On the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's murder, Counterpunch posted its "lost John Lennon interview"conducted in 1971 by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn. The conversation revealed Lennon was even more politically sophisticated than many of us believed.
Ali:"The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can't be done just by propaganda--the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France...the workers began to feel their own strength."
Lennon: "But the Communist Party wasn't up to that, was it?"
That is Leon Trotsky talking.
Lennon: "We should be trying to reach the young workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear. Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them."
That is Vladimir Lenin talking.
Lennon: Workers are "dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own. They should realize that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next. As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said: 'To each according to his need'."
That is Karl Marx talking.
"But we'd also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all."
And that is Marx, Lenin and Trotsky speaking words that have as much relevance today as they did after the Russian Revolution, when Trotsky organized the Red Army to victory over the counterrevolutionary, imperialist-backed White Army and consolidated the world's first workers state.
Which is why the US capitalist state tried to deport John Lennon spied on him, and, in all likelihood, assassinated him.--December 8-9, 2005
Dec. 14-30, 2005--A government that has slaughtered up to 100,000 Iraqis in an unprovoked invasion, poisoned thousands more with chemical weapons and depleted uranium, thrown thousands of innocent Iraqis into horrifying torture chambers, whose forces kill Iraqi families at military checkpoints and shoot at doctors while they're performing surgery, has executed a man who professed his innocence until the end, was convicted on the basis of testimony by jailhouse snitches, renounced gang violence and urged kids to avoid that path.
It is a measure of the advanced state of decay characterizing US bourgeois democracy that its two most powerful chief executive offices are occupied by comic book characters--Alfred E. Newman in the White House and the Terminator in Sacramento. One was known as Governor Death because his state of Texas led the nation in executions. The other is Governor Death because he has now denied three requests for clemency by death row inmates in California.
"Now I get to terminate da bad guys," you could hear the Terminator joking behind the scenes.
The execution of Williams by this already murderous state will go down as one of the most shameful episodes in US history--right down to the bungling incompetence of the Terminator's henchman, who jabbed Williams for 12 minutes trying to find a vein, prompting Stanley to snarl, "You guys doing that right?"
That Arnold Schwarzenegger's denial of clemency was a carefully calculated political decision and transparent sop for the Republican Party's right-wing base was evidenced by his "Statement of Decision" issued 12 hours before the execution. The statement was as bankrupt factually as it was politically. In justifying his denial of the request for clemency, Schwarzenegger cited the dedication Williams wrote in his book Life in Prison to "Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier Dhoruba Al-Muhahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal and countless other men, women and youths who have had to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars."
Said the Terminator: "The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement. . ."
Schwarzenegger is conceding he ignored the merits of Williams' clemency plea and executed him because he expressed admiration for the revolutionaries and political prisoners noted above. Nelson Mandela was a freedom fighter and heroic leader of South Africa's struggle for national liberation from the fascist, white supremacist system of apartheid. Mandela was his country's first black president and remains one of the world's most respected and revered figures. Schwarzenegger, continuing in the ignoble tradition of Vice President Dick Cheney, who as a congressman considered Mandela a terrorist, is characterizing Mandela as a violent, heinous criminal.
Angela Davis has long been a brilliant, well respected professor who has been witch-hunted for her membership in the Communist Party.
Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba Al-Mujahid were released from prison after serving a combined 46 years when their convictions were overturned when it was proven they were framed by cops because they were in the Black Panther Party. Shakur, Peltier, Africa and Abu-Jamal have always professed their innocence, and international campaigns on their behalf and demonstrated that they too were the victims of police frameups and prosecutorial misconduct.
Given Schwarzenegger's unsavory reputation as a serial groper of women and his expressed admiration for Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim and Adolf Hitler, he's the last person in the world who should be passing judgment on the likes of Mandela, Pratt, Peltier, Abu-Jamal and George Jackson.
Schwarzenegger couldn't shine the shoes of a single individual on that list of luminaries.
". . .But the inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate reason to address societal problems."
To the contrary, it is Schwarzenegger's use of Jackson as a pretext to reject Williams' clemency plea that defies reason and is a significant indicator that the Governor was not interested in the merits of the clemency request but was only concerned about terminating the political threat posed by an articulate Black revolutionary. Further, an ardent supporter of the US aggression in Iraq like Schwarznegger has no moral standing to accuse Tookie Williams of seeing "violence and lawlessness as a legitimate reason to address societal problems."
Schwarzenegger stepped up the lies and distortions about Williams in this footnote from his "Statement of Decision" to allow Tookie to die:
"Jackson was charged with the murder of a San Quentin correctional officer. In 1970, when Jackson was out to court in Marin County on the murder case, his brother stormed the countroom with a machine gun, and along with Jackson and two other inmates, took a judge, the prosecutor and three others hostage in an escape attempt. The prosecutor was paralyzed from a police bullet, and thej udge was killed by a close-range blast to his head when the shotgun taped to his throat was fired by one of Jackson's accomplices."
The Terminator's staff should be working for Bill O'Reilly--they'd fit right in. As the World Socialist Web Site put it, "This account is a complete fabrication and a gross distortion of what happened to George Jackson, who became radicalized in prison in the 1960s. He had been convicted for driving a getaway car in a theft that netted $71 from a gas station and was sentenced to one year to life. He spoke out against the brutal conditions inside California's jails and developed a large following, both inside and outside the prison system." [Bill Van Auken, Dec. 14, 2005]
Here Schwarzenegger is deciding whether a man lives or dies and he can't even get his facts straight in the statement justifying his thumbs down decision. First, Jackson was never charged with murdering a San Quentin prison guard. He and two other prisoners were charged with the death of a Soledad prison guard after guards had killed three Black inmates. His two co-defendants were later acquitted of these charges.
Second, Jackson was not in the Marin County court when the kidnapping occurred. Jackson's brother walked into the courtroom armed with pistols and a shotgun, armed an inmate on trial in an unrelated case, and took hostage the judge, prosecutor and three jurors with the aim of freeing his brother George, who was not there, Terminator. The deaths occurred when the getaway van was hit with a barrage of gunfire from cops and guards that killed Jonathan Jackson, the judge, and two of the inmates.
A year later and three days before he was scheduled to go on trial for the death of the Soledad prison guard, George Jackson was shot dead by San Quentin guards. The state claimed Jackson was trying to escape with a gun allegedly smuggled to him by his lawyer, Stephen Bingham, an accusation disputed by other inmates. Bingham was acquitted of this charge in 1984.
Thus the modern day Pontius Pilate, who has the power of life and death over others, lies through his teeth while giving the thumbs down to Stanley Tookie Williams.
But history, if not Schwarzenegger's Austrian hometown, will have the last say on the Terminator's legacy. Already some citizens of Grez, Austria, are demanding the removal of Schwarzenegger's name from a local stadium and renaming it the "Stanley Tookie Williams Stadium."
He won't be back.
Then there's Alfred E. Newman in the White House. But contrary to the delusions of many liberals, George W. Bush is not as emptyheaded as the Mad magazine icon he resembles, notwithstanding his "What me worry?" demeanor. Bush is ruthless, cunning, sadistic, power mad, messianic, and very conscious of the US capitalist class he represents. He is far more class conscious than some of the deluded workers who think he's one of them. Bush did not invade Iraq because God told him to. He invaded to advance the interests of US big business and ensure its hegemony in the oil rich Middle East.
Just as Bush cynically exploited 9/11 to gain public support for invading Iraq, so Bush "moved fast" to use 9/11 as a pretext to illegally spy on Americans and consolidate a presidential dictatorship. The "bombshell" revelation by the New York Times that Bush personally authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American phone conversations and emails should not surprise anyone. It is of the same piece as the stolen 2000 election, the Patriot Act, John Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness" program, the Pentagon's surveillance of antiwar activists, the White House enemies list, secret torture chambers, Abu Ghraib, renditions, and Guantanamo, among others.
A long list of impeachable offenses preceded the NSA spying revelation: dereliction of duty and criminal neglect on 9/11, and possible complicity; illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in violation of US and international law; lying to the American public about those acts of aggression; authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and throughout a global network of secret gulags. While there's been a growing online grass roots movement collecting petitions to impeach Bush, the move has had virtually no chance of catching on in the mainstream bourgeois political establishment--a testament to the utter bankruptcy of US bourgeois democracy and the inability of any sector of the US ruling class to defend the very tenets of that decaying bourgeois democracy.
But the news that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans having international phone conversations with alleged terrorists has already pushed the "I" word onto the national stage--Georgia Democratic congressman John Lewis states that if Bush broke the law as the Times report indicates, he will introduce an impeachment resolution. Nixon White House counsel John Dean and various constitutional scholars are publicly discussing Bush's impeachment on cable talk shows.
There's nothing new about the National Security Agency illegally spying on Americans. The NSA has been doing so for decades. In fact, the very law Bush apparently violated--the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--was enacted in part to curb the rampant abuses of power by the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, and the NSA. FISA specifically spelled out what the NSA could do legally and what it could not. Congress even created a special federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Service Court, to consider NSA requests for eavesdropping warrants to secret to be discussed openly. The Act prohibits the government from electronically eavesdropping on international phone call made on US soil by US citizens without a warrant approved by the special FISA court. FISA is very clear: foreign wiretaps--no court-approved warrant needed. Domestic wiretaps: warrant from a FISA court needed. In 25 years, out of more than 19,000 requests, four were disallowed.
Bush says he only authorized NSA wiretapping against Americans in order to protect them. The same NSA that intercepted two "Al Qaeda" messages in Arabic the day before 9/11 boasting that the next day was"zero hour" and "the match was about to begin"--but was curiously unable to translate them until "the day after." After all, the agency's $30 billion annual budget can't cover every little detail. The same NSA that allegedly destroyed all of its files related to the attacks--another cost-cutting move, no doubt. This is the agency Bush claims he's protecting Americans with.
Bush claimed he only authorized the NSA to wiretap calls from definite Al Qaeda operatives overseas. But if that were true, he wouldn't have to bypass the FISA court. FISA would have rubber stamped any governmental request to eavesdrop on Al Qaeda.
As for Bush's argument that today's world of high tech terrorists leaves no time for a court warrant doesn't wash, either. FISA's retroactivity provision permits the government to wiretap without a warrant for 72 hours.
No, Bush unleashed the NSA to spy on Americans for the same reason presidents have since Harry Truman--to monitor and crush political opposition to Washington's wars of aggression. Already we are receiving confirmation Bush was lying when he claimed the NSA is not targeting domestic communications. Unnamed government officials have told the NY Times that the NSA--on Bush's orders--has been listening in on phone calls within the United States. That is specifically barred by FISA. As the statute's summary reads:
"Makes it a criminal offense for officers or employees of the United States to intentionally engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as specifically authorized or to disclose information through unlawful electronic surveillance."
Just as Bush lied about WMDs and Sept. 11, he's lying about this phony excuse to prevent future Sept. 11's--which should be enough to keep us all awake at night. For instance, Bush defended his circumvention of the FISA court by pointing to telephone calls between two alleged 9/11 hijackers in the US, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and alleged Al Qaeda operatives overseas. According to Bush, "we didn't know they were here until it was too late" because of that cumbersome FISA warrant requirement.
The more Bush lies, the more the truth is illuminated. The NSA, CIA and FBI were well aware that Hazmi and al Mihdhar "were here" long before Sept. 11. The December 21 Washington Post reported that current and former counter-terrorism officials "said there were repeated phone communications between a safe house in Yemen and the San Diego apartment rented by Alhazmi and Almihdhar. [emphasis added--the duo had been living openly in San Diego for two years, and Alhazmi's name was listed in the phone book] The Yemen site had already been linked directly to the Al Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and to the 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Yemen....Those links made the safe house one of the 'hottest' targets being monitored by the NSA before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had been for several years....
"Authorities also had traced the phone number at the safe house to Almihdhar's father--in-law, and believed then that two of his other sons-in-law already had killed themselves in suicide terrorist attacks. Such information, the officials said, should have set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the US government.
“Under authority granted in federal law, the NSA was already listening in on that number in Yemen and could have tracked calls made into the US by getting a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Then the NSA could have—and should have—alerted the FBI, which then could have used the information to locate the future hijackers in San Diego and monitored their phone calls, e-mail and other activities, the current and former officials said.” [emphasis added]
Of course, the probability is high that the FBI had all the information they needed to locate the future hijackers in San Diego, since their San Diego landlord was an FBI informant charged with keeping tabs on the area's Saudi population.
Another failure to "connect the dots?" Unlikely, considering the fact that the FBI rejected a congressional inquiry's subpoena of the informant and quickly moved him to a secret location, according to the Village Voice's James Ridgeway. Interestingly, the 9/11 commission never named this informant. But Ridgeway's column named him as Abdussattar Shaikh.
The CIA also knew all about Hazmi and al Mihdhar. The agency had been tracking them as known Al Qaeda members since January 2000, when they attended an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. The agency watched the pair fly to San Diego after the meeting where they rented the room from the FBI informant. Supposedly the two were placed on an FBI "watch list" by the CIA, but the FBI claims they didn't receive it in time. Sure. Just like the NSA couldn't translate the intercepted pre-Sept. 11 Al Qaeda messages in time.
