_
4) Fighting Bush means fighting capitalism
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5) Outcry against DU grows in Europe
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6) 100,000 in Berlin honor memory of communist heroes
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PROFIT SYSTEM BEHIND PUSH TO THE RIGHT:
FIGHTING BUSH MEANS FIGHTING CAPITALISM
By Fred Goldstein
The Jan. 20 counter-inaugural mobilization shows that the
future is bright. George W. Bush has not even taken office
and already the people are in motion against him.
Bush has neglected advice from many ruling-class advisers
who counseled him to "govern from the center" after the
disputed election. He was supposed to cool things off
because everyone knows he stole the election from his
capitalist rival Al Gore and that he did it largely through
disenfranchising thousands of African American, Haitian,
Jewish and other voters in Florida. Everyone knows Bush won
the White House without a majority of the popular vote.
But what is not openly said by the experts is that a large
section of the population is deeply troubled by more than
election theft. There is mounting anger about the growth of
racism, attacks on women's reproductive rights, violence and
discrimination against lesbian, gay, bi and trans people,
low wages, overwork, high rents and heating bills, declining
social services, lack of health care and child care,
environmental destruction and many other evils.
All the grievances that have piled up during the so-called
economic boom are expected to be compounded by an economic
downturn that is already underway.
But the president-select has chosen to ignore all of the
sage advice to proceed with caution. Instead he's stoking
the fire.
BUSH CHALLENGES THE MOVEMENT
His cabinet choices are giving new energy to the resistance.
Bush's choice attorney general nod to John Ashcroft--the
arch-racist enemy of reproductive rights and lesbian, gay,
bi and trans people--was a serious challenge to the new
movement for social justice.
Bush picked Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, the notorious
pioneer of welfare's destruction and an enemy of Roe vs.
Wade, for secretary of health and human services.
Gail Norton of Colorado, a tool of the corporate plunderers
of the environment, was chosen as interior secretary.
Vice President Dick Cheney, like Bush, represents Big Oil.
There are two former defense secretaries in Bush's
government: Cheney and Cold Warrior Donald Rumsfeld, a
champion of the so-called national missile defense system.
There's also Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell, a
former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
These choices have energized the movement to get into the
streets.
DEMOCRATS' RECORD OF BETRAYAL
But as the movement takes to the streets against Bush, it
should not forget the Clinton-Gore years or the reactionary
record of the Democratic Party leadership.
The movement must not forget the destruction of the welfare
system, which plunged millions of women and children into
extreme poverty.
Nor should it forget the expansion of the death penalty, the
increase in prison-building or the escalation of the so-
called "war on drugs," which has been used by police
departments across the country to incarcerate a generation
of African American and Latino youths.
The so-called anti-terrorism laws passed under Clinton
stripped all rights away from undocumented workers who are
arrested. Affirmative action lending programs for Black-
owned businesses were ended. Construction of public housing
stopped.
And the labor movement must not forget NAFTA, which expanded
the plunder of low-wage Mexican labor and undermined
manufacturing wages in the United States.
The movement must keep in mind that the Clinton years paved
the way for the Republicans' rightward push.
True, the two capitalist parties have political differences.
But they have a fundamental political common ground--both
are enemies of the workers and oppressed people.
Why? Because both parties serve the interests of the giant
capitalist monopolies that dominate U.S. society.
BUSH AND CLINTON: SERVING THE MONOPOLIES
Bush's nominee for treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill,
represents the Alcoa Aluminum monopoly. Who's interests will
this protégé of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan pursue
except those of the giant corporations?
But Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin--late
of Goldman Sachs investment banking house, now head of
Citigroup--pursued the policy of corporate globalization for
years.
Under this policy the International Monetary Fund went into
country after country and forced governments to open their
markets to the transnational corporations. It forced those
countries to sell of their public assets to Wall Street. The
IMF enforced austerity measures against poor workers. All of
this was done in the interests of the capitalists.
The national missile defense program is calculated to both
threaten the world and enrich the military-industrial
complex with huge contracts.
Clinton pioneered the national missile defense by giving the
go-ahead for testing and then racing to establish missile
sites in Alaska. Only the failure of the tests slowed down
the program.
Bush has a plan for tax cuts for the rich. But Clinton
balanced the budget on the backs of the people, giving this
same class of rich bondholders hundreds of billions of
dollars while cutting food stamps, housing, education,
welfare, legal aid to the poor and all other social
services.
In short, both presidents and both parties are tools of
capitalism.
Bush is now in charge of the capitalist government and must
be fought head on.
But the problem isn't just Bush. And the problem wasn't just
Clinton for the last eight years.
The problem is that the entire system is based on profit.
THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM
What is going on with the economy?
It's starting to contract. Inventories are building up.
Sales are declining. Layoffs are beginning across the
country.
Who's ordering them? The same corporate executives that tell
Bush what to do and have told Clinton what to do for the
last eight years.
A handful of executives and board members are bringing the
lives of tens of thousands of workers crashing down with
pink slips because their companies' profit margins are
declining.
The biggest corporations--from Intel to BankAmerica to Ford--
are issuing profit warnings. The inevitable process of
capitalist overproduction is beginning to overtake the
economy.
Over 35 million people already live in poverty in the U.S.
Millions more live just above the poverty line. Tens of
millions earn less than $10 an hour and are struggling to
make ends meet.
The material needs of the people for goods and services are
great. Yet the bosses who own all the factories, offices,
mines and fields are beginning to curtail production.
Millions of workers who have kept going by running up debt
or mortgaging their homes are at risk. The destruction of
welfare will make it more difficult for those who are laid
off to get by.
PROFIT SYSTEM THRIVES ON DIVISION
Profit is the driving force of all economic activity under
capitalism. If goods cannot be sold at a profit, then
production declines regardless of social need.
The vast means of production, which are spread over
continents and involve the coordinated labor of hundreds of
millions of workers, are at the disposal of the tiny class
of billionaires that owns them.
This ruling class is behind the political system that guards
capitalism. The politics of racism--which divides the
working class and oppresses people of color--is the politics
of profit. Racism fosters cheap labor and keeps the workers
fighting each other instead of fighting their real corporate
enemies.
The politics that keeps women in second-class status and
denies them control over their own bodies is also the
politics of profit. Keeping women down, allowing them to be
subject to violence and harassment, is part of the drive to
keep half of the workforce underpaid. Continuing to have
women do massive amounts of unpaid labor in the home keeps
the bosses from having to provide more services.
Oppression and violence against lesbian, gay, bi and trans
people is also deeply rooted in the profit system. Bigotry
serves as an ideological weapon to reinforce reactionary
religious ideology and to trap workers within the narrow
confines of the bourgeois family, which underlies capitalist
property relations.
The politics of war and militarism is driven by the profit-
mongers' need to get cheap labor and resources abroad. When
Cheney and Powell waged the war against Iraq in 1991 under
George Sr., it was to make the Middle East safe for Big Oil.
When Clinton and NATO invaded Yugoslavia and bombed Serbia
in 1999, it was to make that country safe for U.S. and
European capital.
The same profit motive is driving the U.S. to intervene
against the Palestinian revolution, the Colombian guerrilla
movement and the Puerto Rican people fighting to oust the
U.S. Navy from Vieques.
TAKE BACK WHAT BOSSES HAVE STOLEN
As the struggle against the Bush administration gets
underway, it must be carried on as part of the broader
struggle against capitalism.
As long as the class of private property owners possesses
all of society's sources of wealth and uses them to make
profits, the working class and oppressed people are
condemned to suffer economic crises, racism, war and all the
other evils of the so-called free market system.
There's only one way out of the situation: to take the
economy out of the hands of these greedy bosses, establish
the collective ownership of the workers and produce for the
whole society's benefit. This means socialism.
The owning class is completely superfluous. The owners are
unnecessary. They're an obstacle.
Everything is created without them. Their only role is to
collect dividends and interest on their vast holdings.
Generations of working people have fought and won heroic
struggles: the right to organize unions, civil rights,
affirmative action, women's rights, lesbian/gay/bi/trans
rights. But every time the struggle dies down, the
capitalist class tries to erode these gains or take them
back completely. They can do it because their rotten
capitalist system remains intact.
