Haiku Politics

US OUT OF IRAQ NOW

The Socialist Party USA opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, and we continue to demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. The United States had no legitimate reason for invading Iraq and it has no legitimate reason to remain there.

The invasion of Iraq was not a mistake, or an error based on faulty intelligence. It was the logical consequence of a foreign policy designed to ensure that U.S. based corporations control vital resources and that the U.S. military dominates key regions throughout the world. The United States is in Iraq to control its vast petroleum deposits and to solidify its control over the Middle Eastern region.

After thirty months of occupation and chaotic violence, mainstream politicians are beginning to question the continued deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq. Nevertheless, a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal was overwhelmingly defeated by both Democrats and Republicans in a recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. While we welcome the first timid signs that the United States is preparing to step back from the Iraqi abyss, we remain committed to an immediate and total withdrawal.

Still, there are worrying signs for the future. After remaining silent for two years, former president Bill Clinton has begun to criticize the Bush administration's war policies. According to Clinton, the problems with the invasion stem from the administration's underestimate of the difficulties inherent in a successful occupation. The United States should have deployed even more troops from the start so that the occupation forces could have sealed off the borders of Iraq as Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.

Clinton has always spoken for the corporate center. His critique of current policies can only lead to further military adventures requiring an even larger military. Unfortunately, the great majority of progressives continue to believe that the Democratic Party can be transformed. In fact, the Democrats have always stood for U.S. imperialism, as they do now. Indeed, Clinton's recent comments demonstrate just how dangerous this illusion can be.

As the United States begins a phased withdrawal from Iraq, it is critical that we maintain popular pressure to accelerate this process and to ensure that it is a total withdrawal of all military and intelligence units. Yet we also need to expand our horizon beyond Iraq. The Socialist Party stands for a drastic reduction in the military budget, beginning with an immediate reduction of 50%. The hundreds of billions of dollars currently wasted on weapons of destruction need to be reallocated for schools, hospitals, mass transit and low-cost housing. We also call for the return of all U.S. soldiers from overseas and the closing of military bases around the world. U.S. imperialism benefits the corporate elite and not working people either here or abroad.

U.S. military force is the glue that holds together a world that is being torn apart by global capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the poor widens under the impact of an integrated world economy, divisions between social classes, regions, countries and ethnic groups are accentuated. Ultimately, the creation of a U.S. foreign policy that is not based on bolstering the empire will require a new society, a democratic socialist society based on decentralization, cooperation and equality. The tasks are enormous, but the need for change is imperative.

Passed unanimously by the SP USA National Action Committee 12/15/05

Posted by The Haikuist at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here's a quote from today's NY Times article on the Bush regime's use of the NSA to spy on Americans :

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting.

In the aftermath of the Judith Miller fiasco, it seems that the Times has shown a continued willingness to do the White House's bidding.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

I was never really expecting Arnold Schwarzeneggar to commute Tookie Williams's death sentence, and now, in the aftermath of the execution, we can only ponder once again the moral bankruptcy of the American justice system.

Tony Blair was asked in parliament about the the fact that 97% of the world's executions take place in China, Vietnam, and the United States. These days, it is the worst human rights violators that generally carry out capital punishment, which means that the US is in particularly interesting company. While condemning capital punishment, Blair, in his response, predictably made excuses for the United States, claiming that the US is a nation characterized by "the rule of law".

Claiming that the US has "the rule of law" is a rather bizarre claim in light of the fact that the US has almost certainly was imprisoning individuals in secret European countries, carried out by agents of the CIA who acted with impunity and beyond the rule of law. And it is also bizarre to talk of the "rule of law" when the US President flouts international law and has advisors who claim that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to the US when it imprisons its "terror suspects", or when it renders to them to other countries to be tortured, or when its own CIA carries out torture in those secret prisons.

Furthermore, when we talk of the "rule of law" in a society where black people are more likely to be executed than white people, it makes a mockery of the very concept.

But let's ignore all of that and suppose that the US really is a nation of justice and law. Blair claimed that "though I strongly disagree with the death penalty, I think if we're looking for human rights abuses it is sometimes right to look elsewhere at severe human rights abuses that happen around the rest of the world." This statement ignores the fact that capital punishment is, in and of itself, a human rights abuse--something that the EU itself recognizes.

Schwarzeneggar's refusal to commute the death sentence is part of a deeper problem in American culture. It has little to do with which party rules a state government. Schwarzeneggar's predecessor, Gray Davis, was a Democrat who staunchly supported the death penalty. Meanwhile, it was a Republican governor in Illinois who instituted a death penalty moratorium.