Bush claims that he had to spy on Americans in order to "connect the dots" and prevent another 9/11. But 9/11 didn't happen because dots weren't connected. It wasn't an intelligence failure--it was an intelligence success and the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people; an inside job by the US government that handed Cheney's Project for a New American Century its desired Pearl Harbor; a 2001 realization of the criminal, psychotic plan known as Operation Northwoods hatched in 1962 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit widespread acts of domestic terrorism that would be blamed on Cuba in order to justify an invasion of that revolutionary nation. Bush had his chance to protect Americans from terrorism in 2001. After receiving multiple specific warnings about a plot to hijack jets and crash them into the WTC and the Pentagon, he did nothing to stop it and everything to facilitate it. Instead of heightening airport security and putting his air defenses on alert, this commander in chief chose to finish his vacation at the ranch, but not before ending a military alert that had existed for months and allowing a virtual standdown in both airport security and air defenses to occur under his watch. And on the morning of Sept. 11, we discovered that Bush was a deer in headlights who remained frozen in his classroom seat listening to a pet goat story after learning that a second jet had hit the South Tower.
More Bush lies: While fuming over the NY Times' leak about NSA snooping, Bush claimed that the leak in 1998 by the media regarding Osama bin Laden's cell phone use tipped him off to thegovernment's surveillance of him and caused him to ditch the ph one and use other means of communicating orders. But according to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, bin Laden's cell phone use had been reported in 1996 by Time and the following year. The source for the 1996 report was the Taliban regime in Kabul. The source in 1997 was bin Laden himself, in an interview with Peter Bergen.
Kessler's reporting suggests that it's far more likely that it was Clinton's attempt to kill bin Laden in 1998 with cruise missiles that prompted him to abandon the cell phone. Further, the Washington Times article referred to by Bush never said that Washington was listening to bin Laden, as he had claimed. The corporate media did not report about Washington's monitoring of bin Laden until after he had apparently ceased using his mobile phone.
Speaking of Washington's electronic surveillance of bin Laden, it is noteworthy that neither Bush nor the kept press saw fit to mention a bizarre episode that occurred in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks: Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, known for his extensive ties to the military and intelligence, told the Associated Press and ABC News that Washington had been monitoring bin Laden's calls and overheard two of his supporters whooping it up over the results of 9/11. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a stern rebuke of Hatch's comments, calling them an unauthorized release of classified data.
The NY Times revelation about Bush's illegal authorization of NSA domestic spying confirmed still another bald-faced Bush lie in April 2004, when he stated, after two and a half years of ordering warrantless spying, and with the same earnestness Clinton used in denying he ever "had sex with that woman":
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretaps, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about hunting down the terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
Yes, when we think Patriot Act, the first thing that comes to mind is how much Bush values the Constitution, particularly in light of this report by the usually credible Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue about a meeting between Bush and Republican congressional leaders on renewing the Patriot Act:
" ' Mr. President,' one aide in the meeting said. 'There is a valid case that the provision in this law undermine the Constitution.'
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Thompson says the three people he's talked to who attended that meeting all confirm that Bush called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
This contempt for the Constitution is confirmed in Bush's primary justification for violating FISA--that his authority as commander in chief granted by Article II gives Bush inherent war time powers to protect the country from terrorism and supersedes the 1978 congressional statute. [that a 1978 Congressional statute is superseded by Article II of the Constitution, which makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and grants him inherent wartime powers to protect the country from terrorism.
That's quite an expansive argument coming from a supposed strict constructionist like George W. Bush. This is what Article II says on the subject: "The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;..."
The intention of the Founding Fathers in appointing the president as commander in chief over the military was to ensure civilian supremacy and prevent a military dictatorship. Bush's argument is an Orwellian inversion of this democratic principle--he's claiming the president is a military commander in chief over the entire United States; in other words, a military dictator, precisely what Article II was crafted to prevent.
The second principal justification for Bush spying on Americans is that the congressional authorization for Bush to use military force against those responsible for 9/11 overrides FISA. While the notion that this resolution authorizing the use of "all necessary force" against Al Qaeda and the Taliban somehow justifies domestic spying on Americans is ludicrous and constitutionally bankrupt, politically it is far more revealing than Bush ever intended.
Since the "war on terror" is nothing more than " a propaganda facade for launching military actions abroad and attacking democratic rights at home," as the World Socialist Web site recently put it; "a mantra behind which American imperialism carries out its drive to establish global hegemony," Bush's reliance on the war authorization resolution takes on a whole new meaning and actually makes sense from the perspective of the US ruling class: waging war on workers in Afghanistan and Iraq for US capitalist profits and power is of a piece with waging war on workers in America by attacking our democratic rights and slashing our standards of living. Bush's war on terror is a class war on the international working class. The very fact he points to the Sept. 2001 congressional authorization of force as the basis for illegally spying on Americans confirms his war is two sides of the same coin.
Dec. 14-30, 2005--A government that has slaughtered up to 100,000 Iraqis in an unprovoked invasion, poisoned thousands more with chemical weapons and depleted uranium, thrown thousands of innocent Iraqis into horrifying torture chambers, whose forces kill Iraqi families at military checkpoints and shoot at doctors while they're performing surgery, has executed a man who professed his innocence until the end, was convicted on the basis of testimony by jailhouse snitches, renounced gang violence and urged kids to avoid that path.
It is a measure of the advanced state of decay characterizing US bourgeois democracy that its two most powerful chief executive offices are occupied by comic book characters--Alfred E. Newman in the White House and the Terminator in Sacramento. One was known as Governor Death because his state of Texas led the nation in executions. The other is Governor Death because he has now denied three requests for clemency by death row inmates in California.
"Now I get to terminate da bad guys," you could hear the Terminator joking behind the scenes.
The execution of Williams by this already murderous state will go down as one of the most shameful episodes in US history--right down to the bungling incompetence of the Terminator's henchman, who jabbed Williams for 12 minutes trying to find a vein, prompting Stanley to snarl, "You guys doing that right?"
That Arnold Schwarzenegger's denial of clemency was a carefully calculated political decision and transparent sop for the Republican Party's right-wing base was evidenced by his "Statement of Decision" issued 12 hours before the execution. The statement was as bankrupt factually as it was politically. In justifying his denial of the request for clemency, Schwarzenegger cited the dedication Williams wrote in his book Life in Prison to "Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier Dhoruba Al-Muhahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal and countless other men, women and youths who have had to endure the hellish oppression of living behind bars."
Said the Terminator: "The mix of individuals on this list is curious. Most have violent pasts and some have been convicted of committing heinous murders, including the killing of law enforcement. . ."
Schwarzenegger is conceding he ignored the merits of Williams' clemency plea and executed him because he expressed admiration for the revolutionaries and political prisoners noted above. Nelson Mandela was a freedom fighter and heroic leader of South Africa's struggle for national liberation from the fascist, white supremacist system of apartheid. Mandela was his country's first black president and remains one of the world's most respected and revered figures. Schwarzenegger, continuing in the ignoble tradition of Vice President Dick Cheney, who as a congressman considered Mandela a terrorist, is characterizing Mandela as a violent, heinous criminal.
Angela Davis has long been a brilliant, well respected professor who has been witch-hunted for her membership in the Communist Party.
Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba Al-Mujahid were released from prison after serving a combined 46 years when their convictions were overturned when it was proven they were framed by cops because they were in the Black Panther Party. Shakur, Peltier, Africa and Abu-Jamal have always professed their innocence, and international campaigns on their behalf and demonstrated that they too were the victims of police frameups and prosecutorial misconduct.
Given Schwarzenegger's unsavory reputation as a serial groper of women and his expressed admiration for Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim and Adolf Hitler, he's the last person in the world who should be passing judgment on the likes of Mandela, Pratt, Peltier, Abu-Jamal and George Jackson.
Schwarzenegger couldn't shine the shoes of a single individual on that list of luminaries.
". . .But the inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate reason to address societal problems."
To the contrary, it is Schwarzenegger's use of Jackson as a pretext to reject Williams' clemency plea that defies reason and is a significant indicator that the Governor was not interested in the merits of the clemency request but was only concerned about terminating the political threat posed by an articulate Black revolutionary. Further, an ardent supporter of the US aggression in Iraq like Schwarznegger has no moral standing to accuse Tookie Williams of seeing "violence and lawlessness as a legitimate reason to address societal problems."
Schwarzenegger stepped up the lies and distortions about Williams in this footnote from his "Statement of Decision" to allow Tookie to die:
"Jackson was charged with the murder of a San Quentin correctional officer. In 1970, when Jackson was out to court in Marin County on the murder case, his brother stormed the countroom with a machine gun, and along with Jackson and two other inmates, took a judge, the prosecutor and three others hostage in an escape attempt. The prosecutor was paralyzed from a police bullet, and thej udge was killed by a close-range blast to his head when the shotgun taped to his throat was fired by one of Jackson's accomplices."
The Terminator's staff should be working for Bill O'Reilly--they'd fit right in. As the World Socialist Web Site put it, "This account is a complete fabrication and a gross distortion of what happened to George Jackson, who became radicalized in prison in the 1960s. He had been convicted for driving a getaway car in a theft that netted $71 from a gas station and was sentenced to one year to life. He spoke out against the brutal conditions inside California's jails and developed a large following, both inside and outside the prison system." [Bill Van Auken, Dec. 14, 2005]
Here Schwarzenegger is deciding whether a man lives or dies and he can't even get his facts straight in the statement justifying his thumbs down decision. First, Jackson was never charged with murdering a San Quentin prison guard. He and two other prisoners were charged with the death of a Soledad prison guard after guards had killed three Black inmates. His two co-defendants were later acquitted of these charges.
Second, Jackson was not in the Marin County court when the kidnapping occurred. Jackson's brother walked into the courtroom armed with pistols and a shotgun, armed an inmate on trial in an unrelated case, and took hostage the judge, prosecutor and three jurors with the aim of freeing his brother George, who was not there, Terminator. The deaths occurred when the getaway van was hit with a barrage of gunfire from cops and guards that killed Jonathan Jackson, the judge, and two of the inmates.
A year later and three days before he was scheduled to go on trial for the death of the Soledad prison guard, George Jackson was shot dead by San Quentin guards. The state claimed Jackson was trying to escape with a gun allegedly smuggled to him by his lawyer, Stephen Bingham, an accusation disputed by other inmates. Bingham was acquitted of this charge in 1984.
Thus the modern day Pontius Pilate, who has the power of life and death over others, lies through his teeth while giving the thumbs down to Stanley Tookie Williams.
But history, if not Schwarzenegger's Austrian hometown, will have the last say on the Terminator's legacy. Already some citizens of Grez, Austria, are demanding the removal of Schwarzenegger's name from a local stadium and renaming it the "Stanley Tookie Williams Stadium."
He won't be back.
Then there's Alfred E. Newman in the White House. But contrary to the delusions of many liberals, George W. Bush is not as emptyheaded as the Mad magazine icon he resembles, notwithstanding his "What me worry?" demeanor. Bush is ruthless, cunning, sadistic, power mad, messianic, and very conscious of the US capitalist class he represents. He is far more class conscious than some of the deluded workers who think he's one of them. Bush did not invade Iraq because God told him to. He invaded to advance the interests of US big business and ensure its hegemony in the oil rich Middle East.
Just as Bush cynically exploited 9/11 to gain public support for invading Iraq, so Bush "moved fast" to use 9/11 as a pretext to illegally spy on Americans and consolidate a presidential dictatorship. The "bombshell" revelation by the New York Times that Bush personally authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American phone conversations and emails should not surprise anyone. It is of the same piece as the stolen 2000 election, the Patriot Act, John Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness" program, the Pentagon's surveillance of antiwar activists, the White House enemies list, secret torture chambers, Abu Ghraib, renditions, and Guantanamo, among others.
A long list of impeachable offenses preceded the NSA spying revelation: dereliction of duty and criminal neglect on 9/11, and possible complicity; illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in violation of US and international law; lying to the American public about those acts of aggression; authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and throughout a global network of secret gulags. While there's been a growing online grass roots movement collecting petitions to impeach Bush, the move has had virtually no chance of catching on in the mainstream bourgeois political establishment--a testament to the utter bankruptcy of US bourgeois democracy and the inability of any sector of the US ruling class to defend the very tenets of that decaying bourgeois democracy.
But the news that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans having international phone conversations with alleged terrorists has already pushed the "I" word onto the national stage--Georgia Democratic congressman John Lewis states that if Bush broke the law as the Times report indicates, he will introduce an impeachment resolution. Nixon White House counsel John Dean and various constitutional scholars are publicly discussing Bush's impeachment on cable talk shows.
There's nothing new about the National Security Agency illegally spying on Americans. The NSA has been doing so for decades. In fact, the very law Bush apparently violated--the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--was enacted in part to curb the rampant abuses of power by the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, and the NSA. FISA specifically spelled out what the NSA could do legally and what it could not. Congress even created a special federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Service Court, to consider NSA requests for eavesdropping warrants to secret to be discussed openly. The Act prohibits the government from electronically eavesdropping on international phone call made on US soil by US citizens without a warrant approved by the special FISA court. FISA is very clear: foreign wiretaps--no court-approved warrant needed. Domestic wiretaps: warrant from a FISA court needed. In 25 years, out of more than 19,000 requests, four were disallowed.
