>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>WASHINGTON NEWS CONFERENCE: "SEND ELIAN HOME NOW"
>
>On April 12, the National Committee for the Return of
>Elian to His Father in Cuba held a news conference in front
>of the Justice Department. National Committee spokespeople
>demanded that Attorney General Janet Reno end the ongoing
>delays and enforce the decision that Elian belongs with his
>father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
>
>Speaking at the news conference were several Cubans who
>said that the fanatic right-wing Cubans in Miami do not at
>all represent the views of all Cubans living in the United
>States.
>
>Luis Miranda from CASA gave a strong message describing
>the violent and hateful character of Cubans holding Elian
>hostage.
>
>Attorney Dean Hubbard, who met with Juan Miguel Gonzalez
>in Cuba in February, challenged the media to tell the truth
>about Cuban children. Hubbard spoke of how Cuba's
>government does everything in its power to provide the best
>for Cuban children, including free health care and
>education.
>
>Dr. Miguel Orlando Garcia spoke of the continued child
>abuse of Elian.
>
>The Rev. Lucius Walker of IFCO/ Pastors for Peace, a co-
>coordinator of the National Committee for Elian's Return to
>Cuba, gave an overall account of the Justice Department's
>long delays--and of Cuba's determination to keep up the
>struggle.
>
>Several members of the National Committee, as well as many
>other supporters of Elian, later participated in a
>reception with Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
>
>Teresa Gutierrez a leading spokesperson for the National
>Committee, presented a scrapbook of all the messages of
>solidarity for Elian's return as well as photos of the
>activities held by the National Committee to Juan Miguel
>Gonzalez.
>
>The organizers left blank pages in the scrapbook so that
>Elian could fill them with his life in Cuba after he
>returns.
>
> - 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)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <003e01bfab2b$70e89f60$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] Wall Street: A crashing success
>Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 20:49:24 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>WALL STREET: A CRASHING SUCCESS
>
>By Gary Wilson
>
>More than a trillion dollars were lost in the stock market
>crash on April 14, bringing the week's losses on Wall
>Street to $2.1 trillion.
>
>The economic news has shifted about as wildly as the
>markets themselves, going from doom and gloom to mindless
>exuberance.
>
>The question, as it is posed in the pro-capitalist media,
>is usually something like: How long can the dot-com bubble
>on Wall Street be sustained?
>
>This doesn't get to the root of what is happening in the
>economy. And it completely avoids the critical questions
>for the working class.
>
>The speculative gyrations on Wall Street show economic
>instability. But looking at the gyrations alone doesn't
>reveal the root source of the instability.
>
>Karl Marx once noted, "All nations with a capitalist mode
>of production are seized periodically by a feverish attempt
>to make money without the mediation of the process of
>production." The dot-com stock frenzy fits this description
>precisely.
>
>Some news accounts have likened the dot-com market frenzy
>to the 17th-century tulip mania in Holland. Speculators
>drove the prices of tulip bulbs up to the point where a
>single bulb of high quality would cost several hundred
>dollars. That price would be fantastic now, and it was even
>more fantastic back then.
>
>The reports all make it seem as though speculation and the
>speculators were the cause of the tulip bulb crisis that
>put Holland into a long-term depression.
>
>There's an excellent account of the tulip mania and its
>meaning in "The Anatomy of an Economic Crisis," a book
>written by Sam Marcy in the 1980s.
>
>What Marcy shows is that the tulip crisis wasn't caused by
>speculation. Rather, it was caused by one of history's
>first capitalist crises of overproduction.
>
>The speculation was really only a surface manifestation of
>what was behind the crisis. The variations in price, no
>matter how extreme, only show the fluctuations. They do not
>explain the causes.
>
>The collapse of the tulip market was caused by capitalist
>overproduction. It was the result of commodity production
>for exchange, which developed into production for a
>capitalist market. It was production for profit and not for
>immediate consumption.
>
>It is too early to tell if the Wall Street crash of April
>14 will burst the speculative bubble.
>
>But it's not enough to look at the technological
>revolution to understand why Wall Street has risen so far.
>There is at least one other significant factor, one that is
>almost never mentioned.
>
>PRICE OF LABOR DECLINING
>
>While the news commentaries have primarily focused on the
>new dot-com economy in driving up corporate profits and
>Wall Street stocks, one important aspect left out is the
>declining price of labor.
>
>The general reduction in workers' earnings has been a
>significant source of Wall Street's profits. Usually during
>an economic boom, workers are able to win corresponding
>wage increases. This has not happened in the current boom.
>This is a factor that the bourgeoisie makes every attempt
>to conceal.
>
>Here are some of the facts that are often ignored or
>covered up:
>
> Real wages have only kept up with inflation over the
>last decade, and are lower if they are measured against
>labor's productivity gains.
>
> The minimum wage continues to decline in real terms. It
>would be $8 per hour had it kept pace with inflation and
>$11 had it kept pace with productivity.
>
> The unemployment figures show a false low since they
>leave out significant sectors of the population, including
>the huge prison population--1.8 million people--and several
>million undocumented immigrants.
