Oct. 3, 2002 Vol. 44, No. 39

CALIFORNIALos días de Gerardo en la prisión de Lompoc 12

Israeli assaults ignitePalestinian resistance

U.S. maneuvers at UN to shore up plan for Iraq war

Speakers close the final session of the conference with the singing of the International.

50¢

By Richard Becker

Massed Israeli military assaults onRamallah and Gaza City beginning Sept.19 have destroyed most of the presiden-tial compound of Palestinian leaderYasir Arafat and, as of Sept. 25, left atleast 15 people dead.

But the new attacks, while taking aheavy toll, triggered a new upsurge ofPalestinian resistance and intensifiedIsrael’s international isolation.

Israel’s predictable military “victory”turned into an important politicaldefeat, and at the same time complicat-ed the Bush administration’s plans forwar in Iraq.

The events began with the Israeli gov-ernment’s rejection of an offer by thePalestinian Authority (PA) for a cease-fire on Sept. 17. Israel has been occupy-

ing all the major cities of the West Bankand imposing round-the-clock curfewson the population for several months.

Besides the hundreds of Palestinianskilled and wounded, the curfews havemade life nearly unbearable for all livingunder their harsh terms. No one can goout when the curfew is in effect, whetherto work, school, visit family, or for med-ical emergencies.

The day after the Israeli rejection of thecease-fire, the first suicide bombing innearly seven weeks took place in Israel, fol-lowed by a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Sept.19. The bombings, claimed by the Hamasand Islamic Jihad organizations, killedeight people.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thenordered a major assault on the compoundof PA President Yasir Arafat in Ramallahthe same day. It is well known that both

Continued on page 10

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are at odds withArafat on many political issues and do notfollow his leadership.

Sharon’s assault pre-planned

By the size and scope of the attack in Ra-mallah, it was immediately clear that theSept. 19 assault was pre-planned and thatSharon had been awaiting a pretext tolaunch it.

More than 60 Israeli armored vehicleswere involved in the operation, along withhelicopter gunships. Armored bulldozersdemolished all of the buildings except theone Arafat was in. Tank and ground firewas also directed into the PA president’sheadquarters.

By Sept. 20, about 200 people weretrapped in four rooms on the second floorof the remaining building. Israel de-manded that all must be turned over for

“interrogation,” which in Israel means tor-ture. Arafat refused.

Israeli commanders announced overloudspeakers that the remaining buildingwould be brought down on top of its occu-pants if they did not surrender.

On Sept. 21, Israeli troops opened fire onPalestinian demonstrators in Ramallahwho defied the curfew to demand an endto the siege, killing at least four people andwounding many more.

Overconfident in their overwhelmingfirepower, an Israeli official openly boastedto National Public Radio on Sept. 22 thatSharon’s objective was to force Arafat intoexile within days. The same deputy defenseminister revealed that the expulsion of thePA president had been Sharon’s objectivefor two years.

NPR also reported that no U.S. official

PHOTOS OF WWP CONFERENCE TAKEN BY: PAT CHIN, JOHN CATALINOTTO, G. DUNKEL, LIZA GREEN AND BILLHACKWELL.

WWP conference maps struggleagainst capitalist war

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By John CatalinottoNew York

Even as the Bush administration wasmaneuvering feverishly to round upsupport for its planned war on Iraq,Workers World Party was holding anEmergency National Conference Sept.21-22 in New York.

The agenda focused both on Bush’s“endless war on terror,” especially theimpending U.S. invasion of Iraq, and thegrowing capitalist economic crisis.

Members of the party’s leading body,the Secretariat of the NationalCommittee, keynoted the discussion inplenary sessions on the imperialist war

This issue of WorkersWorld includes news andanalysis based on talksdelivered to the party'snational conference

Continued on page 11

Page 2 Oct. 3, 2002 www.workers.org

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Workers World55 West 17 StreetNew York, N.Y. 10011Phone: (212) 627-2994 • Fax: (212) 675-7869E-mail: editor@workers.org Web: http://www.workers.org/Vol. 44, No. 39 • Oct. 3, 2002Closing date: Sept. 25, 2002

Editor: Deirdre Griswold; Technical Editor: Lal Roohk; Managing Editors: GregButterfield, John Catalinotto, Leslie Feinberg, MonicaMoorehead, Gary Wilson; West Coast Editors: RichardBecker, Gloria La Riva; Contributing Editors: JoyceChediac, Pat Chin, Naomi Cohen, Shelley Ettinger,Teresa Gutierrez; Technical Staff: Gery Armsby, ElenaJ. Peckham, Hank Sambach, Leslie Senior; MundoObrero: Carl Glenn, Carlos Vargas; Internet: JanetMayes

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ATLANTA.

Sun., Oct. 6Demonstration at theAmerica Israel Political ActionCommittee National Summit.Sponsored by AtlantaPalestine Solidarity. 2 p.m. AtSwissotel, next to Lenox Mall.For info emailaps@atlanta4palestine.org.

RED BANK, N.J . .

Every SaturdayJoin us to say: No to war! Noto racism! Picket at noon infront of the main gate, FortMonmouth, Highway 35Eatontown. We supply signsor make your own. For infoIAC, PO Box 307, Red Bank,NJ.

SAN FRANCISCO.

Sat., Sept. 28Free Palestine. National dayof protest. Protest U.S. wardrive. Sponsored by Justice

in Palestine Coalition. Gather11 a.m., Dolores Park, 19thand Dolores. Noon march. 1p.m. rally at Civic Center,Larkin and Grove. For info(415) 861-7444 orinfo@adcsf.org orwww.adcsf.org/palestine.

WASHINGTON, D.C. .

Sat., Oct. 26Stop the war against Iraqbefore it starts. Nationalmarch with joint action inSan Francisco. For infowww.internationalanswer.org.

�� NationalPalestinian resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

WWP conference maps struggle against war . . . . . . . 1

Your help is needed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

MOVE tells state, ‘Hands off’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Resistance in South to anti-immigrant racism . . . . . . 3

Housing crisis grows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Lenin’s message to today’s workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Port workers in major showdown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

War is also a woman’s issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

War drive fails to lift economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Crisis in Buffalo, N.Y., calls for worker unity . . . . . . . 5

What will U.S. movement do to stop war? . . . . . . . . 6

Anti-war forces gear up for Oct. 26 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

�� Internat ionalWhy Iraq is pivotal to imperialism’s schemes. . . . . . . 6

‘Weapons inspections’ part of U.S. war. . . . . . . . . . . 7

Africa and the Bush doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

What drives U.S. capital to adventurism . . . . . . . . . . 9

�� WWP statementLessons of the German election. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

�� Notic ias En EspañolLos Días de Gerardo en la Prisión de Lompoc . . . . . 12

Your help is needed!

Fuel the fires of resistanceBy Leslie Feinberg

We are standing at a crossroads inhistory, weathering a storm of reac-tion. The political climate is hot andoppressive. And the stock market is abarometer of more turbulent daysahead. An economic crisis is shudder-ing like an earthquake, rolling acrossthe economic landscape in slow mo-tion, yet powerful enough to create atidal wave that has already toppledeconomic towers like Enron. Workersare watching their pensions washedaway in the Wall Street deluge, andwith it dreams of security and relax-ation in the not-so-distant future.

The deep rumbling on the economicRichter scale is one reason that Bushand his generals are hurling the light-ning bolts of war. This imperial wartempest is capitalist globalization,aiming to sweep aside any obstaclesto capital expansion and jolt the econ-omy with war spending. And stormclouds of racism and repression, gath-ering on the domestic front, aim to in-timidate working and oppressed peo-ple from rising up in class battles.

Pink slips, layoffs, 401Ks and lifesavings evaporating, utility bills quad-rupling—more and more workers areplummeting to earth in economic freefall while CEOs glide gently past themon golden parachutes and the rich

owners get richer. But economic dis-location, and the war crisis, has thepotential to awaken many to the needto fight back. We’re already seeingsigns of motion.

We believe this period of deep po-litical reaction is laying the basis for atide of mass struggle that will sweepthese barons of banking and industryoff the stage of history.

Right now, we’ve got a war to stop,racist roundups and reaction to halt,and an economic crisis that demandswe organize resistance. But a periodof capitalist economic crisis makes iteven harder to carry out the urgentstruggles that we’re such a vital partof.

That is why money must be movedto the top of the agenda.

Workers World is a leading force inthe anti-imperialist, anti-war move-ment. We spend a lot of time and en-ergy helping the coalitions we’re partof to do their own fundraising. Butthat’s not raising funds for WorkersWorld. We’re a working-class party,also hard hit by the capitalist eco-nomic crisis.

As a result, we are sounding theopening bell of a fall fund drive.

We all need to pitch in at this criti-cal moment. Revolutionaries cannotbe financially beholden to any otherclass except the one they work to help

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And we all need to consider addingWorkers World to our wills to ensurethat our revolutionary contributionswill continue beyond our lifetimes.

Every one of us needs to dig deep.Our money is our labor. So we vow tostretch every dollar till it shouts outloud. All of us need to be creative abouthow to raise money.

If we want revolutionary fire—andwe all do—let’s get the fuel!

Leslie Feinberg

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www.workers.org Oct. 3, 2002 Page 3

MOVE tells state, ‘Hands off’By Betsey PiettePhiladelphia

The MOVE organization has taken theoffensive to stave off a threatened police as-sault. The danger of state intervention fol-lowed a judge’s decision affecting the cus-tody case of a member’s child.

The Philadelphia Police and political es-tablishment have carried out many physi-cal assaults on MOVE, a Black-led radicalgroup, including the notorious May 1985bombing from helicopters that killed fivechildren and six adults.

After a Sept. 20 news conference at theirWest Philadelphia home, MOVE membersand supporters traveled in a motorcade toNew Jersey. They put the Philadelphia andCherry Hill police departments on noticethat MOVE would resist any attempts bypolice to remove Alberta Africa’s sonZachary from their home.

In May, after three years of extensiveinvestigation, Family Court Judge EdwardRosenberg had ruled that Africa’s ex-hus-band John Gilbride could share legal cus-tody of their son, but would only be allowedrestricted supervised visits at the FamilyCourt facility.

Rosenberg retired before his rulingcould be fully implemented. In August,Judge Shelley Robbins New reversedRosenberg’s decision by allowing Gilbrideto take the child out of the home for unsu-pervised weekend visits.

When Africa refused to turn over herchild, Robbins New issued a warrantagainst her that was due to be carried outby the Cherry Hill police on Sept. 20.

Robbins New served in the Philadelphia

District Attorney’s Office for over25 years, including when MOVEmembers were on trial for frame-up charges. Following her rulingin the custody case, Robbins Newwas transferred to a criminalcourt.

MOVE spokesperson RamonaAfrica told Workers World: “Thisis no simple child custody case.John Gilbride never showed up totry to take his son on Friday, butthe threat from the state is notover.”

What should have been a legalmatter between estranged parentshas turned into a pretext for an-other intervention by the repres-sive Philadelphia state apparatusagainst MOVE. �

Resistance in South to anti-immigrant racismBy Dianne Mathiowetz

The onslaught of anti-Arab, anti-Mus-lim and anti-immigrant hate mongeringplus the assault on civil liberties and civilrights has had a chilling effect.

