by Billy Wharton
from Common Dreams

Call it the nightmare before Christmas or Santa’s lump of healthcare coal. Either title captures the disastrous qualities of the healthcare reform bill passed by Senate on Thursday. After months of media coverage, a summer of wild town hall meetings and all the high-sounding rhetoric one could swallow, a 2,000 page monster has been birthed.

Though President Barack Obama hailed the bill’s passage by declaring, "This will be the most important piece of social legislation since Social Security passed in the 1930s," it carries few of the universal qualities or public control of the Social Security legislation. For all the political theater associated with the bill, remarkably little in the bigger picture of healthcare in America has changed - private health insurers still run the system, Washington politicians are still gathering in the campaign contributions and millions will still be left without health insurance.

Bad Gets Worse in the Senate
The Senate bill is even weaker than the already comprised piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives. The number of uninsured capable of gaining insurance will be somewhere around 24 million. With private plans as the alternative, estimates are that more than $450 billion in tax-payer money will be transferred to private insurers in order to allow the uninsured to gain coverage. However, that coverage will be something akin to the lowest form of car insurance – you get by before the eyes of the state, but get into an accident and you will find yourself facing massive debt. Estimates are that the low-coverage plans would only cover 60% of costs. Even worse news comes for the more than 20 million people who will likely remain uninsured. They will now also have to forfeit 2% of their annual income because of it. A nightmarish scenario indeed – uninsured and penalized!

Smaller parts of the bill also promise negative outcomes. Medicare plans are still being trimmed by $43 billion. Democrats claim it is fat-cutting through the elimination of tax-payer subsidies to private insurers. Seniors fear the long-term impact of the cuts will result in reduced services, especially for quality of life issues such as the ability to participate in exercise programs for free.
Reproductive rights also took a hit. While the Senate bill moves off the harsh language on abortion proposed by the Stupak amendment in the House bill, it still represents a serious reversal of reproductive rights on a national scale. If a female subscriber wishes to use her healthcare plan to pay for an abortion, she will have to pay into a separate fund connected to plan. Given the unexpectedness of most unwanted pregnancies, this measure practically eliminates the ability to use insurance to obtain an abortion. The Stupak amendment was defeated in words, but its content seems certain to return in practice.

Finger-pointing Misses the Big Picture
Who is to blame for such a fiasco? Much progressive ink has been spilt in examining the days leading up the Christmas Eve coup. Joe Lieberman has been a particular target, and even Bernie Sanders has taken some grief for removing his single-payer amendment and, ultimately, voting yes on the bill. Yet this focus on the theatrics of the approval misses the larger structural dimensions of how this bill will become law. Sure, Lieberman converted his leverage as a fence-sitting Conservative into a further watering of bill and Sanders left the field without much of a fight, preferring a go-along-to-get-along approach in order to fight another day. Neither of these statements says much about how this bill came to be.

The real story of this bill is rooted in two moments. One came from the campaign trails of 2008, where massive sums of campaign contributions from health insurers and pharmaceutical companies tipped the balance of national and local elections throughout the country. Democrats drank deeply from this revenue stream and proved to be loyal servants to both the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical lobby. The contributions were targeted – committees that would be formulating the healthcare reform bill, such as the House Committee on Ways and Means, received an inordinate amount of funds. No wonder then, that when candidate Barack Obama declared a goal of “universal healthcare coverage,” little rebuttal was heard from the normally vocal insurance lobby. The fix was in and it was insured by some $2 million dollars in donations to his campaign.

Just to insure that things went well for the healthcare lobby, an army of lobbyists was mobilized at a critical juncture in May 2009. The lobby spent a reported $2.3 million a day peddling influence. Such a massive expenditure of political and financial resources insured that the perspectives of private insurers were represented at every committee meeting and in the offices of every elected representative. The lobby was also buffered by the efforts of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which successfully exported their free-market notion that “insurance exchanges” could cure the ills of rising healthcare costs. Soon everyone – from Barack Obama to Harry Reid and even Howard Dean in his statement opposing the bill – was parroting this line. This, despite the fact that nearly sixty years of private control, through free-market policies, over healthcare has created a national emergency in the cost and access to care. So much for learning from history.

Single-Payer: Union Hall or Lobby Day?
There was some resistance to this process as single-payer proponents did their best to fight the good fight. Massively outgunned in the realm of financial resources, they turned to a campaign of civil disobedience that bore witness to the sheer hypocrisy of the proceedings. Democracy was not in motion in the House committees that formulated the bills, and doctors, healthcare activists and victims of private insurers rallied to express their dissent. For their trouble, these activists received stinging rebukes from some of the very same politicians they had championed as friends. Not only Sanders, but Representative John Conyers, the author of the single-payer bill HR 676, voted in favor of the watered-down reform proposal. Both yielded to expediency and provided a useful lesson in how power politics work in Washington, where you are only as good as your next campaign contribution or legislative horse-trade.

In the end, the movement in support of single-payer was too thin – not able to mobilize large numbers or exercise any influence on a political process saturated with corporate funds. Single-payer activists will have to return to running broad educational campaigns with an eye toward developing a movement with solid roots in working communities throughout the country. They may pick up some new allies from a labor movement that recoiled from unfettered support of the Democrats once the terms of the Senate bill were released. Now wonder then that the bill was swiftly forced through – popular support was rapidly dwindling. In the end, a painful lesson may have been learned - only the ungovernability of the people in motion can win single-payer. To accomplish this, the church congregation, the dinner table and the union hall are more potent weapons than cultivating “friends” in the Senate or House.

The Healthcare Scrooges
Like Scrooge before his revelation, the health insurance industry and their Democratic and Republican representatives have one-track minds – money, money, and money. Such a singular pursuit blinds one to the reality of the social suffering that the three ghosts introduced old Scrooge to.

A day may come, perhaps even sometime soon, when the millions of sufferers wake up from this nightmare in order to assert the only quality that no socio-economic system can strip them of – their humanity. Then we might not be willing to offer our healthcare Scrooges the chance to reform themselves. It will be right to the political grave for the private insurers and their political lackeys in order to insure that healthcare becomes the birth-right of all the people.

What a wonderful Christmas present that would be.

