WW News Service Digest #366
1) Bush vows endless war
by WW
2) Steel mega-merger: Workers can struggle for control
by WW
3) UAW local president: Workers should not support this war
by WW
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (WW)
Date: torstai 3. tammikuu 2002 07:03
Subject: [WW] Bush vows endless war
-------------------------
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:
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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (WW)
Date: torstai 3. tammikuu 2002 07:04
Subject: [WW] Steel mega-merger: Workers can struggle for control
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 10, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
AS STEEL MEGA-MERGER LOOMS:
WORKERS CAN BE TOSSED OUT -- OR STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL
By Milt Neidenberg
There is turmoil and turbulence in the Rust Belt and far
beyond. Overproduction has created a worldwide glut in the
steel industry. The crisis is exacerbated by a global
recession.
Steel prices have dropped about one-third this year, at a
time when the overall industrial sector of the economy has
also taken a severe downturn. U.S. steel companies have
claimed losses of over $1 billion this year and 25 steel
companies have declared bankruptcy.
The Pentagon war of aggression against Afghanistan won't
bail out the steel industry owners. Armaments account for
less than 1 percent of domestic steel consumption.
(Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 11)
The results are predictable: Another massive, concentrated
restructuring of the industry is in the making.
Merger talks are now going on between the two most powerful
steel corporations in the country. The two are U.S. Steel--a
unit of USX that owns Marathon Oil and other diversified
holdings--and Bethlehem Steel, which recently filed for
bankruptcy. Also in the negotiations is Wheeling Pittsburgh
Steel, which has also been in and out of bankruptcy in
recent years.
National Steel, a former domestic steel producer, and its
main shareholder, the NKK Corporation of Japan, are talking
to U.S. Steel about a buyout. The sale, if completed, would
include other steel companies yet to be named. The result
would weld a half-dozen large integrated steel makers into
one company. (New York Times, Dec. 10)
This super-monopoly will either drive out remaining
competitors or marginalize them. When word got out that LTV--
the third-largest steel corporation in this country and
itself the result of an earlier merger of Youngstown Sheet &
Tube and Republic Steel--had asked a bankruptcy judge to
shut down its operations, the stocks of U.S. Steel and
Bethlehem Steel rose sharply.
It is only well-financed banks that can bankroll these
mergers on such a large scale. A century ago the Morgans and
the Rockefellers bought into the smokestack and other
related industries, as well as oil. That move initiated
their monopoly power.
Today it is J.P. Morgan-Chase, a global banking conglomerate
that is providing the capital for the gigantic merger of
steel corporations. It will have the last word on how the
newly formed corporation would operate. It is the consensus
on Wall Street and among steel analysts that in spite of
anti-trust irregularities, the creation of this behemoth
will be approved by the Bush administration. (New York
Times, Dec. 5)
TRADE WAR IS BREWING
This unfolding development will have economic and political
repercussions here and abroad. Steel monopolies abroad are
fiercely competing with the U.S. in a shrinking market.
A trade war is brewing, triggered by the Bush
administration, which has responded favorably to a well-
financed campaign to blame steel imports for the woes of
domestic steel producers.
President Bush has agreed to impose up to 40 percent in
tariffs and quotas on imported steel to protect the steel
industry here. This move has infuriated the steel
monopolists abroad who have tapped successfully into the
market here, particularly the auto industry. The trade war
will deepen if the protectionist policy is implemented.
The steel barons and their Wall Street backers have a base
in an ultra-conservative, right-wing faction growing within
the government. Treasury Secretary William O'Neill, former
head of aluminum giant ALCOA, is part of this grouping. So
are Ohio Gov. Robert Taft and others who are politically
dependent on steel and industrial-related suppliers and
users. They are pushing protectionism and patriotism to
exploit the steel crisis.
The recession and the war against Afghanistan enable them to
carry out their racist and immigrant-bashing policies.
Under present U.S. imperialist policies, whatever is
necessary to win the trade war will be done--fusing
protectionism and so-called free trade--backed up with
military intervention if required. However, if steel
corporations from other countries are shut out of the U.S.
market by punishing tariffs and quotas, they will use their
own trade weapons to retaliate.