Bush says he only authorized NSA wiretapping against Americans in order to protect them. The same NSA that intercepted two "Al Qaeda" messages in Arabic the day before 9/11 boasting that the next day was"zero hour" and "the match was about to begin"--but was curiously unable to translate them until "the day after." After all, the agency's $30 billion annual budget can't cover every little detail. The same NSA that allegedly destroyed all of its files related to the attacks--another cost-cutting move, no doubt. This is the agency Bush claims he's protecting Americans with.
Bush claimed he only authorized the NSA to wiretap calls from definite Al Qaeda operatives overseas. But if that were true, he wouldn't have to bypass the FISA court. FISA would have rubber stamped any governmental request to eavesdrop on Al Qaeda.
As for Bush's argument that today's world of high tech terrorists leaves no time for a court warrant doesn't wash, either. FISA's retroactivity provision permits the government to wiretap without a warrant for 72 hours.
No, Bush unleashed the NSA to spy on Americans for the same reason presidents have since Harry Truman--to monitor and crush political opposition to Washington's wars of aggression. Already we are receiving confirmation Bush was lying when he claimed the NSA is not targeting domestic communications. Unnamed government officials have told the NY Times that the NSA--on Bush's orders--has been listening in on phone calls within the United States. That is specifically barred by FISA. As the statute's summary reads:
"Makes it a criminal offense for officers or employees of the United States to intentionally engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as specifically authorized or to disclose information through unlawful electronic surveillance."
Just as Bush lied about WMDs and Sept. 11, he's lying about this phony excuse to prevent future Sept. 11's--which should be enough to keep us all awake at night. For instance, Bush defended his circumvention of the FISA court by pointing to telephone calls between two alleged 9/11 hijackers in the US, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and alleged Al Qaeda operatives overseas. According to Bush, "we didn't know they were here until it was too late" because of that cumbersome FISA warrant requirement.
The more Bush lies, the more the truth is illuminated. The NSA, CIA and FBI were well aware that Hazmi and al Mihdhar "were here" long before Sept. 11. The December 21 Washington Post reported that current and former counter-terrorism officials "said there were repeated phone communications between a safe house in Yemen and the San Diego apartment rented by Alhazmi and Almihdhar. [emphasis added--the duo had been living openly in San Diego for two years, and Alhazmi's name was listed in the phone book] The Yemen site had already been linked directly to the Al Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and to the 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Yemen....Those links made the safe house one of the 'hottest' targets being monitored by the NSA before the Sept. 11 attacks, and had been for several years....
"Authorities also had traced the phone number at the safe house to Almihdhar's father--in-law, and believed then that two of his other sons-in-law already had killed themselves in suicide terrorist attacks. Such information, the officials said, should have set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the US government.
“Under authority granted in federal law, the NSA was already listening in on that number in Yemen and could have tracked calls made into the US by getting a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Then the NSA could have—and should have—alerted the FBI, which then could have used the information to locate the future hijackers in San Diego and monitored their phone calls, e-mail and other activities, the current and former officials said.” [emphasis added]
Of course, the probability is high that the FBI had all the information they needed to locate the future hijackers in San Diego, since their San Diego landlord was an FBI informant charged with keeping tabs on the area's Saudi population.
Another failure to "connect the dots?" Unlikely, considering the fact that the FBI rejected a congressional inquiry's subpoena of the informant and quickly moved him to a secret location, according to the Village Voice's James Ridgeway. Interestingly, the 9/11 commission never named this informant. But Ridgeway's column named him as Abdussattar Shaikh.
The CIA also knew all about Hazmi and al Mihdhar. The agency had been tracking them as known Al Qaeda members since January 2000, when they attended an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. The agency watched the pair fly to San Diego after the meeting where they rented the room from the FBI informant. Supposedly the two were placed on an FBI "watch list" by the CIA, but the FBI claims they didn't receive it in time. Sure. Just like the NSA couldn't translate the intercepted pre-Sept. 11 Al Qaeda messages in time.
Bush claims that he had to spy on Americans in order to "connect the dots" and prevent another 9/11. But 9/11 didn't happen because dots weren't connected. It wasn't an intelligence failure--it was an intelligence success and the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people; an inside job by the US government that handed Cheney's Project for a New American Century its desired Pearl Harbor; a 2001 realization of the criminal, psychotic plan known as Operation Northwoods hatched in 1962 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit widespread acts of domestic terrorism that would be blamed on Cuba in order to justify an invasion of that revolutionary nation. Bush had his chance to protect Americans from terrorism in 2001. After receiving multiple specific warnings about a plot to hijack jets and crash them into the WTC and the Pentagon, he did nothing to stop it and everything to facilitate it. Instead of heightening airport security and putting his air defenses on alert, this commander in chief chose to finish his vacation at the ranch, but not before ending a military alert that had existed for months and allowing a virtual standdown in both airport security and air defenses to occur under his watch. And on the morning of Sept. 11, we discovered that Bush was a deer in headlights who remained frozen in his classroom seat listening to a pet goat story after learning that a second jet had hit the South Tower.
More Bush lies: While fuming over the NY Times' leak about NSA snooping, Bush claimed that the leak in 1998 by the media regarding Osama bin Laden's cell phone use tipped him off to thegovernment's surveillance of him and caused him to ditch the ph one and use other means of communicating orders. But according to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, bin Laden's cell phone use had been reported in 1996 by Time and the following year. The source for the 1996 report was the Taliban regime in Kabul. The source in 1997 was bin Laden himself, in an interview with Peter Bergen.
Kessler's reporting suggests that it's far more likely that it was Clinton's attempt to kill bin Laden in 1998 with cruise missiles that prompted him to abandon the cell phone. Further, the Washington Times article referred to by Bush never said that Washington was listening to bin Laden, as he had claimed. The corporate media did not report about Washington's monitoring of bin Laden until after he had apparently ceased using his mobile phone.
Speaking of Washington's electronic surveillance of bin Laden, it is noteworthy that neither Bush nor the kept press saw fit to mention a bizarre episode that occurred in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks: Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, known for his extensive ties to the military and intelligence, told the Associated Press and ABC News that Washington had been monitoring bin Laden's calls and overheard two of his supporters whooping it up over the results of 9/11. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a stern rebuke of Hatch's comments, calling them an unauthorized release of classified data.
The NY Times revelation about Bush's illegal authorization of NSA domestic spying confirmed still another bald-faced Bush lie in April 2004, when he stated, after two and a half years of ordering warrantless spying, and with the same earnestness Clinton used in denying he ever "had sex with that woman":
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretaps, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about hunting down the terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
Yes, when we think Patriot Act, the first thing that comes to mind is how much Bush values the Constitution, particularly in light of this report by the usually credible Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue about a meeting between Bush and Republican congressional leaders on renewing the Patriot Act:
" ' Mr. President,' one aide in the meeting said. 'There is a valid case that the provision in this law undermine the Constitution.'
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Thompson says the three people he's talked to who attended that meeting all confirm that Bush called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
This contempt for the Constitution is confirmed in Bush's primary justification for violating FISA--that his authority as commander in chief granted by Article II gives Bush inherent war time powers to protect the country from terrorism and supersedes the 1978 congressional statute. [that a 1978 Congressional statute is superseded by Article II of the Constitution, which makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and grants him inherent wartime powers to protect the country from terrorism.
That's quite an expansive argument coming from a supposed strict constructionist like George W. Bush. This is what Article II says on the subject: "The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;..."
The intention of the Founding Fathers in appointing the president as commander in chief over the military was to ensure civilian supremacy and prevent a military dictatorship. Bush's argument is an Orwellian inversion of this democratic principle--he's claiming the president is a military commander in chief over the entire United States; in other words, a military dictator, precisely what Article II was crafted to prevent.
The second principal justification for Bush spying on Americans is that the congressional authorization for Bush to use military force against those responsible for 9/11 overrides FISA. While the notion that this resolution authorizing the use of "all necessary force" against Al Qaeda and the Taliban somehow justifies domestic spying on Americans is ludicrous and constitutionally bankrupt, politically it is far more revealing than Bush ever intended.
Since the "war on terror" is nothing more than " a propaganda facade for launching military actions abroad and attacking democratic rights at home," as the World Socialist Web site recently put it; "a mantra behind which American imperialism carries out its drive to establish global hegemony," Bush's reliance on the war authorization resolution takes on a whole new meaning and actually makes sense from the perspective of the US ruling class: waging war on workers in Afghanistan and Iraq for US capitalist profits and power is of a piece with waging war on workers in America by attacking our democratic rights and slashing our standards of living. Bush's war on terror is a class war on the international working class. The very fact he points to the Sept. 2001 congressional authorization of force as the basis for illegally spying on Americans confirms his war is two sides of the same coin.
Sometimes the good guys win...
In this era of imperialist wars, torture, repression, union-busting and a seemingly endless series of blows in flicted on working people, sometimes the good guys--the working class--registers victories of our own--albiet largely defensive in character--that kicks the capitalist exploiters in their ass.
One such uplifting win is the recent union organizing victory by Houston janitors who clean that city's largest office buildings. A majority of janitors signed union cards authorizing representation by the Service Employees International Union--the first union win in Houston in 25 years.
Houston's workers are on a roll. Independent truckers in that city just concluded a successful 10 day walkoutthat forced Bridge Terminal Transport to pay them higher rates to compensate for increased gas costs. Asimilar fight by Los Angeles independent owner operatorsfor higher pay and against longer hours is now unfolding. And last month, Philadelphia transit workers flexed their muscles with a militant 7-day strike that pushed back the city's demand for hefty health care premiums and won a small wage increase.
And now, New York City transit workers are set to conduct a militant strike to defend their jobs, pensions, health benefits, and a safer subway system for the city's riders.
All of these struggles point to the burning need for a political struggle by working people against the capitalist system of private profit; a struggle that culminate in the formation of an indepenedent party of the working class, a socialist party that will fight to reorganize this society to put human and social needs before the accumulation of profit and wealth by financial parasites who get rich off of our labor.--Dec. 13, 2005
"Withdrawing our troops from Iraq prematurely would betray the Iraqi people "
In other words, Bush tells the world, We're not finished raping and plundering Iraq. US imperialism, that is. And just listen to the pathetic, weak sister, me-too whines from his Democratic Party accomplices in crime, as they seek to assure Wall Street of their support for the conquest of Iraq, "No coitus interruptus from us Democrats. Bush just doesn't know how to do it."--Dec. 2, 2005
Bush Can Run But He Can't Hide
"I tried to escape. It didn't work."
Nov. 23-27, 2005--Maybe the locked door preventing Bush's escape from a Beijing press conference was a harbinger from the gods of history that their judgment of this war criminal has already been rendered. The walls--and doors--are closing in on Bush for Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Falluja and the rest of the mounting atrocities that have resulted from his orders. Only another terrorist attack on US soil enabling Bush to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution can save Bush now--and even that will only postpone the inevitable punishment awaiting this depraved cretin who is an apt representative of capitalism in its death agony.--Nov. 23, 2005
If the United States was a healthy bourgeois democracy and a functioning constitutional republic, Bush would have already been impeached for dereliction of duty on 9/11, launching illegal wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the CIA's global gulag.
But if reports by Wayne Madsen and othersare true that Valerie Plame was outed by the White House in retaliation for the fact that her CIA Counter-Proliferation group prevented Bush from planting WMD in Iraq, then the Bush presidency is finished, because even a dying, corrupt, decrepit US bourgeois democratic political establishment cannot tolerate a regime so detrimental to capitalism's interests.
She can't tell the difference between a Marine and a hole in the ground
Nov. 23-27, 2005--Maybe the locked door preventing Bush's escape from a Beijing press conference was a harbinger from the gods of history that their judgment of this war criminal has already been rendered. The walls--and doors--are closing in on Bush for Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Falluja and the rest of the mounting atrocities that have resulted from his orders. Only another terrorist attack on US soil enabling Bush to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution can save Bush now--and even that will only postpone the inevitable punishment awaiting this depraved cretin who is an apt representative of capitalism in its death agony.--Nov. 23, 2005
If the United States was a healthy bourgeois democracy and a functioning constitutional republic, Bush would have already been impeached for dereliction of duty on 9/11, launching illegal wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the CIA's global gulag.
But if reports by Wayne Madsen and othersare true that Valerie Plame was outed by the White House in retaliation for the fact that her CIA Counter-Proliferation group prevented Bush from planting WMD in Iraq, then the Bush presidency is finished, because even a dying, corrupt, decrepit US bourgeois democratic political establishment cannot tolerate a regime so detrimental to capitalism's interests.
US Senate votes to extend $60 billion tax cut for rich while opposing windfall profits tax on Big Oil
Tax cut includes $7 billion for corporations that's part of Bush's "Gulf Opportunity Zone" scheme which is using Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to give welfare to capitalists
FEMA gives 150,000 Katrina evacuees until Dec. 1 to find housing on their own before the agency stops paying for their rooms
House slashes student aid by $14 billion and food stamps by $700 million while Congress gives itself a $3,100 pay raise
Congress endorses Iraq war; rejects withdrawal; endorses torture and gutting of habeas corpus
The evidence is everywhere. As far as US working people are concerned, this is not our government. This is not our military. This is not our war.
