Go to Original
By Ben Evans
Washington - The House Judiciary Committee threatened Thursday to subpoena former White House adviser Karl Rove if he does not agree by May 12 to testify about former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's corruption case.
In a letter to Rove's attorney, committee Democrats called it "completely unacceptable" that the Republican political strategist has rejected the panel's request for sworn testimony even as he discusses the matter publicly through the media.
"We can see no justification for his refusal to speak on the record to the committee," the letter states. "We urge you and your client to reconsider ... or we will have no choice but to consider the use of compulsory process."
Committee Democrats are investigating whether Rove and Republican appointees at the Justice Department influenced Siegelman's prosecution to kill his chances for re-election. It is part of a broader inquiry into whether U.S. attorneys were fired for not aggressively pursuing cases against Democrats.
Siegelman, a Democrat who served one term as governor after being elected in 1998, was convicted in 2006 on bribery and other charges and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He was recently released on bond pending appeal.
Last year, Alabama attorney and one-time Republican campaign volunteer Jill Simpson, told the committee under oath that she heard conversations among GOP operatives in 2002 suggesting that Rove was pushing the Justice Department to pursue a conviction against Siegelman. She also has said Rove asked her in 2001 to find evidence that Siegelman was cheating on his wife.
Rove, who frequently worked in Alabama politics before orchestrating President Bush's White House campaigns, has denied having anything to do with the case. In a recent magazine article, he called Simpson a "complete lunatic" and said he had never heard of her.
The career prosecutors who handled Siegelman's case also have denied any political influence.
Thursday's threat marks the latest development in a lengthy standoff between President Bush and Congress over testimony from current and former White House staffers.
The committee has issued or threatened subpoenas to more than half a dozen administration officials and is suing White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to comply with subpoenas on the U.S. attorney firings.
The White House has generally maintained that their testimony is off-limits from congressional oversight under executive privilege.
Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, maintains that Rove must defer to that position. But as the White House has offered on other matters, Luskin wrote the committee this week that Rove would discuss the Siegelman case on the condition that his comments not be under oath and not be transcribed.
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and several other lawmakers rejected the offer, saying such an interview "will not permit us to obtain a straightforward and clear record."
Friday, May 2, 2008
Agricultural corporation boast huge profits in midst of food crisis
Go to Original
By Naomi Spencer
As inflation and shortages expose billions to hunger worldwide, agricultural giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company revealed a 42 percent leap in quarterly profits. The announcement follows similarly skyrocketing earnings reports from half a dozen other agribusinesses and suppliers, as well as from major oil companies BP, Shell, and Exxon.
For the third fiscal quarter ending March 31, ADM reported $517 million in profit. In an April 29 conference call, executives attributed record earnings throughout all of the company’s operations to an enormous increase in speculative activity in commodities markets.
“Volatility in commodity markets presented unprecedented opportunities,” ADM chief executive Patricia Woertz told investor analysts in on the call. “Once again, our team leveraged our financial flexibility and global asset base to capture those opportunities to deliver shareholder value.”
Commodities markets have been flooded with investors from out of the credit and housing markets looking for more sound sources of profit. As a result, the grain, metals and oil markets have been subject to rampant turnover of stocks and huge fluctuations in the valuation of the most basic goods.
The price of oil, which has risen 75 percent in the past year, drove up freight and farming and fertilizer production costs substantially, greatly affecting grain production costs.
More directly, speculation and investment in the food system have soared. According to data from agricultural research firm AgResource, investment in corn, soybeans, wheat and livestock trades has ballooned from $10 billion in 2006 to over $47 billion.
In the past year, per bushel wheat prices have risen by 64 percent, corn is up 68 percent; soybeans 76 percent. Rice prices have risen by 134 percent.
In addition to speculation, however, as ADM CEO Woertz’s comments reveal, the enormous price rises for staple grains have also been attended by the deliberate influence of the corporations at every stage along the production and supply lines, as well as on the trade floors.
Significantly, amidst the most severe global grain shortfall and inflationary surge in decades, the company recorded a sevenfold increase in profit—from $46 million quarterly to $366 million over the year—in its grain storage, transportation and trade operations. These operations comprise the company’s agricultural services division, which, as the Associated Press noted Wednesday, “includes a large grain-trading operation that tries to profit from shifts in commodity prices and that buffers Archer-Daniels against price spikes.”
As with the continual record-breaking profits of the big oil companies, the fortunes of the large agribusinesses find their direct express in the exploitation of the world’s population. Food price spikes have triggered rioting, social breakdown, misery, and desperation in countries throughout Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.
In developed countries, including the US, food and fuel inflation are increasingly burdensome for working class families already struggling in a worsening job market and housing crisis. For the poorest populations around the world, the cost of food has become untenable.
In an expression of nervousness over the situation, many national governments, international organizations and the press have called for emergency controls on exports, lowering of import barriers, and aid for food programs. Governments have also sought to stockpile grains, scooping up US crops for relatively less cost as the dollar declines, as a form of domestic insurance against unrest. However, the massive purchases have had the consequence of exacerbating volatility on the US grain exchanges and further inflating grain futures.
Agriculture is increasingly a vertically integrated industry, with a few mega-companies dominating the fundamental aspects of the food system—allocation, trading, processing and distribution—with the goal of maximizing the amount of profit that can be turned between payment to farmers and sale to higher-level purchasers. As the largest grain processor in the US, ADM oversees a huge proportion of the country’s corn, soybeans and other crops. It also processes raw grains into ethanol and meal for animal and human food industries, and distributes grains on the domestic and international markets.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal noted enormous profit increases for all of the largest agricultural suppliers and processors. The second-largest grain processor, Cargill, recorded quarterly earnings of $1.03 billion February 29, up 86 percent from a year ago. Third-largest processor Bunge reported $289 million, shooting up 1,964 percent over last year. Farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Co. reported a 55 increase in quarterly earnings over the year, to $369 million.
Monsanto, a company with a virtual monopoly on crop seed and herbicide production, reported $1.13 billion in profits for the latest quarter, more than doubling profits of the preceding quarter. Other corporations with significant agricultural operations, including Syngenta AG, DuPont and Dow Chemical, have also posted huge profits.
Mosaic, a leading producer of fertilizer components potash and diammonium phosphate, took in over $520 million in the last fiscal quarter, up 1,134 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. As Fortune magazine pointed out May 1, as high as Mosaic was able to sell fertilizer over the quarter, it was actually selling for less than half of the contemporaneous market prices due to the “time lag in its sales contracts.”
The magazine cited comments from Merrill Lynch analyst Don Carson, who suggested that while record-breaking quarterly profit-taking was “significant, it will appear minor when compared to the margin expansion in coming quarters.”
By Naomi Spencer
As inflation and shortages expose billions to hunger worldwide, agricultural giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company revealed a 42 percent leap in quarterly profits. The announcement follows similarly skyrocketing earnings reports from half a dozen other agribusinesses and suppliers, as well as from major oil companies BP, Shell, and Exxon.
For the third fiscal quarter ending March 31, ADM reported $517 million in profit. In an April 29 conference call, executives attributed record earnings throughout all of the company’s operations to an enormous increase in speculative activity in commodities markets.
“Volatility in commodity markets presented unprecedented opportunities,” ADM chief executive Patricia Woertz told investor analysts in on the call. “Once again, our team leveraged our financial flexibility and global asset base to capture those opportunities to deliver shareholder value.”
Commodities markets have been flooded with investors from out of the credit and housing markets looking for more sound sources of profit. As a result, the grain, metals and oil markets have been subject to rampant turnover of stocks and huge fluctuations in the valuation of the most basic goods.
The price of oil, which has risen 75 percent in the past year, drove up freight and farming and fertilizer production costs substantially, greatly affecting grain production costs.
More directly, speculation and investment in the food system have soared. According to data from agricultural research firm AgResource, investment in corn, soybeans, wheat and livestock trades has ballooned from $10 billion in 2006 to over $47 billion.
In the past year, per bushel wheat prices have risen by 64 percent, corn is up 68 percent; soybeans 76 percent. Rice prices have risen by 134 percent.
In addition to speculation, however, as ADM CEO Woertz’s comments reveal, the enormous price rises for staple grains have also been attended by the deliberate influence of the corporations at every stage along the production and supply lines, as well as on the trade floors.
Significantly, amidst the most severe global grain shortfall and inflationary surge in decades, the company recorded a sevenfold increase in profit—from $46 million quarterly to $366 million over the year—in its grain storage, transportation and trade operations. These operations comprise the company’s agricultural services division, which, as the Associated Press noted Wednesday, “includes a large grain-trading operation that tries to profit from shifts in commodity prices and that buffers Archer-Daniels against price spikes.”
As with the continual record-breaking profits of the big oil companies, the fortunes of the large agribusinesses find their direct express in the exploitation of the world’s population. Food price spikes have triggered rioting, social breakdown, misery, and desperation in countries throughout Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.
In developed countries, including the US, food and fuel inflation are increasingly burdensome for working class families already struggling in a worsening job market and housing crisis. For the poorest populations around the world, the cost of food has become untenable.
In an expression of nervousness over the situation, many national governments, international organizations and the press have called for emergency controls on exports, lowering of import barriers, and aid for food programs. Governments have also sought to stockpile grains, scooping up US crops for relatively less cost as the dollar declines, as a form of domestic insurance against unrest. However, the massive purchases have had the consequence of exacerbating volatility on the US grain exchanges and further inflating grain futures.
Agriculture is increasingly a vertically integrated industry, with a few mega-companies dominating the fundamental aspects of the food system—allocation, trading, processing and distribution—with the goal of maximizing the amount of profit that can be turned between payment to farmers and sale to higher-level purchasers. As the largest grain processor in the US, ADM oversees a huge proportion of the country’s corn, soybeans and other crops. It also processes raw grains into ethanol and meal for animal and human food industries, and distributes grains on the domestic and international markets.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal noted enormous profit increases for all of the largest agricultural suppliers and processors. The second-largest grain processor, Cargill, recorded quarterly earnings of $1.03 billion February 29, up 86 percent from a year ago. Third-largest processor Bunge reported $289 million, shooting up 1,964 percent over last year. Farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Co. reported a 55 increase in quarterly earnings over the year, to $369 million.
Monsanto, a company with a virtual monopoly on crop seed and herbicide production, reported $1.13 billion in profits for the latest quarter, more than doubling profits of the preceding quarter. Other corporations with significant agricultural operations, including Syngenta AG, DuPont and Dow Chemical, have also posted huge profits.
Mosaic, a leading producer of fertilizer components potash and diammonium phosphate, took in over $520 million in the last fiscal quarter, up 1,134 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. As Fortune magazine pointed out May 1, as high as Mosaic was able to sell fertilizer over the quarter, it was actually selling for less than half of the contemporaneous market prices due to the “time lag in its sales contracts.”
The magazine cited comments from Merrill Lynch analyst Don Carson, who suggested that while record-breaking quarterly profit-taking was “significant, it will appear minor when compared to the margin expansion in coming quarters.”
Five years after “mission accomplished,” sharp rise in Iraqi and US casualties
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By Bill Van Auken
May 1 marked the fifth anniversary of the infamous “mission accomplished” speech delivered by President George W. Bush aboard a US aircraft carrier. Five years after what Bush proclaimed to be the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, US casualties have reached a seven-month high, while the Iraqi death toll continues to mount.
In April, 52 US troops were killed in Iraq, the highest number since last September. The bulk of the casualties came in Baghdad, mostly in the crowded Shia slum neighborhoods of Sadr City. The sharp rise in US dead and wounded, and the far greater death and destruction being inflicted on Iraqi civilians, is the result of a month-old offensive launched by US and Iraqi puppet forces against the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to nationalist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Citing “security officials,” Agence France-Presse said that 1,073 Iraqis were killed last month. This is undoubtedly a gross underestimation of the real death toll. One hospital alone in Sadr City reported taking in 400 bodies.
