>
> WW News Service Digest #73
>
> 1) Mass Protests Sweep Bolivia
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 2) Shut Down the Capitalist Tools
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 3) A16: Socialist Candidates in the Streets
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 4) Prison Labor at Home
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 5) May 7 Rally for Mumia: Cop Threats Don't Work
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 6) What Cuba has that Miami hasn't
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 20, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>MASS PROTESTS SWEEP BOLIVIA: NEWEST CHALLENGE TO
>IMF'S ECONOMIC PROGRAM
>
>By Andy McInerney
>
>A government decision to raise water prices triggered a
>mass outpouring into the streets of every major city in the
>South American country of Bolivia during the first week in
>April.
>
>Demands from different sectors of workers and peasants--
>and even from police officers--began to merge into a
>comprehensive indictment of President Hugo Banzer's pro-
>International Monetary Fund economic policies. On April 8,
>Banzer declared a 90-day state of emergency to try to
>contain the protests.
>
>Demonstrations began April 2 in the Andean city of
>Cochabamba. Residents there protested government plans to
>raise the price of water by some 20 percent.
>
>Water already costs about $30 a month. For many workers
>and peasants that amounts to one-sixth of their monthly
>income.
>
>Demonstrators erected barricades across roads and highways
>throughout the country. By the end of the week,
>transportation across the country was largely paralyzed.
>
>On April 8, soldiers clashed with demonstrating peasants
>as the government tried to dismantle the roadblocks. At
>least three people were killed in the clashes.
>
>The demonstrations had the backing of the Confederation of
>Bolivian Peasants (CCB). CCB leader Felipe Quispe had
>announced in March that the confederation would paralyze
>the countryside to protest Banzer's agrarian economic
>policies.
>
>Many Bolivian peasants--cocaleros--earn their livelihood
>by producing coca leaf, a traditional crop in the Andean
>highlands. Banzer's government has launched a campaign
>against the cocaleros as part of the U.S.-backed "war on
>drugs." This campaign has focused on destroying arable land
>with poisonous chemicals, but has not addressed the
>peasants' needs to make a living in some other way.
>
>Quispe summarized the CCB's demands with a call for a
>"true, integral, agrarian development" program.
>
>WORKERS JOIN PROTESTS
>
>The peasant mobilizations, centered in Cochabamba,
>received broad support from Bolivia's powerful labor
>movement. On April 7, the day before Banzer declared the
>state of emergency, the Bolivian Workers Federation
>reaffirmed plans for a national mobilization and strike
>beginning April 17.
>
>The protests would be aimed at high living costs and the
>government's "inability" to solve the people's economic
>problems.
>
>In the midst of the peasant protests, police in the
>country's two main cities, La Paz and Santa Cruz, struck
>for a 50-percent pay increase. Police and their spouses had
>staged a two-week hunger strike to highlight their low pay.
>
>The police strike, coming amid the generalized mass
>protests, put the government on the defensive. In La Paz,
>the strike turned into an armed confrontation with army
>units.
>
>Striking police turned their tear-gas canisters--
>traditionally aimed at workers and students--against the
>army. Soldiers returned fire with machine guns.
>
>On April 9, the government capitulated to the striking
>police and granted the 50-percent pay raise.
>
>In the hours after the state of emergency was declared
>April 8, the government moved to stifle the protests. Union
>leaders were arrested. The government restricted media
>coverage of the protests.
>
>But the protests did not dissolve. Thousands of peasants
>filled the streets of Cochabamba while thousands more were
>making their way to the city.
>
>CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM
>
>The protests in Bolivia open a new front in the battle
>across Latin America against the IMF's "neoliberal"
>economic policies. Under these policies, governments are
>forced to sell off state industries and impose harsh
>austerity measures as a condition for IMF loans.
>
>The policies' professed goal is fostering "healthy" free-
>market capitalism in the super-exploited countries around
>the world. They have one real aim: to maximize the profits
>flowing into the biggest banks in the imperialist
>countries.
>
>United States banks have a near monopoly on the profits
>generated in Latin America.
>
>It takes police and military force to impose the harsh
>restrictions of the IMF and World Bank. Hugo Banzer was
>elected in 1997 after promising investors to push forward
>the neoliberal economic order in Bolivia.
>
>His word was good with U.S. financiers and generals. As a
>general himself, he had headed Bolivia's brutal military
>regime from 1971 to 1978, crushing the labor movement.
>
>But while increasing profits for U.S. banks, the
>neoliberal economic policies have unleashed a wave of
>resistance across the continent.