It's time to begin the final struggle to get rid of
capitalism altogether; to not only make great gains for the
people but to secure them for all generations to come.
Only socialism can accomplish this.
- 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: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: lauantai 20. tammikuu 2001 09:40
Subject: [WW] Outcry against DU grows in Europe
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 25, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
GREEK TROOPS WANT OUT OF KOSOVO:
OUTCRY AGAINST DU GROWS IN EUROPE
By John Catalinotto
Despite denials by NATO and its member governments that
depleted uranium is a danger, people in Europe have reacted
with growing anger and disquiet about this threat to
soldiers and civilians in occupied Kosovo.
In some European countries--Greece, Portugal and Italy
especially--political parties and other groups have already
begun to organize strong protest movements against DU
weapons.
Anger and confusion has grown as NATO and government
spokespeople contradict earlier statements about the dangers
of DU.
For example, NATO now admits that U.S. planes fired 10,800
DU shells into Bosnia from 1995 to 1996. But in 1997, Lt.
Cmdr. Louis Garneau, spokesperson for the NATO occupation
force in Bosnia, said that "at no time did NATO use depleted
uranium munitions during air strikes in Bosnia."
This was one of many lies that has destroyed NATO's
credibility.
In addition, the European mainstream media are reflecting
differences among the NATO powers. These include DU use but
go beyond this to other areas of contention.
For example, in the Jan. 12 issue of the French newspaper Le
Monde, more than a page was devoted to the dangers of DU.
But there were also two pages about the debate within NATO
over the presence of U.S. troops and other strategic goals.
Seven Italian soldiers, five Belgians, two Dutch nationals,
two Spaniards, a Portuguese and a Czech national have died
after taking part in the occupation of Balkan countries.
Four French soldiers have contracted leukemia.
The Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reports that a Hungarian
soldier has also died of leukemia and that his wife is
demanding financial compensation from the Hungarian Ministry
of Defense.
GREEK TROOPS WANT OUT
The Daily Telegraph in England reported Jan. 15 that over
one-quarter of the 1,400-plus Greek troops stationed in
Kosovo have asked to leave because of the increased risk of
cancer.
The Greek defense minister had to say that the government
would consider the requests, but "we must first wait for the
official results of the radiation tests. If there is a
general problem then NATO forces will take a joint decision
and leave together."
Half of the 400 volunteers set to join the Greek contingent
have now withdrawn their requests to take part in the
occupation of Kosovo. On Jan. 11, the Greek Communist Party
held protests demanding that Greek troops be pulled out.
Thousands gathered in Athens, Thessalonika, Patra, Serres,
Chio and Verioia to protest NATO's aggression against
Yugoslavia and to demand that Greek soldiers be pulled out
of Kosovo.
The Portuguese Communist Party called for a national day of
protest for Jan. 25, meeting in front of the prime
minister's residence to demand an end to the Portuguese
military presence in the Balkans. The PCP also is "against
the dispatch of any more troops to Kosovo; for solidarity
with the populations affected by NATO bombings; and for NATO
being abolished.
The PCP is a mass party with 130,000 members. It took a
strong stand against NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia
during the 1999 war.
In Rome on Jan. 13, the Italian section of the Ramsey Clark
Tribunal, which includes supporters from the Pasti
Foundation and the Communist Rifundazione Party, held a
protest meeting over the use of DU. This group is protesting
the dangers to Italian soldiers but also to the civilian
population of Yugoslavia. It organized hearings of popular
war-crimes tribunals against NATO after the aggression
against Yugoslavia.
Stories about DU are now daily items in the Italian media.
This coverage has also spread, perhaps to a lesser degree,
throughout all of Western Europe.
HOW YUGOSLAVS, IRAQIS SEE DU
While the deaths of NATO soldiers have attracted media
attention, the greater number of DU victims come from the
local civilian population of Bosnia and Kosovo.
In a Jan. 13 article in the British daily The Independent,
Robert Fisk wrote of the town Hadjici. There, he asserts,
"up to 300 out of 5,000 Serb refugees whose suburb of
Sarajevo was heavily bombed by NATO jets in the late summer
of 1995 have died of cancer.