Frequently, however, those targeted forrepression do not respond as the rulingclass anticipates. Rather than be silenced,

they speak out against the in-justice and become symbolsof resistance

This was certainly the casefor three medical students.Because of their nationalityand ethnic clothing, AymanGheith, Omer Choudharyand Kambiz Butt were ille-gally held in a police van for13 hours on Sept. 13 in Cal-houn, Ga., while traveling toa South Miami hospital fortheir studies.

These students spoke against the injus-tice of “Driving While Muslim.” The racistgovernor, Jeb Bush, publicly called fortheir prosecution, which is a criminal of-fense. When Florida officials were unableto find any kind of incriminating evidence,they were forced to apologize to the stu-dents.

Then there is the case of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who had been a tenured profes-sor of computer engineering at theUniversity of Southern Florida inTampa for 16 years.

He was an active voice for Palestineand a leader in the Muslim religiouscommunity.

He and his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, established an Islamic studiescenter and a charitable foundation tobenefit Palestinians impacted by theoccupation. This brought the two menunder scrutiny from the FBI and Israeliintelligence.

After the 1996 Oklahoma City bombingand in spite of the case that was mountingagainst Timothy McVeigh, a white su-premacist and Gulf War veteran, theTampa newspapers charged Al-Arian andAl-Najjar with being the “terrorist mas-terminds” behind the bombing.

Their offices were raided, files wereseized and the assets of their organiza-tions frozen.

Mazen Al-Najjar was taken into custodyon the basis of “secret evidence.”

For three-and-a-half years, Al-Najjarwas held in solitary confinement, allowedone hour a day out of his cell for exerciseand a shower, strip searched upon leavingand entering his cell.

He never was told what crime he wassuspected of committing; who his accus-ers were; or what evidence they had to sup-

No shortage of housing,but crisis growsBy Imani Henry

According to the Department of Healthand Human Services, 798,000 people arecurrently homeless in the United States.The National Low Income Housing Coali-tion stated on Sept. 18 that out of the nearly36 million households, one third pay rentevery month. You must make about $14.66an hour to afford a modest two-bedroomrental and still be able to pay for other basicneeds.

The chair of the Senate HousingCommittee has now declared that thereis a national housing crisis in the U.S. InNew York City alone, 35,164 people or8,600 families have sought emergencyshelter and temporary housing. SanFrancisco has a large homeless popula-tion, including many people of color whohave been gentrified out of the citybecause of high rents.

There is not a shortage of housing. In factthere is a surplus, but only if you can affordthat luxury condo or the hottest propertyat the going rate. Meanwhile there areboarded-up buildings that could be usedto provide affordable housing. More peo-ple are being forced out or even burnt outby greedy landlords and real estate devel-opers who are driven to make more prof-its.

Five thousand young people die home-less on the streets of the U.S. every year–alarge of percentage of them lesbian, gay, biand trans. Now there is another sector ofthe homeless known as “throwawayyouth,” whose families are forced to evictthem if they live in subsidized housing. Theright to shelter, including land, is a basichuman need. But under capitalism, it is a

privilege, acommodity tobe bought andsold for profitregardless ofhuman needor suffering.

It is why 40acres and amule has re-mained the symbolic demand of the strug-gle for reparations, as Black farmers in theSouth fight the Bush administration formoney owed them to save their farms.

In Harlem there is a struggle againstsoaring rents displacing many.

Most every national liberation struggleor imperialist war comes down to the landquestion and who has a right to it—fromNative nations here to the people ofVieques to Palestine to Zimbabwe to Iraq.

An estimated 1.2 billion people world-wide lack adequate housing. Socialism is ahumane system that values human needover profit. One out of every five people ishomeless in the world, but none of themlive in Cuba. In fact, young people and chil-dren are the most valued in Cuban society.

Housing, just like education and healthcare is a right in Cuba. While education andhealth care are free in Cuba, workers payonly 6 percent to 10 percent of their yearlyincome for housing, unlike in the U.S.,where it is over 30 percent. With only atiny fraction of the tremendous resourcesof the U.S., the Cuban government madesure that 100,000 people and tens of thou-sands of farm animals were evacuatedwhen Hurricane Isidore hit on Sept. 20without a single loss of life, thanks to so-cialist planning. �

MOVE supporters rally Sept. 20.WW PHOTO: BETSEY PIETTE

port their charges.His family fought to get his

case into the courts.When a judge finally heard

the government’s argument forholding Al-Najjar withoutcharges for more than 1,000days, he ordered his immediaterelease and thoroughly chas-tised the FBI in a 57-page deci-sion for violating his rights.

Then 9/11 happened.Al-Najjar was rounded up

again along with thousands of other Arabs,Muslims and South Asians.

After being held for months, he was de-ported in mid-August for a 20-year-oldvisa “violation.”

All the while his brother-in-law wasbeing held without charges, Sami Al-Arianhad been organizing support for legislationoutlawing the use of secret evidence.

Congress had acted on the bill and it wasawaiting signature by Bush.

With 9/11, it was swept aside by the USAPatriot Act and Justice Department ordersthat gave government agencies broad au-thority to spy on citizens, monitor organi-zations and disrupt dissent.

When Bill O’Reilly of FOX News invitedAl-Arian on his program in November2001, he publicly labeled Al-Arian a “ter-rorist” and a “supporter of Al-Qaeda.”

Immediately, Professor Al-Arian re-ceived numerous death threats.

The Muslim school he founded inTampa was vandalized.

And the university which had previouslyconducted its own investigation of his ac-tivities, and found no wrong-doing, sus-pended him with pay.

Then within a day of his brother-in-lawbeing deported, the university went intocourt to fire Al-Arian, charging that he hadviolated his contract by causing a “disrup-tion” on campus.

The American Association of Univer-sity Professors has vigorously taken up hiscase as one of the most serious assaults onacademic freedom.

Al-Arian has not been silenced.He has mounted a public campaign to

denounce the threats to civil libertiesposed by Ashcroft and Bush and he is asupporter of the Oct. 26 demonstrationin D.C. �

Page 4 Oct. 3, 2002 www.workers.org

Crisis in Buffalo callsfor worker unityBy Bev Hiestand

Conditions of life are verydifficult for workers and op-pressed communities inWestern New York. Likeother former centers of in-dustry and transportation, wehave been very affected by thedismantling of heavy indus-try, downsizing and layoffs.

What solution does thecapitalist class offer? Hightech! Reindustrialization was supposed tocreate an economic turnaround in this in-creasingly impoverished region.

But the greatly hailed scientific high-tech revolution of the 1970s and 1980s hasbeen so different than the scientific-tech-nological revolution of a century or moreago. Those big leaps in the means of pro-duction led to the expansion of capitalism,but with it came an overall improvementin the living standard of the working class.Today reindustrialization has broughtmore layoffs and been an excuse for agreater offensive against the working class.

And while the imperialist war drive will

bring death and destruction,poverty and misery to the peo-ple of Iraq, it will also deepeneconomic and social sufferinghere. The capitalist state, in-stead of providing resourceson an emergency basis, is indeficit because of the eco-nomic crisis and because thesocial surplus created by ourcollective labor is being fun-neled to Wall Street and the

Pentagon while the infrastructure is left torot.

War will not bring about jobs and pros-perity. The Gulf War in 1991 ended in aneconomic downturn severe enough thatBush Senior didn’t get re-elected.

When people are losing their jobs, thebudget deficit is expanding and benefitsare being cut while corporations are rak-ing in billions, it’s natural to awaken to theneed to fight back.

Now that impulse is being drowned in afrenzy of hoopla about “terrorist cells” inBuffalo. The highly publicized arrests of sixYemeni American young men has taken

By Milt NeidenbergRetired Teamster

No matter how much the Bush admin-istration and its loyal opposition, the De-mocratic Party, whip up the war frenzyagainst Iraq and the “war on terrorism” inthe name of national security, it is the econ-omy that is preoccupying the workers andthe oppressed.

We need a strategy to turn around the“war on terrorism” into a war on poverty—and the issue of “national security” into jobsecurity.

Labor columnist Steven Greenhouseconducted an important interview in theSept. 6 New York Times with David J.Olson. It illustrates the potential powerlabor can wield.

Olson is a professor, a founder of theHarry Bridges Center for Labor Studies,and a consultant on ports and the long-shore union. Bridges was founder of the In-ternational Longshore Workers Union andleader of the historic 1934 San Franciscogeneral strike.

Greenhouse asked Olson what the im-pact on the economy would be if the long-shore workers, who unload containerboxes from ships, conducted a short workstoppage.

Olson answered, “It would severely af-fect those companies that depend on just-in-time inventory ... the whole gamut ofmerchandisers [from] Wal-Mart to Sears,to name a few.”

Olson stressed, “The container box isthe warehouse for modern-day busi-ness. … The ports handle millions ofparts needed for assembly or manufac-ture. ... We’re not talking about goodsflowing into the country, but also goodsflowing out of the country.”

Picture ships from abroad landing onthese shores filled with containers. Thecontainers are unloaded by dockworkers,picked up and transported inland bytrucks, railway and airlines to their desti-nations, where the commodities are un-loaded. Then visualize the reverse: com-modities being exported from theseshores.

Any disruption in thisinterconnected processspells disaster for theemployers. More than$300 billion worthpasses through the WestCoast ports—7 percentof the entire gross do-mestic product.

Now comes theintroduction of a high-er stage of technologyinto the mix. It rangesfrom satellites to hand computers andinter-modal shipments to increase pro-ductivity and speed-up. Inter-modalmeans moving commodities by a combi-nation of road and rail.

In one swoop, the technology brings to-gether a global industrial workforce that in-cludes service workers who plot and recordthe movement of commodities. Marxistscall this the socialization of labor.

Some 10,500 longshore workers actingin unity can unleash this power. It pointsup just how vulnerable the capitalist econ-omy is to the power of labor, which threat-ens U.S. imperialist and globalization ob-jectives. It’s also important to note thatthe longshore workers are very multina-tional and have close ties to their commu-nities.

Of course, the Bush administrationwould intervene in any way it could to im-mediately remove this threat to the stabil-ity of the capitalist system and its plans todominate the globe.

However, the threat of severe cutbacksin the living conditions of the workers andthe oppressed nationalities will elevate theclass struggle to another level.

There are huge hurdles to overcome,not the least of which is the laborbureaucrats, with their political ties tothe Democratic Party, their defense ofthe capitalist system and their hope forits reform. Nevertheless, they are not thefundamental class enemy. The leader-ship is divided on many issues and tac-tics over how to deal with the crisis ofimperialist war, recession, repression

Lenin's message to today's workers

and racism, and the anti-union assault. It will be significantly easier to reach the

rank and file than it was in earlier periodsduring and since the Cold War. If the gov-ernment drags the reluctant workers andoppressed into a war against Iraq, it willspeed up their class awakening.

Lenin offered today’s workers an impor-tant lesson about the transition to a periodof a revolutionary perspective.

He wrote an essay entitled “OnStrikes” in 1899, when Russia sufferedboth repression and war. He began bydiscussing the importance of the strikeweapon:

“Every strike strengthens and developsin the workers the understanding that thegovernment is their enemy and that theworking class must prepare itself to strug-gle against the government for the people’srights,” he said. He called a strike “a schoolof war.”

