People Before Profit blog

This land is your land

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:29:00 +0000

Opinion

Of America’s landmark environmental laws, only one statute has protected so much of our natural heritage – public lands, national forests and even the sea – for so long. It’s probably the most important environmental law that you’ve never heard of. Unfortunately, the White House does know about the law, and it is hell-bent on destroying it.

Ironically, a Republican president was responsible for authorizing the very statute now threatened by President Bush. On Jan. 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act. Commonly known by its acronym, NEPA directs federal agencies to “prevent or eliminate damage to the environment.” Okay, but what exactly does that mean? People understand what the Clean Air Act does: it protects the air we breathe. The same goes for other well-known, self-explanatory laws like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Without diminishing NEPA’s significance, therein lies the reason for its relative obscurity.

If NEPA were a Latin word it would mean, “look before you leap.” That’s because the law requires federal agencies to take a hard look at – and report to the public – all the ways that a project might harm the environment. Because NEPA requires the government to include citizens in its decisions, countless wild places have been spared from the effects of poor planning. Thanks to NEPA, people get to have a say in whether oil and gas companies can drill in Utah’s redrock canyons; whether timber companies can clearcut Alaska’s Tongass National Forest; whether barges can dump trash off our coasts; and whether federal tax dollars can be spent on a new highway (or even a light rail system or bike trails) in your neighborhood.

For more than 30 years, as federal agencies have considered those kinds of projects, NEPA has given a voice to people with questions and concerns about the possible consequences for public lands. NEPA’s open process has ensured that the agencies’ final decisions balance economic needs with environmental and public health considerations.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration is so driven by a pro-industry, pro-development agenda that NEPA poses a bureaucratic obstacle that can only be overcome by waiving environmental protections and by shutting people out of the process. NEPA simply has no value to a White House that prefers making decisions behind closed doors, usually with the help of industry lobbyists and for the sole benefit of corporate interests.

Circumventing or dismantling NEPA protections is the quickest way for the administration to open up America’s last remaining wild lands to rampant energy development, logging and other damaging activities. The Bush administration is doing just that, chipping away at the law agency-by-agency, project-by-project. Witness the steady stream of weakening actions, including an executive order by President Bush directing federal agencies to “expedite” energy-related permits; new rules requiring agencies to identify and eliminate “impediments” to oil and gas drilling; “categorical exclusions” exempting certain logging projects from standard review requirements; a list of a dozen or more controversial highway projects to be completed at an “accelerated” pace; or a special White House task force charged with finding ways to “streamline” or roll back NEPA protections based on industry complaints.

NEPA is considered the Magna Carta of environmental protection, the foundation on which all other environmental laws are built. But more than that, NEPA reminds us that his land is our land, that America’s shared resources belong to us all, and that we have a fundamental right to determine what happens with them. Indeed, at its heart, NEPA embodies the promise we owe to future generations to safeguard our treasured resources and pass on a healthy environment.

As the White House quietly goes about trying to cut the heart out of NEPA, it is banking on the fact that most Americans know little about the law. One thing people need to know is how much America stands to lose if NEPA protections are taken away. All the more reason we must fight to keep that from happening.

John Adams is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, www.nrdc.org. This article originally appeared at www.TomPaine.com

The canaries in the mineshaft

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:18:00 +0000

Opinion

This summer’s heat wave in Europe left more than 11,000 people dead in France alone. Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed. Most of the victims were elderly. Most lived in isolation from family and community. Most were poor.

Wealthy folks don’t die in heat waves.

Fred Brock has written a deeply affecting commentary on this mass tragedy in The New York Times. Brock quotes Dr. Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociology professor who has studied heat-related deaths. Dr. Klinenberg says the toll in France exposes a major social change: the emergence of an older, vulnerable population that lives and dies in isolation.

This population is present and growing in the U.S. as well as in Europe. Children and grandchildren move away, leaving their aging elders to cope as best they can. Communities have become atomized. Neighbors are less likely to look after one another than in earlier times. Heat waves cruelly reveal this fraying social fabric. “Heat waves are silent and invisible killers of silent and invisible people,” says Dr. Klinenberg.

He reminds us that the severe heat wave of 1995 in our own Midwest left 700 people dead in Chicago alone. The event has faded from the national memory, “a non-event in American history,” he says. And he adds, “If 700 people had been killed by a tornado, we’d still be hearing about it.” In fact, says Dr. Klinenberg, heat waves each year kill many more Americans than tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes combined.

In 1995, Chicago officials played down the terrible toll, but the scale of this year’s calamity in France was simply too vast for cover-ups. Today the French are even considering the cancellation of one national holiday to provide funds to care for the elderly.

In the U.S., says Dr. Klinenberg, heat-related deaths are seen as “an act of God” or “the failure of individuals to care for themselves.” In 1995, Chicago’s commissioner of human services blamed the 700 victims. “We’re talking about people who die because they neglect themselves,” he said.

Columnist William Pfaff found this year’s heat waves a blessing. The victims, wrote Pfaff, “were not, most of them, killed by the heat. The time had come for them to die, and the heat eased their way … we should be grateful to pneumonia, broken hips and heat waves that can take us gracefully to where we all must go.”

Indeed, the infirmities of old age are real, and indeed, we all must go. But a society that values human life will not permit the elderly to perish in a heat wave.

As Fred Brock notes, there is nothing graceful “about dying a slow, agonizing death alone; of being discovered only when neighbors or passers-by report a strong odor; or of being buried in a cheap wooden casket in a common grave.”

Society, says Dr. Klinenberg, must come to terms with the broader issue of old people living in isolation. “When massive numbers of people die alone, it’s a social embarrassment,” he says. “It’s the sign of a sweeping social breakdown. Everyone is implicated.”

Those charged with environmental protection under George W. Bush should confront the implications of the 11,000 deaths in France. This summer’s sweltering temperatures in Europe corresponded to the forecasts of climate scientists. British meteorologists predicted that as a result of climate change, 2003 would be the warmest year on record.

In the Guardian of Great Britain, George Monbiot writes that “the consensus among climatologists is that temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade; by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so far.”

“We are not contemplating the end of holidays in Seville. We are contemplating the end of circumstances which permit most beings to remain on earth.”

The 11,000 French elderly are in some sense the canaries in the mineshaft. The air is foul. The canaries are dying.