We need to organize a party that fights for the working class. We need a mass socialist party that fights for a workers and farmers government.--Nov. 19, 2005
Solidarity, trade union democracy, working class independence from the capitalist two party shell game, proletarian internationalism, and anti-imperialist--these are the ingredients required to turn things around politically in the United States through the forging of a class struggle left wing in the labor movement and a mass socialist party.--Nov. 21, 2005
The following is the transcript of a 3-way conversation between a watchtower, operations room, and "Captain R," the cowardly punk who emptied his automatic rifle's magazine into Iman al-Hams.
Watchtower: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward."
Operations room: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"
Watchtower: "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."
A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts
Watchtower: "I think that one of the positions took her out."
Captain R: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."
Capt R: then "clarifies" why he killed Iman
"This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over." [emphasis added]
Americans--including Jewish Americans--still supporting Zionist Israel should be ashamed of themselves.
[We were told that] "every single person that was walking, talking, breathing was [an] enemy combatant. As such every single person that was walking down the street or in a house was a target."
This disturbing symmetry in language between Captain R and Englehart's military command is a chillingly accurate expression of the shared colonialist values binding US imperialism and Zionist Israel; bestial common denominators manifesting in a mentality that sees Iraqis and Palestinians as animals to be slaughtered, as in a turkey shoot.
While pondering the horrifying murder of Iman al Hams at the hands of her Israeli assassin, I found myself recalling Bruce Springsteen's 1999 song, "American Skin," the story of how New York City's police killed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo in a a haze of 41 bullets.
Substitute "Palestinian Skin" for "American Skin" and "17 shots" for "41 shots" and you've got another manifestation of the true "Axis of Evil" threatening the entire planet--Washington and Tel Aviv.
It ain't no secret/No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your Palestinian skin
Nov. 18, 2005
Bush the Torturer
Bush: "We don't do torture"
George W. Bush will go down as the most despised president in US history. He is already one of the most despised figures in world history, right up there with Stalin and Hitler. He will be known as Bush the Torturer.
Cheney: We want to torture
Vice President Richard Cheney has personally strong-armed senators to exempt the CIA from Senator John McCain's amendment banning torture and inhuman treatment of detainees. He will go down in history as Bush's Eichmann.
"It was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field."--Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff commenting on the "interrogation techniques" that were sanctioned by Cheney.--Nov. 8, 2005
McCain: This torture is killing us
Actually, it's killing innocent people illegally detained by US forces around the world. Senator McCain's primary concern is the negative public relations emanating from these and other images of torture will damage US imperialism's ability to wage present and future wars of aggression, which McCain wholeheartedly supports. McCain's still living in a fantasy world of "winning the hearts and minds" of Iraqis and the Muslim world. He should dispense with this fanciful rhetoric and listen to the reality being dished out by Col. Stephen Davis of the Second Marine Division, which is leading the current US offensive called "Operation Steel Curtain" against the people of Husaybah.
Davis told the NY Times: "We don't do hearts and minds a lot out here because it's irrelevant."
True enough. The more you drop 500-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles on Iraqi villages, the more Iraqis will want to kill you.--Nov. 8, 2005
Gulf of Tonkin,WMD: The Song Remains the Same
Nov. 3, 2005--It was fitting last week that as the Libby indictment illuminated the web of lies and intelligence fabrication concocted by US imperialism to sell its criminal invasion of Iraq, we learned that the National Security Agency engaged in a little intelligence manipulation itself back in August 1964 that enabled Washington to win public support for its aggression in Vietnam. An NSA historian found that the agency had deliberately falsified communications intercepts to fabricate an attack by North Vietnamese boats on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin days after a skirmish did occur between Hanoi's navy and US warships in North Vietnamese waters. This nonexistent second battle was the pretext used by Johnson to win Congressional authorization for unlimited military force against North Vietnam.
To add insult to the injury caused by this initial deceit, the NSA had since 2001 suppressed this finding to avoid the inevitable comparisons with the fabricated intelligence used to sell the invasion of Iraq. You remember the NSA--it's the same outfit that intercepted cell phone conversations about the Sept. 11 attacks two days before they occurred and claimed it didn't have the personnel to translate those conversations in time. Right. Just like they all had no idea that "Al Qaeda" was plotting to skyjack jets and crash them into the WTC and Pentagon.
From the Spanish-American War to Iraq to the wars that are beginning against Iran and Syria, the song remains the same--US imperialism must lie to the American people to win support for its wars of aggression. In 1898, when Washington needed an excuse to wage war against Spain for the prized colonial possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it blamed Spain for the explosion on the USS Maine while docked in Havana's harbor, and with the enthusiastic assistance of the Bill O'Reilly's of the day who practiced their own brand of yellow journalism in the employ of William Randolph Hearst, a war hysteria was generated.
It lied when it claimed World War I was the war to end all wars on behalf of democracy. It purposely sent the USS Lusitania into harm's way and the path of German submarines in order to provoke a German attack that would justify US entry into the first worldwide interimperialist war. It lied when it claimed the second worldwide interimperialist war was fought to save democracy from fascism. It lied when it claimed Pearl Harbor was a "sneak attack" when in truth it was the 9/11 of the day. It lied about Korea. It lied about Cuba. It lied about Vietnam. It lied about Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan; and it is lying about Iran and Syria.
You see, US imperialism cannot openly tell US workers that it needs to send them to other countries to die and kill other workers for capitalist profits. So it must fabricate intelligence and carry out false flag operations and provocations to hoodwink Americans into su pporting US imperialist aggression.
But sometimes the lies are so hideous, so crude, so transparent, so murderous, that the liars are exposed and we learn that the working class is not the only class with leadership problems. We watch the capitalist swine turn on each other as they attempt to escape accountability for their crimes. But workers shouldn't gloat like liberals do over the indictment of Libby and possibly Rove and others. We don't have time for such luxury. We have our own crisis of leadership which must be resolved soon or we're going down with the empire.
American workers are beginning to take the first steps toward the goal of solving that leadership question and building a mass socialist party in the United States. We take those steps in Philadelphia, where 5,000 transit workers just went on strike over draconian wage and benefits demands by Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Workers are taking those steps when we fight for union representation in the meatpacking plants of the Midwest and poultry plants in the South; when truckers fight for representation by the Teamsters; when mechanics at Northwest fight for their livelihoods; when machinists push back Boeing's demands; when coal miners continue to courageously fight for United Mine Workers representation.
But these struggles need to be generalized and broadened to the point where workers are organized as a class with our own political party that will fight in the political arena for our interests, home and abroad. Because right now, that's not happening. But it's coming. Because the rulers have no answers but war, torture, economic and monetary crises, attacks on our living standards and democratic rights and human rights. And as workers have done throughout history, including US history, we will fight back and figure out how to organize ourselves in a mass socialist party that will fight for a workers and farmers government and the abolition of capitalism, the death penalty, private profit, and imperialist wars.
Cheney Replaces Libby with Torture Memo Author and WMD Liar
He may have lost his right hand man when Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby, but Cheney had no trouble finding his replacements: former Cheney counsel David Addington as his new chief of staff, and John Hannah as his new assistant for national security. Addington once wrote a memo justifying torture because the Geneva Conventions were "obsolete." Hannah's been up to his neck in the campaign of WMD deceit.
Nice choices, Dick. Keep revealing your character and digging your historical grave. Of course, Cheney doesn't care what we think about him. He intends to carry out US imperialism's war of terror against working people in the US and around the world.
Yes, in more ways than one. First Bush cynically exploited Katrina to impose a military dictatorship in New Orleans. Now, with a killer worldwide avian flu pandemic "100 percent" certain to occur, Bush is chomping at the bit to use this as a cover for the planned enactment of martial law.This rotten capitalist government is more than ready to use US troops to "quarantine" Americans, but when it comes to providing enough flu vaccine for the people, it "is phenomenally not prepared for this," according to Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. Dr. Redlener agrees with COSMOS LEFT that Bush's scheme to use the military is "extraordinarily draconian" that translates into "...martial law in the United States.
Currently there exists merely 2 million doses of Tamiflu, enough for 1% of the public. Only one company--Roche Holding AG of Switzerland, manufactures this antiviral drug. So much for monopoly capital's ability to meet human needs. This would not be possible in a democratically planned economy. As we've been saying for some time, we need a workers and farmers government for our own survival.
Scientists went out of their way to bring the 1918 virus back to life. Some made a trip to Alaska's permafrost and dug up a corpse of someone who died from that outbreak. Earlier this year, under top-secret conditions at a Centers for Disease Control laboratory in Atlanta, these modern day Frankensteins conducted experiments with their newly created virus in order to "better understand" it so they can make better vaccines.
Saner minds in the scientific community warned that this effort could unleash a Pandora's box of global pandemics that could wipe out tens of millions. Now the Frankensteins inform us that the 1918 bug was an avian flu that jumped directly to humans, precisely what many experts are predicting may happen with the bird flu currently ravaging Asia.
The Frankensteins even plan to publish their findings on the Internet. How egalitarian of them.--Oct. 10, 2005
Another Spy Who Came in From the White House?
It appears that there's been another breach of security in this White House so obsessed with national security. Once again, it emanates from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. A US Marine and FBI analyst named Leandro Aragoncillo, working out of Cheney's office, has been arrested for using his top secret clearance to steal classified intelligence papers from White House computers that allegedly contained damaging information on President Arroyo of the Philippines and giving them to her Filipino opponents.
Whatever spying was allegedly taking place, you can bet US intelligence was up to its neck in it and busted Aragoncillo to cover their tracks.
The FBI and CIA are reported to be claiming that this is the first case of espionage reaching into the White House, but as usual they appear to be lying. Aside from reports that the FBI was hot on the trail of an Israeli mole dubbed "Mega" in the Clinton White House, remember that on the morning of Sept. 11, it was Cheney who phoned Bush to tell him that the Secret Service had received a terrorist threat from someone who knew the White House code, "Angel," and warned that "Air Force One is next."
Perhaps it is Dick Cheney who belongs in prison for threatening the security of the US public.--Oct. 10, 2005
"This one says, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US'"--Aug. 6, 2001
Bush Nominates Long-time Crony with no Judicial Experience to Supreme Court
Rewards Hack Harriet Miers for Scrubbing His National Guard Record
First came John Roberts, a right-wing ideologue who has belittled the "so-called 'right to privacy'"; believed Roe v. Wade was "wrongly decided"; defended the violent anti-abortion group Operation Rescue before the Supreme Court, arguing that federal civil rights statutes do not protect women seeking abortions from that terrorist group's threats and violence outside health clinics; and backed Bush's practice of arresting all those Bush considers a terrorist as "enemy combatants," and imprisoning them indefinitely without charges, evidence, or judicial review.
Now along comes Harriet Miers, Bush's White House counsel and long-time lackey who apparently played a key role in covering up the big hole in Bush's National Guard record.
Miers and Roberts have several things in common. Both are anti-abortion right wingers; both are reliable, life-long servants of big business; and both helped Bush steal Florida's 26 electoral votes in the 2000 election.
And it was Miers who handed Bush the infamous August 6, 2001 presidential daily briefing entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."
As rumormillnews put it, "One doesn't even has to think of the nasty expression of 'blackmailing' as this could be an 'offer' -- no side has a reason to refuse."
Which brings to mind a favorite saying of another crime boss: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
Given the fact that Bush may be convicted for obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame outing scandal, having a loyal stooge on the Supreme Court may come in handy.
Such is the stamp Bush will leave on the Supreme Court--a wretched institution of capitalist class rule that is rotting from the inside out.--Oct. 3, 2005
As Gore Vidal says, "There are no conspiracies--just coincidences."
Solidarity Protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Rome, Florence, Paris, Madrid
Sept. 26, 2005--Three hundred thousand demonstrators from around the country showed up in Washington, DC to demand an immediate withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and an end to colonial occupations from Iraq to Palestine to Haiti. The protesters also called for the impeachment of George W. Bush and the diversion of funding for wars to funding social needs, aptly captured in a banner reading, "Money for Levees, Not War!"
The breadth and diversity of the largely working class crowd reflected the majority of Americans it represented. As expected, the capitalist media, led by FOX News, ignored the largest demonstration against this war since its commencement in March 2003. They were too busy reporting how much better Bush responded to Hurricane Rita than he had to Hurricane Katrina.
The best part of the day was the opportunity to disseminate and discuss socialist ideas and revolutionary politics at such a massive forum. Because as impressive and important as these mobilizations are, as a strategy they are not enough to stop this eruption of US militarism and aggression. They weren't enough to stop this war. And they won't be enough to stop future wars on imperialism's agenda. What's needed is a mass socialist movement, led by a mass revolutionary workers party that will fight for a socialist reorganization of society and human needs before private profit.
This is no longer a utopian vision. It is within our reach. The conditions are ripe, if not overripe. It is the only practical solution left for US working people. The Democrats are no longer an option. Events every day reveal they are part of the problem because they are part of the capitalist power structure. And 9/11, Enron, Iraq, and Katrina have impacted the consciousness of the US working class like seismic shock waves. All of a sudden the reality is sinking in that this government is not our government, it's their government. And they don't give a rat's ass about us. We have to start relying on our own strength and our own allies and organizing ourselves as a class. This one-sided class war must stop now.
