People Before Profit blog

EDITORIAL: Puerto Rican independence

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:49:00 +0000

On Sept. 23 thousands of Puerto Ricans went to the town of Lares to commemorate the 137th anniversary of the revolutionary uprising against Spanish colonialism. These protesters also demanded the end of today’s U.S. colonial domination of this Latin American island nation — Puerto Rico.

The Puerto Rican revolutionaries of 1868, headed by Ramón Emeterio Betances, did not simply fight to replace one set of rulers with another. They fought for a whole series of changes as outlined in Betances’ “The Ten Commandments of Free Men,” including freedom of expression, press, civil liberties and religion. But number one among these was the abolition of slavery.

Just five years later, in March 1873, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico as well as the “passbook” labor system, where free workers, both Black and white, most of them peasants, were required to carry a passbook signed by employers certifying that they worked.

Today, just as 137 years ago, the same Puerto Rican progressive movement that still fights for independence and self-determination — a right recognized by the UN Decolonization Committee, the Non-Aligned Movement, the socialist countries, as well as the majority of Latin American countries — also leads the trade union, peace, ecological and women’s struggles, among others.

Because of U.S. colonial domination, the people of Puerto Rico have suffered. Their land has been used as a military base, their people have been poisoned by toxins from military exercises, their women have been used for birth control experiments, and their workforce has been exploited to the point where for every dollar paid in wages, U.S. companies get back over $10 in value.

While Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are an important part of the anti-ultra-right coalition, progressives should not entertain any ideas of making common cause with the right-wing statehood movement, rationalizing that Puerto Rican senators and representatives would shift the balance of forces away from the extremist GOP.

The only real alternative is independence for Puerto Rico with reparations from the U.S. The people of Puerto Rico should be able to freely choose their place among the world’s nations.

EDITORIAL: Second superpower is back

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:48:00 +0000

On Feb. 15, 2003, 11 million people around the world marched and rallied against Bush’s plans to unleash a pre-emptive, unilateral war. This huge outpouring was described as “the second global superpower.”

The antiwar movement ebbed when the U.S. invasion began. Yet over the following months, Bush’s lies were exposed, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo shocked the world, and Iraq was plunged into a nightmare of chaos and death.

Now, with hundreds of thousands gathering Sept. 24 in Washington, San Francisco and other cities, the peace movement is roaring back.

Military families have played a major role in this resurgence. Cindy Sheehan and Gold Star Families for Peace captured the nation’s conscience in setting up their vigil outside Bush’s ranch to protest the needless death of Sheehan’s son Casey and so many others. “What noble cause?” she demanded. Bush’s refusal to come out and speak with the grieving mother underlined the callous arrogance of this chief executive lounging on his ranch while GIs suffer and die.

Then came Hurricane Katrina, exposing the criminal negligence, racism and gross incompetence of Bush and his crony-ridden regime. Many Americans are connecting this to the deceitful, bungled, wasteful tragedy of Bush’s Iraq war.

It’s time to seize on the initiative of Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both Democrats of California, and 40 other lawmakers to demand that Congress prepare a real “exit strategy” to bring our troops home.

It’s time to terminate all funding for the occupation of Iraq. Use that “peace dividend” for reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It’s time to demand a public works jobs program to employ the jobless at union wages across the country. This must include a watchdog committee composed of those directly hit by these disasters to guard against the Halliburton looters lining up to grab the $62 billion already approved. It must insure affirmative action to eliminate embedded racist hiring practices.

Next year is a congressional election year. It’s time to clean the House and Senate of all the ultra-right demagogues who support Bush’s war in Iraq and his war on the working class.

Bush: Saddam must share blame for Katrina

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:37:00 +0000

President rips Hussein for distracting federal government Just two days after taking responsibility for failures of the federal government’s response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush modified that position somewhat, telling reporters that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “should share at least some of the blame” for those failures.

“When the federal government fails to live up to its responsibilities to the American people, the finger of blame should be pointed at one person,” Bush told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. “And that person is Saddam Hussein.”

After reporters appeared startled and taken aback by the president’s remark, Bush said that he could “connect the dots” between the Iraqi dictator and the government’s poor emergency response after the devastating hurricane.

“For years, Saddam Hussein taunted us into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction, for one reason and one reason alone,” Bush said. “To distract us from preparing for hurricanes.”

Adding that “his evil knows no bounds,” Bush told reporters, “Now that Saddam Hussein is in the custody of the Iraqi government, he will never threaten the United States of America with his hurricanes again.”

The president also said that he was prepared to take further actions to protect the United States from hurricanes, such as invading Syria.

Reached at his prison cell in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein said that he was “disappointed” by the president’s comments, adding, “Now is not the time to play the blame game.”

Elsewhere, President Bush said that he “took great interest” in a DVD about Hurricane Katrina prepared for him by his staff, but added, “The part where FEMA responded was a little slow.”

Andy Borowitz writes a daily humor column at .

WORLD NOTES

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:26:00 +0000

Canada: Wal-Mart workers gain The British Columbia Labor Relations Board has certified a union at a Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express in Cranbrook after a majority of workers there voted to unionize with UFCW Canada Local 1518, the union said last week. Workers at three Wal-Mart locations in Quebec are already certified as UFCW Canada bargaining units and first contract talks are under way there, the union said. Meanwhile, Quebec’s Labor Board ruled last week that Wal-Mart had failed to prove the closing of its store in Jonquiere last spring was “real, genuine and definitive” as required under the province’s labor code, because Wal-Mart has kept its 20-year lease on the store building without trying to sublet it. The Toronto Globe and Mail said the board will now determine the “appropriate remedies” for the store’s former employees. As many as 79 of the store’s 190 workers have filed for compensation under the labor code.

China: University launches gay studies course Fudan University in Shanghai is launching China’s first undergraduate gay studies course this month, The New York Times said. The class, “Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies,” will examine gay social, legal and health issues, said sociology professor Sun Zhongxin, who will oversee the class. The initial 100 places for the course filled quickly and more will be added to accommodate several hundred interested students, Sun said. A course on homosexual life had earlier been initiated in the university’s medical school. “For such a university to have a specific course like this, with so many participants and experts involved, will have a very positive impact on the social situation of gay people, and on the fight against AIDS,” said Zhou Shenjian, director of a gay advocacy group in Chongqing.

Nigeria: Protest fuel price hikes Thousands of demonstrators marched through the capital city, Lagos, last week to protest a 30 percent rise in fuel costs after the government cut subsidies last month, BBC News said. At one point, the demonstration — the start of two weeks of peaceful protest — stretched for nearly two miles through the city’s streets. Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka joined the march. The Nigerian Labor Congress said that after the two-week protest, it will decide if further action is needed. Last year the NLC called three general strikes against fuel price increases. Though Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil exporter, it must import fuel because it does not have enough refining capacity to meet its own needs. Two-thirds of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day and the unions say fuel price hikes will be hard on all Nigerian workers.

Germany: Left gains in elections In an election ending in almost total confusion, some things were clear. The anti-social policies of the main government party, the Social Democrats of Gerhard Schroeder, were punished severely by angry voters. But so was the major opposition party, the Christian Democrats of Angela Merkel, which despite its approval of the same painful policies, had counted on a pushover. Both got stuck at about 35 percent, almost record lows.

Many Germans were bitterly angry at Schroeder and his party for cutting jobless pay, reducing pensions, increasing medical payments and watching unemployment climb to the 5 million level. The Christian Democrats began their campaign with a nearly 24 point lead. But as voters realized the plans the party and its business-friendly partners the Free Democrats were advocating, they backed away.

But the real news in the election was the newly formed “Left” Party, a combination of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a young party of disgusted Social Democrats, trade unionists and left forces in west Germany, the WASG.

Headed by PDS leader Gregor Gysi in the east and former Social Democrat leader Oskar Lafontaine in the west, it won 8.7 percent of the vote, more than double its vote in 2002. Thus, it is now a regular caucus in the Bundestag, with over 50 seats out of around 600, and is in a position to offer significant pressure on key economic and political issues.

World Notes are compiled by Marilyn Bechtel (mbechtel @ pww.org). Victor Grossman and Tim Pelzer contributed to this week’s notes.

Colombias paramilitaries still wreaking havoc

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:22:00 +0000

Luciano Enrique Romero Molina, a Colombian trade union leader and father of four, was found dead on Sept. 11 in his home city of Valledupar. His hands were tied behind his back. He had 40 stab wounds and extensive bruising, suggesting he had been tortured.

Romero, 45, was the leader of Sinaltrainal, a union representing food and beverage workers, including some who work at Coca-Cola bottling plants. As an outspoken defender of worker rights and a critic of his country’s employer-backed, right-wing paramilitary groups, Romero was no stranger to receiving death threats. In late 2004 and early 2005 he lived abroad under an international solidarity and protection program.

Even so, no one was prepared for the grisly news of his assassination. Romero is the 37th union activist murdered in Colombia so far this year.

The union blamed Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, the federal government and the paramilitaries for Romero’s death. “We condemn the government and its deceptive ‘Peace Dialogue’ with the paramilitary groups that continue to massacre the defenseless population,” the union statement said, referring to a much-touted government initiative to address the problem of vigilante terror.

A new report by Amnesty International (AI) supports Sinaltrainal’s charges that Colombian paramilitary groups continue to inflict a deadly toll. The study, “Paramilitaries in Medellin: Demobilization or legalization,” points out that the Uribe government has not dismantled the country’s feared paramilitary formations but has instead permitted them to reinvent themselves as private security companies and intelligence gathering networks.

Paramilitary groups have simply been “recycled and legalized in structures more acceptable to public opinion,” the report says.

In a case study of Medellin, the country’s second largest city, the authors of the report say that after the government negotiated the demobilization of the paramilitary groups in 2003, those groups simply morphed into legal security companies that continued to murder and threaten human rights and community activists “in order to guarantee that the civilian population does not challenge paramilitary control.” They also extort money from other companies and individuals.

The AI report notes that paramilitaries continue to threaten nongovernmental organizations working in poor neighborhoods while also trying to discredit their work. Trying to extend their control over elected neighborhood councils, they use death threats to force residents to vote for their candidates and to discourage contending candidates.

Since the government program to “demobilize” the paramilitaries began in 2002, more than 2,300 people nationwide have been killed or have “disappeared” in areas under paramilitary control. AI says it is continuing to investigate new cases of human and civil rights violations committed by these forces, which also work closely with the Colombian security apparatus.

The report also charges that existing laws, including the Justice and Peace Law ratified by President Uribe on July 22, guarantee that paramilitaries and those who support them will not be investigated or punished for human rights violations. For instance, the Justice and Peace Law provides for a staff of only 20 people to investigate hundreds of accused paramilitary soldiers, and each investigation is limited to 60 days.

Further, for those persons convicted of human rights violations, the government reserves the right to send them to work in agricultural colonies in zones controlled by the paramilitaries themselves, instead of to jail. The report also says the Uribe government allows the Ministry of Defense to pay former paramilitaries to supply intelligence and to act as guides during military operations.

AI warns the Colombian government that any peace process that does not address the “corrosive affects of paramilitarism” will not work. The groups says that Colombia’s organized paramilitary groups, which were originally formed by the military in the mid-1960s to assist the army in its war against leftist guerillas, are responsible for the majority of cases of politically motivated killings, disappearances and torture.

The group calls on the government to dismantle the paramilitary networks and bring those responsible for human rights violations to trial.

The full report can be found at www.amnesty.org/library.

tpelzer @ shaw.ca

Literacy is revolution Cuba lends a hand

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:20:00 +0000

Nineteen months ago, 36 municipalities in the Mexican state of Michoacan embarked upon a literacy campaign. Thousands graduated Sept. 12 — four days after International Literacy Day — in the capital city Morelia. In all, some 40,000 people can now read and write who couldn’t do so before.

It turns out their success was due to a program devised in Cuba and helped along by Cuban specialists working alongside their Mexican counterparts. The campaign continues with the aim of achieving a 96 percent literacy rate by 2007. Currently, about 14 percent of Mexicans are illiterate.

The experience mirrors a phenomenon going on in at least 13 other countries where Cuba has moved to the forefront in the global struggle against illiteracy. The content and methods of the literacy programs used in the campaign come from Cuba’s Latin American and Caribbean Pedagogical Institute (IPLAC), which is the source of logistical support, teaching materials, personnel and expertise.

Recruitment efforts for the literacy program in Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador and New Zealand have benefited from media coverage and Internet-based publicity, exemplified by the Argentine web site www.yosipuedo.com.ar.

IPLAC’s Leonela Relys Diaz has assumed a leadership role in devising and exporting “Yo sí puedo” (Yes I can), which is the name given to the Cuban program. She has gone to Haiti, Argentina and Venezuela to introduce “Yo sí puedo” and supervise its implementation there.

Relys herself in 1961 joined well over 100,000 other teenage volunteers in the Cuban countryside where they lived among the poorest people to bring Cuba’s own literacy campaign to fruition. Literacy soon rose to 97 percent, where it has remained ever since.

Today, as then, most students are adults who, denied schooling in their youth, are studying to be able to read at the fourth grade level. Venezuela’s “Mission Robinson” literacy drive followed Cuba’s example of recruiting volunteers, this time young teachers — over 100,000 of them. By 2004, 1.5 million previously non-reading Venezuelans had achieved basic literacy.

