlight.

Even though the young lady was illiterate, she decided to do better for herself and her children. The assistance she received from her teacher and social worker was great.

Melissa Parks

Chicago IL

I recommend you purchase the book "Love and War: An American Volunteer in the Soviet Red Army," written by M.J. Nicholas, pen name of Nicholas Burlak, a long-time friend of my family.

This is more than just a book about events of WWII; it is an actual eyewitness, on the scene, flow-by-blow account of what he saw, what he took part in, what he lived through from 1941 - 1945.

It's a true story of how history drives an American-born youth to volunteer in the Soviet Red Army during World War II and how real love finds him even in the midst of war. M J Nicholas recalls his childhood in Pennsylvania, his family's struggle in the Great Depression and their move in the '30s to Ukraine. When Nazi Germany invades the USSR, Nicholas is just 16. Determined to do his part, he gets himself to the front lines. Based on detailed notebooks he kept at the time, Nicholas tells of daily life in the Soviet army and the gut-wrenching horror of the battlefield. Seriously wounded in history's biggest tank battle at Kursk, he awakens in a field hospital gazing into the "dark eyes of a charming medical second lieutenant." As this determined young woman nurses him back from near death, they fall under the spell of a fervent first love.

From his unique perspective as an American volunteer in the Soviet Red Army, Nicholas offers an unforgettable journey to a nearly forgotten time and place.

Sonia Boshko

Watertown, MA

Re: India China dispute? Says who?

It is no use denying the tension that exists on the Indo Chinese border. The visit of the Dalai Lama to the Twang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh has aroused China's anger. In this context history does count. China has claimed this mostly Tibetan Indian province as rightly its own. In the first 15 years of its existence, the People's Republic of China sought with some success - mostly notably with the Soviet Union and Burma - to rectify territorial boundaries, thereby righting the wrongs of history. With India, it proposed the redrawing of the MacMahon line which the British set as the boundary between India and China. The Nehru government defended it, refusing China's proposal which resulted in the 1962 war with the PRC. Chinese troops overran Arunachal Pradesh, but at the end of this short conflict, it withdrew its army. Thus an uneasy truce prevails today. During the past year, Beijing has tested New Delhi's will on the border for many reasons, including India's challenge to China's role as "referee" in Asia and its growing economic rival tilting towards the United States. Border incursions multiplied; India has beefed up its troops on the border. Yet neither country wants another war, so the standoff remains.

Sion Cambria

New York NY

Difficult victory

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:56:00 +0000

Overcoming the intense lobbying efforts of the health insurance-industrial complex and their far-right "tea party" stormtroopers, which spent some $640,000 a day opposing health care reform, the American people and their organizations, especially their unions, mobilized and pushed through a bill that can improve the health care system for millions of insured and uninsured people.

The Affordable Health Care for America Act, HR 3962, takes a step on the road of curbing the enormous power that profit-making insurance corporations have over our nation's health care.

Among its pluses are:

bans on the much-hated denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, and lifetime coverage caps.
a public insurance option to compete with private plans in a new insurance exchange for people who don't have employer coverage.
Medicaid expansion to provide free health care to all Americans with incomes below 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

While the bill requires individuals to buy insurance, it also offers subsidies to help households earning up to $88,000 a year for a family of four purchase coverage.

The House bill places a surcharge on individual taxpayers who earn more than $500,000 a year and families who earn over $1 million, to help pay for the costs. It also cuts the Bush administration's Medicare privatization debacle, called Medicare Advantage, a big giveaway to insurance corporations.

The bill contains other important improvements for women, including banning price disparities based on sex and barring denial of coverage for "pre-existing conditions" like pregnancy, Caesarean section, rape and domestic violence.

But even though the House bill is overall an important step forward, the insurance companies and ultra-right managed to gum it up.

They saddled it with a vicious anti-choice provision. Called the Stupak amendment, after the Michigan Democrat who introduced it, it would bar women who get any federal subsidy for health insurance from getting access to abortion even if it's paid with her own money.

Women and their organizations won't let this stand, as the health reform fight goes into the Senate. But the Stupak amendment clearly complicates further an already tough fight and plays right into the hands of the big insurance companies and the ultra right who are desperate to derail major health reform.