***

Billy Wharton is the Co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and Editor of The Socialist.

by Josh Hatala, Faith & Socialism Commission member
from Socialist Party USA

The Holidays are a time filled with stark contradictions. While most religions offer inspiring messages of peace and love, commercial enterprises attempt to put a price tag on every human emotion and social relation. But the shiniest presents in the world can’t hide the raw inequalities that exist in our country and across the globe. This Holiday season, as a member of the Faith and Socialism Commission, I ask you to consider what really matters - our communities, our planet and the cause of social justice.

What lessons do the scriptures offer religious Socialists during this time of the year? For Jewish people, the story of Hanukkah commemorates a miracle attesting to God’s love for His people, as well as fidelity to truth in times of hardship. Within the story of the rededication of the temple after persecution by Antiochus IV, and the unexpected burning of lamp oil for eight days, lies another truth- perhaps more interesting and sadly still relevant today. At the core of the Hanukkah story is a celebration of the Jewish victory over the Seleucid Empire. Then, as now, peoples
living under the domination of empires are subject to the will of that empire- whether it be the Seleucids or a modern-day empire of global capital. The minority Jews stood little chance against this mighty empire, yet they fought for the continuation of their communities, their customs, and their beliefs. They stood up to empire- and won.

There is also a message of liberation within the familiar Christmas story. In the context of the Roman Empire, the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, a boy was born to a mother who, as tradition has it, declared:

“ He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

During his time on Earth, Jesus exalted and fed the poor and castigated the rich who had made idols of their earthly wealth, declaring that, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” - a saying important enough to Jesus’ disciples to be included in three of the four canonical Gospels.

How might Jesus respond to the massive disparities in wealth in the United States? Or to the fact that 50 million people -including almost one in four children- struggled this past year to obtain sufficient food? How would He react to global inequalities such as the sad fate of the 18,000 children who die each day from hunger? What would He have to say about the wars initiated by modern empires? It seems obvious in these cases whom he would rebuke, and whom he would aid- which system he would indict, and which he would promote.

Jesus turned the “worldly” wisdom of His day on its head and taught that His kingdom is a kingdom of justice for the oppressed, where the mightiest of this world are in fact the lowest in His. Jesus placed God’s kingdom of peace and justice in direct opposition to an unjust system of imperial rule.

This holiday season let us not forget those who like the Jews of Judea, or the early followers of Jesus, suffer at the hands of empires. Let’s remember the enduring light the Jews commemorate, or the “light of the world” that Jesus became to his followers, as symbols of hope for the future. With this hope let’s act with resolve to challenge injustice, defeat the modern empires, and build bonds with our fellow humans strong enough to make real the message of peace and love that is so central to the holiday season. Our traditions show us that this is possible and, just as importantly, that we are on the right side of history when we do so.

by Dave Zirin
from The Huffington Post

It didn't make SportsCenter, but one of history's most influential sportswriters died this week at the age of 98. His name was Lester Rodney. Lester was one of the first people to write about a young Negro League prospect named Jackie Robinson. He was the last living journalist to cover the famous 1938 fight at Yankee Stadium between "The Brown Bomber" Joe Louis and Hitler favorite, Max Schmeling. He crusaded against baseball's color line when almost every other journalist pretended it didn't exist. He edited a political sports page that engaged his audience in how to fight for a more just sports world. His writing, which could describe the beauty of a well-turned double play in one sentence and blast injustice in the next, is still bracing and ahead of its time. He should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead he was largely erased from the books.

If you have never heard of Lester Rodney, there is a very simple reason why: the newspaper he worked at from 1936-1958 was the Daily Worker, the party press of the U.S. Communist Party. Lester used his paper to launch the first campaign to end the color line in Major League Baseball. I spoke to Lester about this in 2004 and he said to me, "It's amazing. You go back and you read the great newspapers in the thirties, you'll find no editorials saying, 'What's going on here? This is America, land of the free and people with the wrong pigmentation of skin can't play baseball?' Nothing like that. No challenges to the league, to the commissioner, no talking about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, who were obviously of superstar caliber. So it was this tremendous vacuum waiting."

The campaign was integrated into the Party's anti-racist work of the 1930s: "I spoke to the leaders of the YCL [the Young Communist League]. We talked about circulating the paper [at ballparks]. It just evolved as we talked about the color line and some kids in the YCL suggested, 'Why don't we go to the ballparks-to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds-with petitions?' We wound up with at least a million and a half signatures that we delivered straight to the desk of [baseball commissioner] Judge Landis."

As Lester fought to end the Color Ban, he also never stopped highlighting and covering the Negro League teams, giving them press at a time when they invisible men outside of the African American press. But it was Jackie Robinson who captured Lester's imagination. Armed with a press pass to the Ebbets Field locker room, he saw up close the way Robinson was told to "just shut up and play" despite the constant harassment during his inaugural 1947 campaign. "Jackie was suppressing his very being, his personality," said Lester. "He was a fiercely intelligent man. He knew his role and he accepted it. And the black players who followed him knew what he meant too."

Lester saw the way their play -- and their courage -- helped inspire the struggle for Civil Rights, especially in the South. Lester told me about a dramatic exhibition game in Atlanta where all the dynamics of the Black Freedom Struggle were on display. "This exhibition game wound up with the Black fans being allowed in because they had overflowed the segregated stands, they had poured in from outlying districts to see the first integrated game in Georgia history. The Klan had said, 'This must not happen.' That night there was this tremendous sight of Robinson, [Dodgers African American players] Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella coming out and the black fans behind the ropes and in the stands standing and roaring their greeting. A large sector of whites were just sitting and booing. Then other white people, hesitantly at first, stood up and consciously differentiated themselves from the booers and clapped. This was an amazing spectacle. This was the Deep South many years before the words civil rights were widely known. So it had its impact... Roy Campanella, once said to me something like, 'Without the Brooklyn Dodgers you don't have Brown v. Board of Education.' I laughed, I thought he was joking but he was stubborn. He said, 'All I know is we were the first ones on the trains, we were the first ones down South not to go around the back of the restaurant, first ones in the hotels.' He said, 'We were like the teachers of the whole integration thing.'"

Lester would still become emotional when he recalls Jackie Robinson and his impact. "There are very few people of whom you can say with certainty that they made this a somewhat better country. Without doubt you can say that about Jackie Robinson. His legacy was not, 'Hooray, we did it,' but 'Buddy, there's still unfinished work out there' He was a continuing militant, and that's why the Dodgers never considered this brilliant baseball man as a manager or coach. It's because he was outspoken and unafraid. That's the kind of person he was. In fact, the first time he was asked to play at an old-timers' game at Yankee Stadium, he said "I must sorrowfully refuse until I see more progress being made off the playing field on the coaching lines and in the managerial departments." He made people uncomfortable. In fact it was that very quality which made him something special. He always made you feel that 'Buddy, there's still unfinished work out there.'" We can absolutely say the same about Lester Rodney, albeit with a twist. Yes, Lester made you feel like there was unfinished work out there. But he also made you feel like the great fun in life was in trying to get it done. That and seeing a perfectly turned 6-4-3 double play.