"All the surviving refugees of Hadjici ... believe that the
cancers and leukemias that have affected this population
were caused because the U.S. A-10 bombers that struck their
factories were firing depleted-uranium weapons."
Snezana Pavlovic is head of the Environmental Monitoring
Group from the Institute of Nuclear Sciences "Vinca"
radiation protection department in Serbia. In a Jan. 16
interview with the Berlin daily Junge Welt, she said, "NATO
is denying the danger, using as a foundation for this denial
the fact that it is indeed hard to prove direct connection
between consequences for human health and depleted uranium
on a small population."
But she said that "if one concrete person in his or her life
is shown to have been exposed to radiation, and gets an
illness due to malignancy, radiation must be considered its
cause, because of all cancer-inducing factors radiation is
the most dominant one."
Pavlovic explained that contamination in Serbia itself is
low and concentrated, because few metal targets were hit and
because the Yugoslav army and Vinca cooperated to monitor
and remove the contamination. In Kosovo, however, KFOR
occupation forces carried out no similar decontamination
effort. So both the people and environment there are at
risk.
Iraqi scientists, isolated by murderous U.S.-led United
Nations sanctions for the last 10 years, have begun to break
into the media with their studies on increased leukemia and
other cancers in the areas of Iraq hit hardest by U.S.-fired
DU weaponry during the 1991 war. A paper presented at a Nov.
25-26 conference in Gijon, Spain, presents a detailed report
of the increases in these diseases.
The International Action Center's "Sanctions Challenge IV,"
now in Iraq, plans to bring back further information about
the diseases believed to be caused by depleted uranium. The
Iraqis are undoubtedly the hardest-hit population. The IAC
will demand that Western countries allow Iraqi scientists to
visit and present their findings on DU, which is not now
allowed.
- 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: "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: lauantai 20. tammikuu 2001 09:41
Subject: [WW] 100,000 in Berlin honor memory of communist heroes
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 25, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
LUXEMBURG & LIEBKNECHT:
100,000 IN BERLIN HONOR MEMORY OF COMMUNIST HEROES
By John Catalinotto
Berlin
Some 100,000 people walked to the memorial in
Friedrichsfelde Cemetery here in Berlin Jan. 15 to pay
respects to two martyred communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg
and Karl Liebknecht.
The two were murdered by the German Free Korps on Jan. 15,
1919, just days after the communist party they founded took
responsibility for the Berlin workers' abortive attempt to
seize power earlier that January.
The two revolutionaries are famous and beloved for their
courageous opposition to Germany's role in World War I. At a
time when the majority of the Social Democratic Party
leadership was betraying their promises to fight against
their country's role in that murderous war, Liebknecht was
the only member of the party in the German Bundestag
(Parliament) to vote against war credits.
Luxemburg was the only woman at the time who was a top
ideological leader of a major party, and had influence in
the struggles within the worldwide communist movement.
The Luxemburg-Liebknecht demonstration takes place each
year, gathering pro-revolutionary forces from all over
Germany into Berlin. In times when the socialist German
Democratic Republic existed, the government supported and
encouraged the demonstration.
Now, when there is one imperialist-ruled Germany, the
demonstration is a measure of the mood of the left and the
potential for struggle.
Really, two demonstrations take place.
One consists of marches of a coalition of left,
revolutionary working-class and anarchist forces that march
from further downtown to the memorial. In past years the
police have provoked clashes with this part of the
demonstration, though these clashes were limited to a few
arrests this year.
About 10,000 people took part in this march, with a larger
and more visible participation this time from Turkish and
Kurdish revolutionary organizations. These groups, who also
were calling attention to the many Turkish and Kurdish
political prisoners the Turkish military killed last month,
carried banners honoring the two German revolutionaries.
The other is a gathering of 90,000 people, most of them from
the former GDR, who lay red carnations on the memorial site
for Luxemburg and Liebknecht, or perhaps on the graves and
markers of other socialist and communist heroes buried in
the cemetery. These people were called out by the Party for
Democratic Socialism, the only pro-socialist party in the
German Bundestag.
- 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)
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