He talked about wider and broaderforms of struggle that develop a revolu-tionary political perspective. “[We] lookforward to the time when all class consciousworkers would become socialists [and] willbuild a party that struggles for the emanci-pation of the people as a whole ... from theyoke of capital.”

He ended his essay with a call that stillrings with urgency today: Workers and op-pressed of the world, unite!

The enemy that U.S. workers face todayis not in Baghdad. It is in Washington andWall Street, which rip off the wealth andresources created by the multinationallabor of the workers and the oppressed. �

Port workers in major labor showdown

ier or the workweek shorter? Ifwe let the bosses control it, they’llalways use it against the work-ers and to increase their ownprofits. The fate of the ILWU af-fects all workers.

The port workers’ struggle isalso part of the struggle againstcorporate globalization. We needto expose the role of the Water-front Coalition—The Gap andWal-Mart—in trying to break the

ILWU and their super-exploitation of op-pressed workers around the world.

This is a fighting union that began witha struggle against racist hiring and policerepression. When few people knew whoNelson Mandela was, the ILWU refused tounload cargo from South Africa and playeda decisive role in defeating apartheid. Theyhave stood against U.S. intervention fromEl Salvador to Iraq. During the 1995 news-paper strike in San Francisco, not onenewspaper moved through the ports. Theyshut down the ports for Mumia Abu-Jamalin 1999 and they did it again during theprotests against the World Trade Organi-zation.

We and others have been working withthe ILWU to build labor and communitysupport and change the balance of classforces with rallies up and down the WestCoast. The AFL-CIO and the Teamstershave recognized the importance of thisstruggle and have actively taken on soli-darity campaigns with the ILWU. In theBay Area in particular, the ANSWER coali-tion—Act Now to Stop War & End Racism—has been working very closely with ILWULocal 10 and the port workers’ solidaritycommittee.

Together with others, we are also organ-izing a leafleting campaign on the WestCoast to let the public know what the cor-porations in the Waterfront Coalition aredoing to break the union and oppress work-ers. This is a campaign we want to spreadeastward to add pressure on the bosses.

Things are extremely tense. There couldbe a lockout or a slowdown or a strike atany time. And if that happens where willwe be? On the picket line! �

By Nancy Mitchell

A major labor showdownis brewing in 29 ports on theWest Coast. The Interna-tional Longshore and Ware-house Union—the ILWU—represents 10,500 West Coastworkers. It’s a strong unionand has won good wages andbenefits that really set thestandard for what workersshould enjoy.

The union’s contract was up July 1 andit is facing strong opposition from thebosses: the Pacific Maritime Associationand its wicked little front group, the WestCoast Waterfront Coalition—a grouping ofPayless, The Gap, Home Depot, Wal-Martand others who import an estimated $300billion worth of goods a year through WestCoast ports from their sweatshops abroad.

Add to this distasteful mix the Bush ad-ministration, which is threatening govern-ment intervention on the side of the bosses.A couple of days into negotiations, JimSpinoza—the president of ILWU—wascontacted by Homeland Security head TomRidge, who said the government may con-sider this an issue of national security.Meaning what? That they have to protectus from the port workers? I don’t think so.Yet they’re threatening anything from Taft-Hartley legislation against the union tobringing in troops to unload the ships.

The port workers’ struggle is part of thefight-back against the Bush regime’s end-less war. They’re using the war to bombworkers around the world and they’re usingit here at home against immigrant workers,militant workers and the labor movement.

What is this contract struggle reallyabout?

The real crux of the issue is the bosses’introduction of new technology. Throughcomputerizing what the union clerks nowdo, the bosses are trying to outsource jobsand essentially take control of hiring, whichwould lead to the withering away of unionjobs. The bosses say the union is anti-tech-nology. The real issue is who is going to con-trol the technology? Will it make work eas-

Continued on page 8

‘If the government

drags the reluctant

workers into a war,

it will speed up

their class

awakening.’

www.workers.org Oct. 3, 2002 Page 5

Old assumptions don't work

War drive fails to lift economyBy Deirdre Griswold

The gyrations of the stock markets dur-ing the last week of September give a veryclear picture of the tremendous contradic-tion facing the Bush administration in itsheadlong rush to war.

This war is meant above all to shore upU.S. capitalism’s position in the world—especially the fortunes of the giant oil mo-nopolies and the high-tech corporationslinked to the military-industrial complex.

Yet every time the administration takesanother big step toward actually carryingout its plans for a blitzkrieg on Iraq, thestock markets take another dive.

Every major speech by President GeorgeW. Bush over the last six months has sentthe markets plunging.

For example, when he went to WallStreet on July 9 to reassure investors aboutthe economy with promises that the gov-ernment would crack down on corporatecrime linked to huge bankruptcies, the DowJones Industrial Average plunged 178points even as he was speaking.

The latest big slide in the markets beganwhen Bush went to the United Nations onSept. 12 to try to push through a resolutionof support for the U.S. war.

In explaining why share prices are goingdown again, the financial analysts invari-ably have to admit that investors are scaredoff by the war talk. More and more, doubtover whether war spending will boost theeconomy is creeping into their analysis.

This is just the opposite of how the mar-kets reacted to war news in the 1950s and1960s. Then, escalation of the Korean andVietnam wars caused jubilation on WallStreet. It was the generally accepted viewamong many workers, too, that war wouldbring jobs and economic prosperity—a fac-tor that dampened the anti-war movementduring the early years of theVietnam War.

‘Defense’ stocks don’t help the market

At present, even the stocks ofthose companies with a directstake in the present war are nolonger being buoyed by theBush administration’s belliger-ent talk or by the big increasein the military budget that fol-lowed Sept. 11.

An article called“Looking at Stocks witha Stake in War” ap-peared in the Businesssection of the Sept. 22New York Times. It wasbased on an interviewwith Byron K. Callan, ananalyst at Merrill Lynch.

“A war would carry awide range of possiblescenarios for defensestocks,” said Callan. “Isit quick, messy, but ultimately the UnitedStates prevails, or does it cause a lot of in-stability in the Middle East? I don’t thinkwe’ll know any of this for a while. But theworst scenario for the defense stockswould be a quick, simple military cam-paign that produces success beyond thewildest imagination. In that event, defensestocks would underperform the marketquite badly.”

So the picture that the Bush adminis-tration is trying to sell to the people of thiscountry—that a Pentagon onslaughtwould quickly topple the Iraqi governmentwithout U.S. troops taking many casual-ties—would be the “worst scenario” for thewar profiteers. The only thing that will lifttheir spirits is a long, dirty war.

Callan adds that his “enthusiasm” forwar stocks is “tempered because of valua-tions, which are close to all-time highs. Ab-sent Iraq, the U.S. defense budget newswon’t get a whole lot better.” In otherwords, the prices of these stocks are al-ready extremely high. It would take enor-mous and sustained carnage to drive themup much further.

Callan also discussed the “homeland se-curity market.” This, he says, is “a realgrowth market.” This year the government

is spending $37 billion on everything fromhandcuffs and prisons to gathering infor-mation on people’s lives and ordering dan-gerous vaccines from the pharmaceuticalgiants.

But even this ominous new growth in-dustry is not helping the overall economyout of the doldrums. Not only are the fi-nancial markets continuing their relent-less decline, but long-term joblessness isup sharply, along with new claims for un-employment insurance.

The Census Bureau just released a re-port on poverty that shows 1.3 million morepeople slipped below the meager povertyline in 2001, while median household in-come fell 2.2 percent. The income declineaffected all categories—those defined as“non-Hispanic whites” as well as the na-tionally oppressed.

If Bush thought his war drive would pro-vide a quick fix for capitalism, he is beingproven wrong.

The truth is that the U.S. economy hasgrown so large, and has had such a large mil-itary component for so long, that even warspending on the level envisioned now can-not jolt it out of a crisis of overproduction.

While a war for U.S. corporations to con-trol the oil and other resources of the Mid-

dle East and the Caspian Sea may promisebig profits years hence, the problem thebosses face is: how will it affect the bottomline now?

Imperialist geopolitical strategistsand war planners may work out onpaper exactly how far their power willextend by 2005 or 2010, but capitalism isnot a planned economy. It is an economicsystem wracked with contradictions thatcan cause it to implode, as in Argentinatoday. Corporate bosses will walk overanyone for a profit, but that profit has tocome now, in time for the next quarterlyreport, or they can find themselves in anEnron-sized crisis.

Ultimately, it is economics that drivepolitics. Behind the seemingly monolithic,pro-war unity of the two-party capitalistpolitical machine in the U.S., the fears aregrowing stronger in the ruling class estab-lishment that this war may only exacer-bate their problems. The sudden emer-gence of Al Gore as a born-again critic ofBush and the war, after his capitulation toFlorida election fraud and disappearanceinto the night, shows that politicians withnothing to lose have sensed a new wind.

Meanwhile, the anti-war sentiments ofthe people are growing, even though this ismasked by the extraordinary self-censor-ship of the corporate media and its obses-sion with the “war on terror.”

The genuine, popular-based movementto stop the war should take heart from thesedevelopments.

When self-doubt creeps into thehearts of these ruthless predators, it istime for the opposition to press harder,organize more forcefully, and makethem understand that the course nowbeing pursued by Bush & Co. will onlybring the war home. �

War is also a woman's issueBy Dorothea Peacock

Last year on Sept. 22 the Women’s Fight-back Network (WFN) in Boston took to thestreets to say “NO” to war againstAfghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Colombia, thePhilippines, Korea, Vieques, Cuba or Zim-babwe.

Martin Luther King Jr. stated in 1967that, “The U.S. bombs falling in the villagesof Vietnam are exploding in the inner citiesof the U.S.”

Links were made between the warsabroad and the war at home—be it budgetcuts impacting on poor women and chil-dren, the unemployed, elders, students andyouth along with racist killer cops and re-pression against immigrant workers andyouth of color.

Billions of dollars are spent each year onthe Pentagon to bomb and murder peoplearound the world. Now the bankers, bossesand big oil companies want upwards of$200 billion on top of the $400 billion Pen-

tagon budget to carry out an invasion ofIraq.

We say, overturn the Pentagon warbudget and fund human needs—includinghealth care, housing, public education, daycare, mental health and drug treatmentservices, HIV/AIDS funding, Women, In-fants and Children (WIC) and welfare.

Grandmas on fixed incomes are babysit-ters raising grandchildren because thereis no money to pay for childcare or privatesitters.

This week in Massachusetts thousandsof workers have been laid off from welfareoffices and the Department of MentalHealth. Access to free mental health carehas been abolished for those battling de-pression and for those released fromprison as well as undocumented immi-grants.

Racist prison wardens are demandingrent money from prisoners in Massachu-setts to balance the war budget on thebacks of the poorest—but not without a

fight! Our brothers and sis-ters behind the walls are re-sisting this dictate even ifit means stiff punishment.

Some 11,000 seniors arebeing thrown off the TuftsHMO plan, which nolonger accepts Medicare.Another 1 million people inMassachusetts can nolonger fill prescriptions atCVS and Walgreens due tothe outright extortion bythe drug and insurance companies.

