------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Jan. 10, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BUSH VOWS ENDLESS WAR By Brian Becker New York City It's the end of the year and so of course many people want to make end-of-the-year assessments and predictions about what is to come. George W. Bush did this before he departed for the big sky territory of Crawford, Texas--the site of his 1,600-acre spread. The media reported that he was in a downright jovial mood. Throw in a little chest thumping and you have the "essential" Bush administration policy. "Next year will be a war year," Bush confidently predicted. Usually politicians promise peace and prosperity to their constituents. With unemployment rising so quickly right now, accompanied by hunger and a new surge in homelessness, some would think that the president might use the end-of-the-year to promise some government relief, some emergency measures to help these workers. In New York, the place that Bush routinely now describes as a city of heroes, more than 100,000 workers have lost their jobs since Sept. 11. Almost 80,000 mainly low-income jobs were lost in New York in October alone. Post-holiday layoffs from the retail sector will add to this number. The food lines were growing before Sept. 11 as the capitalist economy turned from boom to recession. Even more revealing is how many of these people are first-time users of food pantries. Since Sept. 11, more than 60 percent of those receiving food donations are visiting the food lines for the first time. Bush's jocular promise that "next year will be a war year" will not put a single one of these workers back to work. CLASS BASIS OF THE WAR So why is George W. Bush so cavalier about the prospects for next year? The simple answer is that the president's real constituents are planning to benefit handsomely from next year's promised war. The idea of war usually fills most working people with fear and dread over the anticipated loss of life and other human miseries associated with military conflict. The husbands, wives, domestic partners, mothers, fathers and children of U.S. GIs are not sitting around at New Year's festivities gleefully rubbing their hands together in joyful anticipation of the next war. They have to be worried. With Bush and the generals, however--and especially the bankers and military corporation moguls--it's another story. They aren't the ones who actually fight the wars. That's the job assigned to working-class youth. The big capitalists view the war in Afghanistan and the "war next year" as a huge business opportunity. Bush has presented a new military budget request for 2002 of $343 billion--an increase of $32 billion over last year. That budget is more than 23 times as large as the combined spending of the eight countries routinely identified as the most likely targets of a new U.S. war: Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Somalia. Stocks of the biggest military corporations have shot up since Sept. 11. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Electric and others have had the value of their stock increase from 20 percent to 30 percent in the past three months, in spite of the recession sweeping the rest of the economy. The military-industrial complex represents the biggest capitalists in the country. Along with the big banks and oil monopolies they use an army of paid lobbyists to look after their interests on Capitol Hill and at the White House. These lobbyists dole out huge sums of money to elected officials to make sure that they vote the right way when it comes to budget allocations. In other countries this process is frequently described as runaway bribery and corruption. All the proclamations from on high of sorrow and patriotism after Sept. 11 are for public consumption and to create a sense of "national unity" while the corporations make a killing. The media hype is creating a dense fog of patriotism so that people will presumably not challenge the president as he redistributes the wealth of the country-- away from working class and poor communities and directly into the coffers of his rich friends in the corporate and banking establishment. "No self-respecting lobbyist" has not "repackaged his position as a patriotic response to the tragedy," explained Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey, in a Dec. 3 interview with the New York Times. James Albertine, president of the American League of Lobbyists, is equally explicit. "What happened was a tragedy, certainly, but there are opportunities. We're in business. This is not a charity." The president of lobbyists for Corporate America explained in a post-Sept. 11 interview with The Hill newspaper that now "National Security is top of the list. That includes the military, the intelligence service and the police [and FBI], etc. ... as the economy continues to falter, the Congress and the 'special interest community' [the military corporations] have been working [suggesting] ways to enhance economic growth. ..." TURNING FAST BUCKS ON ARMAMENTS, TAX DOLLARS To see how the system is really working it is best to take the example of Lockheed Martin, the world's largest weapons contractor. Frida Berrigan, research associate of the World Policy Institute, has provided an excellent analysis of this process. Among Lockheed Martin's new lobbyists is Haley Barbour. Until recently, Haley served as the chair of the Republican National Committee. It is estimated that Lockheed Martin will spend around $20 million lobbying elected officials in Congress between this year and last. Only General Electric and tobacco giant Philip Morris spent more on lobbying in the year 2000. Lockheed Martin's weapons have been widely displayed on television during the war against Afghanistan. The corporation's stock has steadily climbed in anticipation of new orders for the "war next year." Its stock rose approximately 20 percent as the Pentagon showcased an assortment of Lockheed-made weapons systems: the F-16 fighter plane, the "bunker buster" bombs and the C-130 transport plane. Raytheon, the manufacturer of the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, is another of the happy corporate campers that strongly supports the president as he prepares for next year's war. One hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired into Afghanistan since Oct. 7. Each missile goes for a million dollars. Let's see, hmmm ... that's $100 million worth of missiles that will be replaced at taxpayers' expense. In October, shortly after the Pentagon lobbed 50 cruise missiles into Afghanistan on the first day of the war, Raytheon doubled its equity sales program with a major offering. The company raised a whopping $1 billion from the October sale. This money won't go to "job creation." Company executives announced that the money would be used for general corporate purposes and to reduce debt. The "war on terrorism" serves as the perfect pretext to subsidize the capitalist class from the national treasury. Working people are losing their jobs and their bosses are being bailed out. The airline industry bosses were bailed out to the tune of $800 million while 100,000 airline workers lost their jobs. In Washington, D.C., the hotel and hospitality bosses were amply provided for in a $100 million assistance program after Sept. 11. Not a penny in that bill went to help the hotel and restaurant workers, thousands of whom lost their jobs. One of the most extreme examples of how Bush is using the "war on terrorism" as a smokescreen to steal from the poor to give to the rich was the bill that the administration pushed through the House of Representatives to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. Enacted 15 years ago, it was meant to ensure that profitable corporations paid some taxes even if their accountants had found enough loopholes for them to escape all normal tax liability. Bush sought to repeal it this year and give the corporations a retroactive refund for the taxes they had paid over the previous 14 years. You can't get more patriotic than that! The House passed a bill that provided a $25 billion tax refund, including $1.4 billion to IBM, $833 million to General Motors and $671 million to General Electric--and the list goes on. CLASS WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD While Bush didn't identify which country would be targeted in "next year's war," it must be obvious to all that the core orientation of the administration is to pursue a wartime strategy all the time. Bush, and the capitalists who are his true constituency, are waging a war abroad under the rubric of the war on terrorism. At home they are fleecing the workers. Layoffs, unemployment, hunger, foreclosures, evictions and increased homelessness--this is the burden the working class is supposed to endure from an economic crisis created entirely by those who benefit from the profit system. The AFL-CIO leadership, which says that it is fighting to defend the interests of workers at home, has decided to support Bush's war abroad. Some who are supposed to be part of the anti-war movement have echoed this theme too. "Let's fight on bread and butter issues at home and gain the ear of the workers rather than risk appearing unpatriotic regarding the war abroad," goes the reasoning. But this political position is doomed to failure. Bush's war abroad cannot be artificially separated from the war at home. Bush and the ruling class want to keep the people in a stupefying patriotic cloud at the very moment that they need to defend their own interests by waging a class war at home. This can only be accomplished by persuasively exposing the fact that the war abroad is designed to sustain the U.S. corporate and banking stranglehold over the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Osama bin Laden is a convenient excuse. But the war will spread to Iraq, Somalia, Cuba, Colombia, Palestine, North Korea--either by overt or covert means. Nations that don't submit to the dictates of Wall Street, the IMF or the White House will be targeted for military aggression. That is the not-so-hidden truth about the war on terrorism. Exposing this class truth is necessary to unleash the struggle at home. A true "emergency" exists for every laid-off worker, especially for those whose benefits will soon expire. The anti-war movement and the workers' movement must become one. Instead of war against poor people abroad, the movement must demand an emergency moratorium on layoffs from the largest corporations, a guaranteed living income for all those who are laid off, a doubling of the minimum wage, and a complete moratorium on evictions, foreclosures and utility shutoffs. LESSON OF DEBS AND DR. KING The long-standing dichotomy between the struggle at home and the anti-war movement must be ended. It is good at the beginning of the New Year to remember the words of two important anti-war leaders whose names were first and foremost associated with the struggle at home. Martin Luther King Jr., rejected the advice of his moderate and liberal advisors by announcing his opposition to the Pentagon war against Vietnam. In a ringing speech in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King linked the civil rights movement with the global struggle against colonialism and he declared, "Our government is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet." Nothing frightened the political establishment more than this dramatic and real connection between the anti-war and civil rights movement. Dr. King's capacity to unify these two struggles for social justice was cut short by his assassination a year later in April 1968. Eugene Debs, who evolved from a railroad worker into a beloved union leader and finally a revolutionary socialist and internationalist, received a 10-year prison sentence for advocating opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. Before he was sent to prison Debs wrote a letter to the novelist and social reformer Upton Sinclair. Debs stressed: "I want the workers to prepare to resist and to put an end to ... our own predatory plutocracy right here at home. I do not know of any foreign buccaneers that could come nearer skinning the American workers to the bone than is now being done by the Rockefellers and their pirate pals. "The workers have no country to fight for," he concluded. "It belongs to the capitalists and the plutocrats. Let them worry over its defense, and when they declare wars as they and they alone do, let them also go out and slaughter one another on the battlefields." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. 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