>
> The emergence of the prison-industrial complex, with
>prison labor paid sub-minimum wages. Giant prison factories
>now dot the country. If prison pay were included when
>calculating all workers' average pay, it would show a
>significant decline in workers' real wages in the United
>States.
>
> Immigrant workers make up almost 10 percent of the U.S.
>work force. Immigrant workers are all lower paid. As many
>as three-quarters are undocumented and paid sub-minimum
>wages. This sub-minimum pay is not included in the official
>figures showing workers'wages in the United States.
>
>What emerges is a clear picture that the economic boom for
>the rich is built in part on an overall decline in wages
>and living standards for U.S. workers.
>
>The dramatic expansion of the sub-minimum work force has
>pulled down wages and living standards for the entire work
>force, while at the same time it has increased profits for
>the rich.
>
>The most dramatic source of this sub-minimum work force of
>super-exploited workers is in the U.S. prisons.
>
>A November 1999 report by Workers World's Monica
>Moorehead, headlined "Prisons-for-profits are a crime" (WW,
>Nov. 18, 1999), detailed the close connection between Wall
>Street and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. The
>list of financial institutions heavily invested in this
>sector of the economy includes American Express, General
>Electric, Goldman Sachs and Co., Merrill Lynch and Smith
>Barney.
>
>Moorehead reported that prison labor has become a multi-
>billion-dollar industry. "`Competitive prison labor' means
>Trans World Airlines can pay prisoners $5 an hour to book
>reservations by phone, which is one-third what it pays to
>its own workers. A Corrections Corporation of America
>prison in Tennessee can pay prisoners a maximum `wage' of
>50 cents an hour.
>
>"Starbucks, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, Best Western and
>Boeing are examples of corporate America's super-
>exploitation of prison labor. This multi-billion-dollar
>industry has now expanded to include clothes, car parts,
>computer components, shoes, golf balls, soap,
>telemarketing, data entry, print shop operations and
>furniture."
>
>The other major source of colonial-like superprofits is
>the millions of immigrant workers. Almost all agricultural
>labor is done by immigrants, who can find work for only
>part of the year and who are most often paid below minimum
>wage.
>
>Of course, big business and the Wall Street bankers are
>also making superprofits from their neocolonial operations
>around the world, as was so clearly exposed at the protests
>against the IMF and the World Bank in Washington the
>weekend after the market crash.
>
> - 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)
>
>
>
>Message-ID: <004401bfab2b$88b1f290$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [WW] For the oppressed of Zimbabwe
>Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 20:50:04 -0400
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>EDITORIAL: FOR THE OPPRESSED OF ZIMBABWE
>
>The most important question regarding land redistribution
>in Zimbabwe is: Who are the oppressed and who are the
>oppressors?
>
>Unless you start from this question, you can wind up
>misled by what will certainly be an all-out effort by the
>imperialist media to demonize the liberation war veterans
>and Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.
>
>A little history is in order. From the end of the 19th
>century--when Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Co. stole
>the region from the Africans--until 1965, Zimbabwe was a
>British colony called Southern Rhodesia. In 1965 right-wing
>settlers declared "independence" and allied with apartheid
>South Africa.
>
>Guerrilla warfare by Black revolutionaries forced
>concessions that led to African-governed independence in
>1980. Mugabe, as the leader of that liberation struggle,
>became president in 1980 and has remained in office since.
>
>But the struggle ended in a compromise, and the settler
>farmers still held all the best land that had been stolen
>from the African people.
>
>This land was supposed to be turned over to the
>population, especially to the liberation fighters.
>Thousands of their brothers and sisters had been
>slaughtered by the racist settler government in the fight
>to win the land. But 20 years after liberation the best
>half of the farming land is still in the hands of 4,500
>European settler farmers, while 10 million Africans farm
>the more barren half.
>
>So it is clear. British imperialism and the European
>farmers are the oppressors. The African war veterans now
>squatting on the land are the oppressed.
>
>Anyone who is for the poor of the world, anyone who thinks
>the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are
>oppressive instruments, anyone who fights for civil rights
>and for freedom, has to be on the side of the squatters and
>against the settler-farmers and their backers in London and
>Washington.
>
>President Mugabe has spoken out in favor of the squatters
>and has called the settler-farmers "the enemies of
>Zimbabwe." If he stays consistent in his support of the
>poor, the big-business media in Britain and the U.S. will
>attack him in the same way they do Slobodan Milosevic,
>Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. They will make him out to
>be evil because they want to intervene against him.
>
>And they won't only attack Mugabe. They will also attack
>the squatters and call them terrorists, just as the
>slaveholders in the United States vilified those who led
>slave revolts.
>
>It is important, as a struggle starts, to know which side
>you are on. In this struggle anyone fair will be on the
>side of the liberation struggle veterans in Zimbabwe.
>
> - 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)
>
>
>
__________________________________
KOMINFORM
P.O. Box 66
00841 Helsinki - Finland
+358-40-7177941, fax +358-9-7591081
e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.kominf.pp.fi
___________________________________
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe/unsubscribe messages
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
___________________________________