For more on Lester Rodney, read Press Box Red by Irwin Silber

Follow Dave Zirin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edgeofsports

by John Oliver Mason

On the road

Are the trucks

And the tanks

Of the forces of the State

To put down the rising

Of the people

Cars

Trash cans

Furniture

Are our fortresses

The State pays millions

Of billions

To spread the lies

It wants to believe

And how do we get it across?

“Hey! Did you hear?”

“No, when?”

“Tonight!”

“Sweet!”

Justice versus Juxtaposition

The Socialist WebZine was recently headed with a multiple choice question:
What deserves more political attention the right to marry or the right to adopt children?
• Right to Marry
• Right to Adopt
• Neither, the bourgeois family unit is an outdated relic
In Sophie's Choice, the William Styron novel that was made into a Meryl Streep film, Sophie is forced - in a moment - to make a barbaric choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life. She is forced, at gunpoint, by Nazis, to make this devastating choice. In talking about the film, people frequently focus on how Sophie could have made the choice she made and they (as she) question her morality in having made her choice. With this focus, the victim not only endures the burden, but also takes the blame. It is often only secondarily that people focus on the barbarians who forced this monstrous choice to be made.

The way the marriage versus adoption question was posed in The Socialist WebZine also tends to make the victim responsible and ignore the perpetrator. Unlike Sophie, the reader is not likely to be answering the question at gunpoint. Nevertheless, it's wrong to ask the reader to make such a choice at all. As socialists we need to be focused on indicting the system that would try to force us to make such barbaric choices.

I'm also inclined to believe that if the question had been perhaps –
Which deserves more political attention?
• A woman's right to chose
• The use of the criminal justice system against people of color
• Neither, they're both bourgeois social concerns that distract from the issue of class
Then we might have seen some pointed angry responses from people who righteously recognize that it's counterproductive to juxtapose struggles against each other when what we need to be doing is attacking the system that causes the oppression that necessitates these struggles.

As socialists we need to avoid such juxtapositions. They are distracting. We need to instead be focusing a hot light on sources of injustice.

Jim Sanders


Editor's response

Jim’s letter touches on an important dilemma socialists face on a daily basis. Make the hard choice – often less dramatic and fatalistic than the one portrayed in Sophie’s Choice – of movement organizing or enjoying the clean hands offered by ideological purity? Successful movements of the past, even those of a socialist nature, suggest that how one decides on tactical issues and what measures are employed to gain small victories may be as important as the content of the issue. Little victories build up over time and build the confidence and habits of oppressed folks. To accomplish this, difficult questions must be addressed.

Despite these lessons, most Socialist projects of the 20th century, as Rick Wolff indicates in the July/August 2009 edition of The Socialist, have been haunted by their decided bias toward attempting to resolve only the macro questions of injustice offered by capitalism. Saying “it’s the system stupid” is simply not enough. One must examine the small ways in which injustice is perpetuated, and how new forms are summoned into existence, including through decisions made by popular social movements themselves. Indeed, the bedrock principles of democratic socialism demand that we ask why we do some things and not others – why marriage equality and not adoption, why family structure and not our workplaces.

It is clear that momentum has been built in a particular direction inside of the gay rights movement. Some of this trajectory can be attributed to the nature of the right-wing attack and another part to the strategy of the movement itself. However, many veteran queer-rights radicals have been surprised by the direction the movement they helped establish has taken. Some have begrudgingly participated, but view the question of marriage as a decidedly conservative one, half-jokingly renaming marriage equality as “the right to be miserable” movement. There have developed, as a result, some interesting, and potentially liberatory, tensions between radicals and more mainstream participants.

Finally, the poll is a poll - a few small sentences meant to capture the complexity of political reality. Judged by its ability to capture what is just, it will fail every time. At their best, however, polls should serve to provoke readers – to outrage, to pose hard questions and to invoke a response beyond the available choices. Great to see that the WebZine has done so in at least one instance.

Billy Wharton
Editor, Socialist WebZine

from Wikipedia

Louis Pasteur (pronounced: [pastøʁ] December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of disease. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. Pasteur also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals. His body lies beneath the Institute Pasteur in Paris in a spectacular vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.

Socialist Party USA Statement

While citizens in most other industrialized nations enjoyed the benefits of publicly administered healthcare from the aftermath of WW II forward, Americans have suffered under a healthcare system dominated by private corporations. For-profit healthcare has produced negative health outcomes at all levels of the system. More than 48 million people have no health insurance, 30 million more are underinsured and 6 out of 10 Americans report that they have either delayed or deferred a necessary medical procedure in the last year. Americans are more than ready for publicly-run healthcare that guarantees access at all levels of the system.

Unfortunately, the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, The Affordable Healthcare for America Act (HR 3962), and the proposals being considered by the Senate will not provide the relief Americans so desperately need. Instead, these reforms were shaped and, in some cases, authored by the very same private interests who have spent decades collecting massive profits by restricting access to care. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama sensed the growing public anger about healthcare and scored many popularity points for promising “universal healthcare coverage.” Once in office, after taking millions from the healthcare lobby, his rhetoric shifted to the neoliberal promise of “choice and competition” in healthcare.

The primary problem with HR 3962 and the Senate proposals is that all of the changes they propose are made within a for-profit system. The House Bill strips the insurance companies of the right to deny coverage based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, it de-links the public option from Medicare reimbursement rates, thereby surrendering pricing to the private sector. The Bill removes the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by private insurers. However, it simultaneously mandates that all Americans carry some form of health insurance, thereby herding millions into low-coverage high-fee private plans. Each step in a positive direction is coupled with a restructuring that will enrich private insurance companies and pharmaceutical makers.