>
> Bolivia's protests come only two months after mass
>mobilizations toppled the president of Ecuador. The
>intervention of the military there and dire warnings of
>sanctions by the U.S. government prevented that movement
>from taking power out of the hands of the pro-IMF clique in
>Quito.
>
>The parallels between the new protests in Bolivia and the
>recent struggles in Ecuador will force the ruling classes
>in both La Paz and the United States to take the growing
>movement seriously.
>
>The IMF is facing its most serious challenge in Colombia.
>While the Colombian government has desperately tried to
>impose its neoliberal model there, its plans have run into
>fierce resistance from the masses.
>
>On the one hand, Colombia's powerful union federations
>have launched several national strikes against the
>government's economic policies. At the same time, the
>country's armed revolutionary movements have forced the
>government to defend its economic policies in front of the
>workers and peasants.
>
>Resistance to the IMF in Colombia is backed by a people in
>arms.
>
>Imperialist economics and the corresponding military
>interventions are provoking resistance at every turn in
>Latin America. That resistance--from Bolivia to Colombia--
>deserves the support of the new movement in the United
>States against the IMF and the World Bank.
>
>In turn, U.S. activists have much to gain from the lessons
>learned by their sisters and brothers in struggle across
>the continent.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft 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)
>
>
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 23:21:24 -0400
>Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
>Subject: [WW] Shut Down the Capitalist Tools
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 20, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>CAPITALIST TOOLS: SHUT `EM DOWN--IMF, WORLD BANK,
>INJUSTICE DEPT.
>
>By Fred Goldstein
>
>They wanted the customary, quiet, respectable affair.
>
>They wanted to pass unnoticed through the streets of
>Washington in their chauffeur-driven limousines, their
>Mercedes and BMWs, going from luxury hotels to the
>International Monetary Fund and World Bank conferences on
>19th Street NW.
>
>There they would emerge at the end of each day to answer
>polite questions from a respectful big-business media.
>
>Instead the imperialist bankers are going to be in the
>spotlight of militant street protest on April 16, exposed
>as ruthless agents of corporate colonialism-the way the
>World Trade Organization was exposed on the streets of
>Seattle as a tool of the transnational monopolies.
>
>Caroline Anstey, a spokesperson for the World Bank, told a
>Washington Post reporter April 10: "We hope we can debate
>around tables rather than in the streets. The problem with
>street democracy is that is isn't always very democratic.
>There are a whole lot of voices, most importantly the
>voices of the 1.2 billion who live on less than a dollar a
>day, whom the bank is there to serve and who may not be
>represented in the streets."
>
>But that is precisely who will be represented in the
>protests.
>
>The 1.2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a
>day. The 880 million with no access to health care.
>
>The 1.3 billion with no access to clean water. The 2.6
>billion with no sanitation. The 850 million who are
>illiterate. (Figures from the United Nations Human
>Development Report, 1999)
>
>Those who want to shut down the IMF and the World Bank
>conferences are doing so because of these institutions'
>role in the exploitation of the world.
>
>DEMOCRATIC BANKERS?
>
>It is sheer demagogy for the mouthpiece of unelected
>bankers--who meet in utmost secrecy all year round plotting
>to infiltrate and strangle oppressed countries--to invoke
>democracy.
>
>The World Bank and the IMF are in fact representatives of
>the world's 200 richest people, who more than doubled their
>wealth between 1995 and 1998 to over a trillion dollars.
>They speak for the three top billionaires, whose assets are
>greater than the gross national product of the 48 least-
>developed countries. (Human Development Report)
>
>These bankers and corporate raiders are expanding their
>stranglehold on the world in the name of globalization. The
>process of globalization, which is supposed to bring the
>wonders of prosperity to the world through "free markets,"
>is actually a process of pillage and plunder.
>
>The IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization,
>all backed by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence
>Agency, constitute a global apparatus of extortion that
>enforces "globalization" on the neocolonial peoples of the
>world.
>
>When the corporations want to sell their goods in a
>country, the WTO (formerly GATT) goes in and forces open
>the markets.
>
>When the corporations want to set up mines, factories and
>agribusiness in a country, the World Bank forces loans on
>the country for ports, roads, hydroelectric projects,
>clearing forests and so on--destroying the environment so
>that the transnational companies can get the wealth out
>easier.
>
>As the national economies are undermined and the countries
>fall into debt, Wall Street vultures and other bankers of
>the world come in and make loans. When the countries can no
>longer pay, the IMF comes in and makes "emergency" loans at
>even higher rates--to meet the emergency caused by the
>transnational corporations.