One of the most astute bourgeois pundits, NY Times columnist David Brooks senses the sea change unfolding before our eyes. Articulating the concerns of the more farsighted, enlightened wing of the US capitalist class, Brooks is worried about the palpable loss of confidence among broad layers of the US population in the institutions of class rule. "They want something new," he laments.
Exactly right, Mr. Brooks. Conditions have never been more promising for building a socialist movement. American workers will turn to socialism because, as Lenin said in 1917, we have no alternative.
Sept. 19, 2005--NYC Indymedia is reporting that New York City police forcibly broke up a legal Cindy Sheehan rally this afternoon in Union Square. The rally, part of a national antiwar organizing tour that culminates at Saturday's massive demonstration in Washington, DC, was attended by hundreds of individuals and members of Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, the Troops Out Now Coalition, and others. While Cindy was speaking, and without warning, Bloomberg's stormtroopers attacked the rally, seizing the sound system and arresting the rally's organizer.
This is another example of the increasingly totalitarian character of the US capitalist state. Free speech and freedom of assembly are under attack by a desperate ruling class who sense that the tide of history is moving against them. They fear and despise the people. Their attack on the First Amendment is from a position of weakness, because they are losing the battle of ideas, and the masses' confidence in the institutions of class rule is eroding. The capitalists can only unleash their fascist thugs, in uniform or out, and try to terrorize us into submission.
They will lose, like all tyrants eventually lose. Because the People will only get stronger.
The First Amendment reads in part: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion . . ."
The words, "... one nation under God" [emphasis added] is an establishment of religion that has violated the First Amendment since they were added to the Pledge during Cold War's zenith in 1954 to demarcate the God-fearing United States from those godless, atheistic Russian communists.
See "What Is to Be Done?" for more on Iraq, Katrina, and the revolutionary socialist movement in the United States.
US Capitalist Regime Guilty of Criminal Neglect, Abandons Thousands to Die
"Don't leave us here to die!"--Capitalism in the 21st century
“And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
We can no longer live under capitalist rule. We can't afford to. Either we fight for socialism, for a workers and farmers government, or we will face many more New Orleans. The choice facing us is still socialism or barbarism.
We should demand from this capitalist government:
Billions for hurricane relief! Not for war!
Provide immediate emergency unemployment relief to all workers who have lost jobs!
Provide a massive jobs program at union wages for Gulf Coast workers!
The US consul-general in Jerusalem said that the Palestinians' contribution was particularly important "because we know it came from poor people."
Yes, while the pockets of the super-rich financial oligarchy you represent are stuffed with cash from Washington's massive tax cuts.
Just as working people should support the right of return for all Palestinians displaced by the Zionist theft of their land, so should we support the right of return for all Katrina evacuees.
No to the gentrification and ethnic cleansing of New Orleans!
End the military occupation of New Orleans!
Jobs, Housing, Education, Health Care for All Katrina Evacuees!
Only problem is Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a Texas-based funeral services company owned by Robert Waltrip, a Ken Lay-type buddy of George W. Bush. SCI paid a $100 million settlement when one of its Florida cemetery chains desecrated vaults, moved hundreds of bodies from two cemeteries and dumped the remains for wild hogs to feast on.
SCI was also at the center of an earlier Texas scandal that came to be known as "Funeralgate." For a while during the 2000 campaign it appeared that Bush's involvement in Funeralgate might sink his presidential bid, but Karl Rove silenced that controversy as effectively as Bill O'Reilly silenced his phone sex scandal with his producer.
A former Texas Funeral Service Commission Director named Eliza May sued then Governor Bush for obstructing an investigation into SCI license violations. May had been fired by Waltrip after an argument. Waltrip met with Gov. Bush's chief of staff and future campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, who preceded Michael Brown as FEMA director before becoming a lobbyist for Halliburton. (Today Allbaugh is making millions hooking up corporations like Kellogg Brown & Root and The Shaw Group with the orgy of profits waiting to be made rebuilding the Gulf Coast.)
Newsweek reported that Bush came by and said to his friend Waltrip, "Hey Bobby, those people still messing with you?"
May tried to subpoena Bush to testify about what he knew regarding her firing, but a judge rejected the subpoena, and Bush escaped giving a deposition. Later a settlement was reached and SCI paid a small fine.
Now this corrupt company, well connected to the Bush dynasty, will be in charge of disposing of Katrina's dead.
Death, corruption, and blood seem to follow George W. Bush everywhere.--Sept. 15, 2005
Bush fiddled . . .
This photo was taken on Tuesday. New Orleans residents were already dying in the streets, abandoned by a government of robber barons that is guilty of criminal neglect. At the top of this gangster regime sits George W. Bush, who also found time this week for still another round of golf.
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Bush told ABC's Good Morning America on Wednesday. The words had a disturbing familiarity to them. Then I remembered why.
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use ... a hijacked airplane as a missile." So declared then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in May 2002 after the explosive revelation that Bush received specific warnings about the Sept. 11 plot.
They both lied. They knew the levees could not withstand a Category 4 or 5 storm, which they also knew was an inevitability. The government also knew all about plots to hijack planes and crash them into the WTC and Pentagon.
They were warned about 9/11. They were warned about New Orleans. They were warned about the power blackout. They are warned every winter about the shortage of flu vaccines.
How many more times will we get hit on the head before we realize that this government does not belong to working people? It is instead a government of the capitalists, by the capitalists, and for the capitalists. This has never been truer than today. As the Sept. 2 Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board put it, "In the figure of the president, George W. Bush, the in competence, stupidity, and sheer inhumanity that characterize so much of America's money-mad corporate elite find their quintessentially repulsive expression."
These characteristics of Bush can be seen in some of his recent remarks:
"We will not let criminals prey on the vulnerable."
Yes you will. You've been doing it your entire "career." You've been one of those criminals preying on the vulnerable. You did it when you pulled an Enron-like scam and dumped your Harkin Oil stock based on an insider trading tip, leaving Harkin's employees with pensions. You did it when you looted the US Treasury and the Social Security Trust Fund. You did it when you looted Iraq. You did it when you looted the Army Corps of Engineers. You did it when you callously turned your back on the poorest citizens of New Orleans.
"We will not let bureaucracy get in the way of saving lives."
You already have done precisely that.
See Oh Really O'Reilly for more on how Hurricane Katrina has graphically illuminated the deepening crisis of US capitalism.--Sept. 3, 2005
. . . while New Orleans drowned
This would never happen in Cuba, where the workers government has systems in place to carry out organized evacuations, provide emergency shelter, and care for children, the elderly, and the sick. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan slammed Cuba with 124 mph winds. The government evacuated two million people including 100,000 in the first three hours. Children, pets, old folks, were evacuated and looked after in an orderly way with no fatalities.
It is not ordained that natural disasters have to be compounded by man-made disasters.
Cuba shows the way. We need a workers government, too. It's becoming a matter of survival.--Sept. 2, 2005
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."--Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, June 8, 2004
Bring the National Guard Home NOW!
US Out of Iraq!
"The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?"
"The days seem awfully dark for those affected."--George W. Bush, 8/31/05
The bourgeois media is covering up for this government's criminal neglect by picturing Bush as a concerned leader who cut short his vacation to mobilize relief for Katrina's victims. I have yet to hear one report on television news on how Bush cut funding for hurricane and flood protection.
This tragedy illuminates one more time why we need a workers and farmers government that puts human and social needs ahead of private profit.--Sept. 1, 2005
This is the man Pat Robertson wants to assassinate and George W. Bush longs to evict from office.
In a stroke of political genius, President Hugo Chavez simultaneously demonstrates the humanity, compassion, and internationalism of the Venezuelan Revolution while undercutting Washington's plans to invade his country and remove him from power.
What a searing indictment of private enterprise! Here the leader of a semi-colonial nation is offering heating oil and eyecare to the poorest citizens residing in the richest capitalist nation in history.
American workers, take heed! This is just a glimpse of what is possible when we organize ourselves politically as a class and use the state power to advance our interests.
For more on Chavez and Venezuela, see "Bill O'Reilly's Fake Criticism of Pat Robertson," on the Oh Really O'Reilly page of this site.
Impotent Labor Movement Abandons Striking Northwest Mechanics to Brutal Union-Busting Drive
All Workers Paying Heavy Price for Decades of Class Collaborationism and Backing Democrats
When We Break from the Democrats, the Power of Our Class to Change Society Will Be Realized
What a great day for humanity that will be!
Working people in the US and internationally need a mass socialist workers party to defend our interests while capitalism's death agony drags humanity into hell. We can't do so in the US until we break from the Democrats and end this one-sided class war. We can't do so when we're still fighting over industrial or craft unionism, which is why Northwest's mechanics left the International Association of Machinists in 1999 to form the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Organization that's on strike today. That issue was supposedly resolved when the AFL and CIO merged in the 1930s, but after decades of making peace with capitalism, the labor movement took a step backward thanks to the treachery of the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats.--August 24, 2005
In resisting Northwest's demands for a 26 percent pay cut, elimination of over half their jobs, reduced sick pay and higher health insurance premiums, the striking AMFA mechanics are fighting for the wages, jobs and health benefits of all US workers.
Given the current climate of war, repression, jingoism, national chauvinism, and flag-waving hysteria, the mechanics' strike against Northwest Airlines is a more direct class challenge to the US rulers than Cindy Sheehan's courageous campaign against their imperialist war in Iraq.--August 26, 2005
The Mother of All Terrorist Atrocities
Hiroshima, 60 years ago today
August 6-9, 2005--We've recently learned that the US government long suppressed the earliest written and photographic coverage of the worst terrorist attacks in history--the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Washington censored this reporting to cover up the nature and scope of the horror inflicted on the populations of those cities as well as to facilitate the myth that it was an act of peace that saved lives.
Ask most Americans about it and you'll discover the censorship and myth-making worked--they will tell you that nuking Japan was the only way to end the war and save US lives because the fanatical yellow hordes would never stop fighting. While it's true that some Japanese military hardliners were vowing to never surrender, there's been a wealth of archives and documents unearthed proving Japan was suing for peace, many US generals opposed dropping the bombs, and that Truman's decision had more to do with the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific front on August 8.
Far from a live-saving necessity that ended World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were heinous crimes against humanity and the opening shots of World War III. Indeed, according to Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, General Korechika Anami vowed to fight on even after Hiroshima was destroyed. Hasegawa writes that what sealed Tokyo's surrender was Stalin's move into the Korean peninsula on August 8 and the decision allowing Japan to keep its emperor.
Just last month, Britain's New Scientist reported that two historians found that "the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War." Historians Selden and Kuznick's research discovered that on August 3, 1945, Truman conceded at a meeting with top advisers and generals that Japan was "looking for peace."
Overruling the advice of these advisers that there was no military necessity to drop the A-bombs, Truman decided to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki anyway. "Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war," Seiden reported to the New Scientist.
This is nothing new. Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, wrote in his memoir that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
General Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek in 1963 that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that damn thing." Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes, reportedly told nuclear scientist Leo Szilard before Hiroshima's destruction that "Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might and that a demonstration of the bomb may impress Russia."
In other words, US imperialism decided to incinerate two cities to send a message to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world that this is what will happen to anyone who stands in the way of US hegemony. Luckily for the world, Stalin got the message--and responded by arming Moscow with a nuclear arsenal that deterred Washington's atom maniacs from using the terrorist weapon again.
The mother of all terrorist atrocities was accompanied by the mother of all coverups. Greg Mitchell of EditorandPublisher.com reports that the US government censored all film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings that had been shot by the US military and Japanese news agencies. The Japanese newsreels were suppressed for 25 years; the US military footage was kept secret until the early '80s, and has never been fully seen.
Mitchell reports that Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel McGovern, who directed the US filmmakers in 1945-1946 and oversaw the Japanese footage, told him "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we dropped the bomb. The Air Force--it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those film images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child...They didn't want the public to know what their weapons had done--at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins."
Mitchell tells us that McGovern stated recently the American people should have seen the footage to see what Washington had wrought. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation." Mitchell accurately notes that because the horrifying footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was suppressed for decades, "the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness"--where they substantially remain today.
No, Washington didn't want Americans to know about the 80,000 residents of Hiroshima who were vaporized instantly and the 50,000 who died horribly within days. Truman didn't want his citizens to come face to face with the 40,000 Nagasaki victims who perished immediately in the fire that time. America's war criminals didn't want its citizenry to know about descriptions of mutilated people with "skin hanging down like rags" wandering the streets of Hiroshima like a scene out of "Night of the Living Dead" in excruiating pain, "often blind from the burns or deaf from the explosion, with their arms stretched out in front of them, with forearms and hands dangling...to prevent the painful friction of surfaces rubbing together"[Hachiya, Michihiko. Hiroshima Diary. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955]
Americans weren't allowed to see the rivers filled with corpses of victims seeking relief from the intense burns, looking like they'd been boiled alive. [Hiroshima Diary] Just as Americans today are not seeing the corpses of innocent civilians and decapitated children in Iraq. Then, as now, Washington is doing everything it can to cover up its war crimes, the better to carry out new ones.