The two major hospitals in the area, which is home to more than 2 million people, said that they had received nearly 2,500 wounded. The medical facilities are overwhelmed with the number of casualties. They report that they lack sufficient numbers of severe trauma specialists to treat the wounded and are running low on basic supplies, including clean water.
“The situation is very critical and unstable,” Abbas Owaid, director-general of Fatima al-Zahra hospital told the United Nations news agency IRIN. “There is still a pressing need for bandages, pain killers, syringes and other first aid materials. Blood is available as there are people who donate, but we still need more as there are injuries.”
Owaid said that ambulances were coming under attack and that patients and staff alike were prevented from reaching his hospital because US-backed Iraqi forces had taken up positions nearby.
A senior military official at the Pentagon used a press briefing Wednesday to assert that the sharp climb in casualties did not indicate an unraveling of the US “surge,” the escalation of the American intervention that sent another 30,000 troops into the occupied country last year.
“While it is sad to see an increase in casualties, again, I don’t think it is necessarily indicative of a major change in the operating environment, at least from the US perspective,” said Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director for operations of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. He added, “When the level of fighting increases, then, sadly, the level of casualties does tend to rise.” He stressed that the US military had never made a decline in casualties “The measure of how things are progressing in Iraq.”
On the contrary, both the Pentagon and the White House were until recently lauding the relative decline in the carnage against the Iraqi people and the reduced number of US soldiers killed in action as proof of the “surge’s” success. Now, the US military is providing daily body counts in which it invariably describes all those killed as “criminals” and “terrorists.” Hospitals receiving the victims, however, report that the bulk of them are civilians, including large numbers of women and children.
The military has been ordered to achieve a political objective deemed crucial for rescuing Washington’s faltering attempt to impose colonial domination over the oil-rich country. It is to take on and defeat the Mahdi Army and thereby weaken the Sadrists, who have voiced opposition to both the US occupation and the bid to open up Iraq’s oil reserves to exploitation by US-based energy conglomerates. The aim is to complete this task before October provincial elections, which Sadr’s followers would otherwise be expected to win in the key southern provinces that contain the bulk of Iraq’s oil assets.
To carry out this task, Washington is prepared to spill as much Iraqi blood as it takes, and to accept a sizeable increase in American casualties as well. One result has been a steady increase in the number of flag-draped coffins returning to towns and cities across America. The news of these individual tragedies is confined to the local media, with the real cost of this criminal war largely concealed from the American people.
Among those who last month lost their lives in the five-year-old war to conquer Iraq were the following:
* Army Specialist David P. McCormick, 26, who died as a result of wounds suffered in a rocket attack April 28. The soldier’s longtime friend and minister, Mike Zimmerman, described him as “a pretty quiet person,” who was “looking forward to getting out” and wanted to go to college for business administration.
* Air Force Technical Sergeant Anthony Capra, 31, who died April 9 from wounds inflicted by a roadside bomb. Capra, who is survived by a wife and five children, was serving his fourth tour of duty in Iraq.
* Sergeant Jesse Ault, a national guardsman from Virginia, who died April 9 from wounds resulting from an improvised explosive device (IED). He had left the guard, but when his wife, also a guard member, was recalled for a second tour in Iraq, he re-enlisted in order to take her place and allow her to stay with their children. “I’ve got to do what’s best for my family,” he told his father.
* Army Sergeant Shaun Paul Tousha, 30, who was killed by an IED on April 9. He was the 100th military fatality from the Houston, Texas area. His sister Becky, reflecting on the mounting death toll, told the Houston Chronicle, “I think they ought to bring our boys home and call it quits.”
* Jacob Fairbanks, 22, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who died in Iraq on April 9. He had been sent back for a 15-month tour shortly after he and his wife, Dwan, had a new baby. Dwan told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he had been plagued by a feeling of dread. “What if I don’t come back this time?” he told her. The Pentagon listed the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
* Staff Sergeant Jeremiah McNeal, 23, of the Virginia National Guard, who died April 6 from wounds caused by an IED. “He joined the National Guard soon after [high school] graduation to support his mother and three younger siblings,” the Virginian Pilot reported. “He was not just another number,” his wife Nikita told the media.
* Private Fist Class Shane Penley, 19, who was killed April 6 by a sniper’s bullet just short of a year after graduating from Bloom Trail High School in Illinois. According to the local newspaper, the Southtown Star, he “joined the Army because he was frustrated trying to find a good job” after waiting on tables in a local restaurant. His three sisters, the paper reported, had tried to talk him out of enlisting.
* Major Stuart Wolfer, 36, who was killed in an April 6 rocket attack on the fortified Green Zone, where the US Embassy and Iraqi government buildings are located. He is survived by a wife and three children. When Representative Robert Wexler (Democrat of Florida) invited his constituents to submit questions for last month’s congressional testimony by the US Iraq war commander, General David Petraeus, Len Wolfer, the soldier’s father, requested that he ask Petraeus, ““ For what? For what had he lost his son?”
The names of the victims of American Hellfire missiles, bombs and machine gun fire in the crowded streets of Sadr City are for the most part unknown outside of Iraq, and are far more numerous. Thanks to a wrenching Associated Press photograph, the identity of one has been publicized. He is Ali Hussein, aged two.
A photographer captured the image of his lifeless, chalk-covered body being lifted from the rubble of his home, which had been destroyed in a US rocket attack. Mouth agape and limbs hanging limp, the little boy wore a T-shirt, blood-stained shorts and a child’s sandals.
As these crimes continued to unfold, the White House took the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech to invent a new defense of the American president’s grotesquely unfounded assessment of the situation in Iraq.
In what was obviously a scripted remark aimed at preempting inevitable media references to the anniversary, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told a news conference: “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.”
This is, of course, all nonsense. The banner, together with Bush’s tailhook landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his strutting before the cameras in a pilot’s flight suit, were all carefully choreographed to sell the success of the Iraq war and American militarism to the public. The banner itself was produced by a private contractor with White House assistance.
The remarks made by Bush on that occasion were fully in keeping with the two-word slogan. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” he told his captive audience of sailors. “And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”
Moreover, barely one month later, he used the same words emblazoned on the banner in a speech to US troops in Qatar. “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people,” he said, “and that mission has been accomplished.”
At that point, the Bush administration and most of the American ruling elite believed they would be able to quickly solidify their grip over Iraq, install a puppet regime and use the country’s oil wealth to pay for the war and strengthen US capitalism.
At the time, the World Socialist Web Site foresaw that there would be no such easy road for US imperialism’s colonial-style venture in Iraq.
“In reality, of course, the killing is far from over,” the WSWS stated on May 2, 2003. “Pentagon officials acknowledge that there is no prospect of reducing the current number of US troops in Iraq—close to 140,000—for years to come. There is, in short, no ‘exit strategy,’ but rather a plan for permanent colonial occupation.
“Some of the greatest US war crimes lie ahead as Washington attempts to suppress popular opposition to its imposition of a puppet regime to rule the Iraqi people in the interests of the US oil companies, banks and corporations.”
This warning has been tragically confirmed. Close to 97 percent of US casualties have been suffered since Bush delivered his speech, while the bloodbath suffered by the Iraqi people over the same period has dwarfed the considerable carnage inflicted during the “shock and awe” stage of the US invasion. According to the best demographic estimates, at least a million Iraqi lives have been lost as a result of the US intervention.
By Bill Van Auken
May 1 marked the fifth anniversary of the infamous “mission accomplished” speech delivered by President George W. Bush aboard a US aircraft carrier. Five years after what Bush proclaimed to be the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, US casualties have reached a seven-month high, while the Iraqi death toll continues to mount.
In April, 52 US troops were killed in Iraq, the highest number since last September. The bulk of the casualties came in Baghdad, mostly in the crowded Shia slum neighborhoods of Sadr City. The sharp rise in US dead and wounded, and the far greater death and destruction being inflicted on Iraqi civilians, is the result of a month-old offensive launched by US and Iraqi puppet forces against the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to nationalist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Citing “security officials,” Agence France-Presse said that 1,073 Iraqis were killed last month. This is undoubtedly a gross underestimation of the real death toll. One hospital alone in Sadr City reported taking in 400 bodies.
The two major hospitals in the area, which is home to more than 2 million people, said that they had received nearly 2,500 wounded. The medical facilities are overwhelmed with the number of casualties. They report that they lack sufficient numbers of severe trauma specialists to treat the wounded and are running low on basic supplies, including clean water.
“The situation is very critical and unstable,” Abbas Owaid, director-general of Fatima al-Zahra hospital told the United Nations news agency IRIN. “There is still a pressing need for bandages, pain killers, syringes and other first aid materials. Blood is available as there are people who donate, but we still need more as there are injuries.”
Owaid said that ambulances were coming under attack and that patients and staff alike were prevented from reaching his hospital because US-backed Iraqi forces had taken up positions nearby.
A senior military official at the Pentagon used a press briefing Wednesday to assert that the sharp climb in casualties did not indicate an unraveling of the US “surge,” the escalation of the American intervention that sent another 30,000 troops into the occupied country last year.
“While it is sad to see an increase in casualties, again, I don’t think it is necessarily indicative of a major change in the operating environment, at least from the US perspective,” said Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director for operations of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. He added, “When the level of fighting increases, then, sadly, the level of casualties does tend to rise.” He stressed that the US military had never made a decline in casualties “The measure of how things are progressing in Iraq.”
On the contrary, both the Pentagon and the White House were until recently lauding the relative decline in the carnage against the Iraqi people and the reduced number of US soldiers killed in action as proof of the “surge’s” success. Now, the US military is providing daily body counts in which it invariably describes all those killed as “criminals” and “terrorists.” Hospitals receiving the victims, however, report that the bulk of them are civilians, including large numbers of women and children.
The military has been ordered to achieve a political objective deemed crucial for rescuing Washington’s faltering attempt to impose colonial domination over the oil-rich country. It is to take on and defeat the Mahdi Army and thereby weaken the Sadrists, who have voiced opposition to both the US occupation and the bid to open up Iraq’s oil reserves to exploitation by US-based energy conglomerates. The aim is to complete this task before October provincial elections, which Sadr’s followers would otherwise be expected to win in the key southern provinces that contain the bulk of Iraq’s oil assets.
To carry out this task, Washington is prepared to spill as much Iraqi blood as it takes, and to accept a sizeable increase in American casualties as well. One result has been a steady increase in the number of flag-draped coffins returning to towns and cities across America. The news of these individual tragedies is confined to the local media, with the real cost of this criminal war largely concealed from the American people.
Among those who last month lost their lives in the five-year-old war to conquer Iraq were the following:
* Army Specialist David P. McCormick, 26, who died as a result of wounds suffered in a rocket attack April 28. The soldier’s longtime friend and minister, Mike Zimmerman, described him as “a pretty quiet person,” who was “looking forward to getting out” and wanted to go to college for business administration.
* Air Force Technical Sergeant Anthony Capra, 31, who died April 9 from wounds inflicted by a roadside bomb. Capra, who is survived by a wife and five children, was serving his fourth tour of duty in Iraq.
* Sergeant Jesse Ault, a national guardsman from Virginia, who died April 9 from wounds resulting from an improvised explosive device (IED). He had left the guard, but when his wife, also a guard member, was recalled for a second tour in Iraq, he re-enlisted in order to take her place and allow her to stay with their children. “I’ve got to do what’s best for my family,” he told his father.
* Army Sergeant Shaun Paul Tousha, 30, who was killed by an IED on April 9. He was the 100th military fatality from the Houston, Texas area. His sister Becky, reflecting on the mounting death toll, told the Houston Chronicle, “I think they ought to bring our boys home and call it quits.”
* Jacob Fairbanks, 22, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who died in Iraq on April 9. He had been sent back for a 15-month tour shortly after he and his wife, Dwan, had a new baby. Dwan told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he had been plagued by a feeling of dread. “What if I don’t come back this time?” he told her. The Pentagon listed the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
* Staff Sergeant Jeremiah McNeal, 23, of the Virginia National Guard, who died April 6 from wounds caused by an IED. “He joined the National Guard soon after [high school] graduation to support his mother and three younger siblings,” the Virginian Pilot reported. “He was not just another number,” his wife Nikita told the media.
* Private Fist Class Shane Penley, 19, who was killed April 6 by a sniper’s bullet just short of a year after graduating from Bloom Trail High School in Illinois. According to the local newspaper, the Southtown Star, he “joined the Army because he was frustrated trying to find a good job” after waiting on tables in a local restaurant. His three sisters, the paper reported, had tried to talk him out of enlisting.
* Major Stuart Wolfer, 36, who was killed in an April 6 rocket attack on the fortified Green Zone, where the US Embassy and Iraqi government buildings are located. He is survived by a wife and three children. When Representative Robert Wexler (Democrat of Florida) invited his constituents to submit questions for last month’s congressional testimony by the US Iraq war commander, General David Petraeus, Len Wolfer, the soldier’s father, requested that he ask Petraeus, ““ For what? For what had he lost his son?”
The names of the victims of American Hellfire missiles, bombs and machine gun fire in the crowded streets of Sadr City are for the most part unknown outside of Iraq, and are far more numerous. Thanks to a wrenching Associated Press photograph, the identity of one has been publicized. He is Ali Hussein, aged two.
A photographer captured the image of his lifeless, chalk-covered body being lifted from the rubble of his home, which had been destroyed in a US rocket attack. Mouth agape and limbs hanging limp, the little boy wore a T-shirt, blood-stained shorts and a child’s sandals.
As these crimes continued to unfold, the White House took the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech to invent a new defense of the American president’s grotesquely unfounded assessment of the situation in Iraq.
In what was obviously a scripted remark aimed at preempting inevitable media references to the anniversary, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told a news conference: “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.”
This is, of course, all nonsense. The banner, together with Bush’s tailhook landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his strutting before the cameras in a pilot’s flight suit, were all carefully choreographed to sell the success of the Iraq war and American militarism to the public. The banner itself was produced by a private contractor with White House assistance.
The remarks made by Bush on that occasion were fully in keeping with the two-word slogan. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” he told his captive audience of sailors. “And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”
Moreover, barely one month later, he used the same words emblazoned on the banner in a speech to US troops in Qatar. “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people,” he said, “and that mission has been accomplished.”
At that point, the Bush administration and most of the American ruling elite believed they would be able to quickly solidify their grip over Iraq, install a puppet regime and use the country’s oil wealth to pay for the war and strengthen US capitalism.
At the time, the World Socialist Web Site foresaw that there would be no such easy road for US imperialism’s colonial-style venture in Iraq.
“In reality, of course, the killing is far from over,” the WSWS stated on May 2, 2003. “Pentagon officials acknowledge that there is no prospect of reducing the current number of US troops in Iraq—close to 140,000—for years to come. There is, in short, no ‘exit strategy,’ but rather a plan for permanent colonial occupation.
“Some of the greatest US war crimes lie ahead as Washington attempts to suppress popular opposition to its imposition of a puppet regime to rule the Iraqi people in the interests of the US oil companies, banks and corporations.”
This warning has been tragically confirmed. Close to 97 percent of US casualties have been suffered since Bush delivered his speech, while the bloodbath suffered by the Iraqi people over the same period has dwarfed the considerable carnage inflicted during the “shock and awe” stage of the US invasion. According to the best demographic estimates, at least a million Iraqi lives have been lost as a result of the US intervention.
Proposed rules seek to bar some rate hikes by credit card firms
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By Kathy M. Kristof
Complaints of unfair rate hikes spur new consumer protections.
Credit card companies would be barred from some retroactive interest rate hikes and other "unfair and deceptive" practices that cost consumers billions of dollars each year under a proposal by federal regulators Thursday.
The proposal by the Office of Thrift Supervision was hailed as a "good start" by the Consumer Federation of America. But the federation and other consumer advocates said stronger steps were still needed, including measures to ban overdraft fees that are assessed because a bank has put a payment check on hold.
Federal regulators said they drafted the measures in response to a wide range of public complaints on credit card fees and practices. Susan Wones of Denver, for instance, testified at a recent congressional hearing that the interest rate on her credit card had soared because the issuer decided her credit card balances were too high. She said she had never been late with a payment or gone over her credit limit, but she was forced to pay an interest rate of 24.99%.
In addition to barring some interest rate hikes, the proposed rules would require banks and other credit card issuers to mail or deliver statements at least 21 days before their due dates to allow consumers adequate time to mail a payment without facing a late fee.
To ensure uniform practices across the industry, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Credit Union Administration are expected to release identical proposals today, said William Ruberry of the Office of Thrift Supervision.
The proposals will be subject to a 75-day public comment period, with adoption anticipated by the end of the year.
"It's about time federal regulators offered consumers some relief from unfair bank practices," said Gail Hillebrand, financial services campaign manager at Consumers Union in San Francisco.
Banking industry groups declined to comment, saying they did not have time to review the proposal.
If enacted, the proposed rules also would:
* Prohibit institutions from increasing the interest rate on an outstanding balance, except in some well-communicated instances, such as when the credit card was issued with a temporary promotional rate. The proposal also would allow banks to hike the rate on an existing balance if the consumer was more than 30 days late in making a payment.
* Curb fees required to obtain some cards so that these fees won't eat up the majority of the available credit limit. In addition, if the fee exceeded 25% of the available balance, it would have to be spread out, rather than charged as a lump sum.
* Bar a controversial practice in which credit card companies apply all payments to the balance with the lowest interest rate, in instances where different rates apply to portions of the consumer's debt.
(This often happens when consumers get a low promotional rate for, say, a balance transfer. However, they are charged a higher rate for purchases and potentially a third rate for cash advances.) The proposed rule demands that any amount over the minimum payment be either allocated among all outstanding balances or allocated to the highest-cost debt.
* Ban credit card and checking account issuers from assessing over-limit or overdraft fees solely because of a "hold" placed on available credit. (These holds are sometimes placed by gas stations for amounts that exceed the customer's purchase price and are not lifted until the retailer's debt clears.)
It was not clear Thursday how common these practices were or how much they cost consumers. But Hillebrand of Consumers Union estimated that it was easily in the billions of dollars.
Credit card issuers collect $15 billion annually in penalty fees, and overdraft fees run to $17 billion a year, she said.
Hillebrand and other groups noted that the rules did not address fees charged to pay a credit card bill over the phone or banks' ability to charge over-limit fees when they've approved the charge. Nor does it stop overdraft fees that are caused by a check hold, in which the bank has the money but has not yet credited the consumer's account.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) is sponsoring proposed legislation dubbed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, which is opposed by bankers but widely supported by consumer advocates.
"This is a good first step -- an important first step," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director at the Consumer Federation of America. "But Congress still needs to act. More needs to be done."
By Kathy M. Kristof
Complaints of unfair rate hikes spur new consumer protections.
Credit card companies would be barred from some retroactive interest rate hikes and other "unfair and deceptive" practices that cost consumers billions of dollars each year under a proposal by federal regulators Thursday.
The proposal by the Office of Thrift Supervision was hailed as a "good start" by the Consumer Federation of America. But the federation and other consumer advocates said stronger steps were still needed, including measures to ban overdraft fees that are assessed because a bank has put a payment check on hold.
Federal regulators said they drafted the measures in response to a wide range of public complaints on credit card fees and practices. Susan Wones of Denver, for instance, testified at a recent congressional hearing that the interest rate on her credit card had soared because the issuer decided her credit card balances were too high. She said she had never been late with a payment or gone over her credit limit, but she was forced to pay an interest rate of 24.99%.
In addition to barring some interest rate hikes, the proposed rules would require banks and other credit card issuers to mail or deliver statements at least 21 days before their due dates to allow consumers adequate time to mail a payment without facing a late fee.
To ensure uniform practices across the industry, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Credit Union Administration are expected to release identical proposals today, said William Ruberry of the Office of Thrift Supervision.
The proposals will be subject to a 75-day public comment period, with adoption anticipated by the end of the year.
"It's about time federal regulators offered consumers some relief from unfair bank practices," said Gail Hillebrand, financial services campaign manager at Consumers Union in San Francisco.
Banking industry groups declined to comment, saying they did not have time to review the proposal.
If enacted, the proposed rules also would:
* Prohibit institutions from increasing the interest rate on an outstanding balance, except in some well-communicated instances, such as when the credit card was issued with a temporary promotional rate. The proposal also would allow banks to hike the rate on an existing balance if the consumer was more than 30 days late in making a payment.
* Curb fees required to obtain some cards so that these fees won't eat up the majority of the available credit limit. In addition, if the fee exceeded 25% of the available balance, it would have to be spread out, rather than charged as a lump sum.
* Bar a controversial practice in which credit card companies apply all payments to the balance with the lowest interest rate, in instances where different rates apply to portions of the consumer's debt.
(This often happens when consumers get a low promotional rate for, say, a balance transfer. However, they are charged a higher rate for purchases and potentially a third rate for cash advances.) The proposed rule demands that any amount over the minimum payment be either allocated among all outstanding balances or allocated to the highest-cost debt.
* Ban credit card and checking account issuers from assessing over-limit or overdraft fees solely because of a "hold" placed on available credit. (These holds are sometimes placed by gas stations for amounts that exceed the customer's purchase price and are not lifted until the retailer's debt clears.)
It was not clear Thursday how common these practices were or how much they cost consumers. But Hillebrand of Consumers Union estimated that it was easily in the billions of dollars.
Credit card issuers collect $15 billion annually in penalty fees, and overdraft fees run to $17 billion a year, she said.
Hillebrand and other groups noted that the rules did not address fees charged to pay a credit card bill over the phone or banks' ability to charge over-limit fees when they've approved the charge. Nor does it stop overdraft fees that are caused by a check hold, in which the bank has the money but has not yet credited the consumer's account.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) is sponsoring proposed legislation dubbed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, which is opposed by bankers but widely supported by consumer advocates.
"This is a good first step -- an important first step," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director at the Consumer Federation of America. "But Congress still needs to act. More needs to be done."
Sending Felons Off to War
Go to Original
By Ivan Eland
The growing unpopularity of Bush’s open-ended wars, especially the one in Iraq, has forced the U.S. military to recruit more and more felons with potentially disastrous consequences, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes in this guest essay:
Enmeshed in two military occupations that have turned into well-publicized quagmires, the Army and Marines are understandably having trouble enlisting new recruits. Their answer: vastly increase the number of convicted felons and other societal miscreants accepted into their ranks.
According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.
For example, some entrants had convictions for crimes of dishonesty—including burglary, robbery, and grand larceny—crimes of violence—such as aggravated assault, arson, and “terroristic” threats, including bomb threats—and sex crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, and indecent acts with a child.
In addition, the two services dramatically increased their “conduct waivers” for people convicted of misdemeanors. Astonishingly, in fiscal year 2007, nearly one in five Army recruits were brought in under waivers for felonies and misdemeanors.
The never-ending wars have also forced the Army to take larger numbers of recruits who are older and less physically fit, have lower education and aptitude, and have formerly disqualifying medical maladies. Also, recently President Bush reduced the length of combat tours in Iraq from fifteen months to twelve.