>
>A VICIOUS CIRCLE
>
>The IMF has "structural adjustment" loans in over 100
>countries. In all cases it demands they sell off their
>national assets to the very corporate establishment that
>impoverished the countries in the first place.
>
>It demands that social spending and subsidies for food,
>cooking oil, gasoline, etc., be reduced--so the governments
>can pay back loans to the very banks that helped to
>impoverish them.
>
>It often demands that special "export zones" be set up, so
>the transnationals can come in and set up low-wage
>factories.
>
>The ultimate enforcers of this system are the Pentagon and
>the CIA, ready to move against any regime that resists the
>imperialist extortion racket.
>
>This is the real process of globalization-capitalist
>globalization in the age of imperialism.
>
>Imperialism is a late stage of capitalism--the era of
>finance capital--in which the banks have become totally
>merged with industry and dominate society. It is no
>accident that the IMF and the World Bank are such dominant
>economic institutions in the expansion of neocolonial
>corporate power. Both represent the financiers of the
>world-mainly of the so-called G-7 countries.
>
>Financial officials of the oppressed countries belong to
>the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO strictly by
>compulsion, as a matter of self-defense, in order to try to
>soften the blows by the imperialist countries.
>
>It is the tiny class of super-rich finance capitalists who
>are the modern ruling class. When the IMF meets in an
>emergency to restructure the economy in Indonesia, south
>Korea, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria or anywhere, it first
>meets with the central bankers of the United States,
>Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Japan and/or with the
>heads of Chase Manhattan, Citibank, BankAmerica, Merrill
>Lynch, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Japan to plot
>strategy. The banks in turn control much of the capital
>behind the transnational corporations.
>
>These are the class forces behind the IMF, the World Bank
>and all of capitalist society.
>
>The driving force of the current phase of globalization is
>the expansion of capitalist industry and commerce into
>every nook and corner of the globe at the lowest possible
>wages. Capital lives off unpaid labor and always seeks to
>reduce labor costs.
>
>For humanity the scientific-technological revolution of
>automating and simplifying the labor process should be an
>opportunity to lighten the load of the working class and
>the peasants all over the world and allow them access to
>cheaper goods.
>
>But to the capitalist class the scientific-technological
>revolution and expanded globalization are just a huge
>opportunity to find cheaper labor and speed up the turnover
>of capital so they can make more and more profits.
>
>Furthermore, it is laying the basis for future disasters.
>
>CRISIS LIES AHEAD
>
>In the recent "Asian crisis"--which was really a crisis of
>overproduction in which countries could not sell the goods
>from vastly expanded imperialist-financed industries--the
>world lost $2 trillion in production, according to the UN
>Human Development Report.
>
>This means hundreds of billions of dollars in lost wages
>and revenue to workers and peasants and a massive increase
>in poverty and unemployment in Indonesia, Thailand, south
>Korea, Russia, Brazil and many other countries.
>
>It is just a prelude to what will come when the Wall
>Street capitalist bubble bursts.
>
>World globalization under the aegis of capitalism--that
>is, the private ownership of the means of production and
>commerce--is bringing about a widening circle of poverty
>and debt slavery. This poverty is not caused by
>insufficient productive capacity to satisfy people's
>material needs. It occurs because this enormously
>productive capacity is subordinated to the owners' needs
>for profit.
>
>They will sell it or cut it back or totally shut it down
>at any moment when it does not give them sufficient return
>on capital. Remove the owners, however, and production can
>and should begin with human need.
>
>Another way to look at globalization is that more and more
>workers all over the world are being brought into a new,
>more refined world division of labor. Each product or
>service is created as the result of the coordinated efforts
>of more and more workers.
>
>It is the expanded socialization of the labor process on a
>global scale.
>
>The problem is that under capitalism, the coordinating
>process and the products of labor are not in the hands of
>the creators of wealth--the workers--but in the hands of
>parasitical owners of the economy who are totally
>unnecessary to the process.
>
>This growing contradiction between the expanding
>socialization of the production process and narrowing
>ownership of the instruments of production by fewer and
>fewer billionaires is the greatest contradiction of the
>modern era. Only the socialization of ownership--workers'
>ownership of the means of production--can resolve this
>contradiction once and for all.
>
>POLARIZATION AT HOME
>
>This contradiction is showing more and more at home, even
>in the midst of the great Wall Street boom.