In between World War II and Iraq, the US rulers learned a bitter lesson from their humiliating defeat in Vietnam: at all costs, cover up atrocities by controlling the media. Otherwise, My Lai-type massacres end up in American living rooms on the television, which makes it harder for imperialism to retain public support for its aggression.
The Pentagon's monitoring of embedded journalists as a means of censoring the unpleasantries of imperialist war did not start in Iraq. George Weller of the Chicago Daily News was part of the first influx of war correspondents to arrive in Japan in September 1945. After slipping into Nagasaki days before the rest of them did, Weller began writing about what he saw unfolding around him. His initial dispatch expressed admiration for the A-bomb's military effectiveness. But then Weller visited a Nagasaki hospital and saw people who had survived in tact from the blast now dying horribly, some with their arms and legs "speckled with tiny red spots in patches"; others had "blackish mouths", and small children had lost all their hair.
The next day Weller wrote more about this "peculiar disease," or "Disease X" as he dubbed it. He reported that a local X-ray expert stated that "these people are simply suffering" from the A-bomb's unknown radiation effects. A third article stated that "Disease X" was "still snatching lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are d ying daily in hospitals, some after having walked aro und three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.
"The doctors...candidly confessed...that the answer to the malady is be yond them." Weller reported that at one hospital, 200 out of 343 patients had died, "dead of atomic bomb--and nobody knows why."
But the world never saw Weller's first-hand account of death by nuclear radiation, because his articles were censored by General Douglas MacArthur. They have surfaced only because Weller's son discovered carbon copies of them in his late father's belongings.
The US rulers indifference toward the suffering caused by their deployment of atomic bombs was not limited to Japanese civilians. US soldiers who witnessed H-bomb tests in Nevada's desert later died horrible deaths because Washington kept secret the lethal effects of radiation.
The only government to actually use nuclear bombs that vaporized and burned hundreds of thousands of civilians to death is threatening to use newer, deadlier and more sophisticated nuclear weapons even nations lacking a nuclear arsenal. We will not be safe from this and all forms of terrorism until the US workers organize politically as a class and takes state power away from the tiny clique of billionaires who have it now.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "
US Rulers Use London Bombings to Escalate Assault on Democratic Rights
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just flushed the Fourth Amendment down the sewers with his decision to order NYC cops to randomly search packages of subway riders. After Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff recently rejected more transit security funding for the city because not many people will die in a subway attack, Bloomberg has wasted no time exploiting the recent London bombings to bludgeon our constitutional rights.
Random searches will not protect us against the terrorist strike that is coming. And they are not meant to. They are meant to intimidate and terrify us. They are meant to get us to cower before the repressive apparatus of the state. They are meant to condition us to the unfolding permanent militarization of our society.
We say NO to these random searches. Before we allow this government to violate our 4th Amendment right to be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion, we should demand the immediate release of all classified files relating to the CIA's relationship with Al Qaeda.--July 22, 2005
It's not about reveling in satisfaction that this wretch is getting her just punishment for helping Bush tell his lies about Iraq's nonexistent WMD in order to sell the war. It's not about the blood on Miller's hands for this sordid role she played as a war propagandist.
And it's certainly not about treason. It's not a matter of whether Rove "knowingly" violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in outing Plame. The Act is a reactionary piece of legislation passed under Reagan designed to prevent whistleblowers like former agent Philip Agee from exposing CIA crimes. The CIA does not represent or act in the interests of US working people. It is a nest of professional killers and assassins acting as hired guns for Wall Street. The Agency acts to safeguard the profits and domination of US monopoly capital wherever its tentacles reach in the world. The CIA murders, tortures, trains torturers, overthrows democratically elected governments, and commits all kinds of mayhem and subversion so that Wall Street can dominate the planet.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act is designed to keep the murderous machinations of the CIA hidden from public view so its agents' dirty deeds can continue. As we discuss in "Militant Admits 'Social Patriotism' in June 13 Editorial' on "What Is to Be Done?", measures and laws that strengthen the military and intelligence of the exploiting rich weaken working people from Pittsburgh to London to Baghdad.
And it's not about who leaked what to whom among Rove, Robert Novak, Miller, Marc Cooper, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, or John Bolton, one of the more intriguing names to emerge in recent days.
No, the Rove scandal is about the deceit and deception employed to sell the illegal, predatory, and criminal Iraq war. It's about the lies Bush told about Iraq having WMD; specifically, the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, a claim that based on forged documents cooked up by Italian, Israeli, British or US intelligence. At the behest of Vice President Cheney, the CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate the yellowcake story. Wilson found there was nothing to the claim but forged documents. When the White House continued to claim that the Niger yellowcake story proved Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, Wilson wrote his July 6, 2003 NY Times column saying otherwise.
Within days, the White House, unable to refute Wilson's column on the facts, unleashed Rove and his attack dogs in the press, including Judith Miller and Robert Novak, to smear and discredit Wilson by compromising the CIA status of his wife, Valerie Plame.Wilson embarrassed the Bush gang. Drunk with an arrogance of power, they retaliated with characteristic thuggishness, leaving themselves open to indictment for violating a federal statute.
But Judith Miller is not sitting in jail because helped Bush spread lies about WMD in order to sell this sordid war. She's there because the US capitalist rulers are using this scandal to carry out a frontal assault on freedom of the press. She's there because the rulers are making an example of Miller. The message to journalists is clear: this is where you'll be if you criticize us too far, if you stray too far from the national party line, or if you refuse to kowtow to our demands for your sources.
This entire affair is a manifestation of the subterranean clashes within the ruling class that are surfacing due to the dawning realization that the invasion of Iraq has turned into a strategic catastrophe for US imperialism.
This is a positive development for the US working class. Anytime the capitalist rulers are wracked with internal conflicts, they are weakened, which means working people are in a better position to forge unity and begin to fight back.
U2, Bono?
Earth to Bono, Geldof and all the guilt-ridden liberal millionaires behind the Live 8 fraud: Capitalism is the cause of world poverty. Only its abolition will "make poverty history." At a time when Bush and Blair should be tried for war crimes in Iraq, Bono and Geldof act as their cheerleaders, fostering illusions among the masses that these imperialist plunderers can actually eliminate poverty and hunger in the superexploited, oppressed, so-called "developing" nations.
Earth to Bono and Geldof: Africa is in the shape it's in due to centuries of forced underdevelopment by colonial and imperialist powers. Appealing to the altruistic tendencies of the exploiters is utopian, counterproductive and dangerous. Bono and Geldof may be well intentioned liberals, but like all well intentioned liberals, they end up objectively aiding capitalism and perpetuating the horrors that are the inevitable byproducts of that system's private profit motive.
Earth to Bono and Geldof: The so-called debt relief and aid packages endorsed by you and your friends Bush and Blair in the June 11 G8 agreement are paltry and conditioned on requirements to "boost private sector development" and end all "impediments to private investments, both domestic and foreign." In other words, they aim to strengthen the very forces responsible for Africa's superexploitation and forced underdevelopment in the first place. Brilliant. Make them all Time's Men of the Year as a reward.
COSMOS LEFT believes that like most artists, U2's best work was produced early in their career, before they became rich, fat and guilt-ridden. I would like to offer ancedotal testimony that benchmarks the beginning of the band's political degeneration. In 1987, I witnessed a free, spontaneous, outdoor concert by U2 held in San Francisco's Embarcadero Square, footage of which was used in the group's 1988 film, "Rattle and Hum."
During the show, Bono noticed a large banner at the back of the audience that read, "SF Loves U2," a sentiment that seemed harmless and logical given the fact we were in San Francisco at a U2 concert.
But not to the politically astute Bono, who inexplicably thought "SF" meant Sinn Fein, the unofficial political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Bono then launched into a hysterical tirade against the IRA, its strategy of urban guerrilla warfare, and the fans holding the banner, who were as bewildered as the rest of the audience.
It was this travesty, this act of buffoonery, that tarnished the day, not the more publicized stunt of Bono scrawling graffiti on an Embarcadero underpass reading, "U2 Stops Traffic."
First, Bono was overestimating the political sophistication of an American crowd, since the overwhelming majority couldn't tell Sinn Fein from chow mein. Given this fact, for Bono to think "SF" meant Sinn Fein in the heart of San Francisco only showed he's even more clueless than the fans he was screaming at.
More importantly, the spectacle of an Irish national publicly excoriating the Irish republican movement with the fury of militant Protestant leader Ian Paisley inaugurated a political degeneration that has culminated with Bono's current status as front man for imperialism's neocolonial plunder of Africa.--July 4, 2005
End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine to Haiti!
End All Aid to Israel!
Support the Palestinian Right to Return!
US Hands Off Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea & Syria!
Defend Civil Rights!
Stop All Governmental Spying!
Release All Government Files on Sept. 11!
We need to answer Bush's lies and the Democrats complicity in Washington's war crimes by hitting the streets on Sept. 24 in Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
But that's not enough. We need to build a mass socialist movement in the United States. When this begins, we'll be able to hear cheers from all corners of the globe. And terrorism will be on the run. Because Marxism has nothing to do with terrorism. Marxism seeks to mobilize the working people to run society in our interests, to meet human and social needs, not private profit. Terrorism rejects this approach, preferring to shock the rulers into reform while the masses are left as spectators. But this only weakens the working class while strengthening the forces of capitalist reaction.--June 30, 2005
The only problem is this makes no difference to the warmaniacs in the Pentagon and their masters on Wall Street. They have every intention of spreading imperialist aggression to all corners of the globe to satisfy their voracious appetite for global domination. They're aiming to attack North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, and if the lies left over from the Iraq war about WMD and terrorism don't do the trick, these rat bastards are fully capable of unleashing what worked so well for them in 2001--another terrorist attack so massive that this time the US rulers will suspend the Constitution, enact martial law and start rounding up political dissidents for illegal detention in more Guantanamos.--June 15, 2005
Songs for the Working Class: The best antiwar and anticapitalist tunes ever written
Lately I've been musing over the most powerful and influential songs that have been inspired by the class struggle and the working class fight for socialist and against capitalist wars. The entries that will be included here will be divided into three broad categories: 1) antiwar songs; 2) songs that envision humanity's communist future; and 3) lyrics from songs about union organizing.
The list will by no means be exclusive and will be added to over time. Readers will note that most of these songs originated in the 19th and 20th centuries. We note that future classics are already being penned by more contemporary artists--country's Steve Earle and alternative rock's System of a Down come to mind. Readers are encouraged to send in songs they feel have been unjustly omitted.
The Clash, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Eugene Pottier (whose "Internationale" was inspired by the Paris Commune) and Joe Hill are topping the list.--May 9, 2005
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
'N' you must not act the way you were brought up
Who knows the reasons why you have grown up?
Who knows the plans or why they were drawn up?
It's up to you not to heed the call-up
I don't wanna die!
It's up to you not to hear the call-up
I don't wanna kill!
For he who will die
Is he who will kill
Maybe I wanna see the wheatfields
Over Kiev and down to the sea
All the young people down the ages
They gladly marched off to die
Proud city fathers used to watch them
Tears in their eyes
There is a rose that I want to live for
Although, God knows, I may not have met her
There is a dance an' I should be with her
There is a town - unlike any other
It's up to you not to hear the call-up
'N' you must not act the way you were brought up
Who give you work an' why should you do it?
At fifty five minutes past eleven
There is a rose...
Yeah!
From "Sandinista," the revolutionary 1981 album by The Clash, the British working class punk rockers who proved themselves to be visionaries in both melodies and lyrics. Naming their album after the Nicaraguan revolution was an act of international solidarity worthy of Marx, Engels, and every toiler who has fought back against the bosses.
Masters of War
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you Even Jesus would never Forgive what you do Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead
--Bob Dylan (1963)
Try not to think of the war criminals responsible for the horrors unfolding in the cradle of civilization as you absorb Dylan's lyrics. Channel your rage constructively by helping to build a mass socialist movement that will throw these scoundrels in jail and consign their wars, in the words of the British Marxist Alan Woods, "along with slavery, feudalism and cannibalism to a museum of barbarous relics of the past."
Dylan's "God on Our Side" has as much burning relevance as "Masters of War," particularly since the ultrarightist Christian fundamentalist fanatics leading the cheers for the war in Iraq claim THEY have God on their side.
God On Our Side
Oh, my name it ain't nothin', my age it means less
The country I come from is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there, the laws to abide
And that the land that I live in has God on its side.
Oh, the history books tell it, they tell it so well
The cavalries charged, the Indians fell
The cavalries charged, the Indians died
Oh, the country was young with God on its side.
The Spanish American war had its day
And the Civil War too was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes i's made to memorize
With guns in their hands and God on their side.
The First World War, boys, it came an it went
The reason for fightin' I never did get
But I learned to accept it, accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead when God's on your side.
The Second World War boys, came to an end
We forgave the Germans and then we were friends
Though they murdered six million, in the ovens they fried
The Germans now too have God on their side.
I've learned to hate Russians all through my whole life
If another war comes it's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them, to run and to hide
And accept it all bravely with God on my side.
But now we got weapons of chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to, then fire them we must
One push of the button an' shot the world wide
An' you never ask questions when God's on your side
Through a many dark hour i've been thinkin' 'bout this
That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you, you'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.