Although this latter measure may help somewhat with military recruiting and retention and gives soldiers a much-needed break from the stress of combat, it is detrimental to winning a war against guerrillas.
In such counterinsurgency warfare, it is crucially important to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous people. To do this, personal relations must be maintained with the local leaders and warlords.
Rotating people out of Iraq so quickly may boost morale and recruiting, but it destroys such relationships. The same happened with short tours in Vietnam.
One problem is that when the U.S. is not fighting a war against what the American public perceives as a dire threat (for example, the Nazis and Imperial Japanese during World War II)—that is, the war is one of choice, such as Iraq or Vietnam—the nation is unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to win.
In World War II, serving more than twelve months overseas was not an issue.
Another problem is that recruiting societal miscreants might especially impair counterinsurgency warfare. Especially violent people, or those who don’t properly control their behavior, might be adequate for all-out combat against a conventional enemy, but would not be good at winning hearts and minds.
In fact, when faced with guerrillas who attack and then melt back into the general population, these recruits might be more apt to commit atrocities against the population.
Finally, the military would rather have such miscreants—some of them violent criminals or felons who have committed sex-related crimes (as long as they are heterosexual offenses)—in its ranks than it would gays.
The fact that openly gay people are still being kicked out of the military does not create an enticing climate for gays to join, at a time when the armed forces need every qualified person they can get.
Similarly, excluding women from serving on submarines (because of the allegedly cramped quarters) and certain combat positions (because they are presumably too frail) deters some athletic and qualified women from enlisting in the ground and naval forces.
The obvious solutions to all of these problems are to avoid unnecessary brushfire wars and to change wacky military personnel policies that undermine the all-volunteer military.
By Ivan Eland
The growing unpopularity of Bush’s open-ended wars, especially the one in Iraq, has forced the U.S. military to recruit more and more felons with potentially disastrous consequences, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes in this guest essay:
Enmeshed in two military occupations that have turned into well-publicized quagmires, the Army and Marines are understandably having trouble enlisting new recruits. Their answer: vastly increase the number of convicted felons and other societal miscreants accepted into their ranks.
According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.
For example, some entrants had convictions for crimes of dishonesty—including burglary, robbery, and grand larceny—crimes of violence—such as aggravated assault, arson, and “terroristic” threats, including bomb threats—and sex crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, and indecent acts with a child.
In addition, the two services dramatically increased their “conduct waivers” for people convicted of misdemeanors. Astonishingly, in fiscal year 2007, nearly one in five Army recruits were brought in under waivers for felonies and misdemeanors.
The never-ending wars have also forced the Army to take larger numbers of recruits who are older and less physically fit, have lower education and aptitude, and have formerly disqualifying medical maladies. Also, recently President Bush reduced the length of combat tours in Iraq from fifteen months to twelve.
Although this latter measure may help somewhat with military recruiting and retention and gives soldiers a much-needed break from the stress of combat, it is detrimental to winning a war against guerrillas.
In such counterinsurgency warfare, it is crucially important to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous people. To do this, personal relations must be maintained with the local leaders and warlords.
Rotating people out of Iraq so quickly may boost morale and recruiting, but it destroys such relationships. The same happened with short tours in Vietnam.
One problem is that when the U.S. is not fighting a war against what the American public perceives as a dire threat (for example, the Nazis and Imperial Japanese during World War II)—that is, the war is one of choice, such as Iraq or Vietnam—the nation is unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to win.
In World War II, serving more than twelve months overseas was not an issue.
Another problem is that recruiting societal miscreants might especially impair counterinsurgency warfare. Especially violent people, or those who don’t properly control their behavior, might be adequate for all-out combat against a conventional enemy, but would not be good at winning hearts and minds.
In fact, when faced with guerrillas who attack and then melt back into the general population, these recruits might be more apt to commit atrocities against the population.
Finally, the military would rather have such miscreants—some of them violent criminals or felons who have committed sex-related crimes (as long as they are heterosexual offenses)—in its ranks than it would gays.
The fact that openly gay people are still being kicked out of the military does not create an enticing climate for gays to join, at a time when the armed forces need every qualified person they can get.
Similarly, excluding women from serving on submarines (because of the allegedly cramped quarters) and certain combat positions (because they are presumably too frail) deters some athletic and qualified women from enlisting in the ground and naval forces.
The obvious solutions to all of these problems are to avoid unnecessary brushfire wars and to change wacky military personnel policies that undermine the all-volunteer military.
Somalia: a victim of Bush’s recklessness
Go to Original
BY Matthew Carr
One of the forgotten battlegrounds of George Bush's 'war on terror' jumped sharply into focus yesterday, with the announcement that a pre-dawn US missile strike had killed the Islamist militia leader Aden Hashi Ayro and at least 10 other people in the town of Dusamareb in Somalia.
The Americans claim Ayro was a key al-Qaeda figure in East Africa. There is no way of objectively assessing these claims, but his assassination is certain to fuel the ongoing conflict in a country that Oxfam recently described as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.
To much of the Western public, violent mayhem has long been synonymous with the failed state depicted in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. But the violence that is currently ripping Somalia apart is a direct consequence of the Bush administration's reckless military adventurism and the Manichean fantasy world of the 21st century's terror wars.
The present conflict can be traced to Christmas Day 2006, when the Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi invaded Somalia in order to topple a grassroots Islamic movement, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).
During their six-month ascendancy in the south of the country, the Islamic Courts earned themselves some kudos amongst the war-weary Somali population, who were prepared to tolerate their literalist interpretation of Sharia in exchange for the freedom to walk the streets without being robbed, shot or raped by warlord militias.
It was a period in which many analysts, such as John Prendergast, a former Clinton official, saw 'the beginnings of governance' after nearly two decades of relentless civil war.
However, the xenophobic Zenawi regime did not regard the triumphant Islamists in Somalia with any enthusiasm. Nor did the Bush administration, which saw the Islamic Courts as an incipient Taliban and accused its leaders of sheltering "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda leaders and an unknown number of lesser operatives.
The UIC denied these allegations and even made some conciliatory overtures to the West, but these efforts were not reciprocated. Instead the Bush administration gave what one US official called a 'yellow-green light' to an invasion that the Zenawi regime presented as its own 'war on terror'.
From its bases in Kenya and Djibouti, the Pentagon's newly-created Africa Command also provided military support for the invasion, in the form of special forces and helicopters. In January 2007 US helicopter gunships carried out 'rinse and repeat' attacks on fleeing refugees near the Kenyan border, who were believed to include al-Qaeda terrorists.
The main casualties in these attacks appear to have been nomads and their livestock, though few people were counting. But the Islamists appeared to have been routed and Ethiopia promptly set about establishing a puppet government, headed by the warlord Abdullahi Yusuf. Since then, resistance to Ethiopian occupation has grown exponentially and Somalia has sunk ever deeper into a vortex of violence. More than one million people have been displaced, thousands have been killed and the country's fragile food supply once more placed in jeopardy.
Was all this done in order to eliminate "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda operatives who may never have been in the country in the first place? Did the US hope to gain access to Somalia's rich oil fields? Or was the Bush administration so blinded by its association between 'Islamism' and 'terror' that it chose to shoot first and ask questions later?
We cannot know what the Islamic Courts might have become had the US engaged them diplomatically or offered aid instead of rinse and repeat free fire zones. But the consequences could hardly have been much worse than they are now.
In its bloody attempt to rescue Somalia from 'fundamentalism' the US and its Ethiopian proxy have paved the way for the violent political fragmentation in which al-Qaeda thrives. While Western politicians dream of further humanitarian interventions elsewhere, it is salutary to pause and reflect on the catastrophe inflicted on yet another country that had to be destroyed before it could be saved.
BY Matthew Carr
One of the forgotten battlegrounds of George Bush's 'war on terror' jumped sharply into focus yesterday, with the announcement that a pre-dawn US missile strike had killed the Islamist militia leader Aden Hashi Ayro and at least 10 other people in the town of Dusamareb in Somalia.
The Americans claim Ayro was a key al-Qaeda figure in East Africa. There is no way of objectively assessing these claims, but his assassination is certain to fuel the ongoing conflict in a country that Oxfam recently described as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.
To much of the Western public, violent mayhem has long been synonymous with the failed state depicted in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. But the violence that is currently ripping Somalia apart is a direct consequence of the Bush administration's reckless military adventurism and the Manichean fantasy world of the 21st century's terror wars.
The present conflict can be traced to Christmas Day 2006, when the Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi invaded Somalia in order to topple a grassroots Islamic movement, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).
During their six-month ascendancy in the south of the country, the Islamic Courts earned themselves some kudos amongst the war-weary Somali population, who were prepared to tolerate their literalist interpretation of Sharia in exchange for the freedom to walk the streets without being robbed, shot or raped by warlord militias.
It was a period in which many analysts, such as John Prendergast, a former Clinton official, saw 'the beginnings of governance' after nearly two decades of relentless civil war.
However, the xenophobic Zenawi regime did not regard the triumphant Islamists in Somalia with any enthusiasm. Nor did the Bush administration, which saw the Islamic Courts as an incipient Taliban and accused its leaders of sheltering "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda leaders and an unknown number of lesser operatives.
The UIC denied these allegations and even made some conciliatory overtures to the West, but these efforts were not reciprocated. Instead the Bush administration gave what one US official called a 'yellow-green light' to an invasion that the Zenawi regime presented as its own 'war on terror'.
From its bases in Kenya and Djibouti, the Pentagon's newly-created Africa Command also provided military support for the invasion, in the form of special forces and helicopters. In January 2007 US helicopter gunships carried out 'rinse and repeat' attacks on fleeing refugees near the Kenyan border, who were believed to include al-Qaeda terrorists.
The main casualties in these attacks appear to have been nomads and their livestock, though few people were counting. But the Islamists appeared to have been routed and Ethiopia promptly set about establishing a puppet government, headed by the warlord Abdullahi Yusuf. Since then, resistance to Ethiopian occupation has grown exponentially and Somalia has sunk ever deeper into a vortex of violence. More than one million people have been displaced, thousands have been killed and the country's fragile food supply once more placed in jeopardy.
Was all this done in order to eliminate "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda operatives who may never have been in the country in the first place? Did the US hope to gain access to Somalia's rich oil fields? Or was the Bush administration so blinded by its association between 'Islamism' and 'terror' that it chose to shoot first and ask questions later?
We cannot know what the Islamic Courts might have become had the US engaged them diplomatically or offered aid instead of rinse and repeat free fire zones. But the consequences could hardly have been much worse than they are now.
In its bloody attempt to rescue Somalia from 'fundamentalism' the US and its Ethiopian proxy have paved the way for the violent political fragmentation in which al-Qaeda thrives. While Western politicians dream of further humanitarian interventions elsewhere, it is salutary to pause and reflect on the catastrophe inflicted on yet another country that had to be destroyed before it could be saved.
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens War on Iran
Go to Original
By Andrew Cockburn
By Andrew Cockburn
Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, "unprecedented in its scope."
Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.
Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.
Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice 
include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.
All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. That has not proved a problem. An initial outlay of $300 million to finance implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous condition of the U.S. economy.
Until recently, the administration faced a serious obstacle to action against Iran in the form of Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon, who made no secret of his contempt for official determination to take us to war. In a widely publicized incident last January, Iranian patrol boats approached a U.S. ship in what the Pentagon described as a "taunting" manner. According to Centcom staff officers, the American commander on the spot was about to open fire. At that point, the U.S. was close to war. He desisted only when Fallon personally and explicitly ordered him not to shoot. The White House, according to the staff officers, was "absolutely furious" with Fallon for defusing the incident.
Fallon has since departed. His abrupt resignation in early March followed the publication of his unvarnished views on our policy of confrontation with Iran, something that is unlikely to happen to his replacement, George Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus.
Though Petraeus is not due to take formal command at Centcom until late summer, there are abundant signs that something may happen before then. A Marine amphibious force, originally due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing date abruptly moved up to May 4. A scheduled meeting in Europe between French diplomats acting as intermediaries for the U.S. and Iranian representatives has been abruptly cancelled in the last two weeks. Petraeus is said to be at work on a master briefing for congress to demonstrate conclusively that the Iranians are the source of our current troubles in Iraq, thanks to their support for the Shia militia currently under attack by U.S. forces in Baghdad.
Interestingly, despite the bellicose complaints, Petraeus has made little effort to seal the Iran-Iraq border, and in any case two thirds of U.S. casualties still come from Sunni insurgents. "The Shia account for less than one third," a recently returned member of the command staff in Baghdad familiar with the relevant intelligence told me, "but if you want a war you have to sell it."
Even without the covert initiatives described above, the huge and growing armada currently on station in the Gulf is an impressive symbol of American power.
Armed Might of US Marred By Begging Bowl to Arabs
Sometime in the next two weeks, fleet radar operator may notice a blip on their screens that represents something rather more profound: America’s growing financial weakness. The blip will be former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s plane commencing its descent into Abu Dhabi. Rubin’s responsibility these days is to help keep Citigroup afloat despite a balance sheet still waterlogged, despite frantic bail out efforts by the Federal Reserve and others, by staggering losses in mortgage bonds. The Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund injected $7.5 billion last November (albeit at a sub-prime interest rate of eleven percent,) but the bank’s urgent need for fresh capital persists, and Abu Dhabi is where the money is.
Even if those radar operators pay no attention to Mr. Rubin’s flight, and the ironic contrast it illustrates between American military power and financial weakness, others will, and not just in Tehran. There’s not much a finding can do about that.
"Good News," Iraq & Beyond, Part II
Go to Original
By Noam Chomsky
Elite policy and the "Axis of Evil"
By Noam Chomsky
Elite policy and the "Axis of Evil"
Having brought up Iran [in Part I], we might as well turn briefly to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil, North Korea. The official story right now is that after having been forced to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons facilities, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way—"good news" for superhawks like John Bolton, who have held all along that the North Koreans understand only the mailed fist and will exploit negotiations only to trick us. A New York Times headline reads: "U.S. Sees Stalling by North Korea on Nuclear Pact" (January 19). The article by Helene Cooper details the charges. In the last paragraph we discover that the U.S. has not fulfilled its pledges. North Korea has received only 15 percent of the fuel that was promised by the U.S. and others and the U.S. has not undertaken steps to improve diplomatic relations, as promised. Several weeks later (February 6), in the McClatchey press Kevin Hall reported that the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, confirmed in Senate Hearings that "North Korea has slowed the dismantling of its nuclear reactor because it hasn’t received the amount of fuel oil it was promised."
As we learn from the specialist literature, and asides here and there, this is a consistent pattern. North Korea may have the worst government in the world, but they have been pursuing a pragmatic tit-for-tat policy on negotiations with the United States. When the U.S. takes an aggressive and threatening stance, they react accordingly. When the U.S. moves towards some form of accommodation, so do they.
When Bush came into office, both North Korea and the U.S. were bound by the Framework Agreement of 1994. Neither was fully in accord with its commitments, but the agreement was largely being observed. North Korea had stopped testing long-range missiles. It had perhaps one to two bombs worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more. After seven Bush years of confrontation, North Korea had eight to ten bombs and long-range missiles, and was developing plutonium. The Clinton administration Korea specialist, Bruce Cumings, reports the Administration "had also worked out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North’s medium and long-range missiles; it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today the North retains all its formidable missile capability."
The reasons for Bush’s achievements are well understood. The Axis of Evil speech, a serious blow to Iranian democrats and reformers as they have stressed, also put North Korea on notice that the U.S. was returning to its threatening stance. Washington released intelligence reports about North Korean clandestine programs; these were conceded to be dubious or baseless when the latest negotiations began in 2007, probably, commentators speculated, because it was feared that weapons inspectors might enter North Korea and the Iraq story would be repeated. North Korea responded by ratcheting up missile and weapons development.
In September 2005, under international pressure, Washington agreed to turn to negotiations within the six-power framework. They achieved substantial success. North Korea agreed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs" and allow international inspections, in return for international aid and a non-aggression pledge from the U.S., with an agreement that the two sides would "respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations." The ink was barely dry on the agreement when the Bush administration renewed the threat of force, also freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks and disbanding the consortium that was to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor consortium. Cumings alleges that "the sanctions were specifically designed to destroy the September pledges [and] to head off an accommodation between Washington and Pyongyang."
After Washington scuttled the promising September 2005 agreements, North Korea returned to weapons and missile development and carried out a test of a nuclear weapon. Again under international pressure, with its foreign policy in tatters, Washington returned to negotiations, leading to an agreement, though it is now dragging its feet on fulfilling its commitments.
Writing in Le Monde diplomatique last October, Cumings concluded that, "Bush had presided over the most asinine Korea policy in history. These last years, relations between Washington and Seoul have deteriorated drastically. By commission and omission, Bush trampled on the norms of the historic U.S. relationship with Seoul while creating a dangerous situation with Pyongyang."
Charges against North Korea escalated in September 2007, when Israel bombed an obscure site in northern Syria, an "act of war," as at least one American correspondent recognized (Seymour Hersh). Charges at once surfaced that Israel attacked a nuclear installation being developed with the help of North Korea, an attack compared with Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981—which, according to available evidence, convinced Saddam Hussein to initiate his nuclear weapons program. The September 2007 charges are dubious. Hersh’s tentative conclusion after detailed investigation is that the Israeli actions may have been intended as another threat against Iran—the U.S.-Israel have you in their bombsights. However this may be, there is some important background that should be recalled.
In 1993 Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement: Israel would recognize North Korea, and in return, North Korea would end any weapons-related involvement in the Middle East. The significance for Israeli security is clear. Clinton ordered the deal terminated, and Israel had no choice but to obey. Ever since its fateful decision in 1971 and the years that followed to reject peace and security in favor of expansion, Israel has been compelled to rely on the U.S. for protection, hence to obey Washington’s commands.
Whether or not there is any truth to current charges about North Korea and Syria, it appears that the threat to the security of Israel and the region could have been avoided by peaceful means, had security been a high priority.
Let us return to the first member of Axis of Evil, Iraq. Washington’s expectations were outlined in a Declaration of Principles between the U.S. and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government last November. The Declaration allows U.S. forces to remain indefinitely to "deter foreign aggression" and for internal security. The only aggression in sight is from the United States, but that is not aggression, by definition. And only the most naïve will entertain the thought that the U.S. would sustain the government by force if it moved towards independence, going too far in strengthening relations with Iran, for example. The Declaration also committed Iraq to facilitate and encourage "the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments."
The unusually brazen expression of imperial will was underscored when Bush quietly issued yet another signing statement, declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq." Shortly before, the New York Times had reported that Washington "insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its...deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." More third world irrationality.
In brief, Iraq must agree to allow permanent U.S. military installations (called "enduring" in the preferred Orwellism), grant the U.S. the right to conduct combat operations freely, and ensure U.S. control over the oil resources of Iraq while privileging U.S. investors. It is of some interest that these reports did not influence discussion about the reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. These were never obscure, but any effort to spell them out was dismissed with falsification and ridicule. Now the reasons are openly conceded, eliciting no retraction or even reflection.
Iraqis are not alone in believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favor the presence of Canadian and other foreign troops—the "good news," that made the headlines. The small print suggests some qualifications. Only 20 percent "think the Taliban will prevail once foreign troops leave." Three-fourths support negotiations between the U.S.-backed Karzai government and the Taliban and more than half favor a coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with the U.S.-Canadian stance and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards peaceful means.
Though the question was not asked, it is reasonable to surmise that the foreign presence is favored for aid and reconstruction. More evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by reports about the progress of reconstruction in Afghanistan six years after the U.S. invasion. Six percent of the population now have electricity, the AP reports, primarily in Kabul, which is artificially wealthy because of the huge foreign presence. There, "the rich, powerful, and well connected" have electricity, but few others, in contrast to the 1980s under Russian occupation, when "the city had plentiful power"—and women in Kabul were relatively free under the occupation and the Russian-backed Najibullah government that followed, probably more so than now, though they did have to worry about attacks from Reagan’s favorites, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who got his kicks from throwing acid in the faces of young women he thought were improperly dressed.
These matters were discussed at the time by Rasil Basu, UN Development Program senior advisor to the Afghan government for women’s development (1986-88). She reported "enormous strides" for women under the Russian occupation: "illiteracy declined from 98 percent to 75 percent, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the Constitution.... Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the strides [women] took in education and employment were very impressive.... In Kabul I saw great advances in women’s education and employment. Women were in evidence in industry, factories, government offices, professions and the media. With large numbers of men killed or disabled, women shouldered the responsibility of both family and country. I met a woman who specialized in war medicine which dealt with trauma and reconstructive surgery for the war-wounded. This represented empowerment to her. Another woman was a road engineer. Roads represented freedom—an escape from the oppressive patriarchal structures."
By 1988, however, Basu "could see the early warning signs" as Russian troops departed and the fundamentalist Islamist extremists favored by the Reagan administration took over, brushing aside the more moderate mujahideen groups. "Saudi Arabian and American arms and ammunition gave the fundamentalists a vital edge over the moderates," providing them with military hardware used, "according to Amnesty International, to target unarmed civilians, most of them women and children." Then followed much worse horrors as the U.S.-Saudi favorites overthrew the Najibullah government. The suffering of the population was so extreme that the Taliban were welcomed when they drove out Reagan’s freedom fighters. Another chapter in the triumph of Reaganite reactionary ultra-nationalism, worshipped today by those dedicated to defaming the honorable term "conservative."
Basu is a distinguished advocate for women’s rights, including a long career with the UN during which she drafted the World Plan of Action for Women and the draft Programme for the Women’s Decade, 1975-85, adopted at the Mexico City Conference (1975) and Copenhagen Conference (1980). But her words were not welcome in the U.S. Her 1988 report was submitted to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Ms. magazine. But rejected. Also rejected were Basu’s recommendation of practical steps that the West, particularly the U.S., could take to protect women’s rights.
Highly relevant in this connection are the important investigations by Nicolas Lanine, a former soldier in the Russian army in Afghanistan, bringing out the striking comparisons between Russian commentary during the occupation and that of their NATO successors today.
These and further considerations suggest that Afghans really would welcome a foreign presence devoted to aid and reconstruction, as we can read between the lines in the polls.
There are, of course, numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation, particularly in places like southern Afghanistan. But the results of the Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier ones and should not be dismissed.
Recent polls in Pakistan also provide "good news" for Washington. Fully 5 percent favor allowing U.S. or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan "to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters." Nine percent favor allowing U.S. forces "to pursue and capture Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan." Almost half favor allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little over 80 percent regard the U.S. military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the U.S. is trying to harm the Islamic world.
The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that "Eighty- three percent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taliban, with a mere 3 percent expressing support for the United States," while over 80 percent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and 6 percent a terrorist.
Events elsewhere in early 2008 might also turn out to be "good news" for Washington. In January, in a remarkable act of courageous civil disobedience, tens of thousands of the tortured people of Gaza broke out of the prison to which they had been confined by the U.S.-Israel alliance (with the usual timid European support) as punishment for the crime of voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. It was instructive to see the front pages with stories reporting the brutal U.S. response to a genuinely free election alongside others lauding the Bush administration for its noble dedication to "democracy promotion" or sometimes gently chiding it because it was going too far in its idealism, failing to recognize that the unpeople of the Middle East are too backward to appreciate democracy—another principle that traces back to "Wilsonian idealism."
This glaring illustration of elite hatred and contempt for democracy is routinely reported, apparently with no awareness of what it signifies. To pick an illustration at random, Cam Simpson reports in the Wall Street Journal (February 8) that despite the harsh U.S.-Israeli punishment of Gaza and "flooding the West Bank’s Western- backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support [to] persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas," the opposite is happening: Hamas’s popularity is increasing in the West Bank. As Simpson casually explains, "Hamas won Palestinian elections in January 2006, prompting the Israeli government and the Bush administration to lead a world-wide boycott of the Palestinian Authority," along with much more severe measures. The goal, unconcealed, is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp the essential principle of democracy: "Do what we say, or else."
The U.S.-backed Israeli punishment increased through early 2006 and escalated sharply after the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in June. That act was bitterly denounced in the West. Israel’s vicious response was regarded as understandable if perhaps excessive. These thoughts were untroubled by the dramatic demonstration that they were sheer hypocrisy. The day before the capture of Corporal Shalit on the front lines of the army attacking Gaza, Israeli forces entered Gaza City and kidnapped two civilians, the Muammar brothers, taking them to Israel (in violation of the Geneva Conventions), where they disappeared into Israel’s prison population, including almost 1,000 held without charge, often for long periods. The kidnapping, a far more serious crime than the capture of Shalit, received a few scattered lines of comment, but no noticeable criticism. That is perhaps understandable, because it is not news. U.S.-backed Israeli forces have been engaged in such practices, and far more brutal ones, for decades. In any event, as a client state, Israel inherits the right of criminality from its master.
The U.S.-Israel attempted to organize a military coup to install their favored faction. That was also reported frankly, considered entirely legitimate, if not praiseworthy. The coup was preempted by Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip. Israeli savagery reached new heights. While in the West Bank, U.S.-backed Israeli operations carried forward the steady process of taking over valuable territory and resources, breaking up the fragments remaining to Palestinians by settlements and huge infrastructure projects, imprisoning the whole by a takeover of the Jordan Valley, and expanding settlement and development in Jerusalem in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years to ensure that there will be no more than a token Palestinian presence in the historic center of Palestinian cultural, commercial, and social life. Non-violent reactions by Palestinians and solidarity groups are viciously crushed with rare exceptions and scarcely any notice. Even when Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was shot and gassed by Israeli troops while participating in a vigil protesting the Separation Wall—now better termed an annexation wall—there was apparently not a word in the English-language press, outside of Ireland.
Israel’s settlement and development programs on the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, are flagrantly illegal, in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions and the authoritative jugment by the International Court of Justice on the Separation Wall, with the agreement of U.S. Justice Buergenthal in a separate declaration.
Criminal actions by Palestinians, such as Qassam rockets fired from Gaza, are angrily condemned in the West. The far more violent and destructive Israeli actions sometimes elicit polite clucking of tongues if they exceed approved levels of state terror. Invariably Israel’s actions —for which of course the U.S. shares direct respon- sibility—are portrayed as retaliation, perhaps excessive. Another way of looking at the cycle of violence is that Qassam rockets are retaliation for Israel’s unceasing crimes in the West Bank, which is not separable from Gaza except by U.S.-Israeli fiat. But standard racist- ultranationalist assumptions exclude that interpretation.
International humanitarian law is quite explicit on these matters. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1950 states that, "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.... Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited." Gazans are unambigously "protected persons" under Israeli military occupation. The Hague Convention of 1907 also declares that, "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible" (Article 50).
Furthermore, High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention are bound to "respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances," including of course Israel and the U.S., which is obligated to prevent, or to punish, the serious breaches of the Convention by its own leaders and its client. When the media report, as they regularly do, that "Israel hopes [reducing supplies of fuel and electricity to the Gaza Strip] will create popular pressure to force the Hamas rulers of Gaza and other militant groups to stop the rocket fire" (Stephen Erlanger, NYT, January 31), they are calmly informing us that Israel is in grave breach of international humanitarian law, as is the U.S. for not ensuring respect for law on the part of its client. When the Israeli High Court grants legitimacy to these measures, as it has, it is adding another page to its ugly record of subordination to state power. Israel’s leading legal journalist, Moshe Negbi, knew what he was doing when he entitled his despairing review of the record of the courts We were like Sodom (Kisdom Hayyinu).
International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own populations. That is always a difficult task, particularly so when articulate opinion and the courts declare crime to be legitimate.
In January, the Hamas-led prison break allowed Gazans for the first time in years to go shopping in nearby Egyptian towns, plainly a serious criminal act because it slightly undermined U.S.-Israeli strangulation of these unpeople. But the powerful quickly recognized that these events too could turn into "good news." Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai "said openly what some senior Israeli officials would only say anonymously," Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times: the prison-break might allow Israel to rid itself of any responsibility for Gaza after having reduced it to devastation and misery in 40 years of brutal occupation, keeping it only for target practice and, of course, under full military occupation, its borders sealed by Israeli forces on land, sea, and air, apart from an opening to Egypt (in the unlikely event that Egypt would agree).
That appealing prospect would complement Israel’s ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank, carefully designed along the lines already outlined to ensure that there will be no viable future for Palestinians there. At the same time, Israel can turn to solving its internal "demographic problem," the presence of non-Jews in a Jewish state. The ultra-nationalist Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman was harshly condemned as a racist in Israel when he advanced the idea of forcing Arab citizens of Israel into a derisory "Palestinian state," presenting this to the world as a "land swap." His proposal is slowly being incorporated into the mainstream. Israel National News reported in April that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of the governing party Kadima, "considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," proposed a plan that "appears very similar to one touted by Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman," though Schneller says his plan would be "more gradual" and the Arabs affected "will remain citizens of Israel even though their territory will belong to the [Palestinian Authority and], they will not be allowed to resettle in other areas of Israel." Of course the unpeople are not consulted.
In December Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the last hope of many Israeli doves, adopted the same position. An eventual Palestinian state, she suggested, would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel." With Israeli Arabs dispatched to their "natural" place, Israel would then achieve the long-sought goal of freeing itself from the Arab taint, a stand that is familiar enough in U.S. history, for example in Thomas Jefferson’s hope, never achieved, that the rising empire of liberty would be free of "blot or mixture," red or black.
For Israel, this is no small matter. Despite heroic efforts by its apologists, it is not easy to conceal the fact that a "democratic Jewish state" is no more acceptable to liberal opinion than a "democratic Christian state" or a "democratic white state," as long as the blot or mixture is not removed. Such notions could be tolerated if the religious/ethnic identification were mostly symbolic, like selecting an official day of rest. But in the case of Israel, it goes far beyond that. The most extreme departure from minimal democratic principles is the complex array of laws and bureaucratic arrangements designed to vest control of over 90 percent of the land in the hands of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization committed to using charitable funds in ways that are "directly or indirectly beneficial to persons of Jewish religion, race or origin," so its documents explain: "a public institution recognized by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization as the exclusive instrument for the development of Israel’s lands," restricted to Jewish use, in perpetuity (with marginal exceptions), and barred to non-Jewish labor (though the principle is often ignored for imported cheap labor). This extreme violation of elementary civil rights, funded by all American citizens thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF, finally reached Israel’s High Court in 2000, in a case brought by an Arab couple who had been barred from the town of Katzir. The Court ruled in their favor, in a narrow decision, which seems to have been barely implemented. Seven years later, a young Arab couple was barred from the town of Rakefet, on state land, on grounds of "social incompatibility" (Scott Peterson, Washington Post, December 20, 2007), a very rare report. Again, none of this is unfamiliar in the U.S. After all, it took a century before the 14th Amendment was even formally recog- nized by the courts and it still is far from implemented.
For Palestinians, there are now two options. One is that the U.S. and Israel will abandon their unilateral rejectionism of the past 30 years and accept the international consensus on a two-state settlement, in accord with international law—and, incidentally, in accord with the wishes of a large majority of Americans. That is not impossible, though the two rejectionist states are working hard to render it so. A settlement along these lines came close in negotiations in Taba Egypt in January 2001 and might have been reached, participants reported, had Israeli Prime Minister Barak not called off the negotiations prematurely. The framework for these negotiations was Clinton’s "parameters" of December 2000, issued after he recognized that the Camp David proposals earlier that year were unacceptable. It is commonly claimed that Arafat rejected the parameters. However, as Clinton made clear and explicit, both sides had accepted the parameters, in both cases with reservations, which they sought to reconcile in Taba a few weeks later—and apparently almost succeeded. There have been unofficial negotiations since that have produced similar proposals. Though possibilities diminish as U.S.-Israeli settlement and infrastructure programs proceed, they have not been eliminated. By now the international consensus is near universal, supported by the Arab League, Iran, Hamas, in fact every relevant actor apart from the U.S. and Israel.
A second possibility is the one that the U.S.-Israel are actually implementing, along the lines just described. Palestinians will then be consigned to their Gaza prison and to West Bank cantons, perhaps joined by Israeli Arab citizens as well if the Lieberman-Schneller-Livni plans are implemented. For the occupied territories, that will realize the intentions expressed by Moshe Dayan to his Labor Party cabinet colleagues in the early years of the occupation: Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." The general conception was articulated by Labor Party leader Haim Herzog, later president, in 1972: "I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter.... But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."
A third possibility would be a binational state. That was a feasible option in the early years of the occupation, perhaps a federal arrangement leading to eventual closer integration as circumstances permit. There was even some support for similar ideas within Israeli military intelligence, but the grant of any political rights to Palestinians was shot down by the governing Labor Party. Proposals to that effect were made (by me in particular), but elicited only hysteria. The opportunity was lost by the mid-1970s when Palestinian national rights reached the international agenda and the two-state consensus took shape. The first U.S. veto of a two-state resolution at the Security Council, advanced by the major Arab states, was in 1976. Washingon’s rejectionist stance continues to the present, with the exception of Clinton’s last month in office. Some form of unitary state remains a distant possibility through agreement among the parties, as a later stage in a process that begins with a two-state settlement. There is no other form of advocacy of such an outcome, if we understand advocacy to include a process leading from here to there; mere proposal, in contrast, is free for the asking.
It is of some interest, perhaps, that when advocacy of a unitary binational state had some prospects, it was anathema, while today, when it is completely unfeasible, it is greeted with respect and is advocated in leading journals. The reason, perhaps, is that it serves to undermine the prospect of a two-state settlement.
Advocates of a binational (one-state) settlement argue that on its present course, Israel will become a pariah state like apartheid South Africa, with a large Palestinian population deprived of rights, laying the basis for a civil rights struggle leading to a unitary democratic state. There is no reason to believe that the U.S., Israel, or any other Western state would allow anything like that to happen. Rather, they will proceed exactly as they are now doing in the territories today, taking no responsibility for Palestinians who are left to rot in the various prisons and cantons that may dot the landscape, far from the eyes of Israelis travelling on their segregated superhighways to their well-subsidized West Bank towns and suburbs, controlling the crucial water resources of the region, and benefiting from their ties with U.S. and other international corporations that are evidently pleased to see a loyal military power at the periphery of the crucial Middle East region, with an advanced high tech economy and close links to Washington.
Turning elsewhere, major polls are not such good news for conventional Western doctrine. Few theses are upheld with such passion and unanimity as the doctrine that Hugo Chavez is a tyrant bent on destroying freedom and democracy in Venezuela and beyond. The annual polls on Latin American opinion by the respected Chilean polling agency Latinobarometro therefore are "bad news." The most recent (November 2007) had the same "irritating" results as before. Venezuela ranks second, close behind first-place Uruguay, in satisfaction with democracy, and third in satisfaction with leaders. It ranks first in assessment of the current and future economic situation, equality, and justice, and education standards. True, it ranks only 11th in favoring a market economy, but even with this "flaw," overall it ranks highest in Latin America on matters of democracy, justice, and optimism, far above U.S. favorites Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile.
Latin America analyst Mark Turner writes that he "found an almost total English speaking blackout about the results of this important snapshot of [Latin American] views and opinions." That has also been true in the past. Turner also found the usual exception: there were reports of the finding that Chavez is about as unpopular as Bush in Latin America, something that will come as little surprise to those who have seen some of the bitterly hostile coverage to which Chavez is subjected, in the Venezuelan press as well—an oddity in this looming "dictatorship." Editorial offices have been well aware of the polls, but evidently understand what may pass through doctrinal filters.
Also receiving scant notice was a declaration of President Chavez on December 31, 2007 granting amnesty to leaders of the U.S.-backed military coup that kidnapped the president, disbanded parliament and the Supreme Court and all other democratic institutions, but was soon overturned by a popular uprising. That the West would have followed Chavez’s model in a comparable case is, to put it mildly, rather unlikely. Perhaps all of this provides some further insight into the "clash of civilizations"—a question that should be prominent in our minds, I think.
The Plague of Potomac Fever
Go to Original
By David Sirota
If any publication was going to document the sickness known as Potomac Fever, it was going to be The Washington Post.
Last month, the newspaper penned a front-page dispatch headlined “Housing Accord Puts Builders First; Strapped Homeowners Offered Little Aid.” It described congressional leaders agreeing to “provide billions of dollars in tax rebates to the slumping home-building industry while offering little to homeowners threatened with foreclosure.” The bill proposes $6 billion in corporate tax cuts, while “families who cannot afford to repay their home loans—the group at the heart of the mortgage meltdown”—would get less than 2 percent of that for “counseling services.”
Next to this story was a report labeled “Sweeping Bills Passed to Help Homeowners.” It told of Maryland state lawmakers “toughening oversight of the mortgage-lending industry and establishing pre-emptive measures to help people at risk of foreclosure.”
The newspaper page was a scientific proof, with states as the control. They show what minimally healthy democratic systems do: help ordinary people. That’s different from a Congress ravaged by Potomac Fever—the disease inside the Washington Beltway inhibiting emotions like compassion and integrity. As the housing crisis intensifies, this malady is getting worse.
For example, states like Oregon are cracking down on predatory lenders, while North Carolina and Minnesota are the latest to regulate abusive mortgage fees. Yet, Congress—debilitated by the fever—does nothing to halt banks’ usurious practices that originally created the mortgage meltdown.
State legislators are demanding aid to borrowers. Delegate Dereck Davis, D-Md., told The Washington Post that homeowners “need a federal bailout from Congress.”
But in the land of Potomac Fever, bailouts are for financial firms. Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., in fact, told newspapers “it’s irrelevant” how many homeowners—if any—are ever helped. According to The Hill newspaper, he is pushing industry-backed legislation that would federally guarantee banks’ outstanding mortgages for modest write-downs. The proposal deliberately avoids forcing banks to freeze interest rates.
Because the plan is voluntary, lenders “will just dump their worst loans into the system,” says economist Dean Baker. The Congressional Budget Office adds that the proposal focuses not on rescuing homeowners, but on “shift[ing] the risk involved in mortgage losses from the current lenders and investors to taxpayers.”
Such virulent strains of Potomac Fever have many causes. One is the proximity of lawmakers to constituents. Many state representatives serve part time and are not career politicians, meaning they have authentic connections to local communities and therefore often better reflect public priorities. By contrast, professional lawmakers in Washington are insulated from real-world pressures by six-figure salaries, security sentries and servile staffers.
Campaign contributions are also a culprit. Though industries certainly influence state legislators, Big Money has a tougher time controlling 50 separate state capitals than one U.S. Capitol. And, boy, is the money flowing in D.C. Reporting on the housing crisis, Politico.com says “campaign donations from affected industries have spiked [and] lobbyists also are making money off the misery.” Banks pleading poverty somehow have plenty of resources to buy influence.
Finally, there is the filibuster—a tool that does not exist in state legislatures. Coupled with the U.S. Senate’s undemocratic structure giving Delaware as many votes as California, the filibuster allows 41 politicians representing just 11 percent of America’s total population to stop almost anything. Corporate lobbyists and their Senate allies have used the filibuster to obstruct legislation representing the public’s economic interests.
Can Potomac Fever be stopped? Maybe not, considering most inside the Beltway are so afflicted they have lost the capacity to even see it. Then again, the more bold actions states take, the more ill Washington will look. Perhaps the embarrassing contrast can cure the plague.
David Sirota is the best-selling author of “Hostile Takeover” (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
By David Sirota
If any publication was going to document the sickness known as Potomac Fever, it was going to be The Washington Post.
Last month, the newspaper penned a front-page dispatch headlined “Housing Accord Puts Builders First; Strapped Homeowners Offered Little Aid.” It described congressional leaders agreeing to “provide billions of dollars in tax rebates to the slumping home-building industry while offering little to homeowners threatened with foreclosure.” The bill proposes $6 billion in corporate tax cuts, while “families who cannot afford to repay their home loans—the group at the heart of the mortgage meltdown”—would get less than 2 percent of that for “counseling services.”
Next to this story was a report labeled “Sweeping Bills Passed to Help Homeowners.” It told of Maryland state lawmakers “toughening oversight of the mortgage-lending industry and establishing pre-emptive measures to help people at risk of foreclosure.”
The newspaper page was a scientific proof, with states as the control. They show what minimally healthy democratic systems do: help ordinary people. That’s different from a Congress ravaged by Potomac Fever—the disease inside the Washington Beltway inhibiting emotions like compassion and integrity. As the housing crisis intensifies, this malady is getting worse.
For example, states like Oregon are cracking down on predatory lenders, while North Carolina and Minnesota are the latest to regulate abusive mortgage fees. Yet, Congress—debilitated by the fever—does nothing to halt banks’ usurious practices that originally created the mortgage meltdown.
State legislators are demanding aid to borrowers. Delegate Dereck Davis, D-Md., told The Washington Post that homeowners “need a federal bailout from Congress.”
But in the land of Potomac Fever, bailouts are for financial firms. Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., in fact, told newspapers “it’s irrelevant” how many homeowners—if any—are ever helped. According to The Hill newspaper, he is pushing industry-backed legislation that would federally guarantee banks’ outstanding mortgages for modest write-downs. The proposal deliberately avoids forcing banks to freeze interest rates.
Because the plan is voluntary, lenders “will just dump their worst loans into the system,” says economist Dean Baker. The Congressional Budget Office adds that the proposal focuses not on rescuing homeowners, but on “shift[ing] the risk involved in mortgage losses from the current lenders and investors to taxpayers.”
Such virulent strains of Potomac Fever have many causes. One is the proximity of lawmakers to constituents. Many state representatives serve part time and are not career politicians, meaning they have authentic connections to local communities and therefore often better reflect public priorities. By contrast, professional lawmakers in Washington are insulated from real-world pressures by six-figure salaries, security sentries and servile staffers.
Campaign contributions are also a culprit. Though industries certainly influence state legislators, Big Money has a tougher time controlling 50 separate state capitals than one U.S. Capitol. And, boy, is the money flowing in D.C. Reporting on the housing crisis, Politico.com says “campaign donations from affected industries have spiked [and] lobbyists also are making money off the misery.” Banks pleading poverty somehow have plenty of resources to buy influence.
Finally, there is the filibuster—a tool that does not exist in state legislatures. Coupled with the U.S. Senate’s undemocratic structure giving Delaware as many votes as California, the filibuster allows 41 politicians representing just 11 percent of America’s total population to stop almost anything. Corporate lobbyists and their Senate allies have used the filibuster to obstruct legislation representing the public’s economic interests.
Can Potomac Fever be stopped? Maybe not, considering most inside the Beltway are so afflicted they have lost the capacity to even see it. Then again, the more bold actions states take, the more ill Washington will look. Perhaps the embarrassing contrast can cure the plague.
David Sirota is the best-selling author of “Hostile Takeover” (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Want to Win the Immigration Debate? Start Talking About Illegal Jobs
Go to Original
By Joshua Holland
*****
By Joshua Holland
Note: AlterNet is proud to announce the launch of our new Special Coverage area focusing on immigration issues -- our 14th in all. We hope to advance a new and more progressive way to approach immigration.
Hopefully, we’ll do so as a community. You can take part in the discussion by signing up for our free weekly immigration newsletter, or by bookmarking our new Immigration Special Coverage page, where we’ll also have a dedicated immigration blog that will bring AlterNet readers the latest news and some lively debates on the issue.
The often-overheated immigration debate is a distraction that draws attention from far-reaching problems facing American workers, particularly those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
Many immigrants’ right advocates argue that newly arrived workers take jobs that Americans won’t do. That’s only partially true; many unauthorized immigrants fill nonunion jobs that are impossibly crappy, pay poverty wages and are rife with workplace violations, and they work those jobs side-by-side with millions of natives and legal residents. The reality is that there are not enough Americans who are willing or able to tolerate poverty wages and other workplace abuses.
Understanding that dynamic can lead to a radically different approach to the issue -- to different methods of decreasing the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States and of regulating the flow of new immigration in the future.
Anarchy
Those who advocate more law enforcement to tackle the immigration issue often invoke images of America descending into anarchy -- of a nation losing control of its borders and, therefore, its sovereignty. Many blame "Big Business," believing that the corporate world, through its congressional lackeys, has pushed to "open" the borders to all comers in order to keep wages low and assure a steady supply of cheap labor.
That narrative is objectively false. For more than ten years, lawmakers from both parties have thrown billions of dollars into beefing up border security. In 1994, the United States spent just $550 million to guard its borders, but that figure quadrupled under Bill Clinton and then quadrupled again under Bush -- by 2005, it had increased to $7.3 billion, and most analysts expect the border security industry -- that’s what it is, an industry -- to continue its strong growth.
During the same period, the number of illegal entries into the United States also increased significantly. Pumping billions of dollars into more patrols and installing all manner of shiny new security gizmos along our 2,000-mile southern border has only resulted in an increase in arrests, detentions and deportations, and a nice, fat profit for Department of Homeland Security contractors. It has had just about zero effect on the number of immigrants coming into the country, largely because the incentives for them to come here have been left untouched.
But the picture is reversed when you look at the enforcement of American workplace laws. While spending on immigration enforcement has gone through the roof, the resources allocated to enforcing overtime, minimum wage, workplace safety and other protections for workers have been cut and cut again.
There is anarchy in America, there is lawlessness, but you’ll find a lot more of it in the kitchen of your favorite diner or on that gardening crew cutting your lawn, for example, than along the Rio Grande.
Consider the numbers. According to research conducted by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice (PDF), the number of workplaces that fell within the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division more than doubled between 1975 and 2004, and the number of workers in those establishments increased by 55 percent. But during that period, the number of inspectors available to enforce basic labor standards declined by 14 percent, and the number of "compliance actions" the agency completed plummeted by more than a third.
Unfortunately, there is little nationwide data on workplace violations, but we do have a large body of local and state studies, and all point to the same conclusion: workplace violations, especially at the lower end of the economy and among vulnerable populations, are simply rampant.
Consider the findings of just a few of those studies, and bear in mind that a majority of the people represented in these studies are American citizens or legal residents:
- A 2004 study of 200 workers conducted at multiple sites by Fairfax County, Va., officials found:
- 54.6 percent getting paid less than agreed
- 53.1 percent reported nonpayment for work done
- 35.6 percent said they’d been victims of racial discrimination
- 25.8 percent had been given bad checks
- 16 percent reported that they’d been subject to violence on the job
- 14.9 percent said they’d received threats from employers
- 54.6 percent getting paid less than agreed
- A 2002 study of chicken processors found that six in 10 plants failed to pay workers overtime
- In a 1998 study of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, researchers discovered that only 2 of the 43 establishments studied complied with basic labor laws.
- A 2005 study of grape pickers in California’s Central Valley found that half of all workers reported pay stubs that reflected less than the total number of hours worked, and half reported that they had not received all of the overtime pay they were owed.
- A 1998 study looking at workers in the restaurant, garment, hotel and motel industries -- all occupations with large numbers of unauthorized workers -- found that only one in 20 restaurants complied with minimum wage laws. Only a third of hotels and motels were in compliance, as were only four of ten shops in the garment industry.
Similar findings have been repeated in study after study. And while these illegal jobs appear to be clustered in industries in which many unauthorized workers toil, millions of American citizens work those same jobs and are also victims of widespread employer abuses. According to one 2003 study, the percentage of workers being ripped off via minimum wage violations is not that much lower for natives than it is for immigrants -- 13 percent versus 9 percent among women and 9 percent versus 6 percent among men.
Obsession -- it’s always all about the immigrants
Every unauthorized immigrant works an illegal job, by definition. But lacking effective legal or social protections, many unauthorized immigrants work jobs that also violate minimum wage laws, occupational safety and health regulations, overtime laws, etc. Others work jobs that are substandard -- dangerous, humiliating or disgusting -- or jobs that pay poverty wages. Employers also know that it’s exceptionally easy to keep undocumented workers from organizing -- if they attempt to do so, the boss needs only to call in "La Migra" and fire any pro-union workers who lack valid papers (or have them deported).
Yet most of the focus of the immigration debate in this country has been on the immigrants themselves -- especially unauthorized immigrants. One could easily conclude from watching a typical screaming heads segment about immigration policy on CNN that "illegal immigrants" exist in a vacuum. Very little attention is paid to the other side of the transaction -- the incentives that American companies and households have to hire an unauthorized worker over a citizen.
Even the highly publicized immigration raids that the Bush administration has launched in recent years barely touch the demand side. Most people probably assume that when a goon squad of ICE agents raids a workplace and carts off dozens of workers in handcuffs, the employers are also being punished. But as the Washington Post noted, while "federal immigration authorities arrested nearly four times as many people at workplaces in 2007 as they did in 2005 ... only 92 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in an economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures." Those raids devastate immigrant families, but they represent little more than an inconvenience to employers, who have little incentive to improve working conditions when they can hire a new work force that’s just as easy to exploit.
Illegal immigrants sell their labor on a black market, a market similar in many ways to those for other illicit goods and services -- the drug trade being a good example. The sellers’ incentives are well-understood: The lion’s share of those who have moved to the United States in the past decade are economic refugees, fleeing economies back home that don’t offer them an opportunity to live a minimally dignified life. Human traffickers, who can realize enormous profits shipping people across national boundaries, provide for the market; their incentives, again, are well-understood.
The buyers, of course, are Americans, and not just corporate America. Middle-class households and many small firms use illegal labor, but their side of the transactions goes largely undiscussed.
Without looking at both sides of the coin -- at the demand as well as the supply -- it’s virtually impossible to arrive at a reform agenda that has a chance of resulting in an effective, humane and sustainable system of immigration control.
The hazards of supply-side immigration control
Law enforcement that focuses primarily on the supply side has proven to be remarkably ineffective when it comes to other "gray" and "black" markets. While Elliott Ness was busting up Al Capone’s liquor network, America went into the speakeasies and kept drinking. We’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars in a 30-year war on drugs, but illegal drugs are widely available in big cities and small towns alike. They call prostitution the "oldest profession"; it’s illegal in every state except for Nevada and Rhode Island, but a quick perusal for "escorts" and "massages" in the phone book of any American community will reveal that the industry is alive and well.
Those who hire immigrant laborers not only have huge financial incentives to do so but also believe they’re committing a "victimless crime," much like those who visit prostitutes, take illegal drugs or who drank liquor during Prohibition. On the other hand, the workers who fill those jobs -- native and foreign born alike -- do so out of desperation.
Law enforcement "crackdowns" can lead to short-term results in these kinds of shadowy markets. They can push the markets further underground, or push sellers and buyers out of a given neighborhood or city. What they have failed to do, consistently, is provide any real and lasting results over the long-term.
The enforcement approach also leads to some ugly and often unintended consequences -- families being separated, employers becoming nervous about hiring perfectly legal workers who look like they might not be and people being detained for lengthy periods of time without the kind of legal protections we like to believe is the bedrock of American jurisprudence. There have even been instances -- rare but not isolated -- in which American citizens have been deported to countries where they’ve never set foot before because they couldn’t provide adequate proof of citizenship.
Immigration control at the root level
An unregulated sector of the economy, rife with illegal jobs, represents the largely unexamined "pull factor" for much of the current wave of immigration to the United States. Most recent immigrants are economic refugees seeking jobs that essentially fall in between what’s available in their native countries and the kind of jobs one would expect to find in a highly advanced economy. They also tend to be jobs that can’t be easily outsourced to countries with an abundance of cheap labor.
A good example of these kinds of jobs can be found in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. A report in Crain’s New York Business found that in underregulated New York restaurants, green grocers, retail corner laundries and private households, "typically, workers will be quoted a flat weekly salary of $300 and then have to work 60 hours a week, receiving an effective of wage of $5 an hour with no provision for overtime." New York State’s minimum wage is $7.15 per hour, and federal and state law require overtime pay for all hours worked over 40 per week at a rate of 1.5 times the base salary.
In order to create a sustainable model for immigration control, we need to look at decreasing the demand for workers who are willing to fill those jobs. That means breaking Americans’ addiction to exploitable labor. As long as there are $5-per-hour jobs in New York City that few natives can afford to work while there are millions of workers who don’t have a job that pays a fraction of that in poorer countries, we’ll have a large number of people who want to migrate to our shores. As long as our immigration system doesn’t permit enough of them to migrate legally, we’ll have an "illegal immigration problem." It’s simply the law of supply and demand at work.
Yet, it’s not true that all unauthorized immigrants work those kinds of jobs. There’s no question that employers are sometimes legitimately unable to find citizens or legal residents to fill even decent jobs. That’s especially true in many rural communities, where young people tend to take off for the big city and the population is aging and declining. Last fall I spoke with Oklahoma State Sen. Harry Coates soon after his state passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation. Employers in Oklahoma weren’t just having problems filling low-paying "McJobs," he told me. "In the oil fields, they’re paying $18 to $20 per hour to start," he said, "but they can’t find enough willing workers to fill the jobs. We’ve told our young people to work with their minds, not with their hands." Oklahoma’s unemployment rate of 3 percent is the fourth-lowest in the United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "We’ve shot ourselves in the foot by running off willing workers for willing employers," Coates said.
Progressive immigration and workplace reform would focus our finite enforcement resources on cleaning up the bottom end of the labor market -- at the jobs that bring people to our shores, rather than on the immigrants who work them. Guaranteeing workers -- immigrant and native alike -- the right to organize and enforcing wage and overtime laws would equalize the price of hiring unauthorized and legal workers, and would go a long way towards addressing the demand for illegal labor without the ugliness that our current approach entails.
Once the goal of eliminating substandard and often illegal jobs -- un-American jobs -- from the U.S. workplace is established, then there’s likely to be little resistance to new workers coming into the work force to fill jobs that can’t be staffed by Americans. Public opinion research shows that when people perceive the economy to be functioning well for them, much of the anxiety over immigration disappears.
It’s the way to build a humane and self-regulating system. Immigration researchers talk about the effect of "transnational social networks" on migration -- a fancy way to describe communities that spill across international borders. Such networks exist between the United States and the countries that account for the lion’s share of new immigration, and researchers have found that they are highly effective mechanisms for communicating information about job markets, legal environments and other factors that people weigh when deciding whether (and to where) they might emigrate. Decreasing the pool of unregulated jobs available to undocumented workers and making it less difficult to migrate here legally will result in less incentive to bypass the system, and the message will get around.
The Devil is in the details when it comes to any public policy, but broadly speaking, the approach has to be built on four pillars:
- Workplace enforcement, including protecting the right to organize and requiring employers to pay living wages and overtime
- A legalization process for workers who don’t have valid papers, have no record of violent criminal activity, and can prove they’ve paid their taxes and meet certain other requirements
- Repairing a dysfunctional immigration system and expanding the legal avenues for immigrants needed to meet the demand for those jobs -- livable, legal jobs -- that can’t be filled by natives alone
- Finally, immigration enforcement
Without the first pillar, many Americans will continue to reject the idea that immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want -- and rightly so.
Wedges, pivot points, and the limits of the other side’s aspirations
Not only does a progressive, demand-side approach offer the best hope for a sustainable model of immigration control -- a win-win model for native and foreign-born workers alike -- it also has the potential to be a political game-changer, redrawing the lines of the debate in a way that unites progressives and divides the corporate Right from the GOP’s culturally insular base.
Conservatives have used the issue of immigration to discuss issues that serve them well. It’s been a "pivot point" -- a topic of intense public interest that they’ve then turned to an issue that advances their larger worldview. Much of their analysis has focused on the perceived "dangers" associated with outsiders and people of color and the need for an expansion of the state’s security apparatus. Illegal immigration has been framed as a national security issue, an issue of terrorism prevention, a result of Roe v. Wade -- solid ground for the American Right.
Focusing on illegal jobs rather than the workers who fill them can provide progressives with a similar opportunity -- it can be a pivot point leading to a discussion of the very real pain that millions of American workers are feeling after 30 years of corporate-sponsored trickle-down voodoo economics. This is comfortable ground for progressives, who, traditionally, have been at their best when fighting for economic fairness for the little guy.
Immigration has become an acrimonious "wedge" issue for both of America’s major parties, dividing traditional constituencies. But it’s an issue that divides Republicans more than Democrats; the GOP’s conservative base is fired up with xenophobia, while its traditional big-business side both values the cheap labor immigrants provide, and, consisting mostly of sophisticated urban elites, lacks the visceral hatred for immigrants that many in the party’s base display.
On the Democratic side, divisions also exist, but they’ve been more muted. Comprehensive immigration and workplace reform would allow progressive reformers to dominate the populist side of the debate, and that can only deepen the divide within the GOP and leave immigration hard-liners with only angry, exaggerated arguments -- cultural arguments -- on the table. That, in turn, would go a long way towards marginalizing their views in the mainstream discourse over immigration.
The approach would also fundamentally redefine the debate, moving from pro- versus anti-immigrant (or illegal immigrant, if you prefer) to the question of how we deal with the issue.
And, because it’s an approach that would necessarily rely on an increase in law enforcement, it also neutralizes the anti-immigration movement’s best argument. Instead of progressives being forced to effectively defend "law-breakers," the question becomes: What kind of enforcement do we want to pursue, and to what end do we use our finite enforcement resources?
And, because immigration hard-liners in and out of Congress by and large oppose minimum wage increases, stronger work force protections, anti-union-busting measures, etc., it can only highlight the fact that while they may have many things in mind when they beat their breasts over the issue of immigration, the economic health of American workers is not one of them.
And that brings us to the most powerful argument that a progressive demand-side approach to immigration control offers: the limits of the other side’s aspirations. At the end of the day, even if advocates of an enforcement-heavy approach were to get everything they wanted, the best they could offer is the promise that every citizen who is sufficiently desperate to take a crappy, strenuous or demeaning job that pays a poverty wage will be able to find one.
That’s it, the sum total of their aspirations, and that’s an argument that progressives would do well to embrace in every discussion of the immigration issue.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
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