The bills lost further reform credentials as Democrats cut last minute deals with Republicans. Immigrants were removed from eligibility for the public option, abortions were written out of the proposal and Medicare funding was cut. The Medicare cuts are particularly cruel, since they will reduce an already compromised plan to bare bones coverage. Some of the cuts will limit private insurance profiteering, but others will slash necessary items such as exercise programs for seniors. Overall, these omissions signal that the reforms are not about providing comprehensive medical coverage, but about political expediency within the establishment political class. The next round of negotiations in the Senate is sure to produce even further regressive measures as campaign-donation driven legislators cut more deals.

What people in this country need is healthcare. It is their right as human beings. The only way to secure this right is to place the healthcare system in public hands–-to remove the profit-motive from the system. Single-payer healthcare, as embodied in House Resolution 676, would be a positive step in this direction. It would provide universal access to care to all residents of the United States by abolishing private health insurance companies. In thirteen clearly written pages, HR 676 does the things the 1,990 page HR 3962 does not. Access to care is made universal, a framework is created to make bulk negotiations with hospitals and doctors and healthcare activists would be freed to set their sights on making the pharmaceutical industry public as well.

The Socialist Party USA therefore encourages its members and supporters to continue their work in the single-payer movement and to pressure elected representatives to vote “No” on the Senate proposal and, eventually, on the merged bill. All non-violent forms of protest should be employed to prevent the passage of this legislation. The protests should clearly oppose the legislation. We do not want a stronger public option, we want what is rightfully ours–-unfettered access to healthcare services.

The passage of the weak and contradictory reform bills threaten to disgrace the notion that the public sector should play a prominent role in the administering of healthcare. Resisting the Obama, House and Senate proposals for reform not only promotes the idea that healthcare is a human right, it sends the message that people will not allow private sector campaign contributions to drive politics–-the satisfaction of our needs as humans should shape legislation.

Access to healthcare is our human right. We must build a movement to secure this right.

Say no to HR 3962!
Say no to Obama Care!
Yes to single-payer!
Yes to a socialized medical system!

by David Rovics
from Rag Blog

Dec. 15, 2009 - COPENHAGEN - The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Copenhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media has been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first place, can get lost.

Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the U.S., Australia and others are leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries.

The center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of small NGOs and other riffraff. Many of the folks involved with the process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on elsewhere in town.

Denmark: social democracy to police state?

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish empire brought some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy. It is this check on Danish capitalism that has allowed this wealth to be so impressively distributed, bringing Denmark a quality of life that is the envy of most anyone who knows about it.

Of course, as in any society, there are different forces at work in Denmark. Most Danes would identify much more with those peasants who rebelled in the 17th century and helped pave the way for modern Denmark, not with the soldiers who massacred them, but those soldiers were also Danes. Most Danes would prefer to remember the heroic stories of resistance during the occupation of Denmark in the 1940's, but there were also many enthusiastic collaborators.

At so many points in history there are pivotal moments when things can go different ways, and something pushes events in a certain direction. The direction of social democracy has been the ascendant one in Denmark for quite some time, but this was able to happen for a variety of reasons -- the strength and purpose of the Danish labor movement, the fear on the part of the rich of the specter of communism, the moral bankruptcy of the leaders of society who collaborated with the Nazis after the war, and so on.

If people know anything about this most southerly of the Scandinavian countries they know it's full of windmills. Germany actually has lots more windmills than Denmark, but many of them are made in Denmark anyway, at the Vespas factories in Jutland (where they recently laid off thousands of workers).

There's a reason Denmark has been a pioneer in windmill technology, and it is, to a large extent, the Danish environmental movement. In the early 70's the Danish government was thinking about building its first nuclear reactor, following the example of Sweden, which has one right across the water, upwind.

People inspired by ideas of communal living and experiential learning formed a community centered around a Free School near the little village of Ulfborg and began making plans to build the world's largest windmill. Over the course of three years, working with scientists, artisans and large numbers of hippies, they built the world's largest windmill. They refused to patent any of their ground-breaking technology, making it all available for anybody to use. Their windmill, still standing and providing power to the community 35 years later, is the prototype for the big windmills you'll see scattered around Denmark and the world.

This windmill provided more than just energy -- it and the movement that built it provided political capital. Those in parliament arguing for a nuclear reactor lost the fight, and Denmark became a nation of windmills.

For the past decade or so, however, Denmark has been run by a coalition led by the neoliberal, xenophobic Vestre party. They have been privatizing hospitals and passing some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in the world. They have had troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have been forcibly deporting refugees back to these war-torn countries.

Fueled by the changes to Danish society wrought by membership in the European Union (EU), this conservative coalition keeps winning elections. Along with a love of capitalism and a fear of foreigners, these people also can't stand hippies or punks or other dissenting elements, and they are on a quest to “normalize” the 900-person intentional community in the heart of Copenhagen known as Christiania. To that end they conducted a police raid early one morning in 2007 and destroyed a house they deemed to have been illegally constructed. (I got my first taste of Danish tear gas there a couple hours later.)

Shortly before this home demolition in Christiania, hundreds of Danish police had landed on the five-story squatted social center known as Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) by helicopter early one morning. They fumigated the place with tear gas, arrested those inside, jailed them for several months, and proceeded to follow the new government policy of destruction of the house. Masked construction workers from Poland did the dirty work, since Danish unions forbid their members from doing work that requires police protection.

Over the course of the next year and a half, however, the government was forced to backtrack on their plan to "civilize" Denmark. The movement to support Ungdomshuset grew dramatically, involving a number of fairly significant riots and probably more important, a weekly drill of marches every Thursday for a year and a half, involving many hundreds and often thousands every week.

Eventually the chief of police and the mayor of Copenhagen had to admit that their policies had been a mistake and they gave the movement what it was demanding, a new house, bought and paid for by the city. (Left wing foundations had offered to buy a new building for the movement but these offers were refused on principle -- the line was that the government destroyed Ungdomshuset and they should replace it with something comparable.)

In the course of the riots and demonstrations around Ungdomshuset the police preemptively arrested hundreds of people on a few occasions. They weren't technically allowed to do this, but they came up with excuses. One eyewitness told me that the police started arresting people, claiming some of them were throwing rocks at them, although the rock-throwing had clearly started only after the police began arresting the assembled crowd.

Preemptive arrests at climate summit

A new law was passed in preparation for the climate summit which makes this kind of mass preemptive arrest perfectly legal -- all the police need to do is arbitrarily determine that an area is designated as a “riot zone” and then they can arrest whoever they want. Any non-Danes arrested can be held for 40 days (including people who were born in Denmark but are not citizens, a reality for many here that may seem surprising to those in the U.S. reading this). It went into effect a week before last Thursday, and since then the Danish police have carried out mass preemptive arrests that dwarf anything they've done before. They don't even need to pretend they have any justification for what is essentially collective punishment.