Tookie Williams will not write any more children's books condemning gang violence, because he is now dead. Such is the irrevocable outcome of taking a human life as a form of punishment--you can't undo death. This is one of the myriad problems with capital punishment. It is important to remember that this isn't about Tookie Williams per se, or his rehabilitation in prison or the books he has written, or whether or not he ever admitted his guilt. It is about all executions, and the morally wrong path that a nation takes when it carries out capital punishment

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

Harold Pinter devotes one section of a longer article published today in Counterpunch to a discussion of the US policy towards Nicaragua during the 1980s. It is important to remind ourselves of Reagan's crimes in Central America for two reasons. First, a ridiculous mythology has developed around Reagan in recent years, particularly since his death--something that is due to an appalling blindness towards the horrible things that he did while in the White House. Second, Reagan's policies in Central American are part of a pattern of imperialism against sovereign nations that continues today, particularly toward nations such as Venezuela.

Here is what Pinter had to say about Nicaragua:

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here's a telling quote from an AP article published today:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that cruel and degrading interrogation methods are off limits for all U.S. personnel at home and abroad. But she gave no examples of banned practices, did not define the meaning of cruelty or degradation, did not say if the rules would apply to private contractors or foreign interrogators and made no mention of whether exceptions would be allowed.

For example, are water boarding, do the attention grab, the attention slap, standing for hours, cold treatment, and water boarding count as examples of banned practices?

It would be interesting to know, but, naturally, Rice always refuses to answer questions about specific practices.

What it thus boils down to is a matter of the Bush regime expecting the world to implicitly trust the US, with no accountability and no public access to the detainees to provide independent confirmation. It is all a laughable charade. We all know it is a charade. Bush knows it, Rice knows it, and so does the rest of the world. The fact is that there is a reason why these actions are carried out in secret. The only question is whether the European nations will carry this investigation forward enough to actually bring meaningful pressure on Bush.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

An article in the Christian Science Monitor discusses the effects that recent layoffs in the US auto industry have had on its victims and on the economy in general. The article asks the following pertinent question:

What's playing out here in America's automotive alley may be the last gasp of the assumption that good factory jobs will last a lifetime. And workers here see it as something more: a warning that the American dream itself is at risk.

The outlines of the challenge go beyond the auto industry, they say - global competition, shrinking union bargaining power, an eroding industrial base. If middle-class paychecks continue to be clipped, they wonder, what will drive the economy forward? What tax revenue will the government have?

This is a valid question that needs to be asked. As global capitalism continues to exert powerful market pressures on the American economy, what is happening to American jobs? Many might point to the fact that the US unemployment rate has dropped since the end of the recession, as a sign that the economy is doing better. But the unemployment rate, in and of itself, doesn't tell us anything about the downward or upward economic mobility of a nation's working class. If certain kinds of jobs go away, and are replaced by lower paying jobs, the unemployment rate in and of itself will not reflect this. As the Monitor article points out:

Nationwide, unemployment remains low by historical standards, but sectors of the labor market, especially manufacturing, have been losing in recent years. And despite a growing economy, wages for nonsupervisory workers haven't been keeping pace with inflation

In other words, despite the rosy picture of the economy that the some economists and government spokespeople have been painting, workers know that the story is a bit different--they know that the wages of workers have been going down over recent years. This is the reality of our current economic system.

The Monitor article also summarizes the argument that apologists for American capitalism often use, namely that "the nation's prosperity hinges on its extraordinary flexibility in deploying labor and investment." Of course, one problem with this argument is that the nation's economic system does not live in a vacuum. In this era of neoliberal globalism, the result of this "flexibility" is to respond to the pressure of global market forces by cutting back on higher paying jobs in the US. As the article points out,

In many cases, the economy's vaunted flexibility has helped displaced workers find new jobs, but typically at lower pay than before. That's what has happened with legions of US steel workers since the 1970s, when that industry declined.

Jared Bernstein, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, says that the typical layoff results in a 10 to 20 percent pay cut for the workers involved. And US manufacturing, long a foothold of working-class prosperity, has been hit particularly hard. "We are losing that foothold at a very rapid pace," he says.

As workers' wages decline in real terms (adjusted for inflation), while the incomes of the ruling capitalist class continue to increase, what this means is that there is a growing gulf in the incomes between the two classes in American society. Whether this bodes a crisis in the short run is difficult to say. But it is clear that for ordinary Americans, the empty promises of the capitalist system are proving to be tragic lies.

What traditionally was seen as protecting workers from the worst excesses of capitalism were the social and government programs of American liberalism. Capitalism could be tamed, so the argument went. But the political collapse of liberalism in the US, combined with the powerful pressures that global market capitalism have placed on the US economic system, which is no longer insular enough to resist these pressures, have shown that traditional post-New Deal liberalism offers no way out of this conundrum. The solution instead lies with a new paradigm in which the people democratically manage social resources for human need rather than profit. Only by overturning the capitalist system at a global level can these problems be solved.

Posted by The Haikuist at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

The London newspaper The Independent has provided a chilling summary of the known facts surrounding the CIA's use of torture.

According to the article, several CIA agents have publicized what is going on because they were appalled by what has been going on:

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know 'the direction their agency has chosen'.

The CIA even had some apparent difficulty finding interrogators who would use such practices:

just over a dozen CIA interrogators were trained and authorised to use the 'enhanced interrogation' techniques. At least three had declined involvement.