Many of the steel makers around the world who are now being
attacked by the protectionists became heavily invested in
the U.S. steel market during the 1980s. During the
recession, the large integrated steel corporations, like U.S
Steel, appealed for and received many millions of dollars to
restructure their industry--a restructuring that led to the
steel glut today.
U.S. Steel partnered with Pohang Iron and Steel (POSCO), a
South Korean steel corporation that produces twice as much
as U.S. Steel. POSCO invested a half billion dollars to
upgrade decaying U.S. Steel facilities in Pittsburg, Calif.,
to state-of-the-art rolling mills. POSCO and U.S. Steel send
1.5 million tons of steel coils each year to the Pittsburg
plant so that the California company can compete with other
steel producers.
Yet U.S. Steel has been a party to cases accusing POSCO and
other South Korean companies of unfair trade, calling for
penalties and restrictions. At the same time however, U.S.
Steel wants a loophole exception when it comes to its
relationship with the California plant. How hypocritical and
self-serving can the steel magnates in this country be?
There are 70 such steel operations here in similar
situations in which companies from other countries have
investments, Japan being the leader. (Cleveland Plain
Dealer, Nov. 11, Special Section)
WHO WILL OWN AND RUN PLANTS?
How this trade war around steel will play out during the
coming World Economic Forum in New York on Feb. 2 remains to
be seen. And, of course, this is not the only U.S. industry
engaged in trade warfare with its capitalist rivals.
Unquestionably, divisions among the steel producers over who
dominates the world market will deepen and intensify. In the
final analysis, the U.S. steel industry as a whole may yet
lose the fight with its rivals abroad. Most of its plants
are aging, less efficient and have higher operating costs.
Unfortunately the Steelworkers' union (USWA) is not prepared
for such a global struggle. It has been sucked into joining
a lawsuit with the steel corporations to punish steel makers
from other countries.
The steel bosses in this country and their protectionist
allies are fundamentally anti-union, anti-worker and racist
to the core. And the steel magnates are using the USWA for
their own material interest.
It's an ill-conceived strategy that sends the wrong message
to steel workers here and abroad and can only undermine
international solidarity at a critical juncture. The USWA
needs the support of workers in these other countries if it
is to save dwindling jobs and the health and pension
benefits of hundreds of thousands of U.S. retirees.
The time is ripening for a struggle over who will ultimately
control the assets of the super-monopoly that will be
created by the mega-merger. The struggle will be based on
who controls the means of production of the integrated steel
industry: coke ovens and blast furnaces that combine iron
ore and other ingredients to make the pig iron; basic
oxidizing furnaces that pour out the molten steel; casters
that shape the steel into slabs; and rolling mills that
stretch and bend the steel into many forms for commercial
use.
Will it be the gigantic steel monopoly owners now in merger
negotiations? Or will the steel workers and their union
exert their rights to take over these powerful means of
production?
One fact is indisputable: The super monopoly will speed up
the socialization of production and labor. The isolation of
steel workers laboring for individual steel companies will
break down. Steelworkers will regroup into broader and more
intimate economic and political relationships. This offers
the potential to build international solidarity and forge
unity among larger groups of workers in the industrial
sector.
The bottom line for the steel monopolists is profits, and
the war-like drive to compete with and dominate the global
market. In this never-ending struggle, the social needs of
workers and their communities are abandoned.
But the knowledge of how to operate and run the giant steel
plants learned by the tens of thousands of workers will
prove decisive as the class struggle intensifies. There is a
desperate need for schools and housing; bridges, roads and
other capital goods are decaying and in disrepair.
The objective conditions are ripening for the workers to
seize and occupy their plants to produce the social
necessities by rationalizing production and abolishing
private ownership. Class-consciousness will inevitably
develop in this battle and a leadership will arise to
fulfill this historic mission.
[Milt Neidenberg worked in Bethlehem Steel, Lackawanna, N.Y.,
from 1950 to 1965. At the peak of production, it employed
20,000 workers. The plant is now closed.]