Those of you in the United States should be familiar with preemptive mass arrests. If you haven't had your head in the sand for the past few decades then you know this happens regularly at demonstrations throughout our great democracy. But it's new for Denmark, and it is a serious step in the direction of the Americanization, you could say, of the country.

Being an American, I can say first-hand that emulating U.S. policies in the areas of law enforcement or the privatization and outsourcing of industry is all a very bad idea, at least as far as the vast majority of people are concerned -- but the interests of a privileged minority are what moves people like the Danish Prime Minister, not the interests of society as a whole.

The policies and concerns of the new Danish government were represented eloquently by the kettling and mass arrest of a small march that was en route to commit acts of civil disobedience at the docks run by the Maersk corporation. Maersk owner A.P. Mø11er is one of the world's richest men and runs one of the world's biggest shipping companies (look for his name, it's everywhere).

Blockading docks is illegal, of course, and under the normal legal procedures in a democratic society people committing such acts would be told to stop and after a certain amount of time would be arrested, fined, brought to trial or whatever. Yesterday, however, as with the day before, hundreds of people were preemptively arrested, including many who had no intention of committing any illegal acts, such as one reporter for the Times of London.

I narrowly avoided being arrested two days ago. Of those arrested the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the rock-throwing incident at the stock exchange that apparently set off the police action. The overwhelming majority didn't even know anything had happened at the stock exchange. All they knew was they were suddenly, randomly being arrested while taking part in a permitted march organized in part by the very mainstream Social Democratic Party. This was a family march involving tens of thousands of people with no civil disobedience or other illegal acts planned as part of it.

The new law may allow for mass preemptive arrests, but international treaties which Denmark has signed called the Geneva Conventions outline certain guidelines for the treatment of detainees which were clearly violated by the Danish police. People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavement, not allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, adding to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures.

Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. Anne Feeney's husband Juli, a 66-year-old Swede who had been slowly walking beside a carriage, was handcuffed and made to sit on the frozen ground. Among the marchers from Tvind, the Free School movement with whom I was walking, those arrested include headmasters and teachers from throughout Europe and Africa. Every one of the Norwegians I had just been hanging out with the day before from Trondheim were arrested.

I participated in a march that was very quickly thrown together involving several hundred people, starting near the Valby train station and going to the prison to which most detainees had been brought. The police surrounded (escorted?) us and seemed to be thinking about arresting all of us, but apparently ultimately thought better of it. Instead they informed us as we were marching towards the prison that most of those detained had just been released, and that we were welcome to march to the prison but no further.

Outside the prison -- a temporary prison that used to be a brewery -- I heard more stories of how the Anarchist Black Cross representatives who had been attempting to provide soup and solace to people as they were being released were told to leave the premises. When they attempted to set up at the train station a kilometer away they were again told to leave. So as most people left the prison there wasn't even anyone to meet them and tell them where to find the train station. Most detainees were at no point given any food by the police. After six hours some had been given water.

Tonight after Naomi Klein, Lisa Fithian, and others from Climate Justice Action held a meeting at the Big Tent in Christiania, hundreds of police and dozens of police vehicles were involved in more or less laying siege to Christiania, which was defended, as in the past, by hundreds of masked, black-clad young people making burning barricades and throwing large numbers of bottles at the police, who then fired lots of tear gas. Tonight the police reportedly used a water cannon to extinguish the main burning barricade and arrested 200. Most of this happened while Anne Feeney and I were playing a concert in the Opera House, not far from the main entrance.

The future is not written. There was nothing inevitable about Denmark building a nuclear reactor, and because of the environmental movement it built windmills instead. Equally, there is nothing inevitable about Denmark becoming a neoliberal police state. The years ahead in Denmark -- and more broadly in the rest of Europe, run increasingly by pro-business and xenophobic governments -- will determine in which direction things will go. And perhaps the next few days will be a particularly important moment in that process.

***
David Rovics is an indie singer-songwriter and political activist.

by Billy Wharton
from Counter Currents

16 December, 2009 - Princeton University Philosopher Cornel West brings such an infectious optimism to his social analysis that it is difficult to avoid discovering a sense of hopefulness in even the most mediocre of news. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to an American president managing two active wars and commanding a military force spread throughout the globe seemed to offer little opportunity for a progressive spin. Yet, West quickly discovered a potentially positive edge. “It's gonna be hard,” he offered during a lecture at a public library in Los Angeles, “to be a war president with a peace prize. Gonna be difficult. Very, very difficult.” The award it seemed could be a “pre-emptive strike for peace.”

West had captured a certain consensus that developed about the award nomination. US President Barack Obama would be so overcome with the honor of receiving the prestigious award that it would trigger an immediate crisis of conscience that would call the country’s military adventures in the Middle East into question and perhaps even hasten a quick retreat. Obama was certainly aware that he would walk in the footsteps of previous recipients such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Theresa. Panelists on the Nobel nomination committee were likely motivated by this neat equation when they arrived at their decision.

Unfortunately for West and others, the one person not in on the scheme was Obama. Instead of imbibing the spirit of peace, he delivered two bombshells. The first came prior to the Nobel ceremonies when he announced that the US would send another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, in an attempt to establish control of the AfPak border region. Larger than this, his speech at West Point Military Academy bought into large parts of the Bush war rationale. The Afghanistan invasion, he argued, was forced upon the US. A natural response to the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001. Nervous cadets in the crowd stood blank-faced as they realized that there are many more years of active combat to come. Though Obama made a vague reference to an 18 month time-frame for withdrawal, Secretary of Defense William Gates made the rounds with the media the following day to clarify that it would take years, at least 2 or 3, before an exit from the war-torn country could be considered.

Put aside the escalation speech for a moment. The second bombshell, Obama’s much anticipated Nobel Prize acceptance speech, proves not only that there is almost no chance that the Democratic Party will bring an end to the wars, but that Obama himself has accepted the imperial mantle passed down through generations of American presidents. Among the first casualties of a speech that can only be described as an expression of American chauvinism, were King and a non-Nobel recipient Mahatma Gandhi. Obama dispensed with them as naïve idealists. “As a head of state,” he argued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.” Obama went on to endorse the use of force as being based upon, “a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason” not “a call to cynicism.”

Two objections are obvious – one elucidated upon later in his speech, the other quickly tossed aside. First, the notion that war is curative to evil in general and that the US, in particular, is an acceptable dispenser of such a cure should raise a skeptical eye. Obama went further by making the Orwellian claim that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” and, in a language endorsed by every imperial president, “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” History offers different lessons.

Far from a neutral operator interested only in the preservation of global peace, the US has engaged in acts of military aggression that substantially contributed to the lessening of peaceful relations amongst nations. Sometimes, as in Iraq, there were direct material motivations. In other cases, political motives or the simple desire to express military superiority fueled the act of aggression. The military invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan so obviously violate the notion of the US as peacemaker that little comment is needed. Even more insidious are the indirect military conflagrations underwritten by the US government. The annals of Latin American history are littered with them – Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador and Operation Condor throughout the region.

Obama might have used the Nobel stage to mark a break from this geopolitical approach to US hegemony through militarism. He could have announced the closure of at least a few of the more than 700 US military bases worldwide. Perhaps Oslo was an ideal site to announce a 50% reduction in the more than 5,000 nuclear missiles the country has. This was clearly the intention of the Nobel Committee and the hope of Cornell West – to create enough moral pressure to move the president a few steps away from the imperial mantle. No such luck. To have done so, would have necessarily required the help of King and Gandhi, who Obama had dismissed early on.

To say that his role as “a head of state” precludes him from employing the lessons of King and Gandhi is to deny some basic facts of history. Neither King nor Gandhi were intellectuals isolated from social policy or geo-political decision making. The two were not sequestered off from society, like cloistered monks, happy enough to invent a few intellectually engaging, but practically useless, ideas. They were, instead, historical actors, able to craft new political realities through practical implementation of theories of non-violence. The consequences of which, in terms of both specific policies and broader political inspiration, had global reverberations that are still being felt.

The catch that now separates them from Obama is that both recognized the idea that it is people, mostly regular people, who make history and who often do so against the will of governments both foreign and domestic. India’s anti-imperialist campaign, carried out under Gandhi’s leadership, provides a stinging rebuke to the notion of military occupation. Equally, King’s brave opposition to the US war in Vietnam sharply contradicts Obama’s claim that the US has spent six decades underwriting global security. Both men offer a notion of social solidarity through peaceful association that works from the local level up into national and international relations. Such lessons might have allowed the US to avoid the military aggressions of the past and to play a significant role in supporting the creation of the kind of peaceful global economic development that both King and Gandhi championed.

Perhaps, in the end, West offers a useful concept, but the wrong social actor. It may eventually be difficult for Obama to manage two wars with a peace prize hanging from his neck. But Obama won’t be the one to determine that. He has left a significant opportunity to offer an alternative to the typical American imperial hubris at the podium in Oslo. Now it is up to us regular folks, the ones who were so important to King and Gandhi’s movements in the past, to turn the Nobel Prize into a burden. A revitalized anti-war movement in the US that reads deep into the inspirational wells of non-violent movements of the past could be next year’s nominee for the coveted prize. What a righteous replacement that would be for a president committed to war and occupation, arrogant enough to attempt to play this off as a part of global security.

***
Billy Wharton is the national co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.

from Defend Education

As people throughout the country struggle under the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, public education from pre-K to higher and adult education is threatened by budget cuts, layoffs, privatization, tuition and fee increases, and other attacks. Budget cuts degrade the quality of public education by decreasing student services and increasing class size, while tuition hikes and layoffs force the cost of the recession onto students and teachers and off of the financial institutions that caused the recession in the first place. Non-unionized charter schools threaten to divide, weaken and privatize the public school system and damage teachers’ unions, which are needed now more than ever. More and more students are going deep into debt to finance their education, while high unemployment forces many students and youth to join the military to receive a higher education. And all of the attacks described above have hit working people and people of
color the hardest.

In California, students, teachers, workers, parents, and faculty have taken action against these attacks. They took to the streets in a one-day strike on September 24th, organized strikes and actions across the state during the University of California Board of Regents meeting from November 18th to 20th, and have called for a state-wide day of action on March 4th. These actions have created a broad mass movement in California, drawing in students from all over the state to create a powerful struggle. As the effects of the economic crisis continue to spread into the education system nationally, it’s time to join our voices with students and workers in California and draw inspiration from their example.

We support each group or coalition organizing in the manner and for the duration of their choosing. In solidarity with those in California, we the below-signed individuals and organizations call on students, teachers, workers, parents, faculty, and staff across the country to join together on March 4th to Take A Stand For Education!

Contact US

Visit the Web site for more details. You can now endorse online!

To endorse this call or to receive more information, visit the above web page or contact march4nationaldayofaction(at)gmail.com.

Find us on Facebook.

To join the national discussion, please visit the March 4th Google Group at.

INITIAL ENDORSERS:

Organizations

All Nations Alliance
Animas Students for a Democratic Society (Durango, Coloardo)
Bail Out the People Movement
Chicago Students for a Democratic Society
College Park Students for Democratic Society
Community Organizing Center for Mother Earth – Columbus Ohio
Connecticut Students Against the War
CUNY Campaign to Defend Education
Fight Imperialism, Stand Together
Graduate Student Employees Union (SUNY Stony Brook)
GSU Progressive Student Alliance (Atlanta)
Milwaukee Students for a Democratic Society
National Assembly to End the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars & Occupations
New School in Exile
NYC Anti-War Coalition
Peoples Video Network
Recreate ‘68 Alliance
Socialist Organizer
Solidarity
SPEAK (Students Promoting Engagement Through Activism and Knowledge) at Georgia State University
Student/Farmworker Alliance
Students for Educational Rights (City College of New York)
Students Taking Action to Reclaim our Education (University of Maryland)
UNC-Chapel Hill Students for a Democratic Society
UW-Milwaukee Education Rights Campaign

Individuals (*all organizations listed for identification purposes only)
Frantz Mendes, President United Steelworkers L. 8751 – Boston School Bus Drivers Union*
Steve Gillis, Vice President United Steelworkers L. 8751 – Boston School Bus Drivers Union*
Susan Massad, Associate Professor Framingham State College*
Ed Childs, Chief Steward UNITE/HERE L. 26 (Harvard Univ.)*
Phebe Eckfeldt, Harvard Union Rep., Harvard Union of Clerical & Technical Workers (HUCTW)/AFSCME L. 3650*
Eleanor J. Bader, writer and adjunct faculty member, Brooklyn, NY*
Peter Cook, Boston Teachers Union, Local 66 MFT AFT, AFL-CIO*
Heather Cottin Adjunct Lecturer, History, LaGuardia Community College, PSC member*
Susan E. Davis, National Writers Union, United Auto Workers Local 1981*
Mike Gimbel, Local 375, AFSCME delegate to the NYC-CLC & Chairperson of Local 375, AFSCME, Labor/Community Unity Committee*
Martha Grevatt, Chair, Civil Rights Committee, UAW Local 122*
Andy Griggs, United Teachers Los Angeles; Co-chair, California Teachers Association Peace and Justice Caucus; Steering Committee, US Labor Against the War*
Dr. Sue Harris, Co-Director, Peoples Video Network*
Imani Henry, Playwright/Performer*
Dan La Botz, Spanish teacher, Cincinnati Waldorf School, Cincinnati, Ohio*
Julia La Riva, member of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)*
Robin McCubbin, professor, Southwestern College, Chula Vista, CA*
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Professor, Women’s & Gender Studies, Syracuse University*
David Sole, Prof. of Chemistry, Wayne Co. Community College, Detroit.*
Billy Wharton, National Co-Chair, Socialist Party USA*
The Most Rev. Filipe C, Teixeira, OFSJC, Diocese of Saint Francis of Assisi*

by Matthew Andrews

Since October 2007, the Socialist Party of Boston has been using meetup.com to schedule meetings and events http://www.meetup.com/bostonsocialists. It's a convenient way to post events and receive RSVPs to anticipate attendance. Meetup is also open to the public and new people regularly find us and "join" us on meetup to keep up with what we're doing. This month we reached 100 members. It's worth taking a closer look at our growth on meetup.

In the month of October, 2009, eight new people joined. In November six people joined. This month we are only a little more than half way through December and we've already reached a record of eleven new members! In other words, our group has been in existence for 27 months, yet has grown 33% (25/75) in the last three months! That's more than double our previous rate.

Some of this is due to a conscious effort on the part of Socialist Party organizers to invite existing contacts to join meetup (a free service for non-organizer users). Members and contacts who have been at our periphery are getting more plugged in. But that doesn't completely explain the growth. Each meetup we schedule brings one to three people we've never met before.

Has meetup.com implemented a new marketing strategy that is bringing lots of new people of all stripes to their website? Or are world events driving our sympathizers to get involved? It is certainly apparent that the world is entering a period fraught with crisis. Much more evidence is needed to definitively say that the public is interested in taking a closer look at democratic socialism. I hope you're as excited as I am to test this possibility by increasing our outreach efforts.

PS. Follow this discussion on the meetup message boards:
http://www.meetup.com/bostonsocialists/messages/boards/thread/8247014/#32606139

from Weekly Update on the Americas

On Dec. 7 the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging two former Haitian officials, two former executives of an unnamed Florida telecommunications company and the president of Florida-based Telecom Consulting Services Corp with foreign bribery, wire fraud and money laundering. According to the indictment, the telecommunications company paid more than $800,000 to shell companies to be used for bribes to officials of Haiti's state-owned telecommunications company, Télécommunications d'Haiti (Haiti Téléco). Two other Florida executives pleaded guilty to related charges last spring. The rightwing Haitian daily Le Matin reported that the unnamed Florida company was Terra Telecommunications Corporation.

The US says the alleged bribery went on from November 2001 through March 2005—in other words, during much of the second term of left-populist president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996 and 2001-2004), and during the first year of the conservative interim government installed after Aristide was forced from power in late February 2004. (Justice Department press release 12/7/09; Miami Herald 12/9/09; Le Matin 12/11/09)

There have been repeated accusations of corruption in Téléco. In July 2008, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined IDT, a New Jersey telecommunications company closed linked to the US Republican party, some $1.3 million for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004; a former IDT manager charged that the company had negotiated an illegal deal with Téléco.

***
Learn more about how now NJ Governor Chris Christie may be linked to this case - click here

from Wikipedia

Édith Piaf, born Édith Giovanna Gassion (19 December 1915 – 10 October 1963), was a French singer and cultural icon who "is almost universally regarded as France's greatest popular singer." Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads. Among her songs are "La vie en rose" (1946), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Milord" (1959), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960), "l'Accordéoniste" (1941), "Padam...Padam", and "La Foule".

During World War II, she was a frequent performer at German Forces social gatherings in occupied France, and many considered her a traitor; following the war she stated that she had been working for the French Resistance. While there is no evidence of this, it does seem to be true that she was instrumental in helping a number of individuals (including at least one Jew) escape Nazi persecution. Throughout it all, she remained a national and international favorite. Piaf dated a Jewish pianist during this time and co-wrote a subtle protest song with Monnot. According to one story, singing for high-ranking Germans at the One Two Two Club earned Piaf the right to pose for photographs with French prisoners of war, to boost their morale. The Frenchmen were supposedly able to cut out their photos and use them as forged passport photos.

by Dennis Brutus
from MRZine

Allow me to make a few points about the current international negotiations which are likely to make a huge impact on the future of the planet. At the heart of the issue is the trade off that has to be made between those who want to continue on a path of exploitation and the protesters marching in the streets for a new path of being less prodigal.

South Africa, post 1994, eliminated the debt attributed to Namibia in a gesture of reconciliation. We fell short of distancing ourselves from the odious debt of apartheid and subsequently lost momentum in overcoming the backlogs in education, health and housing that doing so would have allowed. We should not fall short again, when a deal is signed to cap the carbon emissions for the industrial countries, with a deferred cap for developing countries in the considerably hotter next decade.

The danger in falling short of setting deep cuts of 45% from 1990 carbon emission levels is that it puts us beyond the tipping point where unknown additional and more catastrophic changes will be wrought in the earth's water and rainfall systems, ultimately killing millions in sudden and violent storms, droughts and fires.

If we would rather act in solidarity, and harness the commitment and vitality brought by the unemployed, women, and youth through skills transfer, and if we funded the transfer of energy saving technology, water saving technology and efficient trickle drip systems of agriculture, that solidarity could produce a realistic dividend or fund (again South Africa created a Trust with the sale of strategic bunkers of fuel, to accelerate development of health and education in particularly rural areas -- with Kagiso and the IDT) for green jobs.

I believe we should all try to educate ourselves on some of the local impacts that are bound to come our way. I mean we know that Africa and the countries of the South least responsible for historical carbon will feel the worst effects. The trade in natural resources that allowed Europe to develop must not translate into a trade in waste byproducts and pollution that again distributes the greatest burdens on the poor. Individual action is important, to reduce our own footprint on the planet's resources, but we should be vigilant about the action of South Africa, brokering a deal that allows the corporations and the oil giants to continue to abuse the earth.

Better that there is no deal, so that ordinary citizens can make their choices and voices heard, against the marketing excesses for the rich allowing some to gorge themselves while others starve. Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a reporter, when India gained its independence, whether his country would seek to be as prosperous as Britain. "It has taken all the resources of one planet to make Britain prosperous," he replied, "how many planets would be needed for India?"

Prof D V Brutus
Rosebank
Cape Town

10 December 2009

by Ron Ehrenrich

After retiring for the night, Ruth R. Greenberg-Edelstein passed away quietly in her sleep in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 24, 2009. Ruth’s unexpected death left family and friends shocked and grief-stricken. Ruth is survived by her children, Dan and June; grandchildren Susan and Jake; a niece Beth and two nephews Steven and Jeff. Her husband, J. David Edelstein, died on July 20, 2009.

Ruth Greenberg-Edelstein retired from careers as a nurse and professor of Psychiatric Nursing at Upstate Medical Center and Rutgers University. Ruth was a radical feminist and socialist. She was a card carrying member of the Socialist Party, USA, served as Chair of the Central New York Local, served several terms on the National Committee, and was an editor of “Socialist Women, Mujeres Socialistas”, a publication of the SP Women’s Commission. She was also a member of the Syracuse Peace Council, and Universal Health Care.

Books and articles written by Ruth Greenberg-Edelstein included themes of advocating for the rights and status of women in nursing, and empowering nurses with an emphasis on nursing as a science; and seeing nurturance as a root of group psychotherapy.

In a 1995, after a New York Times article on Untold War Stories, Ruth wrote:

The absence of a story by a World War II Army nurse in your special issue made me feel that perhaps my participation on the battlefields of France and Germany was not that important. But I know better.

As a nurse, I cared for and made contact with men who looked like mummies, they were so bound up in bandages after the fiery crashes of the then-experimental B-29's. In evacuation units in Germany, I eased the pain of dying soldiers and was often the only person to whom they might speak. In other units, I helped care for shattered individuals who had just been released from concentration camps.

Ruth was also a very creative artist with a fertile imagination. We will miss her imagination, her strong opinions and adamant oratory, her leadership, and her commitment to principle.

Two dozen people braved the cold and rain last week in Memphis to protest against Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Memphis Socialist Party members participated in the demo and joined thousands of others across the country in demanding an end to the war and occupation of Afghanistan.



For news coverage of the demonstration click here

by William Blum
from Dissident Voice


All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here’s what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama’s foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America’s never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That’s why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we’re foreigners, and they’re rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.”1

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America’s security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama’s latest escalation:2

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban.3

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials.Kuwait News Agency, November 24, 2009.

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration’s knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington’s allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain’s external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.”4

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. ‘US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,’ a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.”5

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president’s own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”6

Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”7

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007.8

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.
Although the “surge” failed as policy, it succeeded as propaganda.

They don’t always use the word “surge”, but that’s what they mean. Our admirable leaders and our mainstream media that love to interview them would like us to believe that escalation of the war in Afghanistan is in effect a “surge”, like the one in Iraq which, they believe, has proven so successful. But the reality of the surge in Iraq was nothing like its promotional campaign. To the extent that there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq (now down to a level that virtually any other society in the world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society before the US invasion and occupation), we must keep in mind the following summary of how and why it “succeeded”:

* Thanks to America’s lovely little war, there are many millions Iraqis either dead, wounded, crippled, homebound or otherwise physically limited, internally displaced, in foreign exile, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. Many others have been so traumatized that they are concerned simply for their own survival. Thus, a huge number of potential victims and killers has been markedly reduced.
* Extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place: Sunnis and Shiites are now living much more than before in their own special enclaves, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by high concrete walls and strict security checkpoints; violence of the sectarian type has accordingly gone down.
* In the face of numerous “improvised explosive devices” on the roads, US soldiers venture out a lot less, so the violence against them has been sharply down. It should be kept in mind that insurgent attacks on American forces following the invasion of 2003 is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.
* For a long period, the US military was paying insurgents (or “former insurgents”) to not attack occupation forces.
* The powerful Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire for his militia, including attacks against US troops, that was in effect for an extended period; this was totally unconnected to the surge.

We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.

The War against Everything and Everyone, Endlessly

Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded some 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in November reportedly regards the US War on Terror as a war aimed at Muslims. He told colleagues that “the US was battling not against security threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Islam itself.”9 Hasan had long been in close contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen, who also called the US War on Terror a “war against Muslims.” Many, probably most, Muslims all over the world hold a similar view about American foreign policy.

I believe they’re mistaken. For many years, going back to at least the Korean war, it’s been fairly common for accusations to be made by activists opposed to US policies, in the United States and abroad, as well as by Muslims, that the United States chooses as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that in 1999 one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns ever — 78 days in a row — was carried out against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. Indeed, we were told that the bombing was to rescue the people of Kosovo, who are largely Muslim. Earlier, the United States had come to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia in their struggle against the Serbs. The United States is in fact an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become an American bombing target appear to be: (a) It poses a sufficient obstacle — real,
imagined, or, as with Serbia, ideological — to the desires of the empire; (b) It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.

Notes
1. ”Afghanistan Is A ‘War Of National Resistance’: Former CIA Agent” on Information Clearinghouse.
2. For the news items which follow if not otherwise sourced, see: Independent (London), December 14, 2007; Daily Telegraph (UK) December 26, 2007; Globe and Mail (Toronto) May 1, 2008; BBC News, October 28, 2009.
3. New York Times, March 11, 2009.
4. Pakistan Observer (Islamabad daily), October 19, 2009; The Jamestown Foundation (conservative Washington, DC think tank), “Karzai claims mystery helicopters ferrying Taliban to north Afghanistan,” November 6, 2009; Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London), “Helicopter rumour refuses to die,” October 26, 2009.
5. IslamOnline, “US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases,” November 2, 2009. [↩]
6. Washington Times, October 5, 2009, from a CNN interview.
7. Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009.
8. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007.
9. Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009.