“Yo sí puedo” uses television and radio broadcasts to teach literacy, with television being the preferred method. It also uses videotapes and individual student notebooks. Local facilitators organize classes, encourage the students and complement the TV and radio broadcasts.

Interviewed recently in the course of her travels — she has become a celebrity — Relys talked about the essentials of the Cuban program.

The curriculum is adjusted to local circumstances and available resources. Formal instruction lasts no longer than half an hour, often twice daily, five days a week. The content of student readings derives from their own lives and hopes. Literacy teachers find antidotes to student boredom. For students, the program attempts to link letters with numbers, which are often familiar to non-readers.

The road ahead for arriving at universal literacy is long. About 860 million people worldwide are illiterate, and 98.5 percent of them living in poverty. Among Africans, 40 percent are unable to read; in Latin America, the figure is 12 percent, or 40 million people. Two-thirds of all illiterates are women.

In a 2003 letter to President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Cuban President Fidel Castro asserted that reading and revolution are connected. “Martí’s phrase, ‘To be educated is the only way to be free,’ is more relevant than ever in our era,” Castro wrote. “How can we speak of freedom and democracy when millions of people are total or functional illiterates? The privileged persons and masters of the world vehemently wish for masses of illiterate and semi-illiterate people, when deception and lies are the chosen weapons of those who pillage and enslave the peoples.”

atwhit @ megalink.net

Israels Sharon defies world opinion at UN

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:18:00 +0000

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was remarkably candid during his visit to New York last week about his government’s continued willingness to push ahead with several policies widely regarded as violations of international law.

In the course of his visit, which included a Sept. 15 speech before the UN General Assembly, Sharon said Israel would refuse to freeze the expansion of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, continue to build its 400-mile-long “security fence” between Israel and the occupied territories, and possibly disrupt Palestinian elections next January if candidates not to Israel’s liking are allowed to run for office.

Joshua Ruebner, grassroots advocacy coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a Washington-based coalition of over 200 groups, wasn’t surprised. In a telephone interview, Ruebner said Sharon’s remarks were “consistent with Israel’s continuing colonization of the West Bank, something that our organization has been warning would happen under the smokescreen of the Gaza disengagement plan.”

He said they were particularly unsurprising given that one of Sharon’s top advisers, Dov Weisglass, said about a year ago that “the real significance of the disengagement plan was to freeze the peace process.”

Critics of U.S. policies have said the Bush administration has consistently backed Sharon’s annexationist maneuvers, either openly or covertly by taking no serious action to oppose them. In the case of the expanding West Bank settlements, for example, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer said Sept. 18 that President Bush will back Israel’s claims to such territory in any future peace agreement.

The U.S. has also provided, by conservative estimates, $3 billion in aid to Israel each year, much of it military-related.

The Caterpillar corporation, which supplies Israel with giant bulldozers, has become a symbol of U.S. support for Sharon’s expansionist policies, Ruebner said. In response, protests at Caterpillar shareholder meetings, demonstrations outside its offices, and efforts to convince churches and other institutions to divest their holdings of company stock have been escalating in intensity.

“Our member groups met in Atlanta in July and decided to increase the pressure on Caterpillar to end its sale of weaponized bulldozers to Israel,” he said. “These bulldozers have been used to destroy Palestinian homes, infrastructure and agriculture. They’ve been used to build the illegal wall and the illegal settlements, as well.”

Ruebner said the group’s “CAT campaign” includes circulating 10,000 postcards at the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington. The postcards are addressed to Caterpillar’s CEO and demand an end to the bulldozer sales. The campaign will also include lobbying members of Congress to refuse to accept political contributions from Caterpillar and to investigate whether the company’s sales to Israel have violated the Arms Export Control Act.

The CAT campaign is inspired, he said, “in large measure as a response to a recent appeal by more than 180 Palestinian organizations in the occupied territories, Israel and refugee camps to organize boycotts, divestment campaigns, and other steps to put pressure on the U.S. and Israel to comply with human rights standards and international law.”

Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American colleague of Ruebner’s at the U.S. Campaign, said that Sharon’s comments at the UN about Israel’s disengagement from Gaza “were particularly misleading to the general public.”

“Sharon speaks of the end of the occupation of the Gaza Strip,” she said, “but Israel still controls Gaza’s borders, airspace, water resources and movement of goods, and it reserves the right to militarily intervene at any time. It retains ultimate control and thereby denies Palestinians their right to self-determination.”

At the same time, Erakat said, “the disengagement plan has been used as a way to strengthen Israel’s hold on settlements in the West Bank” and to allow the Sharon government to say, “See, we’ve given up Gaza, so now we are entitled to maintain our settlements elsewhere.”

“But those settlements were already illegal,” she said. “It’s not as though they were ever a negotiable issue.” Similarly, she said, Sharon is trying to illegally annex East Jerusalem, which many Palestinians regard as the likely capital of their new state.

Palestinian Americans, she said, “have a special interest and duty as U.S. citizens to hold our government — particularly our congresspersons — accountable for how they spend our tax money. Our taxes should not go to support bloodshed, to support another form of apartheid, to support a situation where Palestinians are regarded as second-class citizens, persona non grata, or subhuman.

“Our elected officials should instead stand up for the principles of justice,” she said.

malmberg @ pww.org

Venezuelas Chavez gets UN ovation

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 02:15:00 +0000

UNITED NATIONS — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez received tremendous applause from world leaders at the United Nations World Summit Sept. 15 after a stirring speech assailing the Bush administration and world capitalism. He then toured New York City, greeted by enthusiastic crowds, and repeated his offer of oil and other assistance to low-income Americans.

In their speeches at the UN gathering, many world leaders indirectly criticized the Bush administration for causing wars and exacerbating poverty. Chavez openly voiced these criticisms — and condemned imperialism in general. He received the biggest ovation of any speaker, many observers noted.

“It is unpractical and unethical to sacrifice the human race by insanely invoking a socioeconomic model that has a galloping destructive capacity,” Chavez said, referring to the push by President Bush to impose unbridled “free market” neoliberal capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Such policies have only generated “a high degree of misery, inequality and infinite tragedy for all the peoples on his continent,” Chavez said.

The world faces a dangerous energy crisis, the Venezuelan president said. Within the next 20 years the world will consume as much oil as in the previous history of all humanity, he said, pointing out that one result is catastrophic global warming. Hurricane Katrina “has been a painful example of the cost of ignoring” such environmental realities, he said.

At the UN, the most urgent matters — implementation of the Millennium Development Goals that aim to radically curb poverty and inequality — have been overshadowed by arguments over reform of the UN, Chavez said.

One of those goals is cutting in half the number of hungry worldwide by 2015, 10 years from now. At the current rate of progress, Chavez noted, this will not achieved for another 200 years. “Who in this audience will be there to celebrate it?” he asked.

Chavez slammed the U.S. for “repeated violations to the international rule of law,” highlighted by its invasion and occupation of Iraq. “There were never weapons of mass destruction, but despite that, and going over the head of the United Nations, Iraq was bombed, occupied and continues to be occupied.”

It is urgent to fight international terrorism, Chavez said, but it must not be used as an excuse for imperial wars. Only international cooperation can end terrorism, he said.

He endorsed calls to move the UN out of the United States, suggesting the creation of an “international city” for a new UN headquarters. “To balance five centuries of imbalance,” he said, it should be in the global South.

Chavez spoke for over 20 minutes. When the General Assembly president signaled the allotted five-minute time limit, Chavez refused to stop, saying that President Bush had spoken for 20 minutes the day before. Even so, while most leaders were applauded politely, Chavez’s speech received the kind of applause one would expect at a rock concert.

After the UN Summit, Chavez spoke alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson at a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He attracted thousands of supporters, filling the church to capacity, with hundreds left waiting outside.

Saying he did not want to spend all of his time in the U.S. surrounded by the glamour of Manhattan, Chavez made a point of visiting the impoverished South Bronx. Accompanied by Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), he spoke with community organizations there, telling them there was more “heart and soul” in the South Bronx than in the entire World Summit. “This is my summit,” he said, referring to the community gathering.

During his U.S. visit, Chavez announced a program to sell reduced-rate oil to poor Americans, starting with a pilot program in a Chicago Mexican community and then expanding to New York and Boston. He also said he would set aside 10 percent of oil produced by Citgo (owned by Venezuela) to ship to U.S. schools and community organizations. He warned, however, that eventually, for the sake of all humanity, an alternative must be found to oil and other nonrenewable fossil fuels.

In a compelling Sept. 16 appearance on ABC’s “Nightline,” Chavez told interviewer Ted Koppel he has evidence of a United States plan to invade Venezuela. Pat Robertson, who has close links to Bush, recently called for the Venezuelan president’s assassination. But Chavez drew a sharp distinction between the American people and the Bush administration’s aggressive militarism. “We do love the people of the United States,” he told Koppel. “We want to be brothers and sisters of the people of the United States, independently of their government.”

dmargolis @pww.org