What is important in this issue is that the CIA is currently able to do all of this with impunity. The fact that the CIA is keeping prisoners in secret sites, in violation of international law and human rights standards, means that they are allowed to act without any international supervision. This need for secrecy has always been an important matter for human rights violators who commit the most egregious outrages. According to the article:

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of "rendition": flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. "If you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria," one former CIA agent is reported as saying. The McCain amendment, however, will have no impact on foreign torturers. It is mainly aimed at halting the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib, where routine humiliations degenerated into sadism.

Yet only the low-ranking military police caught on camera in Abu Ghraib have been prosecuted. America's covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: "After 9/11, the gloves were off." At one point, according to Newsweek, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.

In light of European outrage over the apparent presence of secret prisons within the EU, Condoleeza Rice has already indicated that she will go on the offensive on the matter. She has already implicitly suggested that the CIA's techniques are a good thing because they have produced valuable results. According to Rice, these tactics have "stopped terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, in Europe as well as in the U.S. and other countries." Although she denies that the US carries out torture, the reality is that she is simply engaging in semantics without justifying that claim with any specifics.

Among the torture tactics that the CIA has used, according to the Independent article, are the following:

THE ATTENTION GRAB: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him. Israel, the only democracy to have openly debated coercion of prisoners, declared this legal in 1987, but the Supreme Court ruled it out in 1999

THE ATTENTION SLAP: Interrogators may deliver "an open-handed slap", which is "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear"

THE BELLY SLAP: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage

STANDING FOR HOURS: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to a ring bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are claimed to be effective in yielding confessions

COLD TREATMENT: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10C, and constantly doused with cold water. Misapplication of this technique is blamed for the death of a detainee in Kabul

WATERBOARDING: The prisoner is bound to a board, head slightly below the feet. Plastic is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him, or his head is lowered into a bath. The gag reflex is automatic; few can endure more than a matter of seconds

It will be interesting to see if the European heads of state back down on this issue. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has already made plain her intention of being more of a lapdog to US imperialism. Despite all the attention that this issue has been given in recent days in the European press, one has to wonder if the leaders of those nations will simply be too intimidated by the US to do anything about it.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments

Today's New York Times featured a story on the layoffs taking place at GM--particularly focusing on Saturn, where the dreams and hopes of a "different kind of car company" have been crumbling in the face of the realities of market capitalism.

The failures that are evident at Saturn illustrate the point that even a "different kind" of capitalist enterprise remains, after all is said and done, a capitalist enterprise. Workers under capitalism continue to be at the mercy of market forces, regardless of how "different" the company might be. In the face of these impersonal forces that govern capitalism, workers are confronted with their utter helplessness:

Workers have got to be asking themselves, What do we have to do?" said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

"The social contract was that if we build a quality product, we're going to have jobs, our kids are going to have jobs, and the plant will still be in town," Professor Chaison said. "Now, that idea is gone."

"What do we have to do?" is both a rhetorical lament and a reflection of the reality that there is nothing that workers can do under a system such as capitalism, where there is no rational democratic decisionmaking over society's resources; instead, workers are subject to forces outside their control. Thus the rhetorical question "what do we have to do?" has only one possible answer--the only way to solve the problem is to replace capitalism with democratic socialism.

Many might have suggested that the Saturn model represented a reformation of capitalism. That is because it attempted to engage the workers in a kind of partnership with their capitalist bosses. As the article points out:

Saturn was "an opportunity to show everyone the worker had some influence in the making and building of a car, that we weren't just line rats," said Mark Wunderlin, 49, who moved here from Oklahoma City in 1990.

Saturn workers took part in brainstorming sessions, sharing ideas with management that they might have never mentioned at a conventional plant. Leaders of the U.A.W. served alongside G.M. executives on an advisory council, sharing decisions affecting Saturn.

Granting a measure of worker participation in a private capitalist enterprise that is owned by capitalists, however, is not socialism. It is an attempt at reforming elements of the traditional capitalist workplace model--but, and this is important--it does so while retaining capitalist fundamentals. The workers at Saturn plants did not own or control the means of production. Similar attempts, often by legislation, at instituting worker involvement within the context of capitalist enterprises has been tried in various countries--Germany, for example. But the fundamental reality is that, when push comes to shove, the helplessness of the worker in the face of capitalism cannot help but rear its ugly head, as capitalist market forces will ultimately turn against the worker.

The solution to this kind of helplessness lies in creating a society in which workers, communities, and consumers manage social resources to satisfy human needs rather than profits. Private ownership of the commanding heights of industry can be turned over to the radically democratic institutions of people's organizations that emerge in the struggle against capitalism. Once workers have a democratic participation in a rationally planned economy, they will no longer be overcome by the helpless that leads to the question, "What do we have to do?" Helplessness comes from powerlessness. Give the power to the people, and the helpless will end. That is the vision of revolutionary democratic socialism.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments