From exodio at yahoo.com Tue Jul 1 00:35:09 2003 From: exodio at yahoo.com (John Sackis) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:58 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Washingtons War of Terror in Iraq In-Reply-To: <20030630185228.233CBA915@exigence.opensoftwareservices.com> Message-ID: <20030701063509.95967.qmail@web41215.mail.yahoo.com> Washington’s war of terror in Iraq By the editorial board (of www.wsws.org; World Socialist WebSite) 18 June 2003 A series of sustained counterinsurgency operations by US troops has signaled a new stage in the US occupation of Iraq. Faced with escalating armed resistance and growing hostility from the Iraqi people, Washington has decided to use overwhelming force to suppress and terrorize the country’s 24 million people. A war that was waged under the pretense of destroying fictitious “weapons of mass destruction” is evolving into a classical colonial-style war of repression, the kind that has been waged with bloody results from the US campaign in the Philippines at the dawn of the twentieth century, to the French bloodbath in Algeria beginning in the 1950s, to the US war in Vietnam. Six weeks after President Bush strutted across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and proclaimed that major combat operations had ended and the military mission had been accomplished, American soldiers are being killed by Iraqis at the rate of one a day. Iraqi casualties over the same period have climbed to several hundred. The latest American death, the shooting of a soldier patrolling Baghdad Tuesday, brings to 50 the number of occupation troops killed in attacks or accidents since Bush utilized the aircraft carrier for a photo opportunity. Beyond the daily guerrilla attacks on US troops, there are a number of other telling indications of the mounting resistance to the occupation. Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East reporter for the Independent in Britain, said US officials had told him that aircraft seeking to land at Baghdad airport come under fire from snipers hiding near the runway virtually every night. Another barometer of the seething anger among Iraqis is a spate of prison uprisings that have left several Iraqis dead and scores wounded. Last Saturday, detainees throwing rocks and wielding metal bars attacked US military guards at the Abu Gharib prison west of Baghdad. US guards opened fire on the Iraqis, killing one and critically wounding several others. It was the third such incident in a week at the prison complex. Two days earlier, US troops shot two prisoners to death. American authorities claimed they were trying to escape. The bulk of the violent clashes between US forces and the Iraqi population go unreported. Unless an American soldier is killed or seriously wounded, the US Central Command does not reveal the incident. Iraqi sources charge that US authorities have covered up clashes, including those in which US troops have been killed. The real character of what Washington called the “liberation” of the Iraqi people has emerged: it is a brutal occupation, with daily killings, house-to-house searches and mass arrests. Thousands of US troops backed by helicopter gun ships, fighter planes and tanks have stormed through cities and towns across Iraq over the past several days in what the military has dubbed “Operation Desert Scorpion.” Kicking off this offensive was “Operation Peninsula,” an attack involving some 4,000 US troops, which claimed the lives of over 100 Iraqis. US forces rounded up over 400 Iraqi men, releasing all but 60 of them. Just as most of the detained suspects proved to be of no interest to American forces, so too the bulk of those killed were innocent victims of the onslaught. In a separate action last Friday, US forces answered an ambush on a tank north of Baghdad with apparently indiscriminate retaliation, slaughtering a family of five shepherds working in their fields. Early Sunday morning, 1,300 American soldiers sealed off the restive town of Fallujah, where occupation forces massacred at least 18 demonstrators in April. One of the senior commanders in charge of house-to-house raids there told the Washington Post that the US military’s goal was “to go in with overwhelming force to squash everything before putting a soldier in harm’s way.” Press reports described US soldiers kicking down doors, forcing men to the ground and handcuffing them while planting their boots on the Iraqis’ necks. The soldiers taped shut the mouths and blindfolded those detained before taking them away for interrogation. Women and children, some as young as six, were also rousted from their homes in the pre-dawn hours, handcuffed and held for hours before being released. The US occupation authorities, echoed by the US news media, claim that these operations are directed exclusively against “Ba’ath Party loyalists, terrorist organizations and criminal elements.” In fact, most of those caught up in these sweeps are ordinary Iraqi civilians. The media propaganda cannot conceal the fact that Iraqi resistance to the occupation runs far deeper than the remnants of the Ba’athist regime. While the bulk of the ambushes and shootings of US soldiers has been concentrated in the predominantly Sunni area in central Iraq that provided the strongest popular base for the Ba’athist regime, attacks and protests have also erupted in the largely Shi’ite south, a center of opposition to Saddam Hussein’s rule. Last Sunday, over 10,000 Iraqis marched through the center of the southern city of Basra, stoning British army vehicles and demanding an end to the occupation. A systematic sabotage campaign in the same region has prevented occupation officials from restarting Iraq’s oil industry. The latest sweeps, conducted in some cases against populations that were known as centers of opposition to Saddam Hussein, will only fuel more acts of resistance. “Pentagon officials say the effort is needed to avoid a prolonged guerrilla campaign that not only could cost American lives, but would sap energy from a reconstruction effort already slowed by sabotage and security problems,” the Wall Street Journal, a paper that has provided the strongest editorial support for Bush’s war in Iraq, reported Tuesday. “Yet military planners acknowledge this approach is fraught with its own peril, as the incursions inevitably will alienate parts of the population and generate sympathy for those the US is trying to isolate.” The Journal noted that US troops “have a hard time distinguishing between ordinary civilians and enemy fighters.” It added that while thus far failing to stop the attacks, the offensive and the resulting civilian casualties “have raised support for America’s foes.” “You can’t tell friend from foe,” complained a US soldier, according to a wire service report. “We didn’t want nothing to do with these people anymore,” an Army Sergeant told the New York Times. He added that even children terrified him. “At the end, it was like, ‘Get that kid away from me,’” he said. These remarks are eerily reminiscent of those made by an earlier generation of American troops who were sent on the basis of lies to kill and be killed in a distant land—Vietnam. Fearing the population that they were supposedly protecting from “communist aggression,” they found it impossible to distinguish Vietnamese civilians from the Viet Cong—largely because the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were waging a popular war against a hated and despised army of occupation. As one US Marine Sergeant testified in hearings held in May 1971: “The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, VC had weapons and civilians didn’t and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, ‘How do you know he’s a VC?’ and the general reply would be, ‘He’s dead,’ and that was sufficient.” The conditions are already emerging in Iraq for a similar kind of slaughter. It is only a matter of time before the US commits the type of atrocities in Iraq that some 30 years ago made “My Lai” and “destroying the village to save it” bywords for imperialist savagery. Echoing the mantras of the Vietnam War, the US military command is talking about the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. So much for the pre-war predictions of euphoric support for the American “liberators” from a grateful and pliant Iraqi people. As in Vietnam, the American “goodwill gestures” are at once pathetic and contemptuous. Immediately after storming through the town of Fallujah, brutalizing Iraqi men, women and children, the military organized a giveaway of soccer balls, school supplies and food. Residents reacted with hostility. Many kept their children away from schools where US civil affairs troops staged the giveaways, saying that they were afraid of the soldiers. The Washington Post reported on the attempt by one army unit to turn a garbage-strewn lot into a sports field: “The US military engineers, weighed down by heavy flak jackets and helmets, toiled to clear vacant lots of waist-high garbage rotting in 115-degree heat and transform them into soccer fields. They said children threw rocks and bricks at them.” That such gestures should be treated as a cruel hoax is hardly surprising given the social chaos resulting from the war, together with the escalating US repression. Much of Iraq remains without regular electricity, clean water or a functioning sewer system. The threat of disease grows daily as the summer sends temperatures soaring. Iraqi children are paying the greatest price. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a report earlier this month that the number of children suffering from diarrhea, the number one killer of infants, has more than doubled since the US occupation. Fully 72 percent of the children surveyed by the agency were suffering from the ailment, the result of the war’s destruction of the country’s water filtration and sewage treatment facilities. The number of cases of acute malnutrition among children under five in Baghdad has also doubled since the war, the UN agency said. More than half a million children died from these same conditions in the aftermath of the first Gulf War as a result of the destruction of infrastructure and the UN sanctions. The US “liberation” is already producing similarly horrific results. The adult population faces mass unemployment and deepening poverty. One of the first edicts issued by the new US colonial administrator, Paul Bremer, was the disbanding of the 400,000-man Iraqi army. This action has left an estimated 2.5 million people—10 percent of the population—without any means of support. Upwards of another 100,000 are blacklisted as former members of the Ba’ath Party under another order issued by Bremer. The Telegraph of London Wednesday quoted a “very senior British official” describing the US reconstruction effort in Iraq as being “in chaos” and suffering from “a complete absence of strategic direction.” The official added, “We are facing an almost complete inability to engage with what needs to be done and to bring to bear sufficient resources to make a difference.” He warned that unless the US began to devote serious resources to the rebuilding of Iraq, “by the autumn, we could face the consequences.” There is more, however, than mere incompetence and indifference behind the catastrophe that the US occupation has unleashed on Iraq. The right-wing ideologues who control Washington’s policy toward the occupied country have definite plans that require its economic leveling. Their aim is to smash the pre-war structure of state-controlled industry and dismantle any and all restrictions on the ability of US-based corporations to exploit the country’s resources, first and foremost its oil riches. The energy conglomerates and their political mouthpieces in the Bush administration view Iraq as a potential source of massive profits. They could not care less about the cost to the Iraqi people. In addition to the wealth it can steal from Iraq, the American financial oligarchy and its military-political establishment see Iraq as a staging ground for further economic and military aggression in the Middle East and beyond. The aim is to establish, with Israel serving as junior partner, US domination over the entire region. This is part of a grand—and mad—plan to gain a stranglehold over the world’s oil resources, which would enable Washington to blackmail friend and foe alike on the road to achieving global hegemony. Aside from securing control of Iraqi oil facilities, establishing military bases and setting up the machinery of repression required to crush all opposition, the US has little interest in “rebuilding” Iraq. The humanitarian and democratic rhetoric is mere window dressing, aimed mainly at deceiving and manipulating public opinion at home. Only recently Bremer announced new regulations making it a crime not only to voice support for the deposed Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein, but to oppose continued US occupation. Anyone who calls for the withdrawal of American troops, either in speech, print or through protest demonstrations, may be subjected to military repression. The American administration headed by Bremer has already unveiled plans for the sweeping privatization of state enterprises, beginning with the oil sector. It is widely suspected that the lucrative contracts handed out to Bechtel Corporation and other politically connected firms for the repair of Iraqi infrastructure will serve as a vehicle for the privatization of key public services, including water and electricity. At a June 13 press conference, Bremer, pressed by reporters about the desperate economic conditions and continuing mass demonstrations by Iraqis demanding jobs, repeatedly declared that the situation would only be remedied by “fundamental economic reforms.” The US colonial chief claimed that the Iraqi people could decide for themselves what kind of economic system they wanted. He stressed, however, that a “vibrant private sector” was the “sine qua non for a stable economy and stable economic growth.” He cynically added: “If they choose socialism, that will be their business. My guess is that’s not going to happen.” The US occupation of Iraq is a brutal imperialist enterprise. The soldiers dying there are being sacrificed not for “democracy” or “liberation,” but to further the predatory aims and interests of a gangster element within the American ruling elite. This layer has turned to military aggression as a means of enriching itself and distracting attention from the deepening economic and social contradictions within the US itself. It systematically lied to the American people, fabricating threats from non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and phony terrorist links, to justify an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression. The Iraqi people have every right to resist this occupation. Their democratic rights and social welfare can be secured only by throwing off the yoke of occupation. They will continue to resist, and their struggle will inspire the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East to rise in opposition to US imperialism and its accomplices in the region—the oil sheikdoms and corrupt Arab bourgeois regimes from Jordan and Egypt to Syria and Lebanon. Future historians will record the US “victory” in Iraq as the catalyst for an unprecedented eruption of popular struggles against imperialism not only in the Middle East, but internationally. And just as Vietnam became the focal point for an eruption of political and social struggles within the US, so too will Washington’s crimes in Iraq repel the broad mass of the American people, becoming a focal point for the deeply felt anger and disgust of working people for the right-wing clique headed by Bush and the financial oligarchy which it serves. In the 1960s and 1970s the word “quagmire” became synonymous with the US military and political disaster in Vietnam. In Iraq, the Bush administration has landed US imperialism in a new quagmire, whose implications are even more catastrophic for the American ruling elite. It is the elementary responsibility of working people in the US, Britain and internationally to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and British occupation forces from Iraq. The international movement of millions against war that emerged in the months before the Iraq invasion proved incapable of stopping the onslaught. This was above all due to its lack of a viable and worked out political perspective. The movement against imperialist war must now be revived and developed on the basis of a new perspective—the independent political mobilization of the international working class to defeat the imperialist war machine and the profit system that it defends. Link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/iraq-j18.shtml __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com From alruff at execpc.com Tue Jul 1 05:32:41 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:58 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [Fwd: Costs of War Hit Home] Message-ID: <3F015539.3080608@execpc.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Costs of War Hit Home Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 21:54:55 -0400 From: portsideMod@netscape.net Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com To: portside@yahoogroups.com The Costs of War Hit Home by Karen Dolan An elected official of East Cleveland reportedly made a plea at a recent public event for Bush to wage war in East Cleveland, as in Iraq, so that its roads, schools and crumbling infrastructure could then be rebuilt. Though said in jest, her remark reveals the desperate need felt by many states and cities for resources to be spent at home rather than on war. The recession and the costs of the war are causing huge cuts in public education. The nation's governors warn that state deficits are the largest in more than 50 years. In the next year the deficits will run between $60 billion and $85 billion. This is between 13 percent and 18 percent of state expenditures. The New York Times reported that some states have undertaken drastic cost-saving measures--including unscrewing every third light bulb in government buildings, having teachers double as janitors and releasing prison inmates early. Many states also reported having to lay off teachers, raise student tuitions or cut financial aid--sometimes all three. Pressed to the brink of bankruptcy, states, cities and towns across the U.S. are recognizing the devastating costs to taxpayers of a perpetual war economy. In the months leading up to the war on Iraq, more than 160 local governments passed antiwar resolutions decrying the billions of dollars to be spent on the war while vital social programs face severe budget cuts. SOCIAL PROGRAMS CUT Los Angeles' resolution stated that the "cost [of the war] would be borne by the people of the City of Los Angeles, who rely on federal funds for anti-poverty programs, for workforce assistance, for housing, for education programs, for infrastructure and for the increased demands of homeland security." The National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org) reports that, based on the conservative estimates of $100 billion for the Iraq war alone, taxpayers in Denver would pay $152 million of the war bill from their federal income taxes; in Atlanta, $80 million; in Des Moines, $42 million; in Detroit, almost $180 million; and in New York City, a crippling $2.4 billion. According to the National Priorities Project, the proposed $46 billion increase in military spending for 2003 could be much better spent. California's share could put some 570,000 more children in Head Start; New York state could provide health coverage to almost 750,000 of its uninsured children; Oregon, facing the nation's most severe cuts in public education, could fund 7,000 new elementary school teachers and Mississippi could provide 3,000 affordable housing units to its low-income residents. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the proposed House budget plan includes more than $159 billion in cuts over the next decade to programs for low-income families. Programs such as Medicaid, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), Social Security Insurance, Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and many other programs will all be cut. Alabama will lose at least $1 billion in funding for Medicaid and SCHIP under the proposed budget plan for 2004 to 2013. California will lose almost $10 billion. Further worsening the situation, Congress is in the process of passing a bill giving somewhere between $350 billion and $726 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy. It has just given an additional $80 billion to cover the first month of Iraq war costs. And it is about to agree to a 10-year budget plan that devastates state funding for critical entitlement and low-income programs. Karen Dolan directs the Cities for Peace program at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. Post : mail to 'portside@yahoogroups.com' Subscribe : mail to 'portside-subscribe@yahoogroups.com' Unsubscribe : mail to 'portside-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com' Faq : http://www.portside.org List owner : portside-owner@yahoogroups.com Web address : Digest mode : visit Web site Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From alruff at execpc.com Tue Jul 1 07:12:15 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:58 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [Fwd: message from Adam Shapiro: please circulate] Message-ID: <3F016C8F.7060506@execpc.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: message from Adam Shapiro: please circulate Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 16:22:33 -0500 From: jennifer loewenstein To: jsarin@facstaff.wisc.edu Update : Adam Shapiro has been denied entry into Israel on the grounds that he is a security threat. > Dear Friends, > > Many of you have probably been wondering what has become of me this > last month (if not more)?I have been traveling around the Middle East > (and also to Malaysia), speaking about Palestine and ISM and raising > funds for the movement. On Friday, I tried to enter Palestine from > Jordan and was denied entry, as I was deemed a "threat to the security > of the state" ? something that was not unexpected. It is a measure of > the extent to which Israel must go to deny people like me entry ? > people who wish desperately to see an end to discrimination, > oppression and violence; people who are actively working against these > things using nonviolent means; and people who wish to stand with and > support the Palestinian people during an extremely traumatic and > hopeless time. > > But I do not wish to use your time to complain about my treatment?in > fact, it is nothing compared to what my Palestinian friends and > colleagues around the world experience. While it is true that I am now > cut off from my family (Huwaida is in the West Bank and her relatives > ? now mine by marriage ? are located in the West Bank and in Israel) > and as such am like thousands of Palestinians, it is by virtue of my > activities and words that I am kept from seeing them?not by virtue of > that fact of my identity. When I was in Lebanon, I visited the Shatila > Refugee Camp ? one of the most disturbing places I have ever seen ? > and met people who had relatives in Palestine, but whom they have > never seen, and really have no hope of ever seeing. I met people who > have the keys to their homes in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and hundreds > of other places that you have not heard of, but which exist in the > hearts and minds of these refugees. Before my banishment, I was able > to enter these places, and I admit to almost having taken this for > granted ? after all, I held an American passport, why shouldn't I be > able to walk freely in these streets? Now, faced with exile of sorts, > I am all too aware that my situation is nothing. > > And yet, there is an appeal for the Minister of the Interior to > overturn the decision to keep me out. While I do not have much hope > for such a decision, the very fact that an appeal can be made on my > behalf is an advantage and an option that simply does not exist for > the millions who are refugees from their homes and land. > > The myth about refugees was that they were told to leave their lands > by Arab regimes via radio broadcasts back in 1948. Despite the > testimony of hundreds of Palestinians that this was not true, and that > the reason they fled was because of stories of the massacres, such as > at Deir Yassin, that were being committed by the Irgun, Stern Gang and > Haganah (pre-Israeli Jewish terrorist groups ? as determined by the > imperial power at the time, Britain) and the threats by these groups > to do the same at any village they encountered, the myth of "being > told to leave" has persisted. It is only now, some 50-odd years later, > that the British intelligence reports from that period (the British > were monitoring the radio transmissions from the region) are > confirming that this myth is indeed false. It was only a couple of > years ago that one of the Jewish commanders from that period admitted > to the tactic of using the massacres to scare and threaten > Palestinians from their land. And what good are these revelations and > "discoveries" for the refugees now? > > ___________________ > > My travels this last month have made a great impression on me and I > will be writing more in the days to come. I have met some amazing and > courageous people, who find themselves in a time of great depression, > despondency and lack of hope. The forces of occupation, war and > imperialism are currently felt greatest in the Arab world, and yet, > can we continue to ignore the legacy of these and other policies in > Africa and elsewhere? I truly believe my generation is facing a major > challenge today to develop alternative means of organizing, working > and resisting those policies of war and violence that are mutually > supportive from all parts of the world. Resistance not just for the > sake of resisting or preservation, but for the purpose of effecting > real change and new means by which we engage with each other on this > planet. > > I am aware that this may sound idealistic, and perhaps the challenge > is too great. But from those I have met, I am confident that we have > the skills, desire and commitment to accomplish such changes. We must > make solidarity something more than just a word or a feeling; we must > make it a resource for change. > > I stop here, knowing that I am now rambling, and apologize for > imposing on your time. Feedback, questions and comments are > appreciated. I am still sorting out ideas in my mind. > > in solidarity, > > adam > > _________________________________________________________________ > STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail From earlwal at chorus.net Tue Jul 1 09:23:30 2003 From: earlwal at chorus.net (Bob Reuschlein) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Crisis in the states Message-ID: <3F018B52.738CC6A0@chorus.net> key contrast: A Times article last week noted that the wealthiest 400 taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000, "more than double their share just eight years earlier." Oblivious in D.C. By BOB HERBERT 06/30/03 (New York Times) "Of all the challenges we face, none is more troubling than the fact that thousands of Oregonians, many of them children, don't have enough to eat. Oregon has the highest hunger rate in the nation." Gov. Ted Kulongoski, in his State of the State address. Those who still believe that the policies of the Bush administration will set in motion some kind of renaissance in Iraq should take a look at what's happening to the quality of life for ordinary Americans here at home. The president, buoyed by the bountiful patronage of the upper classes, seems indifferent to the increasingly harsh struggles of the working classes and the poor. As Mr. Bush moves from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, building the mother of all campaign stockpiles, states from coast to coast are reaching depths of budget desperation unseen since the Great Depression. The disconnect here is becoming surreal. On Thursday the National Governors Association let it be known that the fiscal crisis that has crippled one state after another is worsening, not getting better. Taxes have been raised. Services have been cut. And the rainy day funds accumulated in the 1990's have been consumed. If help does not materialize soon ?g? in the form of assistance from the federal government or a sharp turnaround in the economy ?d? some states will fall into a fiscal abyss. That already seems to be happening in places like California, which has been driven to its knees by a two-year $38.8 billion budget gap, and Oregon, which has seen drastic cuts in public school services and the withholding of potentially life-saving medicine from seriously ill patients. Most states have been unable to protect even the most fundamental services from damaging budget cuts. "Few states have succeeded in exempting high-priority programs such as K-12 education, Medicaid, higher education, public safety or aid to cities and towns," according to the compilers of the Fiscal Survey of States, a report produced jointly by the governors' association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. Scott Pattison, director of the budget officers' group, said, "If economic conditions remain stagnant or worsen, and if budget shortfalls continue next year, the states will have exhausted many of their options for countering a weak economy." The budget crisis in California, where an unpopular Democratic governor is politically paralyzed and the Republicans in the State Legislature refuse to consider raising taxes, is potentially catastrophic. Jack Kyser, a public policy economist in Los Angeles told The Associated Press: "People are nervous. There's a real chance for a meltdown that could have rippling effects throughout the nation. This is something of a different magnitude than we've seen before." The governors' association called the fiscal survey the most accurate gauge of the health of state budgets. Its discouraging findings were released as the president was preparing a fund-raising swing that added millions more to his campaign stockpile, and as the Internal Revenue Service was reporting that the nation's richest taxpayers were accumulating an even greater share of the nation's wealth. Some Americans are missing meals and going without their medicine, while others are enjoying a surge in already breathtaking levels of wealth. So what are we doing? We're cutting aid to the former while showering government largess on the latter. There's a reason those campaign millions keep coming and coming and coming. A Times article last week noted that the wealthiest 400 taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000, "more than double their share just eight years earlier." The influence of the wealthy has always been great, but it hasn't always been so cruel. Especially in the past six or seven decades there were many powerful political and civic leaders who looked out for the interests of the less fortunate and pressed their claims for treatment that was reasonably fair. That's changed. The Bush juggernaut, at least for the time being, is rolling over everything that dares to get in its way. And fairness is not something it is concerned about. From Nightoak at aol.com Tue Jul 1 11:47:41 2003 From: Nightoak at aol.com (Nightoak@aol.com) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] a little off topic . . . Message-ID: <1e3.c6ab802.2c32f90d@aol.com> In a message dated 6/30/2003 1:11:51 PM Central Standard Time, brendakonkel@yahoo.com writes: > No peace a home, well . . . without a home!!!! > Not to mention that it speaks directly to Racial Justice, which is our newest working group! Thanks for posting this! :D In peace, Michelle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.madimc.org/pipermail/mapc-discuss/attachments/20030701/cdf9c9e0/attachment.htm From sburns3 at uic.edu Tue Jul 1 11:34:55 2003 From: sburns3 at uic.edu (sburns3) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] suspicious of MoveOn Message-ID: <3F1346A4@webmail.uic.edu> Hi all: If you have been following the MoveOn primary, you know by now that Howard Dean won a plurality, but not a majority, of the votes (46%). The MoveOn people asked one other question, too: "Would you enthusiastically support ANY Democratic candidate against president Bush?" (caps are theirs, not mine). This question received a 28.5% "yes" response. Here's how the MoveOn website chose to portray this result: "We are encouraged by this sense of unity and the broad support for Democratic leaders." In other words, almost three-fourths of the MoveOn voters would NOT support any Democrat against Bush - how is this a show of "broad support for Democratic leaders"? For some time now, I have had my suspicions that MoveOn's agenda is to channel the anti-war movement into support for the Democrats - ANY Democrat, even a pro-war Democrat. Their attempt to misrepresent their own primary results only confirms my suspicions. Steve Burns From kck34 at yahoo.com Tue Jul 1 10:18:51 2003 From: kck34 at yahoo.com (Keith Kinion) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Supreme court ruling on Affirmative action Message-ID: <20030701161851.21246.qmail@web10105.mail.yahoo.com> US Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action: the language of oligarchy By Barry Grey 1 July 2003 The New York Times, reflecting the general view of what passes for the liberal press in the US, hailed last week’s Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action as “a historic stand for equality of opportunity.” As the extraordinary decision handed down by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor demonstrates, however, such claims are a gross distortion of the truth. The most remarkable feature of the ruling upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy, which prevailed by a five-to-four vote, was its unabashed acknowledgment of the existence of a ruling elite in America and its defense of the political and economic interests of that elite. A Supreme Court scholar would be hard pressed to find a precedent in the previous history of the high court for the transparent manner in which O’Connor invoked the concerns of the corporate, military and political establishment in arguing for the expediency of racial preferences. O’Connor, the swing vote on the divided court, felt little need to disguise the fact that “friend of the court” briefs from representatives of the military and major corporations urging the court to uphold racial preferences outweighed legal precedent or constitutional principles in the formulation of her ruling. An extraordinary number of such briefs—over a hundred—were filed with the court in the University of Michigan Law School case. These included filings supporting affirmative action from such corporate giants as 3M Corporation, Exxon Mobil and General Motors, and a brief from two dozen retired senior military officers and former commandants of the military service academies. In defending the position (first laid down by Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke case) that racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses is a “compelling state interest” which justifies the use of racial preferences, O’Connor gave short shrift to questions of democracy or equality. In the pivotal section of her decision, she argued as follows: “These benefits are not theoretical, but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints. What is more, high-ranking retired officers and civilian leaders of the United States military assert that, ‘[b]ased on [their] decades of experience,’ a ‘highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps ... is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principal mission to provide national security.’... At present, ‘the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC used limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies.’... We agree that, ‘[i]t requires only a small step from this analysis to conclude that our country’s other most selective institutions must remain both diverse and selective.’ Here O’Connor declared that a racially diverse officer corps was not only a “compelling state interest,” but a matter of “national security.” She then argued that the use of racial preferences at elite law schools was no less crucial to the functioning of the political power structure in the US: “Individuals with law degrees occupy roughly half the state governorships, more than half the seats in the United States Senate, and more than a third of the seats in the United States House of Representatives. The pattern is even more striking when it comes to highly selective law schools. A handful of these schools accounts for 25 of the 100 United States Senators, 74 United States Courts of Appeals judges, and nearly 200 of the more than 600 United States District Court judges.” There followed a remarkable sentence revealing the essence of O’Connor’s decision: “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.” In other words, affirmative action is an important tool for bolstering the legitimacy of the ruling elite—and keeping the masses in their place. That this has nothing to do with democracy or equality in any serious sense of these words is self-evident. One can imagine similar prescriptions being laid down by defenders of the British Raj who calculated that admitting a visible layer of natives into the colonial administration would keep the Indian masses in check. The elitist and fundamentally antidemocratic basis of the court’s ruling was made even more explicit by Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the four justices who joined O’Connor’s decision, during last April’s oral arguments. Breyer summed up the case made by affirmative action supporters as follows: “[W]e think from the point of view of business, the armed forces, law, etc., that this is an extraordinary need, to have diversity among elites throughout the country, that without it, the country will be much worse off.” In his dissenting opinion, Clarence Thomas, a member of the high court’s extreme right “troika” consisting of himself, Chief Justice Williams Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, focused, for his own political purposes, on the elitist character of O’Connor’s decision. He repeatedly referred to the University of Michigan Law School, one of a handful of highly selective public law schools in the US, as an elite institution. “The interest in remaining elite and exclusive that the majority thinks so obviously critical,” he wrote, “requires the use of admissions ‘standards’ that, in turn, create the Law School’s ‘need’ to discriminate on the basis of race.” Thomas added a barbed reference to the privileged status of the corporate and military leaders who intervened in the case on the side of affirmative action—as well as, by inference, those justices who supported the majority decision. He wrote: “Were this Court to have the courage to forbid the use of racial discrimination in admissions, legacy preferences (and similar practices) might quickly become less popular—a possibility not lost, I am certain, on the elites (both individual and institutional) supporting the Law School in this case.” (“Legacy preferences” refer to the virtually universal practice of granting special status to the offspring of alumni who seek admission to American universities and colleges. Special treatment is also given the sons and daughters of major financial donors.) Thomas, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, nevertheless speaks for a faction of the Republican right that opposes racial preferences out of hostility toward anything that remotely smacks of social reform. These forces include a hard core of segregationists who seek to cloak their racism with hypocritical invocations of legal equality. This faction—including the Christian right, anti-abortion fanatics, the pro-gun lobby and militia elements—exercises enormous influence within the Republican Party and the Bush administration. For the broad masses of minority workers and youth, however, the other side in the long-simmering controversy over affirmative action within the corporate and political establishment in no way represents a progressive alternative. As last week’s ruling by the Supreme Court majority makes clear, its perspective is fundamentally reactionary. Ultimately the decision will have the salutary benefit of helping strip away the democratic trappings in which the policy of racial preferences has been decked out over the past several decades. It is no accident that affirmative action was first given official sanction by the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson in the midst of the urban riots and the political radicalization that arose with the protest movement against the Vietnam War. This policy was expanded and institutionalized by Richard Nixon, in line with his promotion of “black capitalism.” It was a response by the ruling elite to the volatile and irresolvable social contradictions of American capitalist society that were so explosively revealed in the 1960s. Affirmative action was adopted by the federal government precisely at the point when it became clear that the elimination of poverty and the provision of such social necessities as universal health care, decent and affordable housing, quality education for all and full employment were incompatible with the defense of the profit system and the economic interests of the ruling class. It took only a few short years for Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” programs to be revealed as more chimera than reality, and then essentially wound up. At the same time, the US debacle in Vietnam exposed the dangerous implications for American imperialism of a military consisting of a working class soldiery, disproportionately African-American, led by a virtually all-white officer corps. Hence the adoption of a policy aimed at fostering a privileged stratum within the minority populations that would assist in the administration of the cities—still wracked with poverty and social decay—help in the policing of the working class, and play a larger role in supervising American military operations around the world. Affirmative action created a political framework in which questions of race and ethnicity were placed at the forefront, so that the working class public could be diverted from the more fundamental social and class questions underlying the crisis of American society, and divisions within the working class on the basis of race and national origin could be stoked up. That racial preferences were conceived of and debated within ruling circles as a means of diversifying the “elite,” rather than creating conditions of broad social equality, was already made clear by Thurgood Marshall, a liberal Democrat and the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Marshall wrote at the time of the 1978 Bakke case: “[W]e must permit the institutions of this society to give consideration to race in making decisions about who will hold the positions of influence, affluence and prestige in America.” What is new in the current ruling is the naked way in which these considerations are articulated and defended. Traditionally, the Supreme Court has been careful to speak in the language of legal precedent, constitutional jurisprudence and overarching principles. It has felt constrained by democratic opinion, within the population at large and, to a lesser extent, within the political establishment itself, to conceal the class essence of even the most reactionary rulings. That the high court no longer feels itself bound by such constraints—and issues rulings openly in the name of the elite and its interests—reflects a profound change in the outlook and political orientation of the corporate and political establishment. It has largely shed any identification with the democratic norms and methods of the past. This shift in consciousness must, in turn, reflect profound changes in the underlying social structure of the country. Of the many complex and far-reaching socioeconomic developments of recent decades, the most important is the enormous growth of social inequality. The United States has become the most economically polarized of all the major industrialized countries. Just two days after the June 23 high court ruling upholding racial preferences, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a report documenting the colossal enrichment of the wealthiest Americans and the ongoing concentration of income in the hands of a privileged few. The IRS reported that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for over 1 percent of all income in the US in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier. At the same time, their tax burden fell sharply. The average income of these 400 was nearly $174 million, almost quadruple the $46.8 million average in 1992. These figures—and those contained in dozens of similar studies of American society—expose the existence of a financial oligarchy—one which controls the political system lock, stock and barrel. Under such conditions, democratic forms of rule can only become increasingly empty shells, destined to be dispensed with altogether as the inevitable social upheavals fueled by these disparities of wealth erupt and assume a political form. The corollary of the growing social chasm is the political disenfranchisement of the working class, as the entire political system and both bourgeois parties lurch to the right and openly serve the further enrichment of the elite. No section of the political establishment and no institution of political rule—whether the presidency, Congress or the courts—retains any serious commitment to democratic principles. Far from a victory for democratic rights, last week’s Supreme Court ruling reflects the irreversible decay of American democracy. It underscores the futility of any perspective that seeks to defend basic rights while accepting the existing capitalist system and relying on its political institutions. It demonstrates, moreover, the fundamentally reactionary role of racial politics, which cuts across the critical struggle to unite working people on the basis of a genuinely democratic and egalitarian program through the building of a socialist party of the working class. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com From Nightoak at aol.com Tue Jul 1 15:08:49 2003 From: Nightoak at aol.com (Nightoak@aol.com) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Counter-recruitment Conference Message-ID: <1c5.b62e293.2c332831@aol.com> Hello all! I just returned from the first annual "Stopping War Where It Begins:Organizing Against Militarism in Our Schools" conference in Philadelphia. In the next couple of weeks, I will be scheduling talks to help bring the conference to YOU! If you or an organization that you know is interested in: - an update on the conference - a general introduction to counter-recruiting issues - the direct link between racism and recruiting - getting specific questions answered - setting up public information sessions - participating in a statewide training for the GI Rights Hotline or Conscientious Objector Counseling etc., please contact me (or forward my information!): Michelle Nightoak Madison Area Peace Coalition www.madpeace.org (608) 215-5605 There is a national network forming to coordinate a nationwide counter-recruitment campaign, including all of the sponsoring organizations (listed at the end of this email), a number of local or regional organzations, Not In Our Name, and United for Peace and Justice (both orgs sent representatives to the conference and are making counter-recruitment a top priority!). I will be participating in upcoming national conference calls to help build the network and plan next year's conference as well, so if you have concerns/comments/suggestions, etc. from Wisconsin to pass along, please let me know! Many thanks for all of your work! Peace, Michelle The conference was sponsored by these national organizations that have been working on counter-recruiting for years: American Friends Service Committee Youth and Militarism Project Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft Center on Conscience and War Project YANO ROOTS/War Resisters League STARC Alliance CHOICES (Committee for High School Options and Information on Careers, Education and Self-Improvement) Teen Peace Project -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.madimc.org/pipermail/mapc-discuss/attachments/20030701/f7d8e12a/attachment.htm From floevans at netzero.net Tue Jul 1 18:50:45 2003 From: floevans at netzero.net (floevans) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Independent: Iraq's resistance, A new Vietnam for the White House? Message-ID: <003b01c3402b$97b30890$42b54943@hppav> The Independent: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=420848 Iraq's resistance: A new Vietnam for the White House? By Patrick Cockburn in Fallujah 02 July 2003 Enraged Iraqis promised vengeance after they dragged 10 bodies from the rubble of a building, destroyed by an explosion, beside the green domed al-Hassan mosque in the town of Fallujah west of Baghdad yesterday. "We will kill many American soldiers for this," said Abdullah, one of the crowd, as he looked at the ruins. "What would people say if this happened to a Christian church in America?" Iraqis in Fallujah, which has seen many clashes with American troops, say that a US plane fired a missile that killed people listening to a religious lecture late at night. This is hotly denied by the United States army, which says there were no American planes or helicopters over the town at the time. The deaths in Fallujah were at the start of a day that saw escalating violence in and around Baghdad - at least four people were killed or wounded when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired from a car into an American vehicle near the university. On the road from Baghdad to Fallujah, at Ghazalia, a partly burned US truck had jack-knifed into the metal barrier dividing the highway after it was blown up by a bomb. "It was a command-control-device," said an American soldier on guard. The rest of the convoy that had been attacked was parked further down the road. Local people said they had seen two injured US soldiers being taken away by helicopter, but they did not know if they were dead or wounded. Captain John Ives of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division denied that the US was in any way involved in the explosion in Fallujah. He said: "There were no US aircraft or helicopters in the area." He added that American troops had not arrived at the site of the blast until three hours later and he believed, from looking at the damage, that there had been an explosion inside the building. He denied claims that the mosque had been under surveillance, but he added that its Imam was known to oppose the US presence. The American troops had been careful not to set foot on land where the mosque stands to avoid offending religious sensitivities. It is not a consideration likely to do US forces in Fallujah much good. Angry local people outside the al-Hassan mosque would not hear of suggestions that bombs or missiles had been stored in the building. A jagged grey fragment of a shell or missile was passed from hand to hand by the crowd but it was impossible to tell if it was from an American or an Iraqi weapon. "A thousand of them should die for every Iraqi who was killed here," one said. "There is no God but Allah, America is the enemy of God," some people chanted, as a crane lifted pieces of concrete. Nevertheless some of those attending the lecture may have been fearful of being arrested for storing arms. Sheikh Laith al-Zobai, who had been speaking when the explosion happened, had left Fallujah general hospital within hours of having his foot amputated. He later died of his wounds. Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, has been a hotbed of anti-American activity since the war and scene of several confrontations involving US troops. Despite the mounting violence, Paul Bremer, the chief US official in Iraq, said at his weekly press conference in Baghdad yesterday the attacks were the work of a few surviving supporters of Saddam Hussein "getting more desperate" because they could see the success of the US and Britain in restoring normal life in Iraq. Mr Bremer claimed that "day by day things are continuing to improve" and listed the achievements of his administration. He added that evidence of Iraqi support for the Coalition Provisional Authority - as the occupation administration is known - was that more people were coming forward to give information about those attacking US forces. He also said that the attacks were often professional, carried out by groups of between five and seven men, often former members of the Republican Guard or the former Iraqi security services. A more telling sign of real US apprehensions is that Mr Bremer's press conferences, at which he dispenses resolute optimism in the face of increasing scepticism from journalists, take place at the National Convention Centre in central Baghdad behind enormous fortifications of barbed wire and concrete blocks. Iraqis interviewed about attacks on US forces largely approve of them. One Iraqi observer said: "Iraqis generally believe it is good that the Americans are attacked not because they support Saddam Hussein. But they think that the US takes them lightly because the war only lasted three weeks and therefore the Americans thought they could ignore Iraqi opinion about the reconstruction of their country." So far there is no sign that the attacks are centrally co-ordinated except at local level. But the friction between Iraqis and the US troops is increasing, particularly because of the failure to restore public security and the continuing shortage of electricity and water as the torrid summer heat increases. An explosion over the weekend at an ammunitions depot killed at around 15 people and injured at least four near Hadithah, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad, officials said yesterday. The mayor complained that American troops had been guarding it only sporadically. *Assailants gunned down Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khattab, the chief of Saddam Hussein's tribe, in the ousted leader's hometown of Tikrit a few weeks after he had publicly disavowed Saddam. The motive for the attack was unclear. From gmvick at chartermi.net Tue Jul 1 20:14:48 2003 From: gmvick at chartermi.net (Gail V) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:29:59 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] FW: A message from Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin Message-ID: FYI Peace, Gail -----Original Message----- From: Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin [mailto:wi02ima.pub@mail.house.gov] July 1, 2003 Dear Ms. Vick, Thank you for contacting me about the Computer Assisted Passenger Screening system (CAPS II) and "no fly" lists. It is good to hear from you, and I apologize for the delay in my response. As the United States government works to prevent acts of terrorism, it is critical to understand why the debate concerning "no fly" lists and other security measures is so important. It's about protecting American lives while protecting the American way of life. In the United States we cherish our freedom of speech, we respect the right to due process, and we have expectations of privacy. We could possibly prevent and solve far more crimes in this country if we authorized our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to listen to our conversations, to search our property, to read what we write, to open our mail, to detain persons indefinitely, but, as Senator Russ Feingold poignantly reminded us as he debated the Patriot Act in the Senate, "that would not be a country in which we would want to live . . . In short, that country would not be America." As you may know, the federal government has utilized "no fly" lists since the 1990s in order to enhance aviation security. Following September 11, 2001, these lists, which contain names of persons deemed by the federal government to be potential security threats, were expanded dramatically. Currently, these lists only include individuals' names. However, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is planning to implement the computerized CAPS II system, which would include additional passenger data, such as home address, telephone numbers, date of birth, and potentially other information as well. The CAPS II system, like the "no fly" lists currently being used, will be implemented administratively. Please know I am watching this matter very closely. It is absolutely imperative that a proper balance be struck between safety and safeguarding our fundamental Constitutional freedoms. While the very real threats to our citizens make clear that our government must act to protect our safety, we must not allow terrorists to take both American lives and the American way of life. Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let me know. Sincerely, Tammy Baldwin Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin's 2nd District Madison Office: 10 East Doty St., Suite 405 Madison, WI 53703 Phone: 608-258-9800 Fax: 608-258-9808 Beloit Office: 400 E. Grand Avenue, Suite 402 Beloit, WI 53511 Phone: 608-362-2800 Fax: 608-362-2838 Washington, DC Office: 1022 Longworth HOB Washington, DC 20515 Phone: 202-225-2906 Fax: 202-225-6942 http://tammybaldwin.house.gov From alruff at execpc.com Wed Jul 2 10:39:52 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [Fwd: Building the Movement to End the Israeli Occupation] Message-ID: <3F02EEB8.80202@execpc.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Building the Movement to End the Israeli Occupation Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 00:53:19 -0400 From: portsideMod@netscape.net Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com To: portside@yahoogroups.com Building the Movement to End the Israeli Occupation 2nd National Conference & New Jewish Group Devoted to Peace in Middle East Formed * 7/19-7/22: US Campaign To End Israeli Occupation Conference in DC * New Jewish Group Devoted to Peace in Middle East ===== * 7/19-7/22: US Campaign To End Israeli Occupation Conference in DC From: Hany Khalil Spread the Word -- 2nd Organizers Conference US Campaign To End the Israeli Occupation Building the National Movement July 19/22, 2003 Gallaudet University / Kellogg Conference Center / Washington, DC Do you share the principles and goals of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation? Do they reflect the goals of your work for peace with justice in the Middle East? Then join us in July to share what we have learned and coordinate our efforts, so that together we can achieve the greatest impact on public opinion (and on Washington) to end the occupation. The Organizers Conference will be on 19/20 July, and each organization, group or network is invited to send one or two representatives to help build the national movement. Advocacy training on outreach to Congress and visits to Reps and staffers will take place 21/22 July. Most of the time will be spent in strategy sessions. Working groups will choose priorities in each of the three Campaign program areas: congress, divestment, and education for mobilization. They will also identify other action areas for the Campaign or for clusters of groups. Experienced activists and thinkers will be on hand to guide our work. Renowned scholar and professor Edward Said; Cindy Corrie, mother Rachel Corrie; former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (invited), and Phyllis Bennis of the Institute of Policy Studies will address opening and evening plenaries. Activists sharing experience in working sessions include: Rania Awad (media expert): Kathy Bergen (American Friends Service Committee); Ahmed Bouzid (media expert); Leslie Cagan, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ); Nisrin Elamin (Grassroots International); Ron Francis (US Campaign Divestment Project); Nadia Hijab (US Campaign Steering Committee); Hany Khalil (War Times), Fady Kiblawi (campus divestment activist), Mark Lance (SUSTAIN), Barbara Lubin, Middle East Childrens Alliance (MECA); Jeff Mendez (Palestine Center); Nancy Murray (Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights); Josh Ruebner (US Campaign Grassroots Advocacy Coordinator); Ladan Sobhani (Global Exchange); Damu Smith (Black Voices for Peace); Lori Wallach (Public Citizens Global Trade Watch); Ora Weiss (International Solidarity Movement); David Wildman (United Methodists General Board of Global Ministries); Koyuki Yip (Asian American activist); and Mona Younis (human rights advocate). For more information about the Campaign principles and goals, and for information about the conference, go to http://www.endtheoccupation.org The DC based Palestine Center will be managing the registration process. The point of contact for any inquiries is Mr. Tareq Bremer at 202 338 1290 ext. 10 or via email to Tbremer@palestinecenter.org Our Goals * We will inform, educate, and mobilize the public regarding the U.S. Government's current as well as potential role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. * We seek to change such policies as the billions of U.S. military and economic aid dollars provided despite Israel's violations of U.S. and international law. * We call for the U.S. to work within the U.N. to implement a just and lasting peace. Our Campaign * Our Campaign will build on existing opposition to settlements, land confiscation, house demolitions, and other violations of international law, by providing a common platform to challenge U.S. policies supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. * We include civil and human rights activists, faith-based organizations, peace activists, Arab-American organizations, Jewish groups opposing the occupation, students, and others who promote peace and justice in Israel and Palestine. We invite all who support this Call to contribute to the fulfillment of its purpose. ======= * New Jewish Group Devoted to Peace in Middle East Join us in our efforts on behalf of a peaceful and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Dear Supporters of a Just Peace in the Middle East, We are writing to you because you signed the "Open Letter from American Jews On Israel/Palestine" initiated by Professor Alan Sokal of New York University, calling for a just, negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because of your interest in this issue, we want to tell you about and urge you to join a major new Jewish organization that is working to achieve this same goal. At a time of peril but also tantalizing promise in the Middle East, and as a part of the American Jewish majority that supports a viable, two-state solution to this conflict, we need to make our voices heard in Jewish organizations and in the halls of congress. Brit Tzedek v'Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace -- www.btvshalom.org ) was founded a year ago for this exact purpose. By raising the profile of American Jews who support Israel and are critical of both Palestinian violence and many Israeli government policies, we aim to show the broader Jewish community and our lawmakers in Washington that there is a major swath of American Jewry that will not go along with many of the positions of the most prominent pro-Israel lobbying groups. Brit Tzedek has grown to include nearly 3,000 American Jews who support Israel and who think that the best way to express that support is to work for a negotiated settlement that includes a two-state solution, an end to the occupation, and the evacuation of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. We are an increasing presence in Jewish communities and organizations nationwide through our 27 chapters around the country, and we are lobbying congress in support of our positions. In addition, we have launched a nationwide Call to Bring the Settlers Home, as a way of moving concretely toward implementing the end of the occupation, a necessary step in reaching a two-state solution. Please join Ed Asner, Theodore Bikel, Michael Chabon, Adam Hochschild, Stanley Hoffmann, Tony Kushner, Grace Paley, Eli Pariser, Marge Piercy, Judith Plaskow, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Art Spiegelman, Gloria Steinem, Ed Witten, and Rabbis Sue Levi Elwell and Arthur Hertzberg, among many accomplished Jewish scholars, artiswriters and rabbinic leaders, along with nearly 6,000 other American Jews, in signing this Call and helping us to build the Jewish voice for a just and peaceful solution to the conflict: www.bringthemhome.btvshalom.org To bolster our efforts, we need new members -- both those who want to be active AND those who want to lend their name just by virtue of being members. Listen for a moment to David Zonsheine, a co-founder of the Ometz l'Sarev/Courage to Refuse movement, which is comprised of Israeli army officers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories: "It is in the Israeli national interest that Palestinians and Israelis immediately return to the negotiating table and resolve this conflict once and for all. The United States is uniquely placed to do so and will only do so if American Jewry encourages it to do so. American Jewry needs to become part of the solution, and prod its leadership and the US government to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. A strong Brit Tzedek v'Shalom is crucial for Israel's future." We can make a difference. Be part of the solution by joining Brit Tzedek v'Shalom and telling others about our work. Go to our website -- www.btvshalom.org -- You can join online for $35 -- $50 -- $100 -- $1000 (whatever you are able to contribute) ($18 for students or low-income): https://www.groundspring.org/donate/index.cfm?ID=2732-01719-0 And if you have a moment more, please forward this letter to your own colleagues, friends, and family. And finally, whether or not you join, please go to www.bringthemhome.btvshalom.org to sign the Call to Bring the Settlers Home to Israel. We are counting on every one of you to lend your individual support to our collective clout. It cannot happen without you. So please, join us now. In friendship and solidarity, Donna Spiegelman Professor of Epidemiologic Methods Harvard School of Public Health, and Founding Member and member of the Board of Directors of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom Gordon Fellman Professor of Sociology Brandeis University and author of "Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival" Herbert C. Kelman Richard Clarke Cabot Research Professor of Social Ethics Harvard University, and Director, Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Harvard University ======= __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. Post : mail to 'portside@yahoogroups.com' Subscribe : mail to 'portside-subscribe@yahoogroups.com' Unsubscribe : mail to 'portside-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com' Faq : http://www.portside.org List owner : portside-owner@yahoogroups.com Web address : Digest mode : visit Web site Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From alruff at execpc.com Wed Jul 2 10:48:58 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [One for the "Peace Movement" -- A QUESTION FOR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES] Message-ID: <3F02F0DA.7030307@execpc.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: A QUESTION FOR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 08:47:26 -0500 From: "David Peterson" To: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4702612,00.html US-based missiles to have global reach Allies to become less important as new generation of weapons enables America to strike anywhere from its own territory Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday July 1, 2003 The Guardian ( London ) The Pentagon is planning a new generation of weapons, including huge hypersonic drones and bombs dropped from space, that will allow the US to strike its enemies at lightning speed from its own territory. Over the next 25 years, the new technology would free the US from dependence on forward bases and the cooperation of regional allies, part of the drive towards self-suffi ciency spurred by the difficulties of gaining international cooperation for the invasion of Iraq . The new weapons are being developed under a programme codenamed Falcon (Force Application and Launch from the Continental US). A US defence website has invited bids from contractors to develop the technology and the current edition of Jane's Defence Weekly reports that the first flight tests are scheduled to take place within three years. According to the website run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) the programme is aimed at fulfilling "the government's vision of an ultimate prompt global reach capability (circa 2025 and beyond)". The Falcon technology would "free the US military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to destabilising or threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organisations ", according to the Darpa invitation for bids. The ultimate goal would be a "reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle (HCV) ... capable of taking off from a conventional military runway and striking targets 9,000 nautical miles distant in less than two hours". The unmanned HCV would carry a payload of up to 12,000 lbs and could ultimately fly at speeds of up to 10 times the speed of sound, according to Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Washington. Propelling a warhead of that size at those speeds poses serious technological challenges and Darpa estimates it will take more than 20 years to develop. Over the next seven years, meanwhile, the US air force and Darpa will develop a cheaper "global reach" weapons system relying on expendable rocket boosters, known as small launch vehicles (SLV) that would take a warhead into space and drop it over its target. In US defence jargon, the warhead is known as a Com mon Aero Vehicle ( Cav), an unpowered bomb which would be guided on to its target as it plummeted to earth at high and accelerating velocity. The Cav could carry 1,000 lbs of explosives but at those speeds explosives may not be necessary. A simple titanium rod would be able to penetrate 70 feet of solid rock and the shock wave would have enormous destructive force. It could be used against deeply buried bunkers, the sort of target the air force is looking for new ways to attack. Jane's Defence Weekly reported that the first Cav flight demonstration is provisionally scheduled by mid-2006, and the first SLV flight exercise would take place the next year. A test of the two systems combined would be carried out by late 2007. A prototype demonstrating HCV technology would be tested in 2009. SLV rockets will also give the air force a cheap and flexible means to launch military satellites at short notice, within weeks, days or even hours of a crisis developing. The SLV-Cav combination, according to the Darpa document, "will provide a near-term (approximately 2010) operational capability for prompt global strike from Consus (the continental US) while also enabling future development of a reusable HCV for the far-term (approximately 2025)". The range of this weapon is unclear. From earlwal at chorus.net Wed Jul 2 13:44:14 2003 From: earlwal at chorus.net (BobReuschlein) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] US cuts Columbia Aid over ICC Message-ID: from UNWIRE comment: Could be titled "US cuts nose to spite its face" There is a national security "loophole" mentioned at the bottom of the story. (Bob Reuschlein) U.S. Cuts Military Aid To 35 Countries Over Int'l Court The United States halted military assistance to 35 countries yesterday because they would not vow to give U.S. citizens immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Last year, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush said that under a provision of new U.S. antiterrorism legislation, countries joining the new court but failing to exempt U.S. nationals serving within their borders would lose U.S. military aid. The aid that was cut off yesterday includes training programs, as well as funding for weapons and equipment. A total of $47.6 million in aid and $613,000 in military education programs would be cut, U.S. officials said. Many of the nations cut off, such as Colombia and Ecuador, are considered vital to the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda, the New York Times reports. Some affected countries like Croatia are preparing to join NATO and counted on U.S. military aid to help modernize their forces. The new court is the first permanent international war crimes tribunal. The administration has opposed the court, expressing concern over the possibility of politically motivated prosecutions. "There should be no misunderstanding that the issue of protecting U.S. persons from the International Criminal Court will be a significant and pressing matter in our relations with every state," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. Bush offered exemption to 22 countries that have signed but not yet ratified immunity agreements. The countries include Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Administration officials said the move is not a permanent ban on military aid to the 35 countries. The president can resume military aid if he believes that failing to help a foreign government poses a threat to U.S. national security, and countries that sign exemption agreements will be eligible for military aid again (Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, April 2). From Nightoak at aol.com Wed Jul 2 14:53:19 2003 From: Nightoak at aol.com (Nightoak@aol.com) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Racial Justice WG notes posted Message-ID: Here is the link to the latest meeting notes for the Racial Justice Working Group: http://madpeace.org/Wiki/RJWG%2006-30-2003 Peace, Michelle -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.madimc.org/pipermail/mapc-discuss/attachments/20030702/6d791902/attachment.htm From baumel at mts.net Wed Jul 2 14:59:31 2003 From: baumel at mts.net (Syd Baumel) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Re: [WFM-TALK] US cuts Columbia Aid over ICC References: <982000573-1463747838-1057167688@boing.topica.com> Message-ID: <00ca01c340cc$126634e0$677ba8c0@powerland> ----- Original Message ----- From: "BobReuschlein" | The new court is the first permanent international war crimes tribunal. | The administration has opposed the court, expressing concern over the | possibility of politically motivated prosecutions. Right. It should call for a Guantanamo Bay-style ICC. Surely it would have no objection to ratifying and making American nationals subject to such a principled, American jurisprudence-grade international criminal court. Syd www.aquarianonline.com The Simultaneous Policy Coming Soon to a Planet Near You "It's ambitious and provocative. Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try." - Noam Chomsky Adopt SP and Take Back the World www.simpol.org From alruff at execpc.com Wed Jul 2 19:39:43 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] FW: A message from Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin References: Message-ID: <3F036D3F.30909@execpc.com> Check out Baldwin's recent vote on a resolution condemning the Palestinians; a measure put forward by some of the most pro-Isael reactinary elements in the Congress. AAI Action Alert > > > > U.S. House Passes Another Unbalanced Resolution on > > Mideast Conflict > > Thank those Reps. who Spoke Out on H. Res. 294 > > > > Issue: > > > > On June 25, 2003, the U.S. House passed H. Res. > 294. >> > Introduced by Rep. >> > Lantos (D-CA), Rep. DeLay (R-TX), Rep. Pelosi > > (D-CA) >> > and Rep. Hyde (R-IL), >> > H. Res. 294 condemns, "the terrorism inflicted on >> > Israel since the Aqaba >> > Summit and expressing solidarity with the Israeli >> > people in their fight >> > against terrorism." This one-sided resolution >> > voices unequivocal support >> > for Israel and fails to mention Palestinian >> > suffering or rights. >> > >> > Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), the Dean of the House > > Arab >> > American Caucus, led the >> > vocal opposition to H. Res. 294. Rep. Lois Capps >> > (D-CA) summed up the >> > opposition's objection to H. Res. 294 by stating >> > that "We mourn the 22 >> > innocent Israelis that have been killed since the >> > summit. But over twice >> > that number of innocent civilian Palestinians have >> > also died as a result of >> > Israeli military strikes. Their loss should also > > be >> > explicitly recognized >> > in this resolution." >> > >> > Beyond being simply insensitive, Rep. Dingell > > (D-MI) >> > argued that H. Res. 294 >> > is damaging because it is a "one-sided, unbalanced >> > and unfair resolution, >> > which undermines [the Bush] administration's > > efforts >> > to make peace in the >> > region." Rep. Kleczka (D-WI) further pointed out >> > that "A reading of the >> > resolution will find it lacking in one major > > regard >> > and that is, there is no >> > endorsement of the Roadmap, the Roadmap which >> > President Bush has worked so >> > hard to promote to both sides; the Roadmap which > > was >> > the subject of the >> > Aqaba summit." >> > >> > Finally, Rep. Rahall closed his powerful statement >> > by stating "I'm not going >> > to urge you to vote one way or the other, you will >> > make up your own mind, I >> > simply ask my colleagues to look into your own >> > conscience when casting your >> > vote." >> > >> > These representatives and others who spoke out >> > against H. Res. 294 must be >> > commended for their stand against this non-binding >> > resolution that damages >> > President Bush's efforts at peace. >> > >> > What You Can Do: >> > >> > Please take the time to thank the following > > members >> > who made thoughtful >> > floor statements criticizing the resolution's lack >> > of balance and >> > encouraging the Administration to require all >> > parties to fulfill their >> > obligations under the Road Map. Also thank those >> > representatives who took a >> > stand and voted "Nay" or "Present." >> > >> > To contact the following members, go to >> > http://capwiz.com/arab/dbq/officials/ and enter > > the >> > member's name. >> > >> > Floor Statement: >> > Rahall (D-WV), Dingell (D-MI), Capps (D-CA), > > Price >> > (D-NC), >> > Kleczka (D-WI) and Rohrabacher (R-CA). >> > >> > Voted "Nay": >> > Dingell (D-MI), Kleczka (D-WI), Paul (R-TX), > > Rahall >> > (D-WV) and Woolsey >> > (D-CA). >> > >> > Voted "Present": >> > Clay (D-MO), Kilpatrick (D-MI), Kucinich (D-OH), >> > Lee (D-CA), >> > McDermott (D-WA), Waters (D-CA) and Watt (D- NC). >> > >> > > > ************************************************************* >>> > AAI Alert >>> > Arab American Institute >>> > aaialert@aaiusa.org >>> > >>> > Please visit our website at www.aaiusa.org or view >>> > our current "Action >>> > Alert" items at http://capwiz.com/arab/home/. >>> > >>> > >> >> >> >> > Gail V wrote: >FYI > >Peace, >Gail > >-----Original Message----- >From: Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin [mailto:wi02ima.pub@mail.house.gov] > > >July 1, 2003 > > >Dear Ms. Vick, > >Thank you for contacting me about the Computer Assisted Passenger >Screening system (CAPS II) and "no fly" lists. It is good to hear from >you, and I apologize for the delay in my response. > >As the United States government works to prevent acts of terrorism, it is >critical to understand why the debate concerning "no fly" lists and other >security measures is so important. It's about protecting American lives >while protecting the American way of life. In the United States we >cherish our freedom of speech, we respect the right to due process, and we >have expectations of privacy. We could possibly prevent and solve far >more crimes in this country if we authorized our law enforcement and >intelligence agencies to listen to our conversations, to search our >property, to read what we write, to open our mail, to detain persons >indefinitely, but, as Senator Russ Feingold poignantly reminded us as he >debated the Patriot Act in the Senate, "that would not be a country in >which we would want to live . . . In short, that country would not be >America." > >As you may know, the federal government has utilized "no fly" lists since >the 1990s in order to enhance aviation security. Following September 11, >2001, these lists, which contain names of persons deemed by the federal >government to be potential security threats, were expanded dramatically. >Currently, these lists only include individuals' names. However, the >Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is planning to implement the >computerized CAPS II system, which would include additional passenger >data, such as home address, telephone numbers, date of birth, and >potentially other information as well. > >The CAPS II system, like the "no fly" lists currently being used, will be >implemented administratively. Please know I am watching this matter very >closely. It is absolutely imperative that a proper balance be struck >between safety and safeguarding our fundamental Constitutional freedoms. >While the very real threats to our citizens make clear that our government >must act to protect our safety, we must not allow terrorists to take both >American lives and the American way of life. > > > >Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If >I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let >me know. >Sincerely, > >Tammy Baldwin > > >Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin's 2nd District > >Madison Office: >10 East Doty St., Suite 405 >Madison, WI 53703 >Phone: 608-258-9800 >Fax: 608-258-9808 > >Beloit Office: >400 E. Grand Avenue, Suite 402 >Beloit, WI 53511 >Phone: 608-362-2800 >Fax: 608-362-2838 > >Washington, DC Office: >1022 Longworth HOB >Washington, DC 20515 >Phone: 202-225-2906 >Fax: 202-225-6942 > >http://tammybaldwin.house.gov > > > > >_______________________________________________ >discuss@madpeace.org mailing list >http://lists.OpenSoftwareServices.com/mailman/listinfo/madpeace-discuss > > From exodio at yahoo.com Wed Jul 2 22:01:50 2003 From: exodio at yahoo.com (John Sackis) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] War Crimes in the Name of Freedom: 227 Years.... In-Reply-To: <20030702170004.687F6A902@exigence.opensoftwareservices.com> Message-ID: <20030703040150.30208.qmail@web41204.mail.yahoo.com> War Crimes in the Name of Freedom: 227 Years.... >From http://www.dangerouscitizen.com/Articles/714.aspx Each and every American has the blood of the world on his/her hands. And freedom is going to get even bloodier as history, it turns out, is an excellent guide. Alternative Press Review, Web Feature, June 28, 2003 by John Stanton “Great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation.” That according to Leo Szilard, the Manhattan Project physicist commenting on the United States and its decision in August of 1945 to obliterate non-military targets Hiroshima (70,000 dead instantly with 210,000 total deaths) and Nagasaki (40,000 dead instantly with 200,000 total deaths) in Japan. When the United States of America takes its place in the graveyard of empires, its tombstone will display Szilard’s words alongside the inscription, “Born in violence, practiced violence and came to a violent end.” Americans fancy their society as a peaceful, freedom loving enterprise when the reality is that Americans are brutally competitive and adversarial in every aspect of their lives. And they are warlike to the core. Is it any wonder that in America, the easiest act for the US government to carry out is war? As Americans prepare to celebrate their Independence Day this July 4, 2003, with a grandiose glorification of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and wars from days past--it’s worth remembering those millions of civilians and/or non-combatants who have died at the hands of unconstrained and psychopathic American power. The US government has a long history of reengineering and downsizing populations that get in the way of freedom loving Americans and their business interests. Each and every American has the blood of the world on his/her hands. And freedom is going to get even bloodier as history, it turns out, is an excellent guide. Kill ‘Em All Prior to those fateful days in August of 1945, the US Target Committee met in May of 1945 and discussed the need for following up those two days of nuclear infamy with B-29 incendiary raids. “The feasibility of following the raid by an incendiary mission was discussed. This has the great advantage that the enemies' fire fighting ability will probably be paralyzed by the gadget [atomic bomb] so that a very serious conflagration should be capable of being started.” The US Target Committee, anxious to collect data on the “gadget’s” performance recommended a 24 hour waiting period before letting loose the B-29’s to vaporize any humans or structures that might have survived the “gadget’s” output. In February of 1945 in Dresden, Germany, the United States--and its coalition partner Great Britain--were engaged in the firebombing slaughter of scores of German civilians and refugees fleeing the Soviet Army’s advance. According to rense.com. “Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600,000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions on how to blaze 600,000 refugees. He wasn't interested in how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the center of the city reached 1600 degrees centigrade. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the center of the city could not be traced. Approximately 500,000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night…Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.” Writing in World War II magazine, Christopher Lew points out that the Americans incinerated Tokyo, Japan in March of 1945 via firebombing raids killing 100,000 civilians. The US government engaged in military campaigns such as Operation Starvation meant to deny food supplies to the population. Every city in Japan was targeted in a ruthless, murderous and calculated manner. Yet, the Emperor of Japan’s residence was considered off limits by US commanders (the rationale being he would be an asset in the post-war era). “For three hours over Tokyo, 334 B-29s unleashed their cargo [including napalm] upon the dense city below. The fires raged out of control in little less than 30 minutes, aided by a 28-mph wind. Even the water in the rivers reached the boiling point. The fire was so intense that it created updrafts that tossed the gigantic B-29s around as if they were feathers. Officially the Japanese listed 83,793 killed and 40,918 injured. A total of 265,171 buildings were destroyed, and 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes. It was the greatest urban disaster, man-made or natural, in all of history.” The slaughter of the Japanese and their cities was unrelenting and so insidiously effective that the US military ran out of targets. Of course, the US government has never been content just to annihilate those pesky civilians in other lands. There’s always work to be done right here in the United States. Whether rounding up Arabs in 2003 and locking them away or engaging in genocide in the 1800’s, the US government has a long history of reengineering and downsizing populations that get in the way of freedom loving Americans. For example, in 1830 the Congress of the United States passed the Indian Removal Act according to understandingprejudice.org. President Andrew Jackson quickly signed the bill into law. In the summer of 1838, US Army General Winfield Scott led his men in the invasion of the Cherokee Nation. In one of many bloody episodes in US history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles--some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions. Under the indifferent US Army commanders, an estimated 5,000 native Americans would die on the Trail of Tears. The Tradition Continues: Make War Not Love Thanks to its penchant for war and belief in its divine invincibility, worldwide polls now show that the United States is a reviled nation. Little surprise there. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugs off the deaths of 10,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is equally without pity for the American troops now dying each day in both failed military campaigns. Attorney General John Ashcroft—who now likes to be addressed as General Ashcroft—presides over an American justice system which has stripped away the rights of all Americans to due process and other rights formerly guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. In the US, accused serial killers and rapists have more access to legal assistance than an individual suspected of terrorism. And for the first time, America has more of its citizens incarcerated and executed than any nation on the planet. “With liberty and justice for all” seems meaningless as the United States flaunts the fact that it runs a death camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that its foreign and domestic policies include torture, assassination, and eavesdropping on any person it deems a threat to national security. America has been at war since 1775. Indeed, the US has never been at peace. The following are considered major conflicts: Revolutionary War (1775-1783), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Mexican War (1846-1848), Civil War (1861-1865), Spanish American War (1898), World War I (1917-1918), World War II (1941-1945), Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam War (1964-1972), and the Gulf War I (1990-1991). And that list excludes the invasion of Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Gulf War II and a whole slew of covert actions that overthrew governments the world over. The future holds Iran, North Korea, Syria, Colombia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and, arguably, the entire planet. Unfortunately, war is the defining characteristic of the US government and a majority of its people. American freedom depends on war and their economic system demands it. “Under capitalism, corporations that produce weapons make huge profits from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all these government contracts, and make all this money, and you engage in war and you use up all these products and you have to replace them,” according to Howard Zinn. Is there any hope of breaking away from a bloody history celebrated mindlessly each July 4th? Will Americans ever live up to the ideals set forth in the US Constitution? Can they break the habit of war? “War has always diminished our freedom,” says Zinn. “When our freedom has expanded, it has not come as a result of war or of anything the government has done but as a result of what citizens have done. The best test of that is the history of black people in the United States, the history of slavery and segregation. It wasn't the government that initiated the movement against slavery but white and black abolitionists. It wasn't the government that initiated the battle against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, but the movement of people in the South. It wasn't the government that gave the people the freedom to work eight hours a day instead of twelve hours a day. It was working people themselves who organized into unions, went out on strike, and faced the police. The government was on the other side; the government was always in support of the employers and the corporations. The freedom of working people, the freedom of black people has always depended on the struggles of people themselves against the government. So, if we look at it historically, we certainly cannot depend on governments to maintain our liberties. We have to depend on our own organized efforts.” Only the American people can stop war. ______________________ John Stanton is the author (along with Wayne Madsen) of America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II, May 2003. Copyright J Stanton 2003. Article located at: http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=21 ===== ---An open mind is as a fortress with the gates up and the drawbridge down. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com From alruff at execpc.com Thu Jul 3 09:43:24 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] Another war front for Washington? Message-ID: <3F0432FC.7040307@execpc.com> Intensification of US Blockade against Cuba Denounced Havana.- The over 40-year US blockade against Cuba is intensifying in every way, Cuban experts stated at the daily TV roundtable broadcast Monday. The US administration is reopening cases such as that of Canadian James Sabsali -residing in Philadelphia- who must face this country's laws for selling water purifiers to the Island, thus violating US blockade laws, they pointed out. According to the Cuban journalists, US authorities prohibited US Agricultural Fair organizers from traveling to the Island to arrange a new exhibition of their products in Cuba. US companies were also prohibited from attending such events, they added. US officials have affirmed that President George W. Bush is committed to the application of a complete blockade against the Island, the panelists revealed. Washington will not renew travel licenses exempting academics, artists, or cultural groups to visit Cuba, hoping to end the exchange between both peoples, pointed out the experts. Opposing this, several US organizations are calling for normalization of mutual relations, but the government fears that US citizens will realize they have been misled about the Cuban reality, the political analysts explained. The Pastors for Peace organization is beginning its journey to ten US cities on Tuesday, which will take them to Cuba to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Assault on Moncada Barracks on July 26. AGGRESSION AGAINST CUBA ESCALATES (Taken from Granma Newspaper) Cuba continues being an obsession for the US, whose administration and anti-Cuban Mafia are looking desperately for a justification to "silently and creatively" intervene in Havana. It is not only in Miami where an intervention is being clamored, it is also in Central America and Europe, where their allies are trying to confuse international public opinion. US President George W. Bush toured the city of fraud, Miami, since he needs a lot of money for his reelection campaign, attending US$2,000-a-plate lunches, in the same territory where low-price dining halls for the elderly are closed due to a lack of funds. Bush did not make reference to the secret operations against Cuba announced days before by an under-Secretary of State. He did not mention the new measures because "we are not ready to speak about them yet." It is not the first time that he resorted to the words "not so far", "not yet", demonstrating that plans exist, but "when" has not been determined. The White House is particularly encouraged by the European Union position, although disappointed with the Latin American reaction to its anti-Cuban stance. A CALL FOR SUBVERSION A US government report clearly calls to subvert the internal situation in Havana, "silently and creatively," that is clandestinely, in the way they failed to subvert it during the last four decades. It was demonstrated once more that the anti-Cuban Mafia had kidnapped the US government's policy on Cuba, because their representatives were invited on June 13 to express their viewpoints "on these new measures" against Havana. This Mafia is branching out in Central America, and Salvadorian President Francisco Flores, who is asking his Miami friends for help because he thinks that he will lose the coming elections, is among its representatives. But the anti-Cuban moves are also causing unrest in Europe. CIA agent Alberto Montaner will travel to Madrid to examine once again the "human rights" situation in Cuba, in an event organized by Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar, with the participation of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who is visiting Europe. Simultaneously, Mafia representatives with the same purpose will tour Europe during three weeks to meet with high-ranking officials. Provocations in front of the Cuban embassy in France continue, although French and Latin American friends of Cuba denounced the real objectives of these individuals, that is, to impede the visit of tourists and create conditions to justify a US aggression on the Island. Meanwhile, Mafia members such as Huber Matos, who traveled to Argentina to launch his book, asked to internationalize the blockade and termed the Argentinean people and government as ignorant because of the warm welcome they gave Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, though he did not say that his current fortune came from the aid he received to "set Cuba free." Old politicians including Conte Ag=FCero look ridiculous when they sing on television and state that they will come to release us soon, although when asked "when", he did not mention a date because it was a "secret." ON THE ONE HAND, THE GOVERNMENT, ON THE OTHER, THE US PEOPLE The US blockade continues to be tightened, nether silently nor creatively, as proven in the way US authorities pursue people from other countries that have trade relations with Cuba, and the suspension of any proposal from US producers, as well as prohibiting any bilateral exchange. However, the US people received with applause the musicians who are occasionally allowed to enter the US, like the Los Van Van orchestra in its current tour, and other activities in which the Cuban reality is revealed in US territory. Another example of relations between these two countries is the beginning of the Pastors for Peace Caravan that will travel to dozens of cities before arriving in Havana. In addition, important figures who visited Cuba criticized the blockade; there is recognition of Cuba as the real victim of US biological warfare, as an article published in the US denounced recently. This and similar efforts illustrate how the blockade has shown no mercy on the health of Cubans, refuting the campaign that attempts to make people believe that Havana has developed bio-weapons, which is nothing but a lie and a permanent justification to confuse the US citizens in case of a military invasion. The aggression on the Caribbean island is escalating in Miami, Madrid and Paris, among other capitals. However, sensitive voices are crying out in many parts of the world to condemn the US position and support Cuba's right to sovereignty. ---------------- From alruff at execpc.com Thu Jul 3 09:49:19 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:00 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [Fwd: Union goes to war with Labour] Message-ID: <3F04345F.8010401@execpc.com> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Union goes to war with Labour Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 17:50:07 -0400 From: portsideMod@netscape.net Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com To: portside@yahoogroups.com Union goes to war with Labour Cabinet branded 'criminals' on Iraq Kevin Maguire The Guardian (UK) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,9061,9893 19,00.html Wednesday July 2, 2003 Tony Blair and his cabinet were branded "war criminals" yesterday as an organisation that gave birth to the Labour party faced expulsion in an historic split with the government. The RMT rail union voted to support the far left Scottish Socialists, Plaid Cymru, Greens, Ken Livingstone in London and even suspended Labour MP George Galloway in direct defiance of the Labour leadership. It also halved its annual affiliation fees from ?25,000 to ?12,500. A year ago it paid more than ?100,000. Bob Crow, hard left general secretary of the RMT, predicted the union would disaffiliate from Labour after he accused the prime minister of "putting the boot" into workers in Britain and abroad, including the invasion of Iraq. "I think if the Labour party continues the way it is going I cannot honestly see that come five years' time, we will still be in it at all," said Mr Crow. The looming split between the party and one of Britain's most prominent unions is one of the most serious internal crises to hit the Labour leadership in recent years and underlines the problems facing Mr Blair as traditional supporters turn their back on New Labour. With official Labour membership acknowledged to have fallen 400,000 to 250,000 since the 1997 election, the party is in the uncomfortable position of relying increasingly on disillusioned union leaders, with the prime minister's advisers fearing others could follow the RMT. The incendiary comments from Mr Crow, the most awkward of the awkward squad now leading the trade unions, were made as the RMT conference in Glasgow overwhelmingly passed a series of anti-government motions. Activists in the RMT, which proposed the motion in 1899 that formed the Labour Representation Committee which in 1906 became the Labour party, expressed bitter disillusionment with its offspring. David Triesman, Labour general secretary, attempted to postpone what will inevitably be a major crunch as strained government-union relations approach breaking point. "Under the laws of the Labour party it is not what affiliates say they will do but what they do that matters. If an affiliate does actually actively organise for or fund a party or candidate standing against the Labour party then that affiliate puts itself beyond the party rules," said Mr Triesman. "In that situation the rules have to be respected and upheld. It is important to be clear we are not at that point yet." Relations between ministers and unions are close to breaking point with the Fire Brigades union leadership facing calls to disaffiliate following the bitter pay dispute, and the conference of the Bectu broadcasting union voting to ballot members on breaking the link. Yet Mr Crow, a former member of the Communist party and Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour party who never joined Labour, remains at odds with most of the other leading lights in the leftwing awkward squad running major trade unions. While the TGWU, Unison, GMB and Aslef have agreed to review Labour links and funding or support for Mr Livingstone in London as an independent against the official party candidate, all endorse retaining ties with Labour. One senior RMT official opposed to a breach with Labour said the union was "heading for the political wilderness" but the criticism of the government from the floor among the 52 delegates was scathing. The decision to allow branches to affiliate to other parties is unprecedented by a union in recent years. The RMT is furious that Labour has refused to renationalise the rail industry, part-privatised London Underground, failed to end discrimination against foreign seafarers on UK flagged ships and introduce better employment protection. Mr Crow, who described the prime minister and colleagues as "war criminals" over the invasion of Iraq in a tub-thumping speech, said: "They don't like us and they don't want the unions to have any power. They are in favour of keeping it a bosses' party. "Like a marriage that comes to an end, sometimes it is better if there is a divorce. I am not urging a divorce but how long can we sit back and support a political party that has gone further than the Tory party? "People say do we want to get the Tories back in again - I say, how would we know?" Ian McCartney, Labour chairman, said: "The Labour party does not want to break its link with any union affiliate, we believe passionately in the union-Labour link. "I am in regular contact with senior union leaders and we are all committed to building and modernising the link. I know of no serious Labour figure in the union movement who is in favour of ending our historic link. The ball is very much in the RMT's court." Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. Post : mail to 'portside@yahoogroups.com' Subscribe : mail to 'portside-subscribe@yahoogroups.com' Unsubscribe : mail to 'portside-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com' Faq : http://www.portside.org List owner : portside-owner@yahoogroups.com Web address : Digest mode : visit Web site Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From alruff at execpc.com Thu Jul 3 10:14:42 2003 From: alruff at execpc.com (Allen Ruff) Date: Sat Mar 3 22:30:01 2007 Subject: [MAPC-discuss] [READ THIS ONE! Only in America By ERIC HOBSBAWM] Message-ID: <3F043A52.6090006@execpc.com> Read this marvelous essay bu the great world historian, Eric Hobsbawm. -AR -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Only in America By ERIC HOBSBAWM Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 17:50:30 -0400 From: portsideMod@netscape.net Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com To: portside@yahoogroups.com Only in America By ERIC HOBSBAWM The Chronicle of Higher Education From the issue dated 7/4/2003 http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i43/43b00701.htm Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the U.S.A. teaching, reading in its marvelous libraries, writing, or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America, the best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the U.S.A. the same as his. If written today, de Tocqueville's book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the U.S.A. was critical. Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A. has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the cold war that people's attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out "un-American" behavior in their own fellow citizens, but also internationally. It substituted the question "Are you with the U.S.A.?" for the question "What do you think of the U.S.A.?" What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won the cold war against the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided on September 11, 2001, that the cause of freedom was again engaged in another life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about the United States and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage. And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval! Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success story among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world's largest, both pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement was unique; its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, as I have written elsewhere, "in some ways the United States represents the best of the 20th century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the U.S.A., I illustrate the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or liking to live in the U.S.A. -- and especially in New York -- does not imply the wish to become American, although this is still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most people between one's own country and another, as it did before the Second World War, or even until the air-transport revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e- mail revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common. Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian intellectual inquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose treasures are still, unlike in the other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. On the other hand, the human costs of the system for those outside it or who cannot "make it" were equally evident in New York, at least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off the streets or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When I first went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump or "skid row." In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the streets of Manhattan. Behind today's casual mobile-phone calls on the street, I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the pavements of New York in one of the city's bad decades of inhumanity and brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism, in a country where "to waste" is the common criminal slang for "to kill." Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one's own civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the U.S.A.'s own sense of its strangeness ("Only in America ... "), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex Central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. "What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?" Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967. Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti- authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the -- by our standards -- everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the U.S.A. to establish who can command whom. It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United States still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at "the great American novel," even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the U.S.A. to seize the totality of their country, Warhol's vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, "the American dream" of American political jargon and psychobabble. To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime, or at least in the 40-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America, and, as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her 12 years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers, Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends -- the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers -- we would not entertain at home. Like a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a favorite establishment like that of a relative; I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors, and United Nations staff members that makes up the local intellectual scene -- for one of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except the U.S.A. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, hematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the United States, more people there are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest and California. Curiously, the experience, what in the '60s they used to call "the vibes," of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of other countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities today; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London, as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill, has changed -- Parliament is now barely visible -- and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities -- deindustrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World -- it neither feels nor looks like a city transformed. That is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life, such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle- class institutions as the Gimbel's department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition, the World Trade Center, has disappeared. Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A. is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. Those changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass-consumer society that did not arrive in Western Europe until the 1950s was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle '50s, for the U.S.A. the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of 20th century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens -- mainly the college-educated -- began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of what is now the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less "advanced," and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London that became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run. As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national decision- making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world. (Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above paragraph was originally written calls for a revision of the views expressed in it. The "occupational disease of conquering powers" has been reinforced by the Iraq war. The policies and strategic ambitions of the global dominators have destroyed the genuine "coalitions of the willing" on which U.S. supremacy could rely in the cold war, and even more so in the international mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and after 9/11. They have left the U.S.A., unable to win a plurality of free votes in the U.N.'s Security Council, in unprecedented isolation and global unpopularity, surrounded by fear rather than hope. The world has unquestionably been more destabilized not only -- patently -- in the Middle East but everywhere: in Europe, where the European Union is divided and weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East Asia; in what existed of an organized international system, whether of states or nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics, self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.) Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society. That is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear example that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A., however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also. Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the "American Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its solution. Eric Hobsbawm is a fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the New School University. He lives in England. This essay is adapted from Interesting Times: A Twentieth- Century Life, to be published in the United States by Pantheon Books in August. Copyright ? 2002 by Eric Hobsbawm. _______________________________________________________ __________ You may visit The Chronicle as follows: http://chronicle.com _______________________________________________________ __________ Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 ports