- 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:
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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (WW)
Date: torstai 3. tammikuu 2002 07:04
Subject: [WW] UAW local president: Workers should not support this war
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 10, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
FROM A UAW LOCAL PRESIDENT:
"WORKERS SHOULD NOT SUPPORT THIS WAR"
[The following letter on the current war was sent by the
president of a UAW local in Detroit to the UAW
International Executive Board and President Stephen P.
Yokich in early December. It was also mass distributed to a
UAW Region 1 leadership meeting of several hundred local
union officers.]
Dear Brother Yokich and members of the International
Executive Board:
The war against Afghanistan holds great dangers to workers,
our families and our unions. The politicians and mass media
promote the war, declaring it will "end terrorism." But the
labor movement should know better than to support this war.
Remember how on Sept. 10 most people in this country saw
George Bush and his appointees as labor haters, racists,
anti-women, anti-gay bigots, pro-big business and a vote-
stealing gang? UAW's Solidarity magazine was filled with
articles exposing Bush & Co. Did Sept. 11 change their
character?
No one can seriously argue that Bush cares anything for the
working people of this nation. He has hijacked the horror of
Sept. 11 to ram through his anti-labor, anti-people program.
No wonder UAW President Stephen Yokich noted that, "even
before the dust had settled in lower Manhattan, some
conservatives and corporate executives were trying to
exploit this national crisis" (Solidarity, November 2001, p.
4).
With almost no opposition Congress voted to let Bush raid
Social Security for military spending. Fast Track for the
Free Trade Area of the Americas bill is being pushed in
Congress even though it has nothing to do with domestic
security, and will hurt workers in the U.S. and Latin
America. The "Patriot Act" was rammed through curtailing
long cherished civil liberties.
Attorney General Ashcroft (the guy who admires the slave-
driving Confederacy) is in charge of our civil rights! That
should make us all nervous. Racist murders have occurred;
places of worship have been attacked; racial profiling is
being defended; over 1,000 people have disappeared into jail
with no charges. Strikers have been vilified as unpatriotic.
Ashcroft intends to intensify surveillance of peaceful,
legal organizations committed to peace and social justice.
The Bush Gang is giving billions in bailouts to the airline
industry and the stock-jobbers on Wall Street. But when it
came to helping the airline and aircraft workers who have
lost their jobs, Bush & Co. said "NO!"
So what is the war really about? A top oil executive
testified before Congress back in 1998 that the oil industry
wanted to put a pipeline through Afghanistan and needed a
more pliable regime in Kabul. The big oil companies and
Bush, who serves them, are out to grab the vast oil wealth
of the former Soviet Central Asia. This is a war for OIL
PROFITS and profits for the military-industrial complex.
The war has nothing at all to do with terrorism. The U.S.
government trained, financed and armed bin Laden and the
Taliban to overthrow a progressive, secular government. Anti-
union death squad regimes around the world keep getting U.S.
support. September 11 hasn't changed U.S. sponsorship of
terrorist training at the Army School of the Americas
("School of the Assassins") at Fort Benning. It hasn't
changed the U.S. plans to send $7 billion to Colombia where
death squads have murdered 4,000 union leaders in the past
15 years! It hasn't changed U.S. policy to starve the
civilian population of Iraq even though the UN has shown
that nearly 1 million children have died as a result of U.S.
sanctions.
It is a sad commentary that most U.S. labor leaders were
slow to oppose the Vietnam War. We must not be silent now.
Labor must join the youth, church leaders and community
leaders who are demanding an end to the bombing and an end
to this war. Calls to patriotism cannot mask the real intent
of Bush & Co. to crush civil rights, fill the pockets of the
super-rich and destroy the labor movement. We should not
help them. We need money for jobs, education and health
care. We need a foreign policy based on justice for all
people and nations. Only this can remove the roots of
international violence.
I urge the International Executive Board to take a stand
against Bush's war.
Sincerely,
David Sole
President, UAW Local 2334
- 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)