Governor Swift’s $2-billion budget cutsin October do not include cutting the po-lice, who have a shoot-to-kill policy againstpeople of color. Recently, a 25-year-oldmother, Eveline Barros-Cepeda, was shotin the head by a cop in Dorchester. TheWFN attended a vigil for her.

From attacks on affirmative action, de-segregation and bilingual education to

racist Massachusetts Compre-hensive Assessment Systemtesting, public education isbeing carved up to pay forbombs, tanks and the collapseof Enron and WorldCom.

There is an epidemic of do-mestic violence and murder ofwomen in Fort Bragg, N.C., bytheir soldier husbands who re-turned from Afghanistan.Young mothers serving in theU.S. military are boarding war-

ships headed for the Persian Gulf andleaving their babies. The mothers of Iraqand Palestine have children dying fromsanctions, bombs and helicopter gun-ships made in the USA.

Women in the U.S. have a responsibil-ity to speak out and organize. The WFNwill be organizing a contingent of womento march on Oct. 26 to stop imperialistwar and fight for human needs and so-cialism. �

The Nasdaq is the market for hi-techstocks, many of which have militaryapplications. This chart showing theNasdaq’s meteoric rise in the late1990s and its equally dramatic fallsince March 2000 illustrates whathappens under capitalism when arush of investment leads to overproduction

This chart shows the big decline in the price of shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange that started in March of this year.Bush’s increase in the militarybudget, the war in Afghanistan and the buildup for the waragainst Iraq have not been able toovercome the market contraction

Page 6 Oct. 3, 2002 www.workers.org

matic edge in the United Nations SecurityCouncil. But this is not enough. And it begsthe question: What are we going to do aboutit?

Everybody wanted to know: What areyou going to do over there? It’s your coun-try that wants to wage this genocidal, racistwar against the people of the Middle East.

It begs the question of the relationshipof the movement, not just the anti-warmovement but the working-class move-ment, to the struggle against the war andthe struggle for socialist revolution.

During the last century we saw that re-bellions against imperialism first sprang upwhere imperialism was weak, at the ex-tremities of the system. At the center, in Eu-rope and here, the struggle was slow. Butwe also appreciate that ultimately thestruggle has to move from East to West, tothe heart of imperialism—to give the sys-tem a heart attack.

Almost 100 years ago Lenin understoodthe relationship of the movement in thiscountry to the world revolution. The fate ofthe world revolution will probably be de-cided by the struggle of the working classin the United States, because this is the cen-ter of imperialism.

If we understand this, we can feel thespecial responsibility we have to the world.

boost to morale. The media were there, in-terviewing delegates from all parts of theworld. The delegations made strong state-ments, making it clear that this is not justan attack on Iraq but on people everywhere.And they promised to find concrete waysto solidarize themselves with Iraq.

There were about 170 delegates repre-senting 80 to 90 countries, including theArab world, Asia, Africa, Latin America andWestern Europe. We were the sole delega-tion from the United States, so they listenedcarefully to what we had to say. But I wouldsay the majority were from Russia, Yu-goslavia, Albania, Romania, Ukraine, Azer-baijan and Tajikistan.

As we looked around at the delegates,speaking in so many languages being si-multaneously interpreted, it made methink that years ago these delegates couldhave been representing a strong socialistcamp. They could have come with morethan words. They could have come withweapons, food, medicine and other mate-rial things the Iraqis have been deprived ofbecause of the sanctions. And they wouldlet the imperialists know that they couldonly go so far, because we will not tolerateit. But this no longer exists.

We appreciate that this is the kind of sol-idarity Iraq really needs right now. Weknow if it’s just a military struggle, if that’sthe sole criterion, then of course U.S. im-perialism is the far stronger power.

If you listen carefully to what the Iraqisare saying, they are relying on solidarityfrom the Arab masses and any maneuversthey can make to win a temporary diplo-

World wants to know—

What will U.S. movementdo to stop war?By Larry Holmes

Holmes, a member of WWP’s Secre-tariat, was part of an InternationalAction Center delegation at a Baghdadanti-war conference Sept. 17-19.

Teresa Gutierrez, Kadouri Al-Kaysi,journalist Barbara Aziz and I constituted adelegation to a conference in solidarity withIraq in Baghdad this week. It was scheduledto begin last Monday, but it was postponedfor a day, and we did not know why.

It turned out that Monday was a climac-tic day in the international pressure cam-paign on the Iraqis, really from all sides, toagree to admit unconditionally the so-called weapons inspectors, who we knoware the first division of the invasion force.

There was a sense of relief at the con-ference when the decision to admit theinspectors was announced. It says a lotabout how dire the situation is. I don’tthink the participants at the conference,or the Iraqis, think the simple fact thatthey agreed after their arm had beentwisted will stop the war. However, theyhope it will buy time.

Our question is: Will it really do that? Itappears that since Iraq agreed to inspec-tions, instead of backing off, Bush and hisclique and the generals have stepped onthe gas pedal and are speeding ahead withpreparations for war. Bush is demandingimmediate authorization from Congressand the United Nations.

Despite all this, I think the conferencewas good for the Iraqis. It was a necessary

I think that’s a good thing, because noth-ing motivates serious revolutionaries morethan understanding their relationship tothe struggle. When you understand that,you wake up in the morning and you knowyou have a purpose.

Popular anger and resistance to U.S. im-perialism around the world is greater thanit has been in a long time. Contrary to pop-ular opinion, this country is not an island.It is not separate from the planet, unaf-fected by the change in consciousness of themasses. Workers and oppressed people inthis country are weary of war. That’s whythe imperialist propaganda machines arereally turning it on, trying to drag everyoneinto the war, because they’re nervous aboutwhether the workers will follow them.

We know Bush and his clique want to di-vert attention away from rising joblessness,poverty and misery among our sisters andbrothers. The capitalist economic crisis isvery deep. What’s happening in the stockmarket, WorldCom, Enron and so forth, isjust on the surface. Underneath there’s acatastrophic capitalist crisis in the mak-ing.

Will the combination of the war crisisand the economic crisis have the effectwe’ve been awaiting for so long? Will it fi-nally radicalize the masses, wake them up,

The Bolsheviks and WarLessons for today’s anti-war movement

By Sam Marcy $5.95What distinguished the Bolsheviks fromthe other parties in the SocialistInternational? Lenin and the Bolsheviksused the crisis of WWI to organize therevolutionary overthrow of the old orderin Russia. Order from WW Publishers55 W. 17 St., 5 Fl., NY, NY 10011

Why Iraq is pivotal in imperialism’s schemesBy Sarah Sloan

U.S. policy toward Iraq isnot motivated simply by thenarrow economic interests ofthose who own ExxonMobil,Texaco and other oil compa-nies. Karl Marx said that thegovernment is the executivecommittee of the ruling capi-talist class. Its function is to actin the interest of the capitalistclass in its entirety. And so theU.S. government is currentlyconsidering not just how tomake additional profit by gain-ing control of billions of addi-tional barrels of oil, but how to maintainand extend its domination of the entireregion.

U.S. imperialism has long held a planto reshape the Middle East. And nowthey hope that with the power they pos-sess in the post-Sept. 11 period they canreturn the Middle East to the colonialstatus that existed before the 1950s.

The colonial period was ended in thedecades after World War II, when anti-colonial bourgeois-democratic revolu-tions and wars of national liberation sweptthe world. In some cases—such as Viet-nam, Korea, China and Cuba—these revo-lutions were led by the proletariat throughthe communist party. In others, the lead-ership was in the hands of non-proletar-ian and primarily bourgeois—that is, cap-italist—forces.

In 1958 in Iraq there was a people’s rev-

olution led by com-munists and radicalbourgeois elements,mainly from the mili-tary. In the post-rev-olutionary govern-ment, it was the bour-geoisie that consoli-dated power. Beforethe revolution, Iraq’soil wealth was 100-percent owned byU.S., British, Dutchand French oil com-panies. In 1972, thecountry’s vast oilfields were national-

ized, the foreign profiteers kicked out andthe resources used for development—tobuild roads, hospitals, schools and otherinfrastructure.

Immediately after Iraq nationalized itsoil, Iraq was placed on the U.S. list of ter-rorist nations.

Many countries where anti-colonial rev-olutions took place were able to counter thepressures of imperialism by forging exten-sive ties for economic aid and trade withthe Soviet Union and the socialist camp.This was particularly true for Iraq.

Over the last 44 years, the United Stateshas never succeeded in rolling back thegains of Iraq’s 1958 revolution and mak-ing Iraq a complete puppet as it was before.But that has been the true objective in thelast 12 years of war.

In this sense, a war in Iraq is not simplya redivision of markets or spheres of influ-

ence like World War I and World War II,when the imperialist countries fought to re-divide the world because they had run outof territory to grab.

The war against Iraq is more like acounter-revolution, a rollback of the socialprogress achieved by the bourgeois-dem-ocratic revolution in the formerly colonizedworld.

The U.S. government is opposed to thegovernment in Iraq because Baghdad hasmaintained that its land, labor and re-sources are not the property of the imperi-alists. Washington wants to smash any gov-ernment that seeks to be independent.Whether it’s a bourgeois nationalist gov-ernment as in Iraq, the socialist govern-ment in Cuba, or the Chavez governmentin Venezuela—if you stand up, if you say no,if you serve as an example to others andoffer an alternative, you are deemed anenemy by imperialism.

The Bush administration would like toundo the verdict of the national liberationmovements that took place in the 20th cen-tury, to roll back all the achievements thosecountries attained while they were pursu-ing their own development free from theircolonial oppressors.

The question that remains is whether thegreat tide of history—which is to go fromslavery and colonization to freedom andliberation—can be turned back by themechanism of high-tech missiles and pre-cision laser bombs. While we’re not for amoment dismissing the possibility of set-backs and reverses, the answer we give is aclear and resounding no.

Humanity’s social progress is the conse-quence of deep social and economicchanges that have actually laid the founda-tion for the complete emancipation of theoppressed working class of the world. Firstand foremost in that struggle is theachievement of national liberation, inde-pendence, self-determination and equality.

The people of Iraq, Venezuela,Korea— all those who are struggling andsacrificing for national liberation—needa resurgence of revolutionary classstruggle inside the advanced capitalistand imperialist countries.

This is the underlying reason why theactions planned by the ANSWER coali-tion, which include the national mobi-lization on Oct. 26 and other struggles,have gained such worldwide attention,especially since Sept. 11.

Our party and our movement are wag-ing a huge historical struggle. We mustdedicate ourselves to recognizing thatreality and vigorously working to revivethe movement right here in the belly ofthe beast. �

‘We don’t have the luxury

of being bystanders.

We’re catalysts for

revolution’

www.workers.org Oct. 3, 2002 Page 7

and begin to melt away the passivity of theworking class?

Will it end the demoralization, disinte-gration and confusion of the revolutionaryand progressive forces that have been aconsequence of the counter-revolution ofthe last period? Will it open up a new chap-ter of the working-class struggle?

We can’t wait for conclusive answers tothese questions. But we are obliged to actas though the answer is affirmative—andthat not only is it coming soon, but that withevery moment that passes we are losingtime in preparing for it.