>
>When President Bill Clinton made a balanced budget the
>keystone of his political program, it was at the behest of
>the bankers, the bondholders and their domestic
>representatives--the U.S. version of the IMF--Alan
>Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board.
>
>They restructured to drive millions of people off welfare
>in order to pay the debt to the banks. They ended all
>construction of low-income public housing. They reduced
>food stamp benefits, instituted the hated HMO system of
>medicine, cut back on education spending, built more
>prisons, put more cops on the streets, and reinstituted the
>death penalty with a vengeance. They have unleashed new
>waves of racism and police brutality.
>
>Twenty five percent of children in this country and a
>large portion of the elderly go hungry every night while
>warehouses in the Midwest bulge with surplus cheese,
>butter, flour and grain because agribusiness wants to keep
>prices up.
>
>Low wages and super-exploited immigrant labor, often
>bordering on indentured servitude, abound.
>
>Workers in cities like San Diego go homeless because rents
>are so high. Janitors have to struggle in Los Angeles just
>to get wages up to poverty level.
>
>Workers' leisure time is vanishing. Some 43 million people
>are without health care.
>
>This is all part of the capitalist class's restructuring
>at home in order to increase profits-just the way they do
>abroad. It is all the same group that tells the IMF and the
>World Bank what to do in the oppressed countries.
>
>Behind the great disparity between the wealth of nations
>is the great disparity in the wealth of social classes.
>Behind the exploitation of countries is the exploitation of
>one class, the working class, by another, the capitalist
>class.
>
>The IMF should be shut down. The World Bank should be shut
>down. So should the WTO. But beyond that, capitalism must
>be shut down.
>
>Socialism, based on centralized planning for human need
>and not profit, must be put in its place.
>
>Globalization--that is, the socialization of world
>production--is an inexorable process. Under capitalism it
>is becoming a source of greater and greater misery and
>insecurity for the human race. But globalization of the
>economy could and should be the platform for a new stage in
>human development that ensures the material well-being of
>all the world's peoples and the preservation of the
>environment.
>
>This can only be accomplished under communism.
>
>That's what we must fight for in the new century.
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft 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)
>
>
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 23:23:35 -0400
>Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable
>Subject: [WW] A16: Socialist Candidates in the Streets
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 20, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>SOCIALIST CANDIDATES TO A16: "WE'RE WITH YOU IN THE
>STREETS"
>
>On behalf of all the members of Workers World Party across
>the United States, we salute you for taking to the streets
>of Washington in an attempt to shut down the meetings of
>the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
>
>And we are not just with you in spirit. We are here
>alongside you protesting in the streets.
>
>As two long-time militants, we are particularly heartened
>to see waves of young people take their place on the front
>lines of these struggles. Many times the young are told
>that they are tomorrow's leaders.
>
>But you are exercising your leadership today.
>
>By standing up against two of the repressive tools of
>world domination wielded by the most powerful bankers and
>industrialists, you are also demonstrating unity with
>oppressed peoples around the world.
>
>It is just that kind of solidarity--extended by those of
>us who live in the belly of the beast--that will help build
>a world movement to challenge capitalist globalization on
>every front.
>
>And since the international policies of the U.S.
>capitalist Goliath are an extension of its domestic
>policies, we must be strong on the fight against injustice
>and inequality here in the United States, as well.
>
>This is especially true of the struggle against racism and
>national oppression--fault lines of oppression that have
>been used to keep us divided and to weaken our fight-back
>movements for so long.
>
>The U.S. rulers try to bully oppressed countries into
>submission around the world, using their high-tech war
>machine. At the same time, the police operate as occupying
>armies in Black, Latino, Native, Arab and Asian communities
>in this country.
>
>Police violence and murders of oppressed youths are at an
>epidemic level. This brutality is not a result of "a few
>rotten apples" in the police force. It is part and parcel
>of the function of the police--keeping a boot heel on the
>necks of those who have the least to lose and the most to
>gain from overturning this unjust system.
>
>That's the message of terror the state means to send with
>the racist and anti-poor use of the death penalty. This
>weapon of legal lynching--like crucifying slaves and
>burning peasants at the stake--is meant to warn the
>oppressed not to try to rise up and break their shackles.
>
>Today the fight to free death-row political prisoner Mumia
>Abu-Jamal has become a focal point of the struggle to end
>executions in the United States. Youths of all
>nationalities are on the front lines.
>
>When the Theater at Madison Square Garden is liberated for
>an event for Mumia on May 7, filled to capacity with
>activists ready to move heaven and earth to save his life,
>young people will most likely make up the lion's share of
>
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