Will Parry is a retired trade unionist. He can be reached at pscsc@qwest.net. This article is reprinted with permission from The Retiree Advocate, newsletter of the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans, of which he is president.

Medicare battle coming up

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:12:00 +0000

Opinion

Adecisive battle over the future of Medicare will begin soon, when the House-Senate conference committee charged with working out the differences between the Senate and House bills on Medicare sends its report to both houses of Congress. Although timing is still uncertain and details had not been released at the time this was written, it’s clear that we’ll have to move quickly if we are to beat back this latest attack on Medicare.

The House and Senate passed competing Medicare bills on June 27, the House by a vote of 216-215 and the Senate by 76-21.

According to the Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA), the deal being brokered by the conference committee has several major shortcomings. The most important of these is the requirement that Medicare compete directly with private health plans beginning in 2010 – a thinly disguised Trojan horse that will inevitably lead to privatization. The deal also adds a means test to the Part B premium that will force higher income seniors to pay more for coverage, thus undermining the universal nature of the program. The ARA says it endangers employer-provided health benefits by failing to provide sufficient incentives such as tax credits or subsidies. The measure includes a coverage gap that would force beneficiaries whose drug costs exceed $2,200 a year to pay out-of-pocket for drug costs between $2,201 and approximately $5,000.

These provisions prompted key Democrats in the Senate to release a letter to George W. Bush in which they warned: a “partisan conference report that jeopardizes Medicare and does not provide meaningful assistance to the elderly and disabled should not, and will not, pass.” The letter, signed by a bipartisan group of 41 senators – 39 of the Senate’s 48 Democrats, James Jeffords, independent of Vermont, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) – outlines important issues that, it says, “must be resolved for the legislation to merit bipartisan support.”

Although nine Democrats did not sign the letter, the failure of John Breaux of Louisiana and Max Baucus of Montana, both members of the conference committee, to sign is particularly troublesome. The two are the only Democrats – there are seven Democrats among the conferees – who are allowed to participate in meetings of the committee. California GOP Congressman Bill Thomas, who chairs the committee, has refused to include the other five Democrats because, he says, he is “only interested in working with people who are willing to compromise.”

Breaux has been more than willing to “compromise” when it comes to privatizing Medicare. In 1998, when he was a member of a committee established to “look at” Medicare, he emerged as the champion of issuing vouchers to Medicare recipients and then leaving them “free” to use the vouchers to buy coverage on the open market.

While the question of prescription drugs under Medicare highlighted the congressional debate in June, the issue no longer occupies center stage. Fundamentally, Democrats have accepted the structure of the prescription drug program contained in the House bill: in addition to the requirement that beneficiaries shoulder all costs between $2,201 and $5,000, beneficiaries will have to pay premiums averaging $35 per month and an annual deductible of $275 for drug coverage.

In his Oct. 24 Legislative Alert, George Kourpias, president of ARA, noted a recent New York Times/CBS poll that found older voters to be less than enthralled with the job that George W. Bush is doing. The poll found that Bush’s overall approval rating among 65-and-older voters slipped from 63 percent in May to 44 percent in July, and then to 41 percent in October, the lowest among any age group.

Kourpias also warned of the need for prompt action once a final agreement is announced. “Seniors will still have time to let their elected representatives know they disapprove of the bill. But we will have to act quickly to make sure that every member of Congress gets our message before any final bill comes to the floor for a vote,” the former president of the Machinists Union said. “We already know that President George W. Bush will sign any bill enacted by Congress no matter how bad it is. So, our job as activists is to keep the pressure on all members of Congress but especially those who depend on the senior vote for reelection.”

Medicare has proven itself a highly successful universal social benefit. One reason it works is that it’s out of the hands of profit-driven corporate interests. We should fight to expand its coverage, and reject any moves to undermine and privatize it.

Fred Gaboury is a member of the Editorial Board of the People’s Weekly World. He can be reached at fgab708@aol.com

Trips to the street: antidotes to despair

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 05:16:00 +0000

Opinion

I was back out on the street again today in Brunswick, Maine, leafleting and petitioning about the USA Patriot Act. For the past couple of months I’ve gone out at least once a week in our local effort to educate and activate citizens around protecting the tattered and torn Constitution of the United States. Not much of the public is aware of the Patriot Act but every now and then someone will come along who knows about it and is delighted to see another like mind working to hang onto our sacred founding document.

Today a friend and I were at the public library. When I went there a couple of weeks ago they ran me off saying that a town ordinance forbade setting up an ironing board and a clipboard for petitioning. I challenged the town authorities by talking with the chief of police (who knew nothing of such an ordinance) and town clerk. I told them I had been talking to a lawyer. Within a couple of days the town lawyer called to tell me I was free to do my thing. Today, the very head librarian who ran me off before signed our petition.

Yesterday I was in Portland (30 minutes south) handing out leaflets about the role of the Aegis destroyer in the Pentagon’s Theatre Missile Defense system and its economic costs. For two hours about eight of us held signs, banners, and handed out 300 leaflets to the lunch crowd at the downtown farmers’ market as part of Keep Space for Peace Week.

You’ve got to learn to handle rejection when you do this kind of street work. The majority of people don’t want to be bothered. I work hard to get a clue about why and what they fear. Some things I’ve heard from folks is that they don’t care, they don’t want to be bothered, they’ve had enough “doom and gloom,” they are afraid to get labeled a “liberal,” they want the right wing to succeed, and they don’t like to get involved in political issues. The most often used excuse of those not wanting to take a leaflet is “I’m all set.” I don’t know what that really means and on a couple of occasions have asked the person to explain. I didn’t get a very good answer.

I guess when you think about medieval times, there were peasants who did not want to deal with the fact that feudalism’s power over their lives made for some rough living. Still, folks finally got rid of the supreme rule of the king, though it looks like we are heading in that direction again. To me it speaks to the need for constant vigilance on the part of citizens. Tennis and bingo are fine, but we’ve got to leave time for dealing with the things that affect our lives. Some folks just say, “I’ll let someone else take care of making sure I have the right to free speech.”

I’ve learned to look for the light in some folks’ eyes. Just when I start to get a bit discouraged someone with bright, alive, and loving eyes will come along and happily engage me, take a leaflet and give a kind word of appreciation for my efforts. You also begin to realize that being there strengthens them as well, so it’s a mutually beneficial deal.