We don’t have the luxury of beingbystanders. That’s contrary to every-thing revolution is about, from a social-ist and communist perspective. We’recatalysts, agents of revolution, an essen-tial ingredient. We don’t have to worryabout the workers. They’ll come. But theleadership has to be ready. History is fullof stories where the masses were readyand the leadership was not.

Of course, our first priority is the war.We have got to awaken the full scopeand breadth of anti-war sentiment inthis country. That’s what the Oct. 26march is about. Whether people agreewith us on every detail is not important.Everybody’s got to come out. If they askus, can we really stop the war before itstarts, we’ve got to say if you come andyou each bring 100 or 1,000 or 10,000people with you, then maybe we can!

We have to revive the socialist move-ment, because there’s been no socialistmovement in this country. It’s been beatendown. We have to build it up. Who else isgoing to do it? We have an opportunity tomake a socialist and anti-imperialist andanti-war movement that is revolutionary.Why should we wait for someone to lead itin a weaker direction?

We not only want to stop the war; wewant to bring the war home where itbelongs. �

Special to Workers World

With just one month to go before theOct. 26 march on Washington, organiz-ing is kicking into high gear across thecountry. As one of the march’s initiators,the International ANSWER coalition—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—is reaching out to anti-war, peace andcivil-rights organizations to build thebroadest possible demonstration to“Stop the War on Iraq Before It Starts.”

“Despite the Iraqi government’sagreement to accept unconditional UNweapons inspections, the Bush adminis-tration and the Pentagon are movingfull-speed ahead with their plans toinvade Iraq in defiance of the wholeworld,” said Brian Becker, a spokesper-son for ANSWER.

“It is critical at this juncture for allwho oppose a new war against Iraq tocome together to mobilize the greatestpossible expression of anti-war senti-ment in the United States,” Becker con-tinued.

“We urge everyone who agrees withthe demand to ‘stop the war before itstarts’ to join us in making Oct. 26 amassive outpouring the White Housecan’t ignore.”

A West Coast regional demonstrationis also planned for Oct. 26 in SanFrancisco.

A delegation from the InternationalAction Center, one of several groups thatmake up the ANSWER coalition steeringcommittee, participated in a Sept. 17-19anti-war conference in Baghdad, Iraq. Atthe conference, attended by delegatesfrom over 80 countries, they announcedplans for the Oct. 26 march and urged

activists in other countries to make it aninternational day of protest.

So far, demonstrations are planned inBelgium, Denmark, Germany, the Nether-lands, south Korea, Spain and more.

More than 2,300 organizations andprominent individuals have endorsedthe Oct. 26 mobilization, according toSarah Sloan of ANSWER. Dozens moreadd their names every day.

Sloan told Workers World that Oct. 26sponsors include: Muslim AmericanSociety Freedom Foundation; NationalLawyers Guild; San Francisco LaborCouncil (AFL-CIO); 1199/SEIU healthcare workers union; New York CityLabor Against the War; Fellowship ofReconciliation; Student LiberationAction Movement (SLAM); Black Voicesfor Peace; Not In Our Name/Pledge ofResistance; Los Alamos Study Group;and Dorothy Day Catholic Worker.

Also: former UN Oil for Food ProgramDirector Dr. Hans von Sponeck; formerU.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark;Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit;the Rev. Graylan Hagler, PlymouthCongregational Church in D.C.; politicalprisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal; historianHoward Zinn; Kathy Kelly, Voices in theWilderness; and Dr. Helen Caldicott,founder of Physicians for SocialResponsibility.

The ANSWER coalition steering com-mittee includes: Partnership for CivilJustice-Legal Defense and EducationFund, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, FreePalestine Alliance, Mexico SolidarityNetwork, Nicaragua Network, KoreaTruth Commission, International ActionCenter, Kensington Welfare RightsUnion, Middle East Children’s Alliance,

Muslim Student Association and BayanUSA-International.

“We are getting phone calls, emails andletters from people all over the country whoare planning to bring buses to D.C.,” Sloanadded. “But we need more.”

Bev Heistand of the IAC chapter inBuffalo, N.Y., said there is great enthusi-asm for the Washington anti-war protestin Western New York. “We’ve alreadyreserved two buses,” she told WW.

The groups building for the Oct. 26march are also supporting many anti-waractivities around the country leading up tothat date. This includes the National Dayof Protest for Palestine. Major actions areplanned Sept. 28 in San Francisco andSept. 29 in Chicago, along with other cities.

Organizers will join a Sept. 29 “MarchAgainst War” in Washington, D.C.,sponsored by several peace and justiceorganizations. The march is one of manyprotests planned to coincide with theannual meeting of the InternationalMonetary Fund and World Bank in lateSeptember and early October. They willalso participate in the Oct. 6 “Not In OurName” rally at New York’s Central Park.

For more information—including howto endorse, get a speaker, organize trans-portation, or make a tax-deductible dona-tion—readers can visit ANSWER’s Website at www.internationalanswer.org or e-mail dc@internationalanswer.org.

In New York, call (212) 633-6646;Washington (202) 332-5757; Chicago(773) 878-0166; Los Angeles (213) 487-2368; San Francisco (415) 821-6545. �

At a critical moment

Anti-war forces gear up for Oct.26

'Weapons inspections' part of U.S. war against IraqBy Sara Flounders

Workers World Party was trained to becombative in the face of an imperialist war,to stand with whoever is under attack. Wemake no attempt at conciliation on the fun-damental issues—even as we try to buildthe broadest possible unity in mobilizingopposition to the war. We want to workwith all possible forces opposing this war,even when we have differences.

Bush has an enormous problem that heis trying to cover over with the most belli-cose threats. He has weapons of mass de-struction, but his political support is thin,apprehensive and suspicious. Among themasses of people, there is already deep sus-picion.

Wars radicalize whole sections of thepopulation overnight. The ugly face of thecapitalist drive for markets is exposed. Theveneer of democracy and legality is rippedoff.

Why is the mass anti-war demonstrationcalled for Oct. 26 so important? It is an ac-tion in coordination with many politicalforces who want to resist. It is a living coali-tion that is growing by the hour.

We are committed to its success becausethe first action of mass opposition to anunfolding war defines the movement. It

shapes what comes after—what role theoppressed and working class organizationswill play.

In countless interviews with the massmedia, we have helped to cut through thewar propaganda with class-conscious pol-itics, explaining who benefits from the warand who pays.

The same political currents that dividedthe movement against the Iraq war in 1991and artificially injected the slogan, “Sanc-tions, not war” are now raising the slogan“Inspections, not war.”

Both of these slogans imply that Wash-ington and Wall Street have legitimate in-terests, have the right to intervene. Theydisorient the movement. They put de-mands and pressure on the oppressed na-tion under attack and imply that the in-transigence is on their part.

Support for sanctions has proven to besupport for the right of U.S. imperialismto starve a whole people. It is the most bru-tal form of war.

Inspections are war, too. They allow aninvading army to reach into a country andclaim the right to blow up industries, cutoff all technology in the name of searchingfor weapons of mass destruction.

The new U.S. demand for more “mus-cular inspections” or “coercive inspec-

tions” is a cynical war plan developedby the Carnegie Endowment for In-ternational Peace. It is a plan to in-clude U.S. tanks, jets and armoredunits with the inspectors. It would im-pose no-drive zones along with thepresent no-fly zones. It would cut offwhole sections of Iraq, carve it into piecesand destroy at will, all in the name of look-ing for weapons of mass destruction. Anyresistance would be met with bombard-ment.

Iraq would be required to pay for thisoccupation with funds from the “Oil forFood” program. It is the end of all sover-eignty. This is the plan Bush wants to in-troduce in a new UN resolution.

Bush has made a declaration of war onthe peoples of the entire world. No coun-try, no government can risk military con-frontation with the U.S. Even small social-ist countries are trying to avoid directthreat. They may have to make onerouspolitical and economic concessions inorder to survive.

Our challenge is to help shape the re-sistance, to expose the lies and to mobilizeopposition.

No secret conspiracy can succeed. Onlymass mobilization of millions in the streetsin determined opposition can stop this war.

Millions who are con-scious that their owninterests are directlyopposed to the warmakers. Conscious-ness is a weapon.

We have cadre whoare tenant or union

organizers, who struggle for women’srights, lesbian and gay rights, prisoners’rights, are organizers against the deathpenalty, student organizers. Everyone whohas worked on any campaign has an urgentrole to play right now in mobilizing ourclass.

Our party is trained for a crisis. Even asmall group can give leadership at the mostdifficult junctures. That is what a Leninistparty is capable of because it is the con-centrated experience of our class, armedwith a scientific outlook. It is an organizedforce that sees clearly the cause of the warcrisis and understands what must be done.

We know what this war is and what thisnew, more aggressive stage of decaying im-perialism will mean for our class. We alsoknow how to mobilize, how to get resolu-tions, buses, make calls, set up outreach.

This is the struggle Workers WorldParty was born to fight.Flounders is a Secretariat member of Workers World Party. �

Brian Becker

Page 8 Oct. 3, 2002 www.workers.org

Joint action inSan Francisco

11 am • Justin Herman Plaza

NYC volunteers meetings:every Tuesday at 7pm 39 W.14th St. Rm 206

By Monica Moorehead

Where does Africa fit in the scenarioof the insane, aggressive Bush doctrine?

A Sept. 18 New York Times article head-lined “U.S. Moves Commandos to EastAfrica to Pursue Al Qaeda in Yemen” re-ported that hundreds of U.S. Special Op-erations forces have been “quietly” sta-tioned at a military base in Djibouti, a for-mer French colony located where the RedSea intercepts the Gulf of Aden. Along withthese Special Forces, there is also a U.S.assault ship, the Belleau Wood, off theHorn of Africa facing Yemen to pursuewhoever caused the blast on the USS Colea few years ago.

The following day the New York Timesran a front page article headlined “In Qui-etly Courting Africa, U.S. Likes the Dowry.”And what might that dowry be? Oil, oil andmore oil. This outrageous admission can-not be separated from the growing U.S.military presence in East Africa—which isan integral part of the U.S. military build-up against Iraq—or from Secretary of StateColin Powell’s recent trip to Africa, wherehe visited Angola and Gabon, two oil-pro-ducing countries. Nor can it be separatedfrom the recent announcement that Bushplans a major visit to Africa next year.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush ad-ministration has sought venues other thanthe Middle East for getting oil reserves.This is based on the mounting social in-stability of their puppet regimes, especiallySaudi Arabia. And now, with the UnitedStates just itching to invade Iraq, home to

10 percent of the world’s oil reserves,Washington has once again set its sights onAfrica. The aim is not only to get theirhands on more oil but to expand their oil-importing markets.

Thirty-three out of the 41 countriescategorized by the World Bank as“Heavy Indebted Poor Countries” are inAfrica. The total African debt owed tothe International Monetary Fund andWorld Bank is an estimated $350 bil-lion. One-fourth of Africa’s export earn-ings go to pay off the debt.

There is a debt owed not by the Africanpeople but by the banks and imperialism.They owe a long overdue debt to theAfrican people. The $350 billion, with nopolitical strings attached, should go towardrebuilding Africa—including health care,education, housing, food production,transportation, etc.

African women are playing a leader-ship role in forwarding the class strug-gle. Women have been in the forefrontof the national liberation movementsand the struggle for socialism from theRussian Revolution to the revolutions inVietnam, Cuba and China—and Africa isno exception.

Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest ex-

porter of oil, the fifth-largest supplier ofoil to the United States. Imperialism hasintervened many times in “regimechanges” in Africa by “Balkanization”—breaking up bigger countries into weaker,smaller states. During the 1960s theUnited States provoked a civil war that ledto a breakaway of the mineral-rich Biafraregion.

During this past summer, hundreds ofindigent Nigerian women took hostagesincluding management for weeks atChevron-Texaco oil facilities to demandjobs for their sons, paving of roads, andconstruction of hospitals and schools.These heroic takeovers showed the impor-tance of direct action and exposed the in-tolerable conditions that African people,especially women, are forced to endure.Those affected most severely by povertyand the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa arewomen.

On the cover of the Sept. 16 New YorkTimes Magazine there was a picture of atop government official in Rwanda whohappens to be the first woman to facecharges in an international court for incit-ing genocide against the Tutsi people in1994. The Times described this official asthe “Minister of Rape.” To say that this is

blatant racism and sexism is an under-statement. The Nigerian women helped toexpose who the real rapists and plunder-ers of the African peoples and continentare: imperialism, dating back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century andup to the current role of the IMF, WorldBank and transnational corporations. TheTimes Magazine piece was an attempt toincite further imperialist intervention—and to divert attention away from the realissues, which are rooted in the divide-and-conquer legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism that has cost the lives of hun-dreds of millions of African people.

If we want to show our solidarity withAfrica as well as with Latin America, theMiddle East, Asia, the Caribbean andelsewhere, we must do everything thatwe can to defeat imperialism in the bellyof the beast—by instilling class con-sciousness among all sectors of theworkers and oppressed, including bring-ing out as many people as possible onOct. 26 to stop the war against Iraq. U.S.out of Africa! Cancel the debt!Reparations for the African people!

Moorehead is a member of theSecretariat of Workers World Party. �

Crisis in Buffalo callsfor worker unityplace at the very moment that the Penta-gon has quietly deployed hundreds of Spe-cial Operations troops to a military base inEast Africa and has positioned an assaultship facing Yemen.

It’s part of the campaign to push thiscountry in a direction of war. It’s orches-trated to create the impression among thepopulation that they are at war with theArab world. It prepares the population toget ready for war abroad, not war at home.

In recent months we’ve seen tens ofthousands demonstrate to stop budgetcuts from gutting Buffalo public schooleducation. In March, more than 20,000protested the plan of the Kaleida healthconglomerate to shut down Children’sHospital of Buffalo. And a protest quick-ly drew together in May when Kaleidatried to shut down a health clinic in apoor community.

The working class is made up of work-

ers from so many countries and nationali-ties, so many women, so many lesbian andgay, bi and trans people and disabled work-ers that the potential is there for a more left-wing leadership among the laboring class.

The anti-war forces in Buffalo have animportant role to play in helping workersget past this difficult period by demandingno U.S. war and stop the round-ups of Arab,South Asian and Muslim people. It’s up tothe radicals to give encouragement to beatback this racist assault. Through our coali-tion work we have helped keep the anti-warmovement from being derailed, and keepthe anti-imperialist focus. And we are al-ready ordering a second bus for the Oct. 26demonstration in Washington.

The struggle ahead is not going to beeasy. That’s why they call it the struggle!But we are ready, willing and able as aparty to take on the challenges we’re upagainst. �

Africa and the Bush doctrine

SPONSORS:ANSWER coalition �Muslim American Society FreedomFoundation � National LawyersGuild � San Francisco Labor Council(AFL-CIO) �

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� Howard Zinn � Kathy Kelly, Voicesin the Wilderness � Dr. HelenCaldicott, founder of Physicians forSocial Responsibility � Partnership

for Civil Justice—Legal Defenseand EducationFund � IFCO/Pastorsfor Peace � FreePalestineAlliance �Mexico SolidarityNetwork �NicaraguaNetwork � Korea TruthCommission � InternationalAction Center � KensingtonWelfare RightsUnion � Middle EastChildren’sAlliance �Muslim StudentAssociation andBayan USA-International

Sat., Oct 26

Washington DC 202-332-5757San Francisco 415-821-6545New York 212-633-6646www.internationalANSWER.org

Continued from page 4

Challenge to Genocide:

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‘Women have always been in the forefrontof national liberation movements forsocialism. Today African women are forwarding the class struggle’

www.workers.org Oct. 3, 2002 Page 9

itary machine, with its advanced rockettechnology, powerful air force and numer-ous Panzer tank divisions.

The victory of the Nazis in the domesticcounter-revolution did not solve Germanimperialism’s crisis. It still had to expandon the world arena.

Promising new areas for exploitation

The Bush administration’s National Se-curity Strategy (NSS) document puts con-siderable stress on the absolute militarypower of the Pentagon. The New YorkTimes of Sept. 20 wrote that “one of themost striking elements of the new strategydocument is its insistence ‘that the presi-dent has no intention of allowing any for-eign power to catch up with the huge leadthe United States has opened up since thefall of the Soviet Union more than a decadeago. … Our forces will be strong enough,’Mr. Bush’s document states, ‘to dissuadepotential adversaries from pursuing a mil-itary buildup in hopes of surpassing, orequaling, the power of the United States.’ ”

The document is filled with militarythreats, including the right to first strike.From the point of view of the right-wingmilitary geostrategists in the U.S. estab-lishment, this document reads like theirdream come true—even though it is saidthat Bush “toned it down” in places be-cause it sounded “arrogant.” So now itdoesn’t?

But from the point of view of the rulingclass—the industrialists, bankers and mo-nopolists of the transnationals—other por-tions of this document also read very fa-vorably. They find it ever more appealingas the slow-motion stock market crash pro-ceeds, the phony profit reports and corpo-rate scandals pile up, and capitalist over-production, deflation and a decline of prof-its haunt the boardrooms.

The bosses and bankers of course pre-fer “stable” forms of plunder andexploitation—that work through theautomatic processes of corporate opera-tions supplemented by IMF extortion,bribery, industrial spying and so on.They will only opt for adventurism withthe prospect of instability when that isconsidered the lesser evil compared to aprotracted decline of profits and theprospect of economic collapse.

Ever since the outbreak of the Asian eco-nomic crisis in 1998, Federal Reserve Bankhead Alan Greenspan and the financial es-tablishment have been engaged in stavingoff an economic crisis. In fact, Greenspanhas poured hundreds of billions of dollarsinto the economy through direct bailoutsduring the 1998-99 period. By loweringinterest rates, the Fed delivered trillions ofdollars in cheap money to Wall Street.

Every area of economy stifled by surplus

A sweeping survey of business condi-tions in the Washington Post of Aug. 25gives a glimpse into what the ruling classhas been facing.

Describing the epidemic of capitalistoverproduction, or in bourgeois terms of“overcapacity,” the Post survey says “it canbe found these days in a wide swath: agri-culture, autos, advertising, chemicals,computer hardware and software, con-sulting and financial services, forest prod-ucts, furniture, mining, retail, steel, tex-tiles, telecommunications, trucking andelectric generation, just to mention a few.In almost every case, it is accompanied byprices that are flat or falling. …

“Flush with cheap money made avail-able by Wall Street, businesses of all sorts

Bush’s National Security Document

What drives U.S. capital to adventurism

rushed out and expanded their capacity,”continued the Post. By now over one quar-ter of the industrial establishment is lyingdormant—and that figure is getting higherevery day.

For the first time since the 1930s—theGreat Depression—the U.S. economy isfacing deflation, which means fewerprofits, less surplus value and eventuallyvast losses for the bosses, along withunemployment and hardship for theworking class.

Numerous examples are cited by thePost study. One is the airline industry: Air-line payrolls have been cut by 120,000 in12 months; another 100,000 layoffs areplanned. The Post reveals that 500 pas-senger jets, many of them brand new, siton the desert in Victorville, Calif. It showsthat “the airlines have begun to delay orcancel contracts for new planes and en-gines from Boeing, Airbus SAS, GeneralElectric, United Technologies Corp. andtheir vast network of suppliers.”

This process is duplicated in every in-dustry, from telecommunications to ho-tels to the legal profession.

Indeed, the U.S. ruling class has justcome through a lengthy period of revolu-tionizing production and communica-tions–the scientific-technological revolu-tion. Greenspan and others have boastedof the great rise in productivity, which re-ally means the rate of surplus value, or rateof exploitation of the workers. It is preciselythe tempestuous growth of the means ofproduction that is putting pressure on cap-italism worldwide.

U.S. capital’s problem is capitalism itself

Unlike German imperialism in the1930s, U.S. imperialism is not a power re-stricted in its sphere of exploitation by anyimperialist rivals. On the contrary, the U.S.transnational banks and corporations areall over the world, with production facili-ties, sales outlets and financial offices.

Yet this new generation of modernizedcapitalist industry is so powerfully pro-ductive that the present state of U.S. impe-rialist expansion is totally insufficient tomake all this vast investment profitable.Like the German imperialists of the 1930s,the U.S. finance capitalists are feeling moreand more constrained and more and moreamenable to Bush’s New World Order ad-venturism.

The NSS document says that one of itsprincipal aims is “to ignite a new era ofgrowth through free markets and freetrade.”

Washington will use “our economic en-gagement with other countries” to promote“pro-growth legal and regulatory policies

to encourage business investment,” “taxpolicies that improve incentives for workand investment,” “strong financial systemsthat allow capital to be put to its most effi-cient use,” “sound fiscal policies to sup-port business activity,” “free trade that pro-vides for new avenues of growth.”

The document is laced with referencesdirected straight at the bottom-line profitinterests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Butall this is linked to military and politicaldomination of the world.

The fact that it was leaked in the midstof the debate over Iraq tends to send a mes-sage to the ruling class that a war againstIraq is just part of a much broader plan tosolve their problems. Yes, the Bush-Ch-eney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Wolfowitz groupwants to destroy the Iraqi Revolution of1958. Yes, they want to seize the 110 billionbarrels of oil. But they know that the over-production crisis of a capitalist economythat produces a $10-trillion GDP cannot besolved merely by conquering Iraq.

Document aimed at China

In fact, the document aims straight atthe People’s Republic of China, telling theleadership there to stop developing theirmilitary and that only capitalist restorationis acceptable to Washington. It denouncesthe Chinese leaders because they “have notyet made the next series of fundamentalchoices about the character of their state.”

The document makes all manner of ar-rogant political and social demands–thusholding out the prospect to the ruling classhere that somehow the Bush administra-tion will bring about “Lebensraum” in thatland of 1.3 billion people. In addition, thedocument alludes to further opening upIndia and Russia.

This document was penned by a grouprooted in the Reagan and Bush adminis-trations and the period of the collapse ofthe USSR, the retreat of China, and set-backs for the national liberation struggles.Their thinking has been shaped bycounter-revolution, which they regard aspermanent.

The fundamental assumption of the en-tire document is that the masses of theworld, including the workers and the op-pressed right here at home, will remain inretreat forever. That is what makes the en-tire document delusionary.

Indeed, the Bush group is trying to es-cape the contradictions of capitalismthrough adventurism. It is a prescriptionfor reawakening the mass struggle and ul-timately undoing the so-called New WorldOrder.

Goldstein is a member of the Secretariat of Workers World Party. �

By Fred Goldstein

“The National Security Document of theUnited States,” which codifies the Bushdoctrine of the New World Order, wasleaked to the New York Times on Sept. 19,before it was scheduled to be submitted toCongress. The source of the leak may be amatter of speculation, but it was timed tocoincide with the debate over the launch-ing of an unprovoked war of outright ag-gression against Iraq.

It also came just days after German Min-ister of Justice Herta Daubler-Gmelin issaid to have declared that PresidentGeorge W. Bush was using the Iraq war todivert attention from problems at home,just as Hitler did. This statement causedconsternation in Washington. ChancellorGerhardt Schroeder, who won the electiondespite a barrage of criticism from the U.S.,then fired the justice minister as bourgeoiscommentators everywhere complainedhow outrageous it was to compare Bush toAdolph Hitler.

To be sure, Hitler was a fascist dictatorwho came to power in 1933 in a situationof extreme social crisis. The economic de-pression was leading to a civil war betweenthe workers and the capitalist class inwhich the question of which class wouldwield power was emerging.

Hitler consolidated his power, afterbeing named chancellor, by unleashinghis storm troopers to carry out thebloody suppression of millions of com-munists, socialists and progressives andthe destruction of trade unions and allforms of working-class organization,using the dual themes of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism.

Today there is no generalized social cri-sis in the U.S. And even though Bush gotinto office by stealing the election from theDemocrats, he still presides over a politi-cal system of imperialist democracy. Yes,it is growing increasingly repressive andreactionary, with stronger incursions bythe military and the FBI. And it is becom-ing more racist against people of MiddleEastern origin.

However, the forms of capitalistdemocracy—for example, the legal exis-tence of trade unions—still exist for theworking class and the oppressed to uti-lize in their struggles.

In this respect, there is no compari-son. But the minister, whatever her pol-itics and whatever her motive, wasalluding to a different parallel that bearscritical examination.

The problem for German and U.S. capital

Hitler persuaded the German rulingclass to let him try to conquer all ofEurope and the Soviet Union. His talk ofestablishing a Third Reich to last for athousand years had a compelling appealto the powerful German financiers andindustrial capitalists.

Germany’s gigantic, modern and highlymilitarized industrial establishment wascapable of vast output, but it was con-strained by the other imperialist powersfrom grabbing the resource-rich colonialspheres of exploitation and plunder.

Their thirst for the kind of super-profitsbeing sucked out of the colonized world byBritain, France, Belgium and Holland wasthwarted. In this situation, the prospect ofa new economic and social crisis in Ger-many persuaded the bankers and thebosses to back the expansionist militaryadventurism of the Nazis.

In addition, they had supreme confi-dence in the mighty, modern German mil-

Unlike Germany in the 1930s,

U.S. imperialism is not

restricted in its sphere of

exploitation by any imperialist

rivals. Nonetheless, its

tremendous productive

capacity exceeds its present

markets. Like the German

imperialists of the 1930s, U.S.

finance capitalists are feeling

more and more constrained

and more amenable to Bush's

New World Order adventurism

Page 10 Oct. 3, 2002 www.workers.org

Lessons of the German election

With 10 percent of Germans un-employed, Gerhard Schröderhad little chance of reelection

as German chancellor. Ten points be-hind in the polls, he made a desperateattempt to stay in office. He decided toallocate government funds to repairflood damage in the East and, evenmore importantly, he decided to playthe peace card and run against Wash-ington.

If this sounds cynical, it might be be-cause we know that the Social DemocratSchröder and his Greens partnerJoschka Fischer had led German impe-rialism into its first major foreign ad-venture since World War II: the 1999war on Yugoslavia.

But the peace card was just the anti-dote for Schröder’s failing popularity.German public opinion was overwhelm-ingly against the U.S. plans to attackIraq. Schröder and Fischer campaignedheavily against the U.S.’s Iraq policyand promised they would never sendGerman troops into battle there.

Indeed, tens of thousands protestedBush’s visit to Berlin earlier this year,and U.S. open planning for an unjustifi-able attack on Iraq has since arousedmassive resistance in Germany. Unionsand anti-globalization groups havejoined traditional anti-war groups to or-ganize against German participation inthe U.S.-led war.

Enough people changed their votesby Sept. 22 that the “red-green” govern-ment of Schröder and Fischer won 306of the 603 seats in the German parlia-ment, a narrow majority. The rightistcandidate Edmund Stoiber wound up

with 295 votes for his coalition of Chris-tian Democrats and Free Democrats.

The Party of Democratic Socialism—which started the election with the bestanti-war credentials of the parliamen-tary parties—wound up another casu-alty of Schröder’s demagogy. It droppedbelow the undemocratic 5-percent mini-mum needed for proportional represen-tation and thus lost all but two of its 37seats. The PDS’s failure in recent con-gresses to take an absolutely clear anti-war position—as well as its recent par-ticipation in service-cutting state gov-ernments in the East—had also cost itsupport from its traditional base in east-ern Germany.

The war-mongering Bush adminis-tration was more than a little put out bySchröder’s election strategy. It got an-grier when one of Schröder’s cabinetwas quoted saying Bush’s policy of mak-ing war to distract from domestic fail-ures reminded her of Hitler’s. Fortelling this particular truth, she has nowbeen sacked.

Her firing has not yet satisfied theBush gang, who so far are refusing towelcome German imperialism—at leastunder the Schröder-Fischer leader-ship—back into the club.

Many German anti-war activists ex-pect Schröder to quickly reverse hisanti-war stand once safely in office.They point out that U.S. planes are stillusing German bases on their way to thePersian/Arabian Gulf, and a Germanspecial unit is still stationed in Kuwait.

They intend to keep the strong anti-war sentiment of the people mobilizedand ready to take to the streets. �

had called to criticize the siege, or evenmake a ritual call for “restraint,” making itclear that the Bush administration hadgiven Israel the green light necessary foran operation with such high stakes.

But over the next 24 hours the politicalscene shifted dramatically, due to two fac-tors: the mass mobilization of the Palestin-ian people; and the nearly unanimous in-ternational condemnation of the Sharongovernment’s actions.

Political scene shifts

Political demonstrations grew to thethousands and a general strike swept Gazaand the West Bank, including EastJerusalem. The assault on the PA head-quarters had a unifying effect.

In Gaza, armed demonstrations in-cluded members of Hamas, the PopularFront for the Liberation of Palestine(PFLP), Arafat’s Fatah party and others.

“Despite the different views between usand Mr. Arafat, Mr. Arafat is the presidentof the Palestinians,” said Hamasspokesperson Abdel Aziz Rantisi in an in-terview. “All Palestinians are united on thisissue, because we feel that attacking thepresident of the Palestinians is attacking allPalestinians.”

In Ramallah, thousands of youthsmarched on Sept. 23 despite the heavy tollof dead and wounded just two days earlier.“No one threatens our president,” 18-year-old Ali told the Washington Post. “Our pres-ident is elected by us and we protect him.”

The foreign ministers of many Euro-pean, Middle Eastern and other states con-demned the siege and demanded that it behalted. So strong was the wave of interna-tional condemnation that the U.S. alsobegan issuing statements critical of Israel,but using the mildest possible language.

A more-than-bizarre White House re-lease said that President George W. Bush“views what Israel is doing now as unhelp-ful to the cause of bringing about reform inPalestinian institutions.”

On Sept. 23, after U.S. attempts to derailit failed, the United Nations Security Coun-cil passed a resolution that called for:

• Israel to “immediately cease measuresin and around Ramallah, including the de-struction of Palestinian civilian and secu-rity infrastructure.”

• The “expeditious withdrawal of Israelioccupying forces” from Palestinian citiestoward positions held prior to September2000.

• The “complete cessation of all acts ofviolence, including all acts of terror, provo-

cation, incitement and destruction.”To Israel’s evident surprise, the U.S.,

while critical of the wording, did not vetothe resolution, abstaining instead. The res-olution passed 14 to 1. The U.S. has rou-tinely vetoed Security Council resolutionsthat criticized Israel.

U.S. posture tied to war plans

The Bush administration’s decision notto veto this resolution is very much tied toits plans for a new war against Iraq. Amajor concern for many in the foreign pol-icy/national security establishment is thewidespread anger against the U.S. that per-meates the Middle East because of Wash-ington’s military, economic and diplo-matic support for Israel.

For Washington to have vetoed a reso-lution against Israel’s assault on the Pales-tinian leadership and people, in the face ofglobal condemnation of Israeli actions,could have ignited a new round of anti-U.S.protests in the region. Such a developmentcould postpone or even undermine Bush’sIraq war plans, as happened in the springof this year.

Despite the vote at the UN, there is noindication that the latest Security Councilresolution condemning Israeli aggressionwill be enforced, any more than dozens ofsimilar resolutions against Israel over thepast three decades.

While the U.S. insists that Iraq must beattacked again if it doesn’t “fully comply”with all UN resolutions, it protects Israelfrom suffering any sanction or penalty forits defiance of the Security Council.

Defying the latest resolution as well, Is-rael has not pulled back from its siege inRamallah. And, the night after the UN vote,it launched the biggest military assault inyears on densely populated Gaza City. Is-raeli tanks and helicopters attacked in themiddle of the night.

The out-gunned Palestinians put upfierce resistance. Three Palestinian militiamembers and six civilians were killed. Atleast 24 people were injured in the attack.

It is especially important that interna-tional solidarity with the Palestinian peo-ple and their just cause be intensified in thecoming period.

A next step will be demonstrationsmarking the second anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (uprising) on Sept. 28 in SanFrancisco and Sept. 29 in Chicago, as wellas in many other cities worldwide.

As the international movement to stopa new U.S. war against Iraq grows, it mustalso raise the banner of justice and self-determination for Palestine. �

Israeli assaults ignitePalestinian resistanceContinued from page 1

WORKERSWORLDNEWSPAPERANTI-WAR ALERTWorkers World is watching thewar makers. We won’t let themcatch the progressivemovement unawares. Frominside the struggle againstracism, against lesbian and gayoppression, for reproductive freedom andworkers’ rights, we’re watchingthe enemy.

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WW PHOTO: PAT CHIN

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www.workers.org Oct. 3, 2002 Page 11

WWP conference maps struggleagainst capitalist war

Monica Moorehead discussed theimpact of U.S. intervention in Africa,and Johnnie Stevens of New Yorkreported on the importance of the strug-gle for land in Zimbabwe and the need tosupport Robert Mugabe’s initiative.Preston Wood spoke on the Palestinianstruggle on Saturday; the next dayRichard Becker of San Francisco pre-sented an update on the urgent situationcaused by Israel’s most recent aggres-sion against Palestinian PresidentArafat’s compound in Ramallah.