So now as I'm leavin', i'm weary as hell
The confusion I'm feelin' ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head and fall to the floor
That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war.
Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" possesses a relevance all it's own when you think about George W. Bush and how he used his family connections to both get into and out of the Texas Air Guard.
Fortunate Son
Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Ooh, they're red, white and blue
And when the band plays "Hail To The Chief"
Ooh, they point the cannon at you,
Lord It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no senator's son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, oh
But when the taxman come to the door
Lord, the house look a like a rummage sale, yes
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no millionaire's son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one
Yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war
And when you ask them, how much should we give
Ooh, they only answer, more, more, more, yeah
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no military son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate son
Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marchin' Any More" makes the list because it gives a needed history lesson.
I Ain't Marchin' Any More
Oh, I marched to the battle of New Orleans
At the end of the early British war
The young land started growin'
The young blood started flowin'
But I ain't a-marchin' anymore
But I've killed my share of Injuns
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I saw many men lyin'
I saw many more dyin'
But I ain't a-marchin' anymore
CHORUS
It's always the old to lead us to the war
Always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun
Tell me, is it worth it all
For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brothers
And so many others
But I ain't a-marchin' anymore
For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh, I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't a-marchin' anymore
CHORUS
For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burnin' I knew that I was learnin'
That I ain't a-marchin' anymore
Now the labor leader's screamin' when they close the missile plants
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason" Call it "Love" or call it "Reason"
But I ain't a-marchin' any more.
No, I ain't a-marchin' any more
Pete Seeger's 1961 classic, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" was penned before the Vietnam war and went on to become one of the great antiwar anthems of the '60s.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago? Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to young girls, every one! When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing? Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago? Where have all the young girls gone? Gone to young men, every one! When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone, long time passing? Where have all the young men gone, long time ago? Where have all the young men gone? Gone to soldiers, every one! When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
And where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing? Where have all the soldiers gone, a long time ago? Where have all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one! When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
And where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing? Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago? Where have all the graveyards gone? Gone to flowers, every one!
When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?
The other great antiwar anthem of the '60s came from Country Joe McDonald. It had a more sarcastic approach:
The Fish Cheer & I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag
Gimme an F!
F!
Gimme an I!
I!
Gimme an S!
S!
Gimme an H!
H!
What's that spell ?
FISH!
What's that spell ?
FISH!
What's that spell ?
FISH!
Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Well, come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and get those reds -
The only good commie is the one who's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Huh!
Well, come on Wall Street, don't move slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.
And it's one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
The Broadway musical Hair wasn't just about hippies, drugs and the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. James Rado and Steve Ragni also produced a deeply moving antiwar song with a distinct anti-imperialist tone that still resonates today.
Three Five Zero Zero
Ripped open by metal explosion
Caught in barbed wire
Fireball
Bullet shock
Bayonet
Electricity
Shrapnel
Throbbing meat
Electronic data processing
Black uniforms
Bare feet, carbines
Mail-order rifles
Shoot the muscles
256 Viet Cong captured
256 Viet Cong captured
Prisoners in Niggertown
It's a dirty little war
Three Five Zero Zero
Take weapons up and begin to kill
Watch the long long armies drifting home
The song was written about Vietnam, but the last two lines capture the humiliating defeat awaiting US imperialism in Iraq.
He saw our communist future
Then there are the songs that articulate and envision humanity's communist future. The two best are John Lennon's "Imagine" and "The Equalizer," again from the Clash's "Sandinista" masterpiece. "Imagine" accurately reflects Lennon's softer, utopian, petty bourgeois approach. "The Equalizer" represents the harder, proletarian, class struggle stance of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simonon.
Imagine by John Lennon
Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...
Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...
Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.
The Equalizer
The Clash
No! Gangboss no!
We don't want the whip!
As you get weaker - it will get harder
So don't be like him
Keep your bones of effort and strngth
Don't sell them to him
We don't want no gangboss
We want to equalize
To my fathers fathers fathers father
Work was no joy
When his son had grown of age
You got to work now boy
Never ceasing for many years
Want to follow that boy?
Till half and half is equalized
Put down the tools
See the car see the house
See the fabulous jewels
See the world you have built it with shoulders of iron
See the world but it is not yours say the stealers of Zion
Geneva
Wall Street
Who makes them so fat?
Well well me an' you better think about that
In overdrive whooo
Till humanize is equalize
Put down the tools
Every face on every side
Throw down the tools
Stay at home
Don't check with Rome paint strike on the door
It's one to one the fight is on so don't go to war
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead,"
"I never died," says he, "I never died," says he.
"In Salt Lake, Joe, by God," says I
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge."
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead," says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
"The copper bosses shot you, Joe,
They killed you, Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die," says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Joe says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize, went on to organize."
"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where workingmen are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side, Joe Hill is at their side."
"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill," says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
Paris Commune, 1871
The Internationale: Original English Version
Original words by Eugene Pottier.
Original music by Pierre Degeyter.
Arise ye starvelings [or workers] from your slumbers
Arise ye criminals of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
and at last ends the age of cant.
Now away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise!
We'll change forthwith [or henceforth] the old conditions
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
CHORUS
Then come comrades rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race. (repeat).
We peasants, artisans and others,
Enrolled amongst the sons of toil
Let's claim the earth henceforth for brothers
Drive the indolent from the soil.
On our flesh for too long has fed the raven
We've too long been the vultures prey.
But now farewell to spirit craven
The dawn brings in a brighter day.
CHORUS
No saviour from on high delivers
No trust we have in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.
Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot.
Each at his forge must do his duty
And strike the iron while its hot.
CHORUS
__________________________________
British leftist rocker Billy Bragg gave the communist anthem a more contemporary flavor:
Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all
Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race
Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one Earth on which to live
And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above
March 8-29, 2005--A half million Lebanese answered George Bush and Ariel Sharon in the streets of Beirut today. The militantly anti-imperialist mobilization was called by Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that kicked out the Israeli occupiers in 2000. As the placard indicates, the demonstrators demanded that the true foreign occupiers--Washington and Tel Aviv--end THEIR illegal occupations in Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza and their meddling in Lebanon.--March 8, 2005
March 24, 2005--The bourgeois talking heads who pollute America's television news programs dutifully parrotted Washington's demagogic propaganda against Syria's presence in Lebanon, but they never mentioned why Syria is there in the first place. They never explained how Syria was ASKED to intervene in 1976 by the rightist Lebanon government led by Maronite Christians who were about to lose the civil war to the Muslim/Palestinian alliance fighting for democratic self-rule and liberation from the oppressive rule of the Maronites and the fascistic Phalangist.
Bush's media stooges also neglected to tell their viewers how Washington has been meddling in Lebanon's affairs since 1958, when Eisenhower sent the Sixth Fleet and 10,000 Marines to save Lebanon's rightist president Camille Chamoun's neck. Chamoun was in political trouble because the Lebanese people didn't appreciate the fact that the CIA had rigged the election for him. Some things never change.
Bush's puppets in the press also never mention that Bush's father backed Syria's military presence in Lebanon in 1989 in order to help stabilize the area for US imperialism and reward Syria for supporting the first gulf war.
Syria under both Assads has been a petty bourgeois nationalist regime caught between the vise of world imperialism and the Syrian masses, sometimes bending to the former's pressure, other times bending to the latter's. Recently, Damascus has been bending over backwards to prove its usefulness to Washington, even torturing suspected terrorists like Maher Arar. But even this isn't good enough for what the US has in mind for the Middle East. Petty bourgeois nationalist regimes like Damascus and Tehran, which sometimes are forced to stand up to the US due to the pressure from the workers of those nations, are simply not housebroken enough for Washington's imperial ambitions, which require puppet governments all too willing to do its bidding.
Days after the huge March 8 mobilization in Beirut, another even larger protest called by the Lebanese opposition took place. While there was a palpable sentiment for a Syrian withdrawal, this action took on an even more tangible nationalist character. Everyone--Maronite Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, and secularists showed up, many to protest not only Syria's presence but the US and Israeli aggression that threatens the Middle East and the entire world.
On March 24 we received the following letter from a Lebanese activist regarding the above essay. Our friend agreed with much of "Careful What You Wish For, Bush" but took issue with its description of the Damascus regime as petty bourgeois nationalist and its underestimation of the brutality of that government. His letter raises good points that have stimulated further discussion and clarification of views expressed in the original essay.
dear friends at cosmosleft
i am one of those lebanese who has been peacefully demonstrating for
my country's freedom from syrian occupation. please hear me out a
little.
first, i want to salute your efforts resisting the american radical
right and US-zionist imperialism in the middle east. but i want to
caution you against making a huge mistake. i trust that on the iraq
war, you, like 90% of all the leftists i encountered in my 4 years as
a college student in the US, took the complex stance of
1) not believing US rhetoric, but pointing instead to US interests
2) condemning the abhorrent (often US-backed) dictatorship of saddam
3) celebrating the iraqi people's advances in freedom and democracy,
to whatever extent these advances are taking place
4) deploring the ongoing loss of life and destruction in iraq
5) supporting iraqi freedom fighters exercising their legal right to
attack occupying troops
6) denouncing insurgent atrocities like hostage-killing and car
bombing of innocents.
i ask you to take a similarly complex stance to the situation in lebanon.
i take issue with your characterization of the syrian baath as "a
petty bourgeois nationalist regime caught between the vise of
imperialism and the Syrian masses, sometimes bending to the former's
pressure, other times bending to the latter's." don't be under any
illusions: syria's baathist regime is a brutal dictatorship. it is
horribly oppressive in syria, and exploitative of lebanon (in fact,
the syrian people are by far its primary victims). it has violently
intervened in lebanon's affairs as it saw fit at each time - it cares
nothing for our little country except to use it as a military base and
economic resource to rob - just as we have been used by americans,
palestinians, israelis, and others in our tragic history.
lebanon was once an oasis of free thought in the middle east, and we
lebanese are addicted to the freedoms we once lived, which syria is
trying to stomp out with car bombings. (no less than 4 in the last
several months.) let's be clear: the lebanese opposition is genuine,
not a puppet of foreign interests. in fact, we are a very broad
alliance, spanning from the extremes of left to right, and across
sectarian lines, including people who led militias against each other
not long ago. and we have accomplished a tremendous amount - just one
year ago you couldn't whisper against syrian rule in lebanon, out of
fear of the mukhabarat - the intelligence services. for the first time
in arab history, we have brought down an oppressive govt with
nonviolence and people power - in a region where the only way govts
have changed is in a bloodbath. [since we did that, the same govt was
reappointed by our syrian masters - a slap in the face, followed by
the 2 latest car bombs in christian areas of beirut. all of which will
not deter us, nor shake our commitment to nonviolence.] today we have
shattered the taboo of fear and are expressing ourselves in the
streets for the whole world (especially the arab world) to see.
we totally respect hizbollah and their shi'a supporters when they
oppose us peacefully and democratically. the fact that we have seen
side-by-side demonstrations, with almost zero violence, in a deeply
divided country where only 15 years ago we slaughtered each other in
the streets, is a wonderful victory for lebanese democracy. the
opposition MPs who have been touring the world for support have been
very clear - we support hezbollah and appreciate its liberation of the
south. they are not a terrorist organization but a legitimate
resistance movement, political party, and social organization. we
categorically rule out US military aggression against syria. we
support syria's right to regain its occupied golan heights. we just
want syria to end its violent domination of lebanon so we can settle
our internal disputes among ourselves, peacefully and democratically.
for that we need external help - not war and sanctions, but media
attention and diplomatic initiatives that bring attention to our
cause.
having said that, there is a very serious issue here which i think is
the source of your attitude towards the situation. the US govt is
taking credit for every little advance that takes place in the middle
east - as if the thought of democracy never crossed our minds til we
we saw the US bomb baghdad. that's a lie. we arab reformers and
revolutionaries have been active for as long as tyranny reigned in our
part of the world. we owe bush nothing - in fact he has set back our
cause by associating democracy with american imperialism. i just wrote
an angry letter to charles krauthammer responding to his recent
editorial where he essentially said "bush was right - look at beirut".
don't speak in my name again, i told him. we've been having elections
in lebanon for nearly a century, so shove it! and i told him to stop
implying that the beirut demonstrations stand opposed to the western
demos against the iraq war - cos believe it or not, krauthammer, i was
at both.
i applaud you for noting how bush I gave asad I the green light to
rape lebanon for over a decade, and now bush II is liberating lebanon
from asad II ? - please.
so that's my long rant. to summarize, i'm just begging you not to
disregard the real popular movement for freedom taking place in
lebanon and the arab world, in your rush to attack bush and US
imperialism. bush is trying to trap you into this position, by
stealing liberal causes like 3rd-world liberation and taking credit
for them by associating them with the US "project". don't fall for
bush's lies, we arab democrats have nothing to do with him and resent
his posturing. please take the more complex, closer-to-reality view
that lebanon is beset my multiple bad guys - including the baathist
dictatorship that rules us from damascus.
For a free Lebanon,
a Lebanese activist
COSMOS LEFT REPLIES:
Thanks for your thoughtful and constructive letter. Your
points are well taken. We clearly agree much more than we
disagree. Your fundamental problem with my essay is that it
understates the dictatorial character of the Damascus regime,
and in my attempt to focus the fire on Washington and Tel
Aviv's machinations in Lebanon, your criticism has some merit.