Our side can’t afford the high-tech media manipulation that gets movie stars and Texas cowboys elected these days. For now, we still have the right to go out and speak to folks on the street. Today one woman asked me to send her all the materials that it would take to get her started leafleting and petitioning in her community. That made my day.

You don’t always know the results of your work on the streets. But I am confident that my presence unleashes a ripple effect that touches many more lives as the conversation moves from the street to the office, and to the dinner table at night.

I remember how I became an activist. I was in college, after having done my time in the military during the Vietnam war. I was close to graduation at the University of Florida and got invited to join the United Farm Workers lettuce boycott campaign on my campus. I had a test coming up so I declined the invitation. But the next day I skipped class and handed out leaflets in front of the campus cafeteria. I had such a good time that the next day I went again, skipping my test. Soon the UFW offered me a job and I quit school to become an organizer. You never know what getting out on the street talking with folks can do to you.

Try it some time. You might like it. Next week I’m going to the post office for the lunch crowd.

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, www.space4peace.org. He can be reached at globalnet@mindspring.com

Public vs. for-profit health care in Canada

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 05:08:00 +0000

Opinion

The Canadian public has said no to the erosion of universal, single-tier public health care. Indeed, popular pressure forced a recent Canadian Royal Commission to propose expansion of the public system.

The Canadian system provides hospital and medical coverage for all. The richest and the poorest may well be seen by the same doctor and treated at the same hospital.

Despite the universal nature of the system, costs are much less than in the American system. Forty years ago, the Canadian system resembled the American system. Now Canadians see universal public health care as one of the country’s defining accomplishments.

Despite endless corporate campaigns to erode confidence in public health care, the Royal Commission promotes publicly funded health care and recommends its expansion. Some home care services would be incorporated into the Canada Health Act and covered as insured services. User fees, extra billing, and medical savings accounts were rejected.

While this is positive, there is also the key issue of the privatization of health care delivery. Right-wingers have been forced to recognize that the Canadian public strongly supports universal health care insurance. So many of them have decided to lie low and refrain from attacking public health care insurance. But there is a growing attack on public health care delivery.

With a guarantee of public money, corporations are trying to take over the delivery of health care, beginning with support services. With billions and billions of dollars of public money at stake, the corporations pursue this goal with a furious hunger.

During the last British Columbian provincial election, the major right-wing party opposing the social democratic government promised health care workers they had nothing to fear. However, after the election, that same party passed legislation removing collective agreement protections against privatization for health care employees. Bumping rights and other protections for workers facing layoff were also eroded.

British Columbia had some of the country’s best hospital collective agreements. But the giant corporations trying to take over the work will cut wages almost in half – not enough to support a family or retain experienced workers.

When the struggle first began, taped conversations with corporate representatives suggested that thousands of hospital employees would be blacklisted.

A regional manager for one transnational corporation stated he would not hire union members if his company succeeded in a bid for work done by those members. In another call, a consultant with a management labor relations company said his firm would be reluctant to hire any union members for fear they would vote their old union back in if they were forced to work for about $10 (Canadian) an hour, rather than the current $17 an hour.

Initially, the main health care union tried to negotiate concessions to keep the work unionized. However, when put to a vote, the workers rejected the concessions. The government is now proceeding with the privatization of many thousands of hospital support jobs.

In Ontario, the Conservative government tried to privatize important hospital diagnostic services and introduce “public-private partnerships” (“P3s”).

Canadian hospitals are not-for-profit. Introducing full for-profit hospitals would not be accepted – so the Conservatives tried the thin edge of the wedge. With a P3 hospital, a for-profit corporation would finance a new hospital facility, provide support services, and lease the facility back to the hospital over 25 to 60 years.

The Conservatives proposed two P3 “pilot projects” – one in a suburb of Toronto (Brampton) and another in Ottawa.

Unfortunately for the Conservative government, the unions and health coalitions pounced on the issue. The social democratic party, which had caved in to corporate pressure when it had governed in the early 1990s, came out on a platform of “public power,” opposing privatization and calling for a much broader role for the public sector. The business-oriented Liberal Party was also forced to come out against the P3s.

During the recent provincial election, the president of the Ottawa hospital caused outrage when he revealed the hospital planned to sign a P3 deal before the election. Foolishly, he noted that the cancellation penalties would be so large no new government could cancel the project.

This affront to democracy severely embarrassed the ruling Conservatives, who were in on the project. For this and other sins, they were soundly defeated in the Oct. 2 election, with all three Brampton Conservative incumbents thrown out, including the Minister of Health who led the privatization campaign.

The Liberals, who assumed power on Oct. 23, have also promised to reverse the Conservative government’s privatization of hospital diagnostic services.

Privatization has been set back and strong popular support for public health care continues. But the corporate campaign continues – and so, too, does the fight back!

Doug Allan is a Canadian trade union health care researcher and health coalition organizer. He can be reached at douga@web.net. Allan will be speaking in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit at events sponsored by the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo (see page 9).

Time for patriotism

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 05:02:00 +0000

Opinion

It was funny celebrating the Fourth of July this year and imagining what a U.S. solider might say when explaining to an Iraqi kid what the July 4th holiday is. “Well, it was when the people rose up against King George and kicked an unwanted imperialist army out of their land,” the solider might say. In less than 300 years the United States has gone from defying imperialism to actively defending it. Perhaps we should go back to our roots.

Speaking of our roots, the Ashcroft Justice Department has succeeded in taking away many of our rights that are guaranteed to the people in the Constitution. The Patriot Act allows law enforcement officials to conduct “sneak and peek” searches of people’s homes without a warrant – a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Justice Department is now allowed to indefinitely detain, without a trial, civilians who are suspected of fighting against the United States. The government can indefinitely detain non-citizens for almost any reason. What part of “In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial” (Sixth Amendment) doesn’t this administration understand?

But it could get a lot worse. In the so-called Patriot Act II the Justice Department seeks to destroy even more, such as taking away the citizenship of citizens who the Department decides are supporting terrorist organizations. All Americans should actively fight this – while we still have a chance.

Some misguided flag-wavers and yellow-ribbon-wearers say Americans must support America and support our troops, and we should stick by our country even if our country is doing something wrong because “it is our country.” If that is true then perhaps they should be questioning the validity of the Bush administration’s patriotism. The Bush team sought to enact the deepest cuts to veterans’ benefits since the Great Depression! This is truly sad, especially since veterans are suffering now more than ever.

Due to the Pentagon’s continued use of “depleted” uranium, which is known to cause cancer, even according to the Pentagon’s own investigations, thousands of veterans have suffered from a large variety of illnesses including cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease. One former tank man (who handled depleted uranium shells) now has such bad central nervous system damage that his brain is literally shrinking while he remains alive. But depleted uranium and the Bush administration aren’t the only things that are hurting veterans – the anthrax vaccine, which is not approved by the FDA, has been the source of many veterans becoming so sick that they couldn’t get out of bed if their life depended on it. Of course the Pentagon says these troops are suffering from “emotional distress” and therefore extra compensation for their families is not necessary. With explanations like that who wouldn’t suffer from emotional distress?

Teddy Wood is a student in Santa Cruz, Calif. He can be reached at Scsk8er35@cs.com

Edward Said: a voice for the voiceless

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 07:26:00 +0000

Opinion

Edward W. Said, who died Sept. 25 at the age of 67, was many things to many people. Depending on which newspaper’s obituary you read, Said was “a prominent figure in the debate over the Arab-Israeli conflict” (Boston Globe), “the subject of bitter dispute” (the London Daily Telegram), a “Palestinian apologist” (The Jerusalem Post), or “the most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of Palestinian independence” (The New York Times).

In many ways, the range of descriptions is quite appropriate. To some, the Columbia University professor was an activist who happened to teach; to others, Said was an academic who happened to be political. To still others he was both. His importance and influence seems to be agreed upon by all.

His opponents – and he had plenty of them – went so far as to call him “The Professor of Terror” and question his upbringing.

Said was born in Jerusalem, at the time under British control. Though his family left Jerusalem in 1947, Said had an undeniable connection to Palestine throughout his life. From 1977 to 1991, Said was a member of the Palestine National Conference.

Though Said openly disagreed with some of Yasser Arafat’s decisions as president – most notably, Said was critical of the 1993 Oslo Accords – he was on the side of the Palestinian people in their struggle for independence.

This was in no small part a source of his vilification by the right. But Said remained firm in his convictions – for Palestinian freedom and against terrorism in all its forms.

Said also found his fair share of critics for his literary and cultural theoretical work. With the 1978 publication of Orientalism, Said forced light onto the dark corners of Western literature. He showed the world the effects and manifestations of colonialism.

In doing this, Said played a large role in fundamentally changing the way literature is studied. On the first day of my first college American Literature class, before reading Columbus and Cotton Mather, we read Said. To understand America, my professor explained, you have to understand it as a colony.

But while Said’s writings pushed all of the students in that class to see America as colonized, he was also aware of America as colonizer.

In one of his later books, Culture and Imperialism, Said tackled the role the arts and literature play in making imperialism acceptable. Citing the example of the first Gulf War, Said compared the Arab interpretation of events with the American interpretation. “In the American view of the past,” Said wrote, “the United States was not an imperial power, but a righter of wrongs around the world, in pursuit of tyranny, in defense of freedom no matter the place or cost.” In other words, America had convinced itself that its own imperialism was good, an ideology that has led to the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Said’s work also helped bring about the acceptance of non-Western literature in academic circles. “The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans, who now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard,” Said wrote in his introduction to Culture and Imperialism. “The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time.”

To ignore this interaction of cultures, Said wrote, “is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century.”

Said’s death leaves a certain emptiness in the academic and political world. However, his work, life and legacy have paved the way for many others to carry on his fight.

Jen Barnett is circulation and marketing manager of the PWW. She can be reached at jbarnett@pww.org

The destruction of life as we know it

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 07:19:00 +0000

Opinion

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and prime ultra-reactionary advisor to the Bush administration, is also a head hatchet man. He believes that President Theodore Roosevelt ushered in an era of socialist government that has existed to this day.

Teddy Roosevelt, known as a “trust buster,” broke up monopoly control of the economy. Like Grover Cleveland before him and FDR after him, Teddy warned of the subversion of democracy by huge accumulations of wealth in the hands of the few.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who, of course, took this country further in the direction of social programs, was excoriated and reviled in the board rooms and mansions of the wealthy. He was roundly hated by the wealthy class he came from, and he acknowledged that fact in 1936 when he declared, “and I welcome their hatred.” He was called a “class traitor” and a “communist” for declaring as he did in a 1944 speech, “[All Americans should have] the right to a useful and remunerative job ... the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him ... a decent living; the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies ... the right of every family to a decent home ... to adequate medical care ... the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; the right to a good education.”

The Bush family had more reason than most of the wealthy oligarchy to hate FDR. In the 1930s Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather, established a bank in partnership with a German industrialist named Fritz Thyssen who authored a book bragging that he financed Hitler’s rise to power. Thyssen was tried and convicted as a Nazi war criminal. In 1942 the FDR administration seized the assets of the bank under the Trading With the Enemy Act.

Every one of the rights that FDR enumerated were and are an anathema to the ultra reactionaries like Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Frist and Norquist. They and their predecessors have waited for 60 years or more to destroy the gains made during the years since FDR’s New Deal.

Their goal is to destroy the very fabric of our society, and as means to this end they would do the following:

• Eliminate all federal taxes on private capital • Eliminate Social Security and private pension systems • Eliminate public housing • Eliminate food and drug protections • Eliminate public education • Eliminate public welfare • Eliminate unions • Eliminate regulation of business • Eliminate restrictions on public funding of religion • Eliminate public funding of the arts.

It is reasonable to think that this list is an exaggeration but each one has been stated in one form or another by those who are close to Bush and his administration. While others may try to be more subtle Norquist is an “in your face” type. Here are some of his thoughts: “My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” “We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.” “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape.”

What they keep out of sight as much as possible is their efforts to roll back equal rights for minorities. Declaring that the law should be “color blind” they are going to the courts, where they were recently defeated.

Bush has perfected the strategy of dressing up his reactionary program with innocent, even progressive-sounding slogans. What is becoming ever more clear is that he and his entourage lie to the American people in order to disarm and distract any opposition. However, this strategy will fail.

The labor movement in the 1930s was able to organize hundreds of thousands of workers and their families to win important gains for all – the very gains now under attack. Labor won then and labor will win again.

David Buxenbaum is a trade unionist. This column appeared in AFSCME District Council 1707’s publication, DC1707 Voice.

Celebrating our history

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 07:12:00 +0000

Opinion

I learned to fly as an RAF cadet in Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe] during the war and vividly remember the way in which Britain obliterated the history of the people of the country that it then occupied and controlled.

Zimbabwe was named after one of the most impressive architectural remains that I have ever seen, with beautiful buildings that made it obvious that highly talented builders had worked there many years ago, when the country was known as Matabeleland – well before Cecil Rhodes invaded it in the 1890s, stole the land and gave it to his white friends.

But we were assured that no African could possibly have designed and built these buildings and that they must have been erected by the Egyptian slave traders who used to swoop down from the north to capture and carry off their human cargo.

Now, Zimbabwe is free and, like every former colony, one of the first tasks that it has to undertake is to rediscover its own history and start teaching it to its own children, so that they can grow up proud of their heritage and civilization.

The British labor movement suffers from the same problem, in that, at school, children are still given the names and dates of kings and queens. They can see the many statues of British statesmen and generals on horseback, most of whom were bitterly opposed to democracy and, in many cases, were sent abroad to conquer and hold down our old empire.

There are many blue plaques on the walls of old houses telling us that “Lord this-and-that” or “General so-and-so” lived here or worked here, but how many reminders do we see of the struggles of working people, who lived and worked to improve wages and working conditions?

For, like the Black Rhodesians in the old days, our own working-class history has been neglected or ignored, almost as if we were a colony of the medieval lords and landowners – as indeed we were. More and more people are beginning to realize how important it is to rediscover that history and learn from it.

That is why May Day is so important and why people flood in to attend the Durham miners’ gala and the annual celebration of the sacrifice and courage of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who pioneered modern trade unionism.

We also have the commemoration of the famous Burston strike school each September and, since 1976, the rally at Burford, where Cromwell ordered the execution of three Leveller soldiers who, on principle, refused to fight in Ireland and, in doing so, offer leadership to all those ever since who have argued for a British withdrawal so that the Irish can determine their own future.

There are other annual events organized around the country and a growing number of memorial lectures are held to remind ourselves of the work of those in the labor and socialist movement who have gone before and whose work we need to study with care.

E.P. Thompson’s famous Making of the English Working Class, with its comprehensive index, records events in many towns that ought to be remembered.

It would a good idea if local trades councils were to institute a series of red plaques, which could be placed at special places where some strike occurred or some important demonstration was organized for peace or human rights or against racism.

Folk music is – and must be – used for the same purpose, and there is nothing more exciting than to see an audience discovering, for the first time, something of the work of others, here or worldwide, who fought for liberation for the common people against tyranny or oppression.

One of the finest examples of this is to be found in the work of Roy Bailey, a retired professor, with whom I work on a show called “Writings on the Wall,” reading radical statements over the last 700 years, while he sings about them with his guitar to remind people of the fantastic heritage that we have.

History is never just the story of the past, to be put behind us as we “modernize,” abandoning our beliefs in pursuit of some “third way” as if it was a magic potion that could cure us of all our ills without making the effort.

History is the story of how we got where we are, the mistakes that we made and the achievements that we can be proud of. It should allow us to learn better from our own experience and own mistakes as we plan our course of action for the future.

Our history helps us to realize that we are not the first people to have articulated the aspirations that we have, to dream the dreams that we dream or have to face the opposition that we now face. The reassuring knowledge of all the generations that have gone before ends the idea that we are voices in the wilderness.

The Black community has long been demanding that Black studies should be on the school curriculum. The labor movement should be making the same demand for our history too.

Tony Benn, known as the elder statesman of the British left, was a Labour Party member of Parliament for 50 years. This is abridged from an article in the British newspaper Morning Star.

A world of light and darkness

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:08:00 +0000

Opinion

Recently, news of a blackout hit the world press: the giant blackout that affected more than 50 million people in the northeastern USA and Canada. It lasted more than 24 hours, paralyzing transportation, causing massive traffic jams, and trapping people in subway tunnels and elevators. There were also multi-million dollar economic losses.

Immediately upon learning the news, the ineffable President Bush Jr. issued public statements calling for calm. There was nothing to fear, this was no terrorist act. Along these same lines, the mayor of New York asked citizens “to take it in stride.”

Underlying these “upbeat” declarations by government officials, aimed at keeping their citizens calm, there seemed to be a real intent to hide the true causes of this catastrophic blackout. After the reassurances came the accusations: “It wasn’t us, it was our neighbors who did it!” They tried to accuse Canada, spreading “news” that the technical fault originated on Canadian soil and only later affected the USA. However, this accusation had to be retracted when later investigations showed a very different story.

First of all, the fault occurred in Ohio, not in Canada. Second, it was due to an overload caused by extra demand brought on by a heat wave. But – and this is the key point – it happened because thousands of kilometers of high tension transmission lines were past their useful lifetime, and even though these lines were extremely unreliable, they had not been replaced or brought up to date.

Almost immediately there was a storm of public declarations. For example, Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and former energy secretary under Bill Clinton, said, “We are a superpower with a Third World electric power grid.” But then came the most interesting part: He stated flatly that while he was energy secretary he had travelled the country and, on learning about the near-obsolescence of vast and crucial parts of the power grid, he had warned of the chaos which could ensue. But, he said, he had invariably come up against an absolute refusal by the private electric companies to make essential investments in new technologies to modernize their plants and update the distribution network.

It is worthy of note that the Niagara Mohawk Corp., which was blamed for triggering the blackout, forms part of the Select Energy group, which, in turn, is part of the Connecticut-based Northeast Utilities holding corporation, which effectively controls the electric power supply for a vast part of the U.S.

Perhaps due to these statements, the CIA then insinuated that perhaps the blackout may indeed have been caused by acts of sabotage.

Some reflections: Richardson was “slightly” mistaken when he called the U.S. power grid “Third-World-like.” The so-called Third World is not a uniform whole, nor is the situation of people around the world identical. Some two billion human beings, a third of the world’s population, totally lack electricity and safe drinking water, according to UN figures. But, of course, this permanent “blackout” is not the kind of news that “sells,” so it will never be the lead item on any major network newscast.

For “Third World” countries that do have electricity, their situations are not identical, even though, unfortunately, thanks to neoliberal-type capitalist globalization they are becoming quite similar. In this, Gov. Richardson is right. In all the countries where basic services become privatized, the ill-fated utility users — now simply “customers” — have ended up on the short end of the stick. They find themselves at the mercy of transnational corporations who fix at whim rates and conditions of (bad) service for what once were called “public utilities,” but which are now nothing more than cutthroat, profit-driven businesses.

As in Aesop’s fables, we can draw several morals from this story. The first is that none of this is new. It is something new for the “giant of the north,” which is getting a taste of its own medicine, something which much of the rest of the world has had forced down its throat on prescription of the IMF, the World Bank, and associates. The second moral is that it is once again proven that a country’s strategic utilities (energy, drinking water, telecommunications, transport) must not remain in the hands of private enterprise, which, far from seeking the public good, only look to increase profits.

Only the State, through its powers, can offer essential democratic guarantees of management and control. This concept is basic for the exercise of national sovereignty.

This is yet another reason why in Uruguay we defend state-owned enterprises.

Carlos Flanagan is international secretary of the Communist Party of Uruguay. Translation by Owen Williamson.

A new beginning for WTO after Cancun

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:03:00 +0000

Opinion

Forget the spin you have been reading in the papers about the “failure” of the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun. It was one of the most successful international meetings in years because it redefined how trade can benefit the poor and how the developing world can be real players in these negotiations. In fact, if policymakers and global trade negotiators were paying attention, Cancun could lead the WTO into a new era where trade talks actually bring about fair trade, and the benefits to both the developing and the developed world that they’ve been promising.

What did we learn in Cancun? Three things: First, that equitable and effective global trade agreements can’t be negotiated when the balance of power rests exclusively with the wealthiest nations. Second, that civil society has a legitimate and useful role in these discussions. And third, that fair trade, trade that ensures that producers are paid a fair price and workers are paid fair wages, is the world’s best hope for a sustainable trading environment.

First, there was the International Fair Trade Fair, the first ever gathering of producers from around the world that market their goods and services on the basis of global trade rules written to benefit the poor. Over a hundred producer cooperatives and networks from every continent showed off their child-labor-free soccer balls, no-sweatshop clothing, along with dozens of fantastic kinds of organic coffee, tea and chocolates.

The second remarkable success in Cancun was the WTO meeting itself. It was the first time that the World Trade Organization began to feel like a truly global organization – not just an awkward arm of the U.S. government’s foreign and domestic economic policy.

In previous meetings I have seen small hints of shifting power relations at the WTO, but Cancun was a breakthrough – a giant shift in the balance of forces in global politics.

One critical factor is the growing working partnership between many governments, especially from the developing world, with non-governmental and civil society groups that provide much needed technical analysis and just plain old political support to governments straining to keep up with the blizzard of proposals and frenzy of meetings that make up a critical element of U.S. government strategy to keep other countries off balance and on the defensive in these talks.

Another important contribution to the shift in power inside the WTO is the reality of 10 years of trade deregulation. On the basis of computer projections the poorer countries were convinced that signing away their right to regulate imports and exports would miraculously turn into rapid economic growth and the transformation of their societies into something along the lines of the United States – or at least like Singapore or Korea.

The reality now rules. Most countries have gone backwards as a result of the last round of trade talks while the worst of the unfair trade practices, like the dumping of agricultural products by U.S.-based grain companies, has significantly increased.

Most governments no longer have the luxury of just hoping for the best. The reality of trade rules and regulations dictated by the U.S. and Europe has finally sunk in. Cancun might just be the real beginning of trade talks that could move us all finally into a new, positive direction.

Luckily, a number of trade negotiators and members of the press were able to visit the Fair Trade Fair and to see just what good trade looks like and to talk with real people to find out what a positive contribution good trade rules can make to the day-to-day well being of poor producers in developing countries. Most fair trade coffee producers, for example, receive two to three times the currently disastrous global market price, making it possible for them to send their sons and daughters to school and to begin securing water, sewer, electricity, and the other basics of life.

The Fair Trade Fair could provide the inspiration and ideas for a way out of the current deadlock. The basic principles are simple – make sure that producers are paid a fair price and that workers are paid fair wages. In addition, certified fair trade rules require direct connections between the buyers and producers and continuous environmental improvement. This goal is to prevent both exploitation of the producers and dumping on the world market.

If the goal of the WTO was to ensure fair prices to farmers and to prevent export dumping, we could find an equitable solution that would be supported by farmers and governments both North and South. It is a matter of political will, not a lack of good ideas that is keeping us from going forward. With enough political will great ideas like Fair Trade can carry us forward towards local-to-global social justice and sustainable prosperity. Cancun is probably best understood as neither a success nor a failure but rather as an exciting beginning to truly worldwide trade negotiations.

Mark Ritchie is president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. This is abridged from an article originally published at www.iatp.org.

Aborting rights

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 04:53:00 +0000

Opinion

President Bush may soon sign legislation that bans abortions – with no exception for the mother’s health – and would jail doctors for providing what is in some cases life-and-death reproductive health care to women across America. Members from the House and Senate met in conference and resolved their differences in the two versions of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

The imminent passage of the first bill to ban abortions since the Roe v. Wade decision leads me to meditate on the words of former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.). He once told me and three other pro-choice leaders: “I think the four of you have become very hardened, very cold, very callous ... you really have developed, I’m sad to say, a moral blind spot.”

The occasion was a congressional hearing back in 1997 on the same abortion ban. I had testified that Congress should not practice medicine and that reproductive health decisions should be made by women with their families and physicians, not by government. The U.S. Supreme Court in Stenberg v. Carhart had subsequently found a similar bill unconstitutional.

This “morality” tale is once more on my mind as I watch the anti-choice juggernaut (again) sweep the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban of 2003” through Congress and onto the desk of George W. Bush. Distrusting women as moral decision makers, Congress is set to pass a broadly written ban that would outlaw some of the safest and most common abortion procedures.

These legislators include Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) who is in no position to be passing moral judgment on anyone. As part of his bigoted statement equating homosexuality with polygamy, he also took a swipe at reproductive privacy, telling an AP reporter: “It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold – Griswold was the contraceptive case – and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out.”

Rick Santorum and his cronies in Congress are doing nothing to pass legislation to help women who need to make life-saving reproductive choices. Instead, these legislators are telling us whose conscience counts and – according to them – it’s not mine, it may not be yours and it is certainly not those of the majority of Americans who support reproductive freedom.

And what about Bob Barr’s moral blind spot? How can someone who advocates tirelessly to criminalize abortion rationalize paying for his second ex-wife’s abortion? (The check he wrote was shown on national television.)

This draconian abortion ban bill is unconstitutional because it does not have an adequate exception for the health of the woman, which is required according to Stenberg. Democrats on the conference panel tried twice to create a health exception to the ban, but Republicans defeated them in two sets of party-line votes. Earlier this year, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sponsored amendments to the Senate bill that would have provided family planning initiatives to reduce unintended pregnancy and improve access to prenatal and post-partum care for women. How can legislators who abhor abortion reject amendments that would reduce the need for abortion?

I wonder what the Bob Barrs and Rick Santorums of the world really want when they question the moral integrity of women to make their own childbearing decisions. They can’t argue that they want improved lives for women and children. A study conducted by Catholics for a Free Choice found that members of Congress who oppose abortion are also more likely to vote against social programs that benefit women, children and families.

It is not an act of conscience to refuse to provide family planning and abortion services. It is an act of discrimination. Often it is an act of medical malpractice. Always it is a refusal to provide legal and medically appropriate options to a patient whose conscience should be considered above all others.

A few days after the 1997 congressional hearing, I appeared on a television show to debate a congressman who is virulently opposed to abortion. Throughout the program, my gaze kept drifting to a young woman makeup artist. She stayed on the set throughout the taping and watched the proceedings with a stricken look. Afterward, she told me that this was her first day back after having an abortion. Her wanted pregnancy, you see, had gone terribly, tragically wrong. “Don’t these politicians understand?” she said. “This is about women’s health.” I wish she could have posed the question to the congressman, but I suppose he hadn’t seen her. Something must have blocked his view.

Gloria Feldt is president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. This article originally appeared on www.TomPaine.com

New Yorks non-partisan election scam

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 04:54:00 +0000

Opinion

New York City is now debating a proposal for “nonpartisan” elections for City Council.

What is a nonpartisan election system? Essentially, candidates run for office unaffiliated, that is to say, their names appear on the ballot without a party line or party endorsement and party primary elections are eliminated.

When Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg originally put forward the idea, he said he wanted to use his personal wealth to “educate” the public on the merits of the nonpartisan issue and have it on the ballot for the 2004 elections.

When grassroots organizations and labor objected, the mayor backed off, saying he would not get involved; rather, he would leave it up to the charter commission (appointed by him) to decide after public hearings were conducted.

Attending the hearings was an eye opener. The public, along with city representatives, learned that the mayor’s commission on charter revision had decided before the hearings to place the referendum on the ballot. At a hearing in July, several City Council members – who spoke unanimously against it – were witness when Chairman Frank Macchiarola let the cat out of the bag and admitted the commission had already made its decision.

Macchiarola also said the referendum was at least four years off, but we soon found out that also was not true and that it would be on the ballot in 2004.

The commission made several references to “the machine” during the hearings – we assume they meant the Democratic Party because the City Council consists largely of Democrats. They were suggesting that the partisan system only allows a candidate backed by a political machine to reach the primary. To this we must ask: Who chose Bloomberg, or Gov. Pataki – who is the Republican Party boss?

Under our present election laws, over the past years we have achieved a diverse and, in many cases, progressive council that includes outspoken members from various communities and ethnic groups.

As the balance of power in the council shifts in a progressive direction, the monied interests are trying to derail, divert and dilute our voting system. Similar efforts are happening with the California recall against Gov. Gray Davis or the power grab by the Republican machine to redraw voting districts in Texas.

The argument for nonpartisan elections is weak at best and the commission has not been able to put forth substantial evidence to show that it will increase voter turnout. If the commission wanted to increase voter turnout they should implement some of the suggestions made at the hearings: same day voter registration; proportional representation (an issue avoided like the plague); fixing the campaign finance system, as board chair Fritz Schwarz has suggested, to encourage self-financed candidates to limit their spending like everyone else or be penalized.

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) gives some excellent reasons to reject this referendum. Eliminating party primaries would create confusion for voters – candidates would not be required to list their party affiliations on the ballot and those that do would not necessarily have earned their party’s endorsement. It would favor wealthy candidates like Bloomberg who don’t need strong parties, at the expense of working people who do. It would make it harder for minority candidates to win elections. David Dinkins has said that he would never have been elected mayor without a party primary.

The confusion surrounding the issue is not surprising. Council Speaker Miller called it “the nonpartisan-partisan-nonpartisan referendum,” referring to the change made allowing candidates to show party affiliation if they choose. Most voters have enough to juggle without having to investigate candidates’ credentials on their own.

Central Labor Council President Brian McLaughlin asked recently, “Why should we strip away the political process and structure just when many minorities and immigrants have only now recently gotten involved?” Berta Lewis of ACORN and Working Families Party explained nonpartisan this way: “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” City Councilman David Paterson said, “We will bring all our resources to help defeat it.” A UFT representative said, “We are going all out. We are 140,000 strong, we are not going to allow the wealthy to steal our democratic process”.

Wording prohibiting union contributions to candidates was removed from the referendum because the mayor and commission are feeling the heat from labor. The mayor is trying to appease organized labor in an effort to keep it from campaigning against the referendum.

The challenge is to muster all New York City’s progressive forces to counter the sweet sounding phrase “nonpartisan” and educate New Yorkers about yet another power grab right here in the Big Apple.

If progressive forces do their job, the nonpartisan referendum will be laid to rest in a partisan way.

Gabe Falsetta is a member of the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo circulation collective. He can be reached at gfalsetta@pww.org

Why theres no peace in Palestine

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 04:41:00 +0000

Opinion

On Sept. 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn, heralding the beginning of the Oslo peace process. Ten years later, the process is completely deadlocked. Israel has decided to “remove” Arafat, and many outside observers are left wondering what went wrong. The answer lies in the fundamental failure of the Oslo process to address the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While scenes of bombed-out Israeli buses on television screens have become a familiar sight for many Americans, this conflict is not about suicide bombings. Rather, violent attacks on Israeli civilians stem from larger unresolved issues, particularly Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Oslo agreements, which were to be implemented in phases, made no mention of occupation and postponed, until the final stage, negotiations over the most contentious issues, including borders, refugees, Jerusalem and settlements. It failed to address the fundamental power imbalance between Israel, a regional hegemon, and the Palestinians, a stateless, occupied population. Palestinians hoped that the Oslo process would lead to an end of occupation and the creation of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But Oslo’s phased process, and the absence of an effective enforcement mechanism or a clear end goal, allowed Israel, as the more powerful party, to continue a policy of territorial expansion, leaving Palestinians with little recourse.

While Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were haggling over areas in which Israeli troops would redeploy, Israel continued to build settlements in the occupied territories. Between 1994 and 2000, the Israeli settler population doubled. Concurrently, Israel constructed a network of “bypass roads” to connect the settlements to each other and to Israel. By early 2000, nearly 250 miles of bypass roads had been built on confiscated Palestinian land. Israeli settlement building went largely unchecked by the United States, supposedly an “honest broker” between the two sides.

What the world perceived as a “peace process” was resulting in a marked decrease in Palestinians’ already poor standard of living. Israel maintained its control of the land and resources of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and through a series of increasingly restrictive checkpoints, it controlled movement of persons and goods as well. Israel had altered the form of its occupation, but not the content.

The attempted reincarnation of the Oslo process in the U.S.-backed “road map” is faring no better. While the road map calls for an end to occupation and is intended to be based on “reciprocal steps,” attention thus far has almost exclusively focused on what measures the Palestinian Authority is taking to crack down on militant groups. Israel’s obligations, such as freezing settlement activity and removing roadblocks, have largely been ignored. At the same time, Israel continues to carve up the West Bank, seizing more Palestinian land, demolishing businesses and destroying livelihoods as it constructs its so-called security wall there.

No one should doubt that Palestinian suicide bombings pose a major security threat to Israeli civilians, but these attacks do not occur in a vacuum, and neither Israelis nor Palestinians are served by a political process that ignores the cause of conflict and focuses on one group’s security at the expense of the other’s. Attacks on Israeli civilians are unlikely to end until the conditions that encourage them are removed.

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end, there needs to be a fundamental change in the approach to its resolution. As the party with the most power, the choice is Israel’s. Israel can maintain the status quo. But occupation has not brought Israel security, and choosing to continue it will undoubtedly ensure the deaths of more Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Conversely, Israel can accept the solution that the majority of Palestinians and the international community have accepted: two states based on the 1967 borders, an end to occupation and the possibility of true peace and security.

Catherine Cook is senior analyst at the Middle East Research and Information Project, www.merip.org

Racism and the California recall

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 04:35:00 +0000

Jeremy Ryan’s article “Texas Redistricting Plan Threatens Equality” (PWW 9/20-26) is a significant contribution towards the unification of people’s forces, by laying bare the racist content of the Republican leadership’s offensive against our electoral democracy.

Ryan notes that, while casting the Texas plot “as part of a national right-wing power grab ... is absolutely true, what is often overlooked or underplayed is [its] racist nature.” The same could also be said of the California recall election, and, in retrospect, the Los Angeles secession vote last year.

What is clearer and clearer in California’s barrios is that the recall election is also the occasion of an anti-Mexican, anti-Chicano propaganda campaign reminiscent of the repatriations, anti-zootsuit riots, Operation Wetback, repression of the Chicano Moratoriums against the Vietnam War, English-only campaign, and Proposition 187 of past decades. But there is something chillingly new to this latest attack: It is explicitly political and is aimed at activist citizens.

The attack started with Republican State Senator and gubernatorial recall candidate Tom McClintock demanding that Democratic Lieutenant Governor and gubernatorial recall candidate Cruz Bustamante renounce his college days’ membership in MECHA –Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan). Aztlan is the Aztec term for the lands to the north from which the Aztecs migrated to what is now Mexico City. For Chicano students, it signified an identification with the movement for equality and justice by a bilingual group proud of its indigenous hemispheric roots. This is one of the major underpinnings of the movement for Mexican American equality.

McClintock alleged that the organization was a separatist group that aimed to return the southwest U.S.A. to Mexico, and he asserted that Bustamante should disavow any connection to it. The issue was picked up by Fox News, radio talk shows, and major and minor newspapers. Most major news outlets characterized McClintock’s charge as an overstated negative campaign tactic but they gave it play, opening the doors for bigoted ultra-right vitriol.

This is not just negative campaigning or dirty tricksterism. The MECHA/Aztlan issue has been developed for over a decade by far right fringe hate groups in marginal internet and media venues, but now McClintock and Fox News are injecting it into the mainstream.

A very large percentage of progressive Mexican American activists in California were members of a MECHA chapter in high school or college. In some ways, attacking a Chicano for being a MECHA alumnus is like attacking an African American for being a member of the NAACP. The founding documents of MECHA, which grew out of a conference of students and educators held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1969, are called the Plan de Santa Barbara – the Santa Barbara Plan. The far right has blatantly mischaracterized them into something like the infamous Protocols of Zion fabrication. That seems too preposterous to be effective, but most Americans are ignorant of the Spanish language and even more so of Nahuatl, the Aztec language.

There are widespread efforts to suggest that increasing Latino political power has negative implications for non-Latinos. This was a significant undercurrent in the secession movement in Los Angeles, where right-wing forces used the slogan that the San Fernando Valley was not getting its fair share. The non-Valley areas are overwhelmingly Latino, African American and Asian. At the same time, the president of the City Council was, and is, a Mexican American representing a San Fernando Valley district.

Bustamante has proudly stood by his MECHA past as well as his stands opposing the recall and for taxing the wealthy and corporations to fund social programs, and for controlling gasoline prices.

The racist and nationalist attack on Bustamante and MECHA ties in with the Republican effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis. It reinforces the Republican line that Davis is overspending and wasting the state budget with unnecessary expenditures (i.e., education, health care and other measures that benefit Mexican Americans). This wedge of bigotry has opened the way for TV ad attacks on Bustamante for donations from Native American tribes, and on Davis for signing the law providing drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants.

I have no doubt that the MECHA/Aztlan issue, and other anti-Mexicano variants, will be used in next year’s national elections and beyond. It is time for all progressives to join with Mexican Americans and Latinos in taking on this new variation of racial and national stereotyping. The first step is for Californians to vote against the recall and support Bustamante as well.

Rosalio Muñoz is a former staff writer for the PWW and an activist in Los Angeles. He can be reached at rosalio_munoz@sbcglobal.net