Guest speaker Peta Lindsay, a youthorganizer for the anti-war ANSWERCoalition in Washington, D.C., and afirst-year student at Howard University,infused the conference with the vitalityof this new movement. She has beendebating her pro-government politicalscience professor on virtually everyquestion discussed this semester, andhas been winning the argument so far asher fellow students are concerned.They’re forming groups across the cam-pus to build the demonstration on Oct.26 against a war on Iraq.

And the working class? NancyMitchell from San Francisco describedthe struggle of the very progressiveInternational Longshore Workers on theWest Coast, who are facing a majorshowdown with “the biggest and sleazi-est multinational corporations, hand inhand with the Bush administration,”which is threatening to use troops toload ships.

Mitchell described the ILWU’s activerole in the anti-war struggle. She alsopromised that “we’re going to be withthem all the way” should the currentlabor negotiations turn into an openstruggle of over 10,000 workers in 29ports along the coast.

Dorothea Peacock of Bostondescribed how women are forced to bearthe costs of war, and raised the slogans“Not on women’s backs!” and “No war,no way. It’s time for the bosses to pay!”

Cleveland autoworker MarthaGrevatt, a leader of the struggle for les-bian, gay, bi and trans rights in the autoindustry, raised the slogan, “Out of theclosets, no to the war!”

Andre Powell of Baltimore explainedthe just struggle for reparations forAfricans and the descendants of slavesand how “socialism is the best repara-tion.”

Five discussion groups gave everyonethe chance to exchange informationabout their local work and deepen theirunderstanding of the main politicalthemes of the conference. A main focusof the discussion was how to mobilize forthe national demonstrations on Oct. 26.

Activists from San Diego and NewJersey also reported a new opennessamong rank-and-file military personnelto anti-war leafleting. Others reportedthat troops and reservists had calledwanting to resist military service for awar against Iraq.

The reports from these discussiongroups to the entire conference made itclear that the members and friends wereenthusiastic about reaching out to allsectors of the working class with theanti-war message.

A worldwide front

Fred Goldstein opened the third ple-nary with a critique of Bush’s NationalSecurity Statement and its attempt tomobilize the U.S. imperialist ruling classfor an arrogant attempt to dominate theworld both militarily and economically.Other speakers referred to the Bush doc-trine also.

This naturally included discussionabout the many areas of the globe whereU.S. imperialism is actively intervening,either with military troops, sanctionsand/or subversion.

Lydia Bayoneta of Rochester spoke onthe U.S. moves to reoccupy thePhilippines under the cover of the “waron terror.” Rebeca Toledo of New Yorkdescribed the attempts to overthrow theelected government of Hugo Chavez inVenezuela. Alicia Jrapko of SanFrancisco showed how neo-liberalismand the international banks had broughtthe Argentine economy to its knees.Berta Joubert of Philadelphia spoke ofthe continued struggle of the people ofVieques, Puerto Rico, to get the U.S.Navy off their island.

Teresa Gutierrez discussed the conse-quences of Sept. 11, 2001. Gloria La Rivafrom San Francisco, who addressed theMay Day demonstrators in Havana thisyear, called for continueddefense of the five heroicCubans held in U.S. prisonsfor having monitored anti-Cuban terrorist groups inMiami. The prisoners sentmessages of solidarity to theWWP conference.

There were also guestspeakers: Khadouri al-Kaysidescribed conditions in Iraq;an exiled trade unionist dis-cussed the situation for theworking class in Colombia;and Yoomi Jeong of theKorea Truth Commissionreported on the state of thestruggle against U.S. troopsin south Korea. ��

In reports on repression at home,Gloria Verdieu of San Diego spoke of thestruggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal andthe growth of the prison-industrial com-plex. Dianne Mathiowetz of Atlanta andBev Hiestand of Buffalo describedrecent frame-ups of individuals from theArab and Muslim communities in theirregions.

A highlight of that session came withthe introduction of Haitian immigrantMarcus Jean, a guest speaker fromBoston. Union activist SteveKirschbaum described organizing sup-port for Jean against phony “terroristthreat” charges his boss made to combathis union activity.

The role of the party

The final session, led off by WorkersWorld newspaper editor DeirdreGriswold, discussed the essential role ofa revolutionary Marxist party in com-bating the plans of the imperialist rulingclass and defending the workers andoppressed peoples worldwide.

In almost all directing bodies in U.S.capitalist society, from the U.S. Senateto the boards of directors of the majorcorporations, the composition reflectsall the biases and special oppressionsbuilt into the imperialist system. Thusaside from a few token representativeswho are women or people of color, thesebodies are composed of white men, usu-ally with Anglo-Saxon names.

For many observers, perhaps themost impressive thing about the WWPconference was that over 60 percent ofthe 52 people who took the podium werewomen, 40 percent were people of color,many were activists in the gay, lesbian,bi and trans struggles, and all were notonly eloquent speakers but obviouslyleading organizers in many areas. It wasa promise for the future. �

crisis, the resistance to an anti-worker,anti-immigrant and racist offensive, andthe building of the party.

Larry Holmes opened the conferenceby characterizing Bush’s NationalSecurity Statement, released the daybefore, as a call to “beat up and bullyeveryone to get your way.”

Holmes had just returned from anInternational Solidarity Conference inBaghdad, where 170 delegates from 80countries expressed their solidarity withthe Iraqi people. He was part of a dele-gation from the International ActionCenter, along with Teresa Gutierrez andKhadouri al-Kaysi.

Holmes pointed out that what theworking-class and anti-war movementdoes inside the United States “has to bedecisive. Everybody is depending onwhat we do.”

Will the war crisis and the economiccrisis “wake up the working class andmelt away its passivity? We are obligedto act as though the answer is affirma-tive,” said Holmes.

‘Can U.S. workers stop the war?’

Sara Flounders and Brian Becker, wellknown as leaders of the anti-war move-ment in the U.S., both exposed the Bushadministration’s lack of popular andpolitical support for the invasion of Iraq.Successful resistance to this war mightbe difficult, they said, but it is possible.

They also explained the importantrole of Workers World Party in the anti-war movement. Becker related whathappened a year ago, following Sept. 11,2001, and the Bush administration’srapid mobilization for war.

WWP decided quickly to confront theheavy propaganda offensive, and urgedthat anti-globalization actions set forSept. 29, 2001, be turned into anti-waractions. This resolve to resist the tide ofreaction emboldened courageous anti-war groups and individuals, helping togive birth to the ANSWER coalition.

Flounders compared the current slo-gan being raised by some in the move-ment of “inspections, not war” to the slo-gan raised during the 1991 Gulf War of“sanctions, not war.” She pointed outthat “inspections ARE war” in anotherform, as Washington’s demands for“aggressive inspections” are reallymeant to provoke Iraq and create a pre-text for an attack.

Flounders prepared party activists tostruggle within the movement on thisquestion, at the same time as they buildan anti-war demonstration on Oct. 26that includes all forces opposing the war.

Continued from page 1

‘Hands off Iraq! Build a Workers World!’

This conference of workers fighting for a socialist solutionto capitalist war, depression and racism reflects the richdiversity of the U.S. working class in nationality, genderand sexual expression.

Por Alicia Jrapko(miembro del Comité Libertad para los Cinco de San Francisco,California)

Para millones de cubanos, las condi-ciones en la que viven los Cinco PresosPolíticos Cubanos en prisiones norteam-ericanas, es una de sus mayores preocupa-ciones. Estos Cinco cubanos quienes entreotras cosas fueron acusados de espionaje,enfrentan sentencias desde 15 años a doscadenas perpetuas. Desde que fueron sen-tenciados en Diciembre del 2001, los Cincofueron trasladados a diferentes prisionesfederales alrededor del país. Era obvio queel gobierno de los Estados Unidos pre-tendió separarlos en un intento de doble-gar la fuerza y moral que los Cinco patrio-tas mostraron en la Corte.

Las condiciones de las diferentes pri-siones donde se encuentran los Cinco,varían entre ellas, y reflejan tanto el climapolítico del estado donde se encuentran,como así también el nivel de seguridad decada prisión.

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, quien en-frenta la sentencia más severa de dos ca-denas perpetuas y 80 meses, se encuentraen la prisión federal de Lompoc en el Surde California. A la prisión de Lompoc lallaman “The New Rock” (La Nueva Roca)porque fue la prisión que sustituyó a laprisión de Alcatraz que era conocida como“The Rock” (La Roca). Allí son enviadospresos que han tenido algún problema dedisciplina en otras cárceles, y si por 18meses sus comportamientos mejoran losasignan a cárceles de menor rigor.

Las celdas son pequeñas ya que Lompoces una prisión muy antigua. Cadamovimiento de los presos está controlado.Por ejemplo para ir al comedor, a la bib-lioteca o al patio, solo se puede hacercuando se anuncia un “movimiento” através de los altoparlantes. Gerardo se lev-anta a las 5:50 de la mañana al igual quelos demás prisioneros. En ese momento,los guardias abren automáticamente lasrejas de todas las celdas y de allí los presospueden salir para las áreas comunes de launidad. Entre las 6:15 y las 6:30 llamanpara el desayuno. Después del desayuno lospresos regresan a sus celdas o a las áreascomunes donde alrededor de las 7:45 lla-man para ir al trabajo.

En las prisiones federales, es obligatoriotrabajar. La compañía que opera todas lasproducciones de las prisiones se llama“Unicor”. En Lompoc hay tres fábricas, unaensambladora de cables, una imprenta yuna fabrica de señales. Las tres fábricas seencuentran adentro de la prisión. Con-seguir trabajo en las fábricas no es fácil yaque muchos prisioneros quieren trabajaren ellas. Aunque el pago es ínfimo, paramuchos presos, el trabajo es la única fuentede ingreso que tienen. Si los prisioneros noconsiguen trabajo en la fábrica, son asig-nados a otras tareas, como limpieza, lacocina o servicios, etc.

En los Estados Unidos, la industria de lasprisiones, ocupa el segundo lugar enrelación a la cantidad de personas que tra-

bajan en ella. La corporación de pri-siones federales genera gananciasexorbitantes. Los presos gananentre 23 centavos a $1.15 por hora,mientras que el salario mínimofuera de las prisiones es de $5.15 porhora. En estos momentos ese salarioni siquiera se acerca a la cantidadnecesaria para satisfacer las necesi-dades básicas de una familia.

Gerardo gana un promedio deentre 60 y 80 dólares por mes, o seaaproximadamente 50 centavos porhora. El fue asignado a un trabajode mucha responsabilidad. No esprecisamente porque quieran queGerardo se supere o tenga un mejorbienestar, sino porque se dieroncuenta de que Gerardo poseía unnivel de educación y conocimientoel cual podían utilizar para benefi-cio de la fábrica. No es sorpresa, yaque Gerardo al igual que los otros 4patriotas rehenes del imperio, fueeducado en Cuba, donde todas laspersonas tienen acceso a la edu-cación gratuita y de indiscutible cal-idad, desde el jardín de infanteshasta las escuelas de graduados ypost-graduados.

Gerardo trabaja en una computadora,donde se encuentran todas las bases dedatos de la fábrica y está a cargo de entrarlas órdenes, llevar los récords, redactar lasórdenes y pasarlas a producción, cerrar lasórdenes cuando son enviadas a los clientes,hacer los informes de ventas y los estatusde órdenes, y además, él responde acualquier solicitud de datos.

Debido a la difusