Red Pepper » USA

Why the Walmart campaign matters

louise — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:37:23 +0000

Photo: OURWalmart/Flickr

When Mike Compton started working at a Walmart distribution center on the outskirts of Chicago last July, he had never really given much thought to unions. After bopping around several warehouse jobs through temp agencies, he was hired at the Walmart warehouse. And he didn’t give much thought to the bad reputation Walmart had as an employer. ‘I needed a job,’ he said.

Today, Compton is unemployed having once been fired, then reinstated, then fired again, for attempting to unionise his fellow warehouse workers. Over the course of just a few months, the lack of respect from managers, the meager pay, and the inconsistent hours inspired him to be a part of the growing rank-and-file worker movement to demand justice at the world’s largest employer. By this Autumn walkouts hit this distribution center and one in California. Workers at retail stores staged smaller walkouts.

While the company has been the bugbear of unions organising the retail sector for years, there is something different going on this time around, and it serves as a bright light for the American labor movement after a few years of crushing losses. The struggle for fair wages and respect for workers at Walmart extends beyond merely the idea of unions at the retail centers, as it shines a spotlight on all parts of the supply chain, from factories abroad to the shelves in Anytown, USA.

The fire at a factory in Bangladesh, which supplied products to Walmart, that killed more than one hundred workers, was a stinging reminder of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, which killed 146 immigrant workers, mostly Jewish and Italian women. That incident led to tremendous reforms in safety standards in America and refocus on workers in general. That hasn’t happen this time, but the idea is to build pressure.

That’s why when Occupy Wall Street activists heard about a ship laden with Walmart goods from that country coming into port near New York City they quixotically attempted to block it from docking. Port police cut the activists early, although it is a sign that this ongoing uprising at Walmart is not just a parochial labor campaign, but a fight against the global system of labor inequality.

Case in point: On 11 December, Walmart CEO Mike Duke was in New York City, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, in light of the strikes, the allegations of the company bribing an official in Mexico, and the deadly factory fire.

‘They’re here as a corporation to advise those who set international policy,’ said protester Deborah Timmesch.

Indeed, from this angle, Walmart’s reputation of discrimination, low wages and destruction of local communities isn’t the sign of a rogue corporation but rather the standard for global capitalism.

This kind of broad scope for activists and a diversity of tactics could, hopefully, lead to a reinvigoration of the labor movement, both in the United States and elsewhere. In the states, many unions have not only lost members and settled for concessionary wage deals, while at the same time losing legal rights in traditionally labor-strong states like Wisconsin and Michigan. The bottom-up campaign at Wal-Mart could change that. One positive sign is that one of the main organising agents in the Illinois is the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a radical but often marginalised union, working with the mainstream United Food and Commercial Workers.

If workers at a Walmart retail center seek to unionise, the company can just shut down the shop. But they don’t have that option with a distribution center that serves as the nerve center for all the stores around it. Like longshore workers have secured their pay and benefits by virtue of their control of the choke points in the intermodal supply chain, Walmart workers are seizing these choke points as well.

Anti-austerity movements around the world have pointed to growing inequality as the root of the economic crisis, Walmart’s position as both a global employer and shaper of global policy should be at the center of that conversation.

For Compton, it’s an easy connection to make. ‘They set the standard,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t expect more from the biggest employer in the world?’

A Black Thursday for Walmart

louise — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:13:07 +0000

Photo: UFCW International Union/Flickr

There’s no better day to strike against an oppressive commercial employer than on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, and possibly the biggest exhibition of fervent consumerism and Capitalist triumph bar Wall Street. A notoriously aggressive event; consumers flock to stores for discounted goods and half-price sales. Past years have seen assaults, stampedes, stabbings and shootings, occasionally resulting in both employee and customer fatalities.

Up until the late 2000’s retailers had opened their doors at 6.00 am; the day after Thanksgiving. However, in the past few years opening hours have reached new lows and by 2011 a number of large retailers including; Target, Kohls, Macy’s and Best Buy lured customers in at midnight on Thanksgiving. Not to be outdone, this year Walmart, the biggest private employer in the world, announced it would be opening its stores at 8pm on Thursday, Thanksgiving evening. Barely would its workers, or ‘associates’ as Walmart rhetoric labels them, have time to swallow their turkey dinners before they’d have to leave family homes and confront thousands of frenzied shoppers, some who’d been camping outside stores since Wednesday night.

Walmart has a well-known flagrance for the treatment of its staff, operating an almost autocratic in-store infrastructure; women and ethnic minorities are often subject to harsh treatment from a mainly white, male management. Employees are regularly required to work without meal breaks and often off-the-clock hours without overtime pay. A 2004 New York Times report found extensive violations of child labour laws, including minors forced to work shifts late into school nights. The zenith, or rather nadir, of the corporation’s disregard for its staff was exposed in its ‘Dead Peasants Insurance’; policies taken out on a number of low level workers in an attempt to profit from their deaths. Walmart’s ill-treatment of employees has prompted a number of documentaries, including the critically acclaimed ‘Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price’ and numerous books such as ‘The Wal-Mart Effect’ by Charles Fishman.

Akin to most major corporations in the US, the nation’s biggest employer also operates a rigid anti-union policy; including heavy managerial surveillance and pre-emptive closures for those stores attempting to unionise. Walmart responds that is not anti-union but ‘pro-associate’, unions are an unnecessary third party medium when the managerial door is always open. According to company policy, workers are entitled to discourse with the highest stratums of the corporate ladder.

Interestingly, when butchers in Jacksonville, Texas voted to unionise in the year 2000, Walmart decided to eliminate every in-house meat cutting department across America. This year, despite Walmart’s policy of anti-unionism, United Food & Commercial Workers, a long standing, but largely ineffectual opponent of Walmart, and OUR Walmart, decided to implement ground-breaking protests on the eve of Thanksgiving. Launched in June 2011 OUR Walmart is an organisation labour historian Prof. Nelson Lichtenstein describes as not ‘looking for legal certification’ or claiming ‘to represent everyone’, but simply ‘a minority that is willing to stick their necks out’. Our Walmart effectively unionised employees using clever social media strategies including a powerful YouTube Video with the tagline ‘Stand Up, Live Better’, a play on Walmart’s own slogan, ‘Save Money, Live Better’. Their aim was simple, not to dent Black Friday profits, as this was seemingly impossible, but rather to raise awareness of the unfair labour conditions faced by some 1 million hourly store employees. These issues range from low wages, increases in health insurance premiums, unfair scheduling, managerial bullying and of course the heartless Thanksgiving evening-shifts.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 22nd November, or Black Thursday as it became known, hundreds of Walmart workers, all risking retaliation for their actions, alongside general members of the American public, protested outside over 100 stores across the USA. Rallies took place in Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Washington D.C. and picket signs could be seen outside scores of Walmart stores across Chicago, California and Texas. Walmart executives underplayed and even outright dismissed the actions of the strikers; Bill Simon, CEO and president of Walmart arrogantly stated ‘We estimate that less than 50 associates participated in the protest nationwide. In fact, this year, roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year. Walmart’s vice president of communications added that ‘the number of protests being reported by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union are grossly exaggerated.’ However, OUR Walmart Campaign Director Dan Schlademan argued that striking Walmart employee numbers reached well into the hundreds and hailed the event as the “largest U.S. strike in the history of Walmart’.

As of yet, the actual physical effects of the strike remains to be unseen, and indeed the dismissive rhetoric of Walmart executives suggest that nothing will change in the immediacy. However, requested police presence that prevented protesters entering retail car parks at stores in Chicago and Texas imply that executives were clearly anxious at the threat of far more than 50 strikers.

Furthermore, the fact that the dissent actually took place at all, and at present there have been no mass sackings, is a huge success for the future of Our Walmart. Interestingly many Black Thursday shoppers sympathised with the protesters, the majority of those desperate enough to partake in the sales are similarly low-waged individuals all probably experiencing similar working conditions and with little or no representation. Sadly the vicious cycle of poverty forces individuals, too poor to shop at more expensive alternatives, to support the corporations that oppress them.

As members of a relatively unskilled labour force, for Walmart workers the threat of another individual more than willing to take your job should you have any complaints, hangs in the balance. However, the biggest positive to draw from the Black Thursday walkouts is that a segment of employees were brave enough to challenge authority so-far without backlash, and can be the inspiration for many more. This is clearly only the beginning for labour change and Walmart’s first real union. In an interview with The Huffington Post Texan Colby Harris, Walmart employee and OUR Walmart activist stated, ‘Walmart thinks that after all this blows over we’re going to give up. We will continue with our fight… until changes are made. You can’t continue running from the problem, otherwise it’ll never be fixed.’

Hoping for change: Obama and the limits of elections

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:00:57 +0000

In the minutes after Barack Obama’s victory was announced in 2008 an elated woman in a bar on the south side of Chicago turned to me and shouted: ‘My man’s in Afghanistan. He’s coming home.’ Given the euphoria of the night I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Obama had explicitly said the war would be continuing. If her man was coming home, it would no thanks to the new president.
As Obama stands for re-election it is important for people to own their disappointment. Rhetorically, at least, he projected a far more dynamic, idealistic and populist campaign than the one he was actually running. As the community organiser-cum-presidential candidate, he managed to simulate the energy and vision of a movement and then super-impose it onto a tightly run, top-down presidential campaign bid.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the manner in which he sought to harness the symbolic resonance of his race while simultaneously denying its political significance: at one and the same time posing as a direct legatee of the civil rights movement and little more than a distant relative. But when it came to matters of substance, far from raising expectations too high he actually set them quite low. He stood on a moderate platform in the middle of an economic crisis that demanded drastic action. At the very moment he might have extracted enduring and far-reaching concessions from the banking industry he not only flinched but went out of his way to rescue it.
A few months into his presidency he called the bankers to a meeting to tell them: ‘I’m not out there to go after you, I’m protecting you.’ As one of them told Ron Suskind in The Confidence Men, ‘The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.’
Yet those who believed he would achieve nothing must own their own assessment also. In his first term he has appointed two female supreme court justices, one of whom is the first Latina on the bench, withdrawn combat troops from Iraq, announced a date for withdrawal from Afghanistan and introduced a healthcare reform – however tepid. That’s a more impressive record than any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.
The limits of ‘great men’
After re-reading The God That Failed, a book in which six prominent ex-Marxists relate their disillusionment with communism, the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said expressed his irritation at what seemed like a show trial for a straw man: ‘Why as an intellectual did you believe in a god anyway? And besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early belief and later disenchantment were so important?’
To concentrate so wholly on Obama, as if he exists in a vacuum, is to succumb to the reactionary notion that history is made by ‘great men’ rather than the far more complex interaction of people, time, place and power. The ire is trained on one man and one alone. Not a system, institution or kaleidoscope of forces but Obama. If he were better, things would be different. If he tried harder, he could succeed. Such charges betray a devotion to a man and reverence for an office that is indecent in a democracy and incompatible with left politics.
For his limitations have always been apparent, not only in his politics but in the alignment of forces and institutions in which both he and the office he occupies are embedded. A leader elected in a winner-takes-all voting system where both main parties are sustained by corporate financing, the congressional districts are openly gerrymandered and 40 per cent of the upper chamber can block anything is never going to be a benign vehicle for radical reform.
That is not making excuses for Obama’s shortcomings. He does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. He’s the president of the most powerful country in the world. He has enough benefits already. Meanwhile, those most likely to have elected him – blacks, Latinos and the young – are most likely to have fared the worst under him.
Unemployment for 18 to 19 year olds is 23.5 per cent; for those aged 20 to 24 it’s significantly lower at 12.9 per cent but still significantly higher than the national rate of 8.2 per cent. The economic gap between blacks and whites has actually widened under the nation’s first black president, who has also overseen an unprecedented rate of deportations. And while these groups are doing particularly badly, few beyond the very rich are doing well. A report earlier this year revealed that between 2007 and 2010 the median US family lost a generation of wealth. And that’s before we get to his kill list, Guantanamo Bay and drone attacks – to name but a few foreign policy horrors.
Occupying for change
No appraisal of Obama’s record is credible beyond the confines of what is possible within the US electoral system. Virtually every enduring progressive development in US politics since the second world war has been sparked either by massive mobilisations outside of electoral politics that have forced politicians to respond or through the courts. Obama’s first term has provided a painful lesson in the distinction between elections, politics and power.
Elections change personnel; politics changes agendas; power is the means by which those agendas are put into action. Getting Obama into the White House was the beginning of a process, not the end. The leap, by many on the left, from disenchantment to accusations of betrayal owes more to emotional and cognitive dissonance than political critique or strategic intervention. His victory, put simply, was the most progressive viable outcome of the 2008 elections – which illustrates not his left credentials but the severe limitations of US electoralism.
From the outset there were many attempts to put pressure on Obama – particularly from Latino activists seeking immigration reform, gay activists campaigning for marriage equality and trade unions looking to restore security and wages that have been effectively stagnant over the past 40 years. But these forces did not crystallise and converge into an effective critical mass until late last year under the broad tent of Occupy Wall Street. OWS managed to shift the national conversation from small government to inequality and give popular voice to the case for redistribution. Taking place almost without reference to electoral politics – beyond acting as a focus for anger at the huge amounts of money and lobbyist influence that dominate US elections – it diverted attention from questions about Obama’s left authenticity to the structural issues blighting US society. In this respect Occupy worked.
Polls showed that almost twice as many Americans agreed with Occupy’s aims as disagreed. Another poll, released in December by the independent Pew research group, revealed that 77 per cent of Americans believe there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations, while those who believed ‘most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard’ was at its lowest point since the question was first put in 1994.
Obama forced to respond
In his address to the Republican Governors Association in December, rightwing pollster Frank Luntz said: ‘The public … still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.’
This not only put the right on the back foot but provided considerable space to the left of the Democratic Party that the White House was forced to take notice of. Obama did not embrace the OWS agenda – beyond the demand for more progressive taxation, which was in any case part of his 2008 platform – but he has repositioned himself in the wake of it. Seeing an active and impatient constituency to his left he has been forced to respond in ways both rhetorical and substantial.
Having remained silent on the issue of race for most of his tenure, he felt the need to address the murder of Trayvon Martin, a black unarmed teenager shot dead by a Latino vigilante in Florida who was not even arrested, let alone charged, for several weeks. ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,’ said Obama. ‘I think [Trayvon’s parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.’
A few months later, after years of claiming he was evolving on the issue of gay marriage, he expressed his support for it. He used the power of his office to halt the deportation of thousands of young undocumented immigrants. In an executive order he ruled that young immigrants who arrived in the US illegally before age 16 and spent at least five continuous years here would be allowed to stay and apply for work permits if they had no criminal history and met other criteria, such as graduating from high school or serving honourably in the military.
All three of these acts carried significant risk in an election year. All three he could have done at any time – Trayvon Martin wasn’t the first black person to be summarily executed in the past four years. But he felt he had to do them now to shore up a restless base and respond to the frustrations of those who put him in office.
All three, like his stimulus package, healthcare reform or new financial regulations, were inadequate. None compensates for the dead by drones in Pakistan, let alone the growing poverty at home during his tenure. For socialists the hope that emerged from Obama’s campaign was not in the candidate himself but the coalition of forces that made him and his victory possible. Those forces are still out there. Obama was never going to organise the left opposition himself. But when an effective left opposition has emerged, he has been forced to respond.

That Cuba feeling

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:00:37 +0000

A CND march at Aldermaston
On 14 October 1962, a US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over Cuba taking photographs of the ground below. The next day, Central Intelligence Agency analysts examined the pictures – and concluded that they showed the construction of a launch site for Soviet missiles, confirming their suspicions that Moscow was creating a nuclear forward base in the Caribbean.
Thus began the Cuban missile crisis – a 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world closer to all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since.
US president John F Kennedy spent the best part of a week working out how to respond. He was still smarting from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the unsuccessful US-backed Cuban-exile invasion of the island in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro’s by then pro-Soviet revolutionary regime, and he resisted pressure from hawks to launch an immediate invasion. But the strategy he eventually adopted was high-risk. The US imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and promised not to invade if Moscow withdrew its missiles – but backed up the offer with a secret ultimatum threatening immediate invasion if it did not comply, with the only sweetener a secret promise to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey.
Both superpowers put their military forces on full alert, and for a week it seemed to the whole world that nuclear Armageddon was imminent. Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced the naval blockade in fiery language; the United Nations security council met in emergency session and resolved nothing; a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 over Cuba…
But then Khrushchev blinked. Out of the blue, he agreed to Kennedy’s deal: no Soviet missiles in Cuba, no American missiles in Turkey or Italy. At the time, because the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Italy was not made public, it looked like a straightforward Soviet climbdown – and Khrushchev’s authority in domestic Soviet politics took a blow from which it never recovered: he was ousted two years later. Kennedy won, but he did not live long to savour his victory – he was assassinated in November 1963 – and the hubris that the successful resolution of the crisis instilled in the American establishment played a disastrous role in escalating US intervention in Vietnam.
Britain and CND
Britain was not an actor in the missile crisis. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was kept in the dark by the Kennedy administration in its early stages. Macmillan privately expressed polite concern to Kennedy that the US might be going too far in ratcheting up the confrontation with the Soviets – he was worried most of all by the implications for West Berlin, which he feared could be subjected to another Soviet blockade or even invasion – but in public he gave robust support to the Americans.
For the British people, though, the problem was not the future of Berlin but what appeared to be the strong possibility of nuclear war. Newspaper circulations soared as, day by day, tension mounted.
But the crisis didn’t benefit the movement for nuclear disarmament. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in early 1958 with the support of the Labour left and its weekly papers, the New Statesman and Tribune, had enjoyed a spectacular political success in 1960, when its lobbying of trade unions and constituency Labour parties led to the Labour conference adopting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, against the histrionic opposition of the party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. But Gaitskell and his allies had overturned unilateralism at the next year’s conference – and the CND leadership subsequently found itself without a viable political strategy and facing a barrage of criticism from activists for putting all its energies into Labour. By 1962, its influence was on the wane.
There was still life in the peace movement. CND’s Easter 1962 annual march from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to London attracted 150,000 to its closing rally, its biggest ever crowd. But the impact of the Cuban crisis was demobilising. On one hand, it showed the futility of demonstrating – and on the other it showed that the leaders of the superpowers were not in the end prepared to launch a nuclear war. Activists drifted away from the movement; the nuclear powers agreed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that seemed to indicate there was hope of multilateral nuclear disarmament by negotiation; and by 1964, when Labour won a general election under Harold Wilson, the movement for British unilateral nuclear disarmament was part of the past. Its activists moved on, to housing campaigns, workplace militancy and opposition to the US war in Vietnam.
The second wave
CND kept going as a small pressure group with a few thousand members through the 1960s and 1970s, a forlorn survivor that few thought would again play a significant role. Meanwhile, international nuclear diplomacy ground on. The Partial Test-Ban Treaty was followed by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which committed non-nuclear states to remaining non-nuclear and nuclear states to keeping nuclear know-how to themselves (though its impact was limited because India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and subsequently developed their own nuclear weapons). The two superpowers negotiated interminably, reaching significant agreements on limiting strategic nuclear forces and anti-ballistic missile systems in 1972 (SALT-1 and the ABM treaty) and a further agreement on strategic arms in 1979 (SALT-2), though it was not ratified by the US Congress.
But then everything changed. What had seemed to be an inexorable process of winding down the cold war – the 1970s saw not only nuclear arms agreements but also the Helsinki accords guaranteeing borders in Europe and respect for human rights – suddenly went into reverse. In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Days later, Nato announced that it would be deploying new American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe – cruise and Pershing 2 – if Moscow did not withdraw its own new-generation intermediate-range missiles from Europe.
The Nato announcement thrust nuclear arms into the political limelight for the first time since the Cuba crisis. One man in particular made the running in Britain, the historian E P Thompson. He wrote a furious polemical piece for the New Statesman; followed it with a pamphlet for CND, Protest and Survive, excoriating the government’s asinine advice on how to cope with a nuclear war; then, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, launched the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal, a manifesto for a ‘nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal’. By summer 1980 – when the Thatcher government announced that it would be replacing Britain’s ageing Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles with American Trident SLBMs – anti-nuclear protest groups had sprung up throughout Britain and CND was a mass movement again. Labour adopted a non-nuclear defence policy at its autumn 1980 conference; the next month Michael Foot, a founder member of CND, became Labour leader. In 1981, feminist pacifists established a peace camp outside the US base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first batch of cruise missiles would be based.
For the next six years, the movement against nuclear arms was central to politics in Britain. It was huge: at its height in 1983‑84, CND estimated that it had 100,000 national members and perhaps 250,000 in affiliated local groups, and its demonstrations were massive, with 300,000 turning out in London in 1983. The movement was also much more sophisticated than in its first wave: there was no serious argument between advocates of working through the Labour Party and proponents of direct action; and END provided it with leadership that could not easily be dismissed as pro-Soviet or hard-left (though the Tory government did its very best to persuade voters otherwise).
But Labour lost the 1983 election; cruise arrived in Britain in 1984; and work started on the Trident submarines. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and soon made it clear that he wanted an end to the new cold war. Under Neil Kinnock, who succeeded Foot as Labour leader in 1983, Labour stuck to a non-nuclear defence policy through the mid-1980s – but after Labour lost again in 1987, with a new détente apparently in the air and the peace movement much less vocal, he wavered. Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan agreed a deal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, codified in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in December 1987. Kinnock declared that the agreement changed everything and announced the abandonment of the non-nuclear defence policy. It took two attempts to get it through Labour conference, but by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 Labour was fully signed up to retaining British nuclear arms to resist a threat that had ceased to exist. The dwindling band of peaceniks pointed at the emperor’s new clothes, but no one took any notice.
Disarmament stalls
The INF treaty was signed nearly 25 years ago, and it should have inaugurated an era of nuclear disarmament – particularly after the implosion of the Soviet bloc and Soviet communism between 1989 and 1991. At first it seemed to have done so. In 1991, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), and the result, combined with the effect of the INF treaty, was a significant reduction of US and Soviet (after 1991, Soviet successor states’) stockpiles of nuclear warheads. The global total halved by 2000, from 70,000 in 1987.
But the disarmament momentum soon ran out. Russia balked at further reductions of its nuclear weaponry; the US cooled on the whole disarmament process; and the smaller nuclear powers – Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel – either refused to engage or made minimal gestures towards denuclearisation. START-1’s successor, START-2, was signed but not implemented and replaced by an interim Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
Meanwhile, it became clear that nuclear weapons were not central to the international crises of the time – Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the bloody conflicts in Africa, the rise of al-Qaida, 9/11 and its aftermath – and that insofar as nuclear weapons were an issue the key problem was that the anti-proliferation regime was not working. Iran and North Korea were close to joining India, Pakistan and Israel as nuclear powers – and neither they, nor the Indians, Pakistanis or Israelis, were prepared to disarm.
US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations have continued: the START process was revived and concluded with a new treaty in 2010, when US president Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev agreed to deep cuts in strategic arsenals. Both Russia and the US have since reduced the number of actively deployed nuclear warheads to 2,000 apiece. But the stockpiles remain frighteningly large. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US retains in reserve nearly 6,000 and Russia more than 8,000. The total global warhead count in 2011 was around 20,000 – not quite as many as at the time of the Cuba crisis, but not far off.
The nuclear threat now
British anti-nuclear-arms campaigners didn’t give up after 1987. Some went off to create think-tanks, others put their efforts into making CND an alternative foreign policy pressure group. During the 1991 Gulf war, the campaign formed the core of the anti-war movement. Almost simultaneously, however, came a calamitous collapse of membership and an austerity drive that closed down Sanity, CND’s monthly magazine. The organisation never quite went under, but it returned to the margins. Whereas in 1991 it had set the agenda for opposition to the military intervention against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, a decade later it was reduced to a minor supporting role in the organised opposition to the US and UK military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nuclear arms are still there, but the politics of nuclear arms has changed. The future of Britain’s own bomb is more at risk from government budget cuts than it ever was from CND-inspired Labour opposition; and the threat of nuclear war no longer appears to come from a suicide pact between Washington and Moscow. For the past decade or more, the most likely sources of Armageddon have been India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and North and South Korea – all standoffs that no one in Britain can realistically hope to influence. That Cuba feeling, that we’re powerless to effect change, is back again, and it’s difficult to see how we can get rid of it.

Obama: The unreported truth

louise — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:31:15 +0000

Photo: porchlife/Flickr

With the final presidential debate upon us, liberals and ill-informed leftists will no doubt be jumping on the Obama bandwagon once again. The astoundingly charismatic president already holds a well-deserved award for ‘best marketing campaign 2008,’ along with an almost laughable Nobel Peace Prize; but before one goes door to door for good ol’ Barack, a look at his lesser-known foreign policy is in order. I will try to steer clear of issues which were given any substantial coverage in the mainstream media, and any domestic policies, such as healthcare and tax-reform, where he has made crippling compromises. Instead, my goal is to display the continuity and, in many ways, escalation of hostile Bush policies, and to show the smiling democrat for what he really is.

In congressional testimony, Dennis Blair- Director of National Intelligence for the Obama administration- noted the existence of an ‘assassination program’ which targets dozens of people, many of them US citizens, living abroad. Following up unconfirmed accusations of terror made by the Executive Branch, Obama dispatches highly trained military personnel to murder any possible suspects, without the authorisation of the countries in which they reside. The thought of adhering to the 5th amendment, (which states- ‘No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury’) or abiding by the presumption of innocence, or respecting national sovereignty, is beyond contemplation. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen working as a cleric in Yemen, was killed on the 30th of September 2011 while, more notably, Osama bin Laden met his maker earlier this year. Several attempts made by a federal judge to inquire into these practices were blocked by Obama in 2010.

The killing of bin Laden, as noted by political analyst Noam Chomsky, was done in a way almost designed to infuriate the Pakistanis. Levels of anti-American sentiment are already at a boiling point among the military and civilian population, and refusal to make a lawful arrest will no doubt drive more Muslims toward the Jihadi movement (just as Osama would have wanted). David Petraeus was not incorrect when he said that the United States is bin Laden’s greatest ally, and we have seen Obama reinforce that notion through secretive drone strikes in Pakistan (just one of the six countries he has bombed without Security Council authorisation), killing up to 2,680 civilians and injuring far more. Amnesty International calls to ‘provide lawful justification’ for these bombings and ‘record civilian casualties’ have, of course, been ignored. Chomsky’s observation that ‘Bush kidnaps and tortures…while Obama just kills’ is, in fact, generous. While Obama shut down CIA torture facilities, other such US prisons still exist- many of which make Guantanamo seem like a slightly sub-par Disneyland.

The following is taken from a BBC report on the infamous ‘black prison’ in Afghanistan- documenting the experience of ‘less than sixteen year-old’ boy, Rashid:

At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical check-up in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

‘They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing,’ he said. ‘They were doing everything.’

He said he lived in a small concrete cell that was slightly longer than the length of his body. Food was tossed in a plastic bag through a slot in the metal door. Both teenagers said that when they tried to sleep, on the floor, their captors shouted at them and hammered on their cells.

When summoned for daily interrogations, Rashid said he was made to wear a hood, handcuffs and ear coverings and was marched into the meeting room. He said he was punched by his interrogators while being prodded to admit ties to the Taliban; he denied such ties. During some sessions, he said, his interrogator forced him to look at pornographic movies and magazines while also showing him a photograph of his mother.

‘I was just crying and crying. I was too young,’ Rashid said. ‘I didn’t know what a prison looks like or what a prison is.’
As you can see, Obama shows no deviation from the inhuman Bush policies, and has refused to prosecute CIA officers who have taken part in the most egregious and illegal torture methods. In the case of Bradley Manning- a real American patriot accused of leaking embarrassing government documents- civil liberties attorney Glen Greenwald states: ‘[Manning is] subject to confinement – and the accompanying deprivation of social contact that solitary confinement necessitates, create[ing] long term psychological injuries. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he [Manning] sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.’

This consistent unilateralism and disregard for human rights attracted fierce protests when undertaken by Bush, yet activists remain largely silent in the face of the current administration.

Drawing our attention to Afghanistan and Libya, the subservient media did their job in leaving Obama’s atrocities pretty well unreported; with only an LA Times article mentioning the massacre of innocent Afghan civilians early on in his presidency: ‘Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council.’

Figures state that a total of 4,239 Afghani civilians have died since Obama’s surge in 2010, a number far greater than the World Trade Centre death-toll, and the country remains just as unstable. Afghanistan’s puppet Karzai government is ranked number 2 on the Transparency International list of most corrupt nations; the top-spot being held by Somalia- a nation which, incidentally, Obama has just supplied with bucket-loads of arms. As for Libya, it is no coincidence that direct military intervention occurred in the most oil-rich Arab nation. Ignoring Brazilian-Indian peace talks, the prospect of Gaddafi accepting a negotiated withdrawal, and Turkish or Egyptian intervention, Obama proceeded to supply the air-force for the rebel army (who never asked for western help to begin with)- contributing substantially to the estimated forty-thousand death-toll, and paving the way for US hegemony over Libya.

As for the rest of the Arab-spring, do not be fooled by vague statements about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’; the Wilsonian trend of supporting corrupt middle-eastern dictators did not stop with Obama, and Egypt is a prime example. At the height of the Egyptian protests, Obama sent a mediator to talk with Mubarak (who is, not secretly, a long-time ally of the US and Britain). The mediator chosen was Frank Wisner, a lobbyist- I repeat- lobbyist, for Mubarak himself. Wisner, of course, reported back to Obama advising him to maintain support for the dictator, which he did up until the very end. The formula has been repeated time and time again, (Suharto, Ceausescu, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler etc.) where aid and assistance is provided to thuggish tyrants right up until their military turns against them or they turn against you- and Obama is in no way above it.

Other directly anti-democratic policies enacted by the Obama administration are at play in Palestine and Haiti. When Hamas came to power in one of the only fair elections in the region, Bush punished the Palestinian people with horrendous and shocking sanctions. Restrictions were placed on water and food, and Israeli atrocities were stepped up in the West Bank. Sadly, Obama has continued down this path, and fails to recognize Hamas as a legitimate government, stating: ‘Hamas must recognise Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements.’ These claims sound fair enough, however Hamas have recognised Israel’s right to exist in calling for a two-state settlement, (calls which have been blocked by Israel and the United States) it has tried to renounce violence, calling to re-implement the 2005 ceasefire agreement (calls which, again, have been blocked by Israel and the United States) and it is the state of Israel that has failed to abide by Jimmy Carter’s ‘roadmap’ agreement, along with several UN resolutions. Obama vetoed the Palestinian bid for statehood earlier this year, voted against a resolution calling for ‘the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,’ and supports the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements- doing away with even the most minor penalties for settlers as brought in by Bush.

As for Haiti; Obama sent Hillary Clinton over in 2009 to meet with president Rene Preval, in the hope of getting unfavourable candidates excluded from the electoral process. It was determined that Ariside, the candidate who won 90 per cent of the vote before he was deposed with the help of France and Canada, would not be allowed to run. US-Haitian foreign policy has been abysmal ever since Woodrow Wilson dismantled their parliamentary government to allow a US takeover, stating that ‘Haitians are negro for the most-part…therefore require as complete a rule as possible,’ but Obama’s crimes have been even worse. After the earthquake, Obama’s first act was to send US military personnel and Coast Guards to ensure that no Haitians were trying to flee to the US. Several refugees were subsequently captured and detained at Guantanamo. By the time Obama agreed to send aid, Cuba and Venezuela had already supplied over 100 doctors and food supplies, yet neither was recognised by the US as a ‘donor’ and therefore was not invited to the conference in Montreal. To this date, only 30 per cent of the US aid pledged has gone to Haiti, and Obama has failed to invest in any Haitian national institutions, as that would not benefit US investment.

Virtually unreported is Obama’s shameless support for Alassane Ouattara- now president of Cote De Ivor- who, according to Amnesty International, ‘gave the green light for war crimes and crimes against humanity’ when fighting the existing leader, Laurent Gbagbo. Deputy Director for Africa Véronique Aubert states: ‘We know that they have executed hundreds of men of all age on political and ethnic grounds. We know that women have been raped. There are quite a lot of testimonies in the report, including on sexual violence.’ Ouattara and his terrorist army were given direct support by France and the United States, who lost economic control over the country with the election of Gbagbo; and it is expected that Obama will give $25 million in aid to the new Ouattara government. I do not doubt that Gbagbo was corrupt, however a study by James Inhofe stated it was ‘statistically impossible for Gbagbo to have lost the election,’ and it is known that Ouattara is friends with Henry Kissinger and other US officials. Either way, he is not someone who I would endorse.

Finally, to dispel any illusion that Obama is ‘dedicated to peace,’ I would like to call attention to the president’s nuclear policies. With all the fear-mongering and propaganda surrounding Iran’s uranium enrichment program, US intelligence documents state that even if Iran had nuclear weapons, the threat would be miniscule. The development of Iranian nuclear weapons is in response to Israeli actions- namely, lowering US-funded nuclear submarines into the gulf- and would not be authorised for use by the ruling clerics. In fact, 80 per cent of the middle- eastern population have said that they believe Israel and the United States to be the main threat to nuclear security, and that the region would be safer if Iran did have a nuclear deterrent. Obama’s criticism of Iranian nuclear programs is even more hypocritical, as the US supports nuclear programs for the only three countries who have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (India, Israel, and Pakistan), and helps to block IAEA inspectors from gaining access to Israeli nuclear facilities. Obama has also gone against resolution 687, which calls for a nuclear-free zone in the middle-east, and has refused (along with Israel) to join the rest of the UN nations in building a nuclear-free African continent. With astounding arrogance, the president has also decided to build thirteen-tonne nuclear bombs- the largest weapon in the pentagon’s arsenal- just days after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Therefore, while the alternative may be a whole lot worse, I urge you to think twice before waving your ‘Obama ’12′ flag in the coming election. Remember what you are standing for. Do not settle for the symbolic victory of having a black man in the white house, or succumb to supporting the left-leaning faction of a one-party state. It is his policies that matter, not his cool demeanour or glinting incisors. And if you can’t find anyone better, then why vote at all?
Oliver Eagleton is a fifteen year-old school student from Dublin, Ireland.

Occupy Oakland: Whose streets? Our streets!

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:37:42 +0000

When Occupy Oakland, in California, called for a city-wide general strike last November, the young movement made it clear to the US political world: this is not your average protest. This is not even your average Occupy. In fulfilling its promise and organising the first general strike on US soil in 65 years, Occupy Oakland emerged as the undisputed radical wing of the Occupy movement in America. In the months since, it has also become the most controversial.
From its early days as a massive tent encampment to its multiple shutdowns of the city’s port, Occupy Oakland pushed the movement against the 1 per cent in brave directions. Some activists, however, question whether its more recent, erratic tactics are leaving behind many in the 99 per cent who the movement claims to speak for. Increasingly hostile confrontations with the local, notoriously brutal police have alienated many supporters and reopened the classic violent/nonviolent protest divide.
Amidst this atmosphere of state repression and internal rifts, many organisers chose to use the winter as a chance to regroup. As spring arrives, the question now becomes: will Occupy Oakland dissolve into another ultra-left organisation without a popular base, or will it return stronger with a renewed sense of unity and energy that can push forward a broad-based movement for economic justice?
A city ripe for Occupy
If there was any city in the US that was predisposed to the Occupy movement, it was Oakland. Located across the bay from liberal San Francisco and just next to the student-activist hub of Berkeley, Oakland is a post-industrial city with its own unique social conditions and strong progressive history.
Once a manufacturing centre, Oakland lost most of its blue‑collar union jobs in the deindustrialisation of the 1970s and 1980s. A working-class city without enough work, its population is 75 per cent people of colour. Almost equally split among black, white, Latino and Asian residents, over the years this diversity has produced both tension and progressive multi-racial coalitions.
Oakland has a proud labour history, including a 1946 general strike – the last one in the US until Occupy Oakland revived the tradition last autumn. These days, Oakland is home to the country’s most radical trade union, the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, who work the port. The ILWU represent the best of US organised labour, refusing to unload cargo from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and shutting down the docks for a variety of progressive causes.
Ask most Americans about Oakland political history, however, and they will give you one answer: the Black Panthers. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the revolutionary black movement in 1966 in response to the ongoing oppression of the African-American community. With their combination of militant action (armed patrols to monitor the police) and social programmes (free breakfasts and health clinics), the Black Panthers established a spirit of community resistance that continues in Oakland to this day.
The Panthers themselves met their demise at the repressive, occasionally murderous hands of the FBI and local law enforcement, a pattern that did not end in the 1960s. The Oakland Police Department (OPD) is infamous for its violence and corruption, with police brutality towards black and Latino men an everyday occurrence. In 2009, an Oakland transit policeman shot and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, while he was face down on the ground. After the incident, which was filmed and viewed online millions of times, thousands of people took to the streets in protest and mini-riots.
It was here, out of the Oscar Grant movement, that the loose coalition that would come to make up Occupy Oakland first emerged: black radicals, white anarchists, non-profit leaders of every shade and thousands of unaffiliated citizens who had little love for the police.
From tent camp to mass mobilisation
Two weeks after Occupy Wall Street pitched its first tents in New York in late September, a group of Oakland activists called for a local formation in solidarity. Speaking to the public rather than the politicians, the Occupy Oakland call to action was short and simple: ‘Our only demand is an invitation: Join us!’
Occupy Oakland’s tent encampment attracted thousands of people to its general assemblies, unpermitted marches and open-air teach-ins. This influx of people and energy was the movement’s first great achievement. Normally apolitical people were able to make their voices heard through the democratic decision-making, while veteran organisers broke out of their movement silos and committed themselves to a united front. Even in progressive Oakland, no one had felt this type of potential in years.
Like many of its US counterparts, Occupy Oakland’s actual camp was a mixed bag. On one hand, the encampment provided food, shelter and a 24/7 community of political organising and social solidarity. Yet it also included the dark elements of city life: rampant drug use, mental health breakdowns, sexual violence. The tents were an important starting point, but many activists soon realised the need to move on to the next stage of the movement.
The potential for this evolution was hindered by the decision of Oakland mayor Jean Quan (a former progressive turned flip-flopping moderate) to evict the encampment on 25 October. The eviction resulted in massive police violence, most evident in the nearly fatal assault on activist and Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen.
Photo: J. Paul Zoccali
Olsen’s injury, again filmed and widely seen online, brought national attention and became a rallying cry for Occupy Oakland. The next day, thousands of people re-took the plaza and a general assembly of thousands made the call for the historic general strike. Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people heeded the call, making the 2 November protest by far the largest Occupy action in the US to date. While not a general strike in the truest sense of the phrase – only the teachers’ union formally voted to leave their jobs – the local union federation did participate in a strong way. Thousands of students and workers joined on their own accord, bringing business to a halt in the downtown area and at the port. ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ was the chant, and at least for one day, it rang true.
Since the police again cleared Occupy Oakland’s encampment on 25 November, activists have taken the struggle in new directions. Along the way, there have been both victories and defeats. Occupy Oakland’s evolution is a study in the power and pitfalls of a decentralised movement for social change.
Organised labour and local support
On 12 December, Occupy Oakland organised the movement’s most coordinated, ambitious action yet, targeting all major ports on the west coast. More than 20 Occupy groups took action, with total port shutdowns in Oakland, Portland, and Longview, Washington. The regional action was in part a solidarity action with ILWU longshoreman in Longview, who for months had been locked out in a brutal labour dispute with international grain corporation EGT. As events played out, they revealed both the strengths and weaknesses in Occupy’s relationship with organised labour.
While the 2 November general strike had the full support of the ILWU local leadership in Oakland, the situation for the 12 December port shutdown was more complicated. Many rank-and-file workers helped organise the shutdown but the union leadership issued a public refusal of endorsement. Part of this was due to legal obligations under the union contract but also a feeling of disrespect from Occupy in terms of the union’s democratic process and jurisdiction on the port. When the day came, however, and 3,000 Occupy and rank-and-filers picketed the docks, the longshoremen did what they always do: refused to cross the lines, once again shutting down the port.
Occupy Oakland activists continued to organise around the Longview dispute, preparing to mobilise thousands of west coast activists to descend on Longview in late January to blockade EGT’s next shipment. Just days before the expected confrontation, EGT came back to the bargaining table and offered an agreeable contract to the ILWU. Although there are still many Occupy-union tensions, the Longview campaign signalled the power of cross-movement solidarity and remains one of Occupy’s greatest successes.
A victory in far-away Longview, however, could not hide the fact that Occupy Oakland was losing its local support. Many people felt that the movement was losing its focus on Wall Street banks and economic inequality, and was instead fixed on battling the city government and police. Black and Latino community leaders, in particular, critiqued the movement for its neglect of various issues – home foreclosures, unemployment, public school closures – that disproportionately affect poor people of colour. The fact that Occupy Oakland was at least 80 per cent white (in a city that is only 25 per cent white) did not help. As one black activist said, ‘I have no love for the cops, trust me. But these Occupy folks aren’t fighting police brutality – they’re provoking it.’
All these tensions came to a head on 28 January. That day, Occupy Oakland’s attempt to take over an unused public building turned into yet another street battle with the Oakland Police Department. The police escalated their brutality, shooting ‘non-lethal’ projectiles and arresting 400 people by the end of the night. Yet it was Occupy Oakland’s own actions – or more accurately, the actions of a small, visible group of Occupy Oaklanders – that dominated the headlines and did more destruction to the movement. Black Bloc protesters brandishing shields broke into and vandalised City Hall, burning an American flag in front of the cameras. That doesn’t win you many friends around here. We may want to be like Egypt and Greece, but this is still America, and Occupy Oakland’s violent fringe caused serious fallout both locally and around the country.
The question of violence
Of all of Occupy Oakland’s organising challenges, none has been more contentious than the question of violence. Most Oakland activists favour a policy of nonviolent direct action for strategic if not philosophical reasons. A small group, however, of young, mostly male insurrectionists refused to allow such a policy to pass the general assembly, instead demanding the movement adopt the catch-all ‘diversity of tactics’. Unfortunately there is no accompanying discussion of ‘responsibility of tactics’. What this means in practice is a constant stream of autonomously planned actions that go on without much coordination or coherent strategy.
Without democratically elected leadership or collective accountability processes, small groups have taken the banner of Occupy Oakland in erratic directions. The most glaring example has been the weekly ‘Fuck the Police’ marches, which announce that ‘if you identify as peaceful and are likely to interfere with the actions of your fellow protesters in any way, you may not want to attend this march.’ The inevitable property destruction and police confrontation have not built power for Occupy Oakland. Indeed, these actions have only justified the state repression in the minds of many, alienating the working and middle-class masses that are the key to Occupy’s future.
For as much as Occupy hopes to confront the power of the 1 per cent, our greatest challenge and most important process is in organising the 99 per cent (or at least the 69 per cent – I’ve never been a believer in total consensus). To build such a broad movement, Occupy Oakland and its sister groups must abandon their initial claims to be a movement without leaders and demands.
People need a platform to fight for, and they need democratic (not Democratic) leaders who can develop a strategy to achieve it. In Oakland, much of that leadership needs to come from the black, Latino and Asian communities who endure the worst social conditions and have their own radical organising traditions.
Occupy Oakland began with a bang, but the ruling class always knows how to demonise a movement. With the billion‑dollar circus that is the presidential election underscoring just how thoroughly corporations control our so-called democracy, Occupy has the opportunity to develop an alternative that can appeal to millions of Americans. Will we put the heat back on the bankers and war-makers – or will we (re)elect them to public office? Whatever happens, if Occupy is to truly become a massive wave of radical social change in America, look for the strong currents coming in from the west coast waterfront.
Josh Healey is a writer, performer and organiser based in Oakland, California. His writing has appeared in The Progressive, AlterNet and the Huffington Post. Find out more at www.joshhealey.org

Punishing Palestine: How the US plays politics with aid

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:52:44 +0000

In September, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas handed an official letter to United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon containing his people’s bid for statehood at the UN table. Then he turned to ask the world. As he concluded his address to the heads of the collected nations, he was greeted with a standing ovation. Crowds in Palestine, watching New York on a large screen, roared, their faces proudly daubed with the colours of their flag. After 63 years of occupation, their appeal was for recognition that they, like Israel, have a legal right to exist. Well aware of the US intentions to veto their bid at the security council, they celebrated anyway, welcoming a day of empowering action after months of stalled talks.
Two days later, despite expressions of alarm from members of the Obama administration and international aid agencies, the US Congress voted to slash $200 million of humanitarian aid to Palestine. Standing in front of Congress members, the American-Jewish policy analyst, Elliott Abrams, held up the suspension of aid as the perfect punishment: ‘It is a good way of telling the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organisation] officials that their caper in New York was a serious mistake and that they will pay a price for it.’
Gaza’s aid-dependency
More than 75 per cent of the 1.6 million Palestinians trapped in the walled enclave of Gaza are dependent on aid. Half of these are children. The former head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), John Ging, said that, in 2010, Gaza was already in the ninth year of using emergency rations. The queues outside their distribution centres lengthened significantly after the 22-day Israeli assault at the start of 2009, which left thousands without homes and unable to rebuild.
Gaza’s aid-dependency is firmly rooted in its inability to trade with the outside world, prevented by the Israeli blockade, which is now into its fourth year. Suspended in a frozen economy, people’s skills have stagnated. There were once thriving agriculture and fishing industries; today 35 per cent of Gaza’s farmland and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are inaccessible due to Israeli military measures. The undernourished industries are barely supplemented by the piecemeal imports that come up through Rafah’s maze of hazardous tunnels.
The blockade has created a unique, man‑made poverty, carefully crafted to prevent starvation but promote suffering.
Congress’s decision will augment the sad reality that, across the West Bank and Gaza, access to aid is persistently obstructed by politics. Some $85 million of the cut US funding was due to go towards improving the struggling Palestinian health system. Just to reach clinics, patients must run the gauntlet of the more than 500 checkpoints that divide up the West Bank, or submit themselves to the political lottery of the Israeli health permit system to access treatment outside Gaza.
Those that reach the clinics find that supplies are often scarce and doctors lack training. Even with the support of international donors, healthcare is not a given right.
Playing politics with aid
Steve James, chief executive for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said he was ‘deeply concerned about the implications of the US withdrawing aid funding from the Palestinian Authority’. Haven spent more than two decades working with Palestinian communities on health development, MAP has increasingly come up against the politicisation of aid as a barrier to health. ‘In addition to the very real impact it will have on the health and welfare of Palestinians, the decision is a clear case of playing politics with aid,’ said James.
Beyond the humanitarian consequences, the political precedent this sets is deeply concerning. The concept of international humanitarian assistance is founded on a shared belief that every human has the right to life without suffering. This principle cannot be pegged to the political whims of a powerful donor, lest we endorse a corrupt global economy whereby humanitarian aid is held hostage to political submission.
Palestine’s ‘caper in New York’ was an occupied nation seeking statehood through the most legitimate and legal channel available, as opposed to the potential bloodshed of a third intifada. Congress’s subsequent decision to withdraw aid can be viewed as nothing less than the collective punishment of a civilian population and blatant political blackmail. Palestinians looking around at their neighbouring Arab states will rightly be questioning why international funds have been poured into the uprisings of the Arab Spring (and the regimes that preceded them) while they must bear grave sanctions for sending one man and a letter to the UN table.
In the wake of the decision, the US can no longer maintain its incongruous role as a supposed ‘honest broker’ of peace between Israel and Palestine. The inequality of support is now staggering. Israel is set to benefit from $3 billion-plus in aid from the US in 2012. It is the largest cumulative recipient of aid since the second world war. The allocated budget, said Republican US official Nita Lowey, ‘fully funds our commitment to ensure our ally Israel maintains its qualitative military edge’. The great moat of wealth disparity that runs along the length of the separation wall grows deeper by the day.
US demands that Palestine must simply sit down and play by their rules are increasingly absurd. For one, the notion that Israeli officials have been waiting patiently at the negotiating table with olive branches in their hands has all but evaporated over the past year. The ‘Palestine papers’ leaked in January 2011 revealed that Israel has time and again rejected requests for compromise; its rebuttals have been so extensive that Palestinian negotiators were humiliated to see the papers published. Israel’s ongoing refusal to halt settlement-building during negotiations, Palestine’s prerequisite for returning to the talks, is further evidence of its disregard for the process.
Congress’s cuts do not stop at the door of the Palestinian Authority. Two US laws, passed in 1991 and 1994 by the Bush and Clinton administrations respectively, made it mandatory to halt funding to a UN agency that granted membership to a Palestinian state. These laws were explicitly introduced to scare UN agencies into rejecting Palestine as a member, thereby keeping it in a state of rolling isolation.
A Palestinian state
Israel and the US are most fearful of Palestine’s potential membership of the International Criminal Court, for then Israel is likely to be called to account for its actions and the deaths of civilians during the 2009 war on Gaza.
Despite the punitive US laws, UNESCO has been the first of the UN agencies to accept the state of Palestine as a member. The US has already suspended its funding as a result, and others are likely to follow.
Speaking to Congress before the vote, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reminded her fellow congressmen of the old laws: ‘The George H W Bush administration, which is highly regarded to this day for its success in multilateral diplomacy, made a bold pledge: the US would withhold funding to any UN entity that granted membership, or any upgraded status, to the PLO. The PLO’s scheme was stopped dead in its tracks. The administration should use the same funding conditions that worked two decades ago to stop Palestine’s dangerous unilateral scheme today.’
What Congress really fears is that Palestine may realise that, after years of being locked between two aggressive powers, the world is ready to accept a state of Palestine based on the 1967 borders. ‘How will any Palestinian leader be able to accept less when he sits down with Israel than he has already gotten at the UN?’ asks Elliott Abrams, nervously.

Wisconsin: Labour’s last stand

admin — Sun, 15 May 2011 19:09:44 +0000

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya – Wisconsin. The showdown in Madison, Wisconsin, does not compare with the long-awaited self-liberation of North Africa and the Gulf in terms of sacrifice or level of organisation, but it is the most significant labour struggle in the US in decades – and it may prove to be just as globally important as those more dramatic engagements, because it represents the first real bump in the road for the US right’s new agenda.
Madison emerged as a global flashpoint because its new Republican governor, Scott Walker, introduced what he called a ‘budget repair bill’, supposedly to alleviate a shortfall of $137 million this year and a projected $3.6 billion the year after. These measures are estimated to amount to an effective pay cut of up to 10 per cent. More important, they were non-negotiable. Indeed, Walker declared that as the state is ‘broke’ and has nothing to bargain with, it must therefore ensure that public employees have no bargaining rights.
Collective bargaining for public employees – with the exception of some police and firefighters – is to be limited to wages alone, with no mention of benefits, working conditions, or disciplinary procedures. Even on wages, possible concessions are limited to cost-of-living adjustments, unless a state-wide referendum says otherwise. Even more pernicious, the bill eliminates employer collection of union dues and imposes annual union certification votes, with a majority of all members (not just those voting) required for continued certification.
The measures are intended to destroy public-sector unions in Wisconsin. They are tried and tested – similar measures implemented by Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana in 2005 led to a 90 per cent reduction in public-sector union membership. Other measures include the elimination of health benefits for ‘limited term employees’ and a sweeping mandate to introduce ‘efficiency’ in the state’s Medicaid programs (the federally funded but state‑administered health insurance for the poor).
The evolution of the protests against Walker’s onslaught is an object lesson in that most endangered of species: American-style democracy. Walker, in the finest tradition of US politics, formally announced the bill on Friday, 11 February, hoping to take advantage of the weekend ‘news hole’ to jackhammer the bill through the legislature before the public knew what was going on. But the public employees’ unions and many others were on the alert, since he had repeatedly telegraphed his radical austerity agenda.
A Valentine’s Day protest previously planned by the Teaching Assistants’ Association of the University of Wisconsin at Madison suddenly mushroomed to 1,000 people. The next day saw the hearings of the joint finance committee, the first body to consider budget bills.
The hearings included public testimony; and although the Republican co-chairmen tried to limit knowledge of this to a few groups of Tea Party activists, the information got out and people from all walks of life and all parts of Wisconsin streamed in, ready to talk about the effects of the budget repair bill on their lives. As 10,000 protesters shook the walls of the Capitol, hour after hour of poignant, eloquent testimony touched everyone who watched. The Republican co-chairs hurried people through their scandalously brief two minutes, often refusing to allow legislators to dialogue with them. In the final 14 hours of testimony, not a single person spoke in favour. When, after 17 hours, the co-chairs abruptly and arbitrarily cut off testimony with hundreds still on the list to be heard, the tension exploded into anger and protest, with chants of ‘Let us speak’ ringing in the halls.
Cutting off testimony was seen as a gross abrogation of the rights of Wisconsin citizens. The Democrats convened an informal hearing that continued round the clock for days. Protesters decided that they had to stay in the building in order to keep testifying, and the Capitol occupation was born. Over the next few days, protest numbers increased to 50,000. Then, the situation was transformed when the entire Democratic delegation of the state Senate left the state, denying the Republicans the quorum needed for budget-related legislation (and putting themselves beyond the reach of state law enforcement, who could have ordered them to go back).
The occupation lasted 17 days, with as few as 100 or as many as 800 sleeping in the Capitol at night. The largest US labour protests in living memory peaked at an estimated 80 to 100,000 participants on 26 February. Although public employees in Wisconsin are not allowed to strike, there were work stoppages. Schoolteachers in Madison walked out for four days in a row, defeating a legal attempt to enjoin them to return. Rural areas in Wisconsin that hadn’t seen a protest since the 1980s saw hundreds or thousands of people protesting against appearances by Walker and packing town hall meetings.
These actions inspired others around the country – and the world. The Republican governor of Michigan was forced to say he would negotiate with public-sector unions rather than coerce them. The Indiana legislature (at the urging of Governor Daniels) dropped a ‘right-to-work’ bill that would have wrecked private-sector unions. Protesters tried to occupy the Ohio statehouse. And people from around the world, including Egypt, ordered pizzas to keep the Capitol residents fed around the clock.

A very broad constellation of social forces was brought to bear. In general, ‘social movement unionism’ is a weak or non-existent force in US politics; with some notable exceptions, unions are notoriously insular and focused on their own immediate concerns. The Wisconsin labour struggle, however, has been a delicate balance of several moving parts. The occupation was maintained primarily by a coalition between the Teaching Assistants’ Association, local community and student grassroots activists, and many previously inactive community members. The big protests were spearheaded by larger unions with public sector members: the Wisconsin Educational Association Council, the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees’ International Union. Police and firefighters, even those not covered in the bill, have demonstrated in solidarity with their fellow public employees, as have numerous private-sector unions, such as the Steel Workers. A contingent of 150 dockers even flew in from southern California to sleep in the Capitol.
As I write, the 24-hour occupation of the Capitol is over, but activists maintain a presence in the building in the day and on the grounds at night. There is serious talk about a general strike if the governor starts to implement the threatened layoffs of at least 1,500 state employees; the last one was the Twin Cities (Minnesota) strike of 1934.
The budget repair bill is not the brainchild of Scott Walker, a long-time colourless Republican functionary turned radical Tea Partier. It is part of a pre-programmed national offensive by the new right. The fundamental components are being repeated in Ohio (where it just passed the senate), Indiana (withdrawn), Florida, Tennessee and numerous other states, with lesser versions in California and New York, proposed by Democratic governors.
The first component might be called neoliberal austerity, although it is perhaps more straightforward to term it ‘austerity for thee but not for me’. Most of these plans involve tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and sacrifice for public workers, who will lose rights and compensation, and for the broader public, who will suffer a severe loss in government services such as healthcare, police protection and education – while this struggle was going on, Detroit, Michigan, made the decision to close half of its public schools. This offensive is also supported by divide-and-rule policies. Republican politicians repeatedly refer to public employees as parasites and enemies of the people; Walker calls public employees the ‘haves’ and private-sector employees the ‘have-nots’, as if it is school teachers and government clerks who exploit private sector workers.
The second component is the deliberate assault on public-sector unions. The argument from right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation is that they differ fundamentally from private-sector unions, in that they do not haggle over the distribution of honestly derived profit but rather over the ill-gotten spoils of taxation and other government revenue collection. Furthermore, and more fundamentally, private-sector employees have no leverage or control over their employers, while public-sector unions, which spend some small part of their membership dues on political campaigns, can help choose their bosses (elected politicians) and exert leverage on them. Since private-sector workers have no democratic representation in the workplace and the fundamental elements of their lives are totally subject to the whims of the market, ‘fairness’ requires that the same be true of public employees.
Perhaps more to the point than these spurious arguments is the fact that private-sector unionism now stands at just over 7 per cent in the US. Last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, unionised public-sector employees outnumbered unionised private-sector employees for the first time, even though the private sector is much larger. Public unions remain because they have not been subject to 30 years of constant union-busting, with the result that union penetration in the public sector is still at about 35 per cent. Now, with the ideal firmly entrenched in popular ideology that everything must be run like a corporation, it is only natural that government gets into the business of union-busting too. Public sector unions are also the largest organised source of reliable political money on the liberal side – with the recent Supreme Court Citizens United ruling freeing corporations to engage in political spending without limit, it is again only natural to try to destroy the resources of the other side.
In a way, this fight is the last stand of organised labour in America. Yes, it will go on in some form, but the question of whether it plays a political role in the country, whether or not it continues to provide a bulwark, however weak, against untrammelled corporate rule, will be determined in the next months. And this fight is not just for organised labour – it is for everyone who would be harmed by the dark new order arising in Wisconsin.
Rahul Mahajan is a teaching assistant who has been involved in organising the Wisconsin protests

New radicals

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:04:53 +0000

On entering the White House, President Obama promised to turn the US economy around with fiscal stimulus and job creation, alongside a progressive action plan for welfare reform. Most of the US, it seemed, was disillusioned with the Bush ‘tax cuts for the rich’ strategy for economic growth. Just two years later the Democrats face a powerful surge of conservative activism aiming to undermine those plans – and the government itself. Under the umbrella of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have taken to the streets, galvanised for action.
The first Tea Party protests took place across the US on 27 February 2009, with an on-air rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli eight days previously credited as a watershed moment. Discontent had been brewing for some time among the conservative middle class, who felt their too-high taxes were paying for the failings of others. A mood of suspicion towards the establishment prevailed.
The spring and summer of that year saw a wave of further protests. Activists united over demands for lower taxes and smaller government, based on a conservative reading of the US constitution. Obama’s Wall Street bailout and healthcare reform came under particular attack. To the Tea Partiers, Obama’s administration and the liberals are ‘the enemy’, bringing unacceptable ‘socialism’ into US politics.
The groups were organised locally and loosely affiliated on the internet. Soon two main lobbyist groups, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, stepped in to provide the movement with financial backing, education and training.
So is this really an example of a spontaneous, grass-roots uprising? Or is it, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it, ‘astroturf [engineered] by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class’?
The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
On the one hand, the movement undoubtedly thrives on the energy of its activists. ‘The Tea Party’s approach is similar to the early feminist and civil rights movements – amateur, nubile, and thus somehow more “real”,’ says Tim Stanley, a professor of contemporary US history at Royal Holloway University who has been researching the movement. But it is also rooted firmly in the 21st century: ‘It’s a new type of instant, plugged-in, mobile campaigning.’ It has been reported that the literature of the left, such as Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is being studied by Tea Party activists determined to beat the progressives at their own game.
On the other hand, the movement has changed significantly in character since its inception. High-profile supporters have given the Tea Party both celebrity endorsement and Washington expertise. Along with ex-Republican politicians such as FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey, media personalities such as Fox News host Glenn Beck have celebrated the movement and agitated its members. Sarah Palin has risen above the ridicule she inspired among the liberal establishment during her run for vice-presidency to become darling of the Tea Party – and with it, a renewed political force.
More controversial is the question of the movement’s wealthy financial backers. Cash injections for FreedomWorks have included, among others, $2.96 million from the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, directed by the billionaire Richard Scaife. The Koch brothers, multi-billionaire owners of gas and oil conglomerate Koch Industries, have also spent millions through their organisation Americans for Prosperity. An investigative report by Jane Mayer for the New Yorker concluded that through Tea Party involvement, the Kochs have ‘helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement’.
The movement has also lost some independence through its gradual integration into the Republican machine. During the 2010 election cycle, Republicans learned the value of Tea Party support when more moderate Republican favourites lost out to candidates with Tea Party backing. But it remains to be seen how far this uneasy partnership can go. As Tim Stanley puts it, ‘The GOP [Grand Old Party] is still dominated at an organisational and money level by Martini-sipping, pro-business frat boys who can’t stand the proletarian nature of the Tea Party.’
Regardless of these tensions, the movement embodies a potent political mix. And despite this talk of oil billionaires and hyperactive talk show hosts, the Tea Party should not be understood as a uniquely American phenomenon. FreedomWorks has shown transnational aspirations in holding talks with British conservative campaign group the Taxpayers Alliance, and is reportedly urging right-wing European think-tanks to start activist wings.
It may be time for progressives on both sides of the Atlantic to dig out their dusty old copies of Rules for Radicals.

Based out

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:00:54 +0000

When the United States signed a deal to use seven Colombian military bases late last year, the Obama administration assured Latin American countries that the bases would not be used as launch-pads for operations in neighbouring states. Unfortunately for State Department spin-doctors, a Colombian journalist spotted a US Air Force document that had been sent to Congress months earlier, which showed this was exactly what US military planners
had in mind.

It stated that the Palanquero airbase in Colombia ‘provides an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America’ and listed ‘anti-US governments’ among the threats faced by US forces. ‘Full spectrum operations’ is a Pentagon term for dominating the battle space on land, sea, air and space, and can include nuclear weapons.

Although the text of the document has now been changed, it caused a sensation in Latin America because it seems to confirm fears that the Colombian bases deal is about cementing US military dominance in the region and maintaining its ability to interfere in any country it chooses.

Loosening the alliance

Latin American governments are right to be concerned, but the deal with Colombia is, paradoxically, a sign of US weakness in the region. Left-wing governments have swept to power across the Americas in the past decade and to varying degrees have rejected the crude free-market economics espoused by US dominated institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. These progressive governments are also loosening the historically tight alliance with the US military.

Latin American elites once gave US Green Berets free rein in their mountains and rainforests and schooled their own officers in US academies, where they learnt the latest counter-insurgency and torture techniques to be used against ‘subversives’. But today the ‘pink tide’ governments are pulling their officers out of US training schools. Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Uruguay have now withdrawn from the School of Americas, the notorious institution that boasts 11 Latin American dictators among its graduates. Ecuador and Nicaragua are likely to withdraw their soldiers and Costa Rica, which has no army, has pulled out its police cadets. The School of Americas used to be based in the Panama Canal Zone, but has now moved to Fort Benning, Georgia and has a new anodyne name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co operation.

The US does not own any military bases in Latin America. Since US Southern Command left its headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone in 1999, it has had to rely on friendly governments to lend or lease it military bases in the region. After leaving Panama, it signed four 10-year leases on air-bases in Ecuador, El Salvador, Aruba and Curacao. The left wing president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, recently refused to extend the lease and US forces have left the Manta airbase. It has now been written into the constitution that US forces cannot be stationed on Ecuadorian territory.

The lease on the airbase in El Salvador was extended for five years, just before another left-winger, President Mauricio Funes, was inaugurated in January. So he was not given a chance to expel US troops, but the US will be concerned that its Salvadoran base does not have a long-term future.

In Paraguay, the Pentagon spent millions of dollars building a base with a state-of-the-art radar system, which opened in 2006. But to the consternation of US military planners, a progressive priest, Fernando Lugo, has won the presidency, so it looks as if the construction was a wasted investment.

Apart from the large numbers of US troops sited in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the most important US base in the region is in Honduras, where 500 troops of Joint Task Force Bravo are stationed. One reason why Pentagon hardliners have been sympathetic to the recent coup in Honduras is because the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, planned to start commercial flights from the base, compromising the security and secrecy of US operations on that vital installation.

Clawing back military hegemony

As it casts its eye around the region, the Pentagon has been finding it harder and harder to find military allies and has been forced to fall back on Colombia, the country with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. As it tries to claw back its once unassailable military hegemony, the US has re-activated the Fourth Fleet of the Southern Command Navy, which patrols the waters all round Latin America. The Pentagon is now planning to pay for the construction of new naval bases in Panama, where US military training may take place, according to the Center for International Policy.

Since the launch of Plan Colombia in 2001, nominally a counter-drugs strategy but with an obvious counter-insurgency element, US forces have gradually been sucked into the war against Colombia’s left-wing guerrillas and are already present on many of Colombia’s military bases. Declassified documents show that the US now spends almost half its military aid budget in Colombia on private military contractors, which obscures the true extent of the US presence there; ITT, for example, operates Colombia’s ground-based military radars.

This latest agreement allows US troops to use seven named bases. Of these, Palanquero airbase is the most important. The US will spend more than US$40 million on improving the runway so it will have the capacity for large transport aircraft such as C-17s, which have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and can carry tanks, helicopters and large numbers of troops. Also noteworthy are the two naval bases, Cartagena and Malaga, not only convenient ports for the newly-activated Fourth Fleet, but vital gateways to both the Atlantic and Pacific, crucial to the US military’s global strategy, as well as operations in the Americas.

Coalitions of the unwilling

The militarisation of Latin America has provoked a swell of protest. Almost all the governments of South America have spoken out against the Colombian bases deal. In Colombia, a wide coalition of grass-roots movements, including the country’s largest trade union federations, is braving paramilitary repression to speak out against the bases – which, they say, not only violate the country’s sovereignty but will exacerbate the country’s human rights crisis.

In Ecuador a similar coalition successfully pressured the government to evict US forces from the Manta base. Both the Colombian and Ecuadorian movements are part of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (or No Bases Network) that grew out of the social forum in India in 2004 and was formally established in Quito in 2007. The network, which now has hundreds of campaigners in all continents, aims to close the estimated 1,000 US and 200 European bases worldwide.

Latin America’s new anti-base movement has an inspiring example in Puerto Rico. There tens of thousands of people protested and took part in civil disobedience campaigns against the US Navy, which for decades carried out bombing exercises on the small island of Vieques. The test bombs contained depleted uranium and carcinogenic chemicals such as triocyl phosphate. In 2003, the US Navy finally left Vieques and the Pentagon closed all but one of its military bases in Puerto Rico. n

Grace Livingstone is the author of America’s Backyard: the United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror (Zed, 2009)
No Bases Network: www.no-bases.org