My essay also made clear that I am no friend to Damascus and
give no political support to the Syrian regime. Characterizing it as a bourgeois nationalist regime, however, does not deny it is a brutal
dictatorship as well. Recent history is littered with
examples of bourgeois nationalist governments that are also
brutal dictatorships--including Saddam Hussein's. COSMOS LEFT harbors no illusions to the contrary.
We are in agreement that Hezbollah is a legitimate resistance
movement, and we stand together in opposing US military
aggression against Syria. But that is exactly what's on the
agenda. As a revolutionary socialist in the US, my job is to
block with Syria against US imperialism by demanding that
Washington keep its hands off Syria and Lebanon, so that the Syrian and Lebanese toilers can overthrow capitalist rule in those countries. Toward this end, revolutionaries socialists in the US should not hesitate to articulate the repressive character of the bourgeois Syrian regime.
The possibility that US or Irael intelligence assassinated
Rafik Hariri cannot be ruled out. At the very least, Bush
used his murder to carry out a long planned campaign to
destabilize and overthrow the Syrian government so the US and
Israel can plunder the peoples of the Middle East.
The Lebanese civil war may have ended 15 years ago, but the
social, economic and political divisions continue. The
country's social and economic polarization has only deepened
as Beirut has instituted free market, antilabor policies. I
don't think I need to tell you that Washington doesn't give a
damn about Lebanese sovereignty. Its attempt to turn your
country into an American and Israeli satellite may provoke
another civil war that will destabilize the entire Middle
East.
Thus the hands of this imperialist stooge are soaked with the blood of literally millions of workers and peasants from Vietnam to Honduras to Nicaragua to Iraq.
The only "crisis" regarding Social Security, as far as American workers are concerned, is that Bush and the rest of the capitalist class are trying to dismantle and END it, because the crisis of capitalism and the decline in the rate of profit are DRIVING them to do so. They're saying to American workers, "You're on your own. You're living too long for us to pay for your retirement. Pay for your own. We want to keep all of the surplus value we extract from your labor. It'll help boost our rate of profit. Become a capitalist yourself."
That's how Bush is trying to sell his assault on Social Security, urging workers to help him build an "ownership society," where they become their own bosses and manage their own retirement income. "Pay no attention as we loot your retirement income," he's really saying while dangling the illusion of the parasitic wealth he enjoys. "Just think that you're a capitalist."
This is a fraud, like everything else coming from Bush and the class of exploiters he represents. Bush's privatization plan will not and cannot change the class structure of the US. Workers will not become capitalists. We will be more vulnerable to the harshness of the "free" market. But Bush's ownership society hoax is the ideological underpinning of the entire scheme: keep workers thinking like bosses. It is the logical capitalist answer to the ideological underpinning of Social Security--the working class solidarity upon which the plan is funded. Workers paying for other workers, cementing class ties across the generations.
Bush is facing an "uphill" battle in privatizing Social Security because he's violating the sacred social contract forged from the massive labor upsurge in the 1930s that spawned its creation--you work all your life producing profits for the capitalists, in return for at least some retirement income to buffer us from abject poverty in our old age. Bush's uphill battle is a reflection of the antagonism of the class struggle itself--the different ways capitalists and workers view not Social Security but life itself. To the capitalists, when workers get old, we're useless, no longer a source of profits, a drag on the economy, ready to be tossed away. But workers say, no, we worked all our lives, we have a right to a decent pension in the twilight of our lives.
The enactment of Social Security was a big victory for US workers--keeping tens of millions of workers out of poverty for seven decades. But it was never intended to be a fully funded federal pension. Part and parcel of the fight to save Social Security today will be the fight to expand it so that it does. And we cannot rely on the Democratic Party to be with us in that fight, just as we could not rely on the Democrats to stop the invasion of Iraq. It took colossal battles by the working class to win Social Security. And it will take big battles today to preserve and expand it.
Chertoff was also instrumental in drafting the unconstitutional Patriot Act, illegally detaining and deporting hundreds of Muslim immigrants after 9/11, and orchestrating the brutal railroad and witch hunt of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" who was blindfolded and stripped naked to a table with duct tape while his injuries went untreated for days.
Brought to you by the same sadistic war criminal who tried to hoist Bernard Kerik on the backs of the American people, one of the sleaziest and most corrupt losers to ever disgrace the national stage. From the point of view of the US capitalist ruling class, Chertoff is a much better choice, reflected in his instant anointment as a "respected former prosecutor and appeals judge" by the same propaganda machine that helped Bush lie about the reasons for invading Iraq.
Iraq's Election: Window Dressing for a Murderous Occupation
Cartoonist Steve Bell's View of Iraqi Election
Jan. 31, 2005--An election held under the gun of martial law and a murderous military occupation is not democratic, no matter how much the capitalist government and its kept corporate media bombards us with propaganda that it is. Cheerleaders for Bush and this blood-drenched criminal aggression should think twice before hailing Sunday's vote as a victory for Bush, peace, freedom and democracy. Missing from the self congratulatory analyses of media whores like Bill O'Reilly is the fact that what drove millions of Iraqis to the polls is a desire to end the occupation of their nation by American and British forces. Rightly or wrongly, they viewed the election as a way to recapture some semblance of independence and sovereignty.
"We feel now that we are human beings living in this country," explained 25-year-old Najaf resident Muhammad Abdul-Ridha to the NY Times. "Now I feel I have a responsibility, I have a vote. Things will go right if people leave us alone to do what we want to do. If they leave the Iraqi people to decide for themselves, things will get better."
In other words, Abdul-Ridha is telling Bush, O'Reilly and the rest of the imperialist war criminals, "US OUT OF IRAQ!"
Millions of other Iraqis had no illusions whatsoever in the US-orchestrated election.
"It is not fear that prevents me from voting, but the elections themselves," Immad Muneer, 50, told the Times. "The candidates who get elected will not be able to demand that the foreign forces leave our country. They will be puppets moved by other people."
Most Iraqis know little about the candidates and parties that ran in this election. But many, like Muneer, understand that the leading electoral blocs, Allawi's Iraqi List, the Shiite-dominated Unified Iraqi Alliance, and the Iraqi Communist Party-dominated Peoples Union, all backed the invasion and seek an accommodation with US imperialism in order to eat the political and economic crumbs Bush is willing to throw their way.
Bush apologists in the media and supporters of the occupation in Iraq claim that the election presented a stark choice between Zarqawi-led terrorists and the "freedoms" won by Washington's occupying army. But like most of what these cretins say, this is a false axis. Most Iraqis reject terrorism AND the occupation. They want to be left alone to "decide for themselves," as Abdul-Ridha pointed out.
The problem facing Iraqis is the same facing American working people in US elections--the absence of a working class voice. The electoral blocs mentioned above consist either of businessmen, tribal chiefs, and other layers of Iraq's privileged elite or the Shiite religious hierarchy long denied power by Saddam Hussein. Even the wretched Iraqi Communist Party supported the US invasion, giving new meaning to the phrase "class collaborationism" that has long defined Stalinists from Russia to America.
We Have Not Been Silenced
San Francisco, Jan. 20, 2005
Jan. 20-26, 2005--We have not been silenced. The thousands of protesters who filled Washington's streets to protest Bush's inauguration are only a snapshot of the much broader opposition to the wars, repression and austerity that this capitalist regime is unleashing on the world's working class.
Bush has no mandate for these reactionary policies. His margin of victory was the smallest by an incumbent president in over 100 years. A new Zogby poll shows an astonishingly high 31% of Americans are ashamed to have Bush as president. A majority of Americans are against the brutal occupation of Iraq as well as Bush's schemes to privatize Social Security and revamp the tax code so that workers pay even more and capitalists even less. Many are skeptical towards the government's version of 9/11, and are suspicious of the stench surrounding 9/11, realizing that Washington continues to cynically exploit the tragedy to win public support for the barbaric and long-planned wars of colonial conquest unfolding before our eyes.
Many Americans recognize the same mantras, cliches and lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iran that we heard before the invasion of Iraq. Iran has built several nuclear power plants to illuminate the darkness of semi-colonial underdevelopment--as is their sovereign right to. And as long as the only government in the world that has used nuclear weapons still possesses them and threatens to use them again, Iran, North Korea and every other sovereign nation has the right to build nuclear weapons. Bush and the corporate media are lying about the alleged threat from Iran to cover up the true reason for militarily attacking--install a puppet Iranian regime friendly to American corporations.
Iran is not a threat to the region or the world. Israel, the UK and the US are the biggest threats to peace on this planet, from Gaza to Basra. The Iranian capitalists are a threat to US capitalists, who don't want the upstarts in Tehran to become too big a power in their corner of the world. It is the Iranian workers and peasants who have the right to deal with the bourgeoisie in that country, not Washington or London. Ever since the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979, US imperialism has been salivating over the prospect of installing a puppet regime to do its bidding in this oil rich, strategic nation. That's what Bush's saber rattling against Iran is all about.
Clear thinking Americans know that when Bush speaks of "spreading freedom" around the world, he really means spreading the kind of death, chaos and destruction that he has brought to Iraq. And these Americans will be open to the idea that when Bush and all capitalist ideologues speak of "freedom" they're talking about the freedom of the capitalist class to exploit working people, from Chicago to Baghdad.
Many Americans are disturbed about US soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other gulags around the world. We sense that the problem runs deeper than Specialist Charles Graner, Private Lynndie England, and the other "few rotten apples" who are being scapegoated to cover the responsibility for these crimes that points right to Rumsfeld and his boss, George W. Bush.
As these Americans continue to watch the capitalist media fawn before Bush and his coterie of war criminals, and keep seeing the spineless Democrats supporting his wars, incapable of mounting a serious defense of democratic rights, they will be increasingly open to socialist ideas and revolutionary politics.
Conservatives and liberals alike point to the 59 million Americans who voted for him in November. Conservatives like Bill O'Reilly argue this translates into popular support for Bush. Liberals like Greg Palast and the Nation say it means most Americans are either reactionary like Bush or just plain stupid for voting for someone they disagree with on most major issues like the war, Social Security and taxes.
Palast wrote in his Jan. 20 article, "Oaf of Office": 59 million Americans marched to the polls and voted for George W. Bush....[i]f 59 million Americans agreed with George Bush that every millionaire's son, like him, s houldn't have to pay inheritance taxes....that killing Muslims in Mesopotamia will make them less inclined to kill us in Manhattan; that turning over social security to the casino operators that gave us Enron, WorldCom and world depression is smart economics, then, fine, Mr. Bush deserves the job. But most Americans, bless'm, don't actually believe any of that hokum. YET MOST STILL VOTED FOR HIM!"
Wrong. Most Americans didn't vote for George Bush. Half of America didn't vote. Bush won half of those who did, which means that only a quarter of Americans cast their votes for him. It's safe to say that out of the 50 percent of Americans who didn't vote, most are opposed to Bush and his policies. They didn't bother showing up at the polls because they correctly sense that these elections are meaningless and neither major candidate represents their interests. In this sense, those Americans who don't participate in this fraudulent and undemocratic political system show a great deal more political astuteness than the likes of Palast who harbor illusions that the Democrats are a valid alternative or even the "lesser evil."
While it's true there's no shortage of political backwardness and retarded class consciousness in the US, it's dangerously simplistic to lump the 59 million who did into one monolithic, homogenous mass of ignoramuses. Many workers, hearing the hapless Kerry support the Iraq war while claiming he was an "entrepreneurial Democrat" who'd be "better for business," correctly concluded there was little difference between Kerry and Bush and decided to stay with the existing commander in chief during the perceived "war on terror."These workers and others, disoriented and desperate after decades of betrayal by the Democrats and class collaborationism, were prone to the daily bombardment of fear-mongering, propaganda and deceit by the capitalist government and media. They didn't "march to the polls" to vote for Bush as much as they were too afraid to do anything else.
Of course, out of those 59 million Bush voters, perhaps half, or one eighth of the population, constitute the ultrarightist, Christian fundamentalist core that gives Bush his narrow, unstable social base. These are the lost souls who don't care that 100,000 Iraqis have died since Washington invaded, who aren't all that bothered by the images from Abu Ghraib, who with the help of religious dogma have so internalized the alien class values of the exploiters that only a minority of them will be politically salvaged by the blows of the class struggle.
Those who see Bush's reelection as proof of widespread support for his policies or evidence of the stupidity of American working people wrongly assume that this is a healthy, vibrant representative democracy that accurately reflects the people's will. US bourgeois democracy is debased and decaying. Its elections are nothing but an acute expression of this political degeneration. Both parties represent the capitalist class. American workers are not represented and have no voice in this two party shell game. Further, the central issue in US politics is the Iraq war. A majority of Americans oppose this criminal war, yet this voice found no expression in the Bush/Kerry campaign because both candidates were pro-war.
Consequently, those who look to the Democrats or the electoral process for solutions are similarly deluded. A new political movement is waiting to be built in the United States: a mass socialist movement that takes on the source of the wars and crises enveloping the planet--the capitalist system that puts private profit before human need.
Thousands protest Bush's inauguration in DC, Jan 20, 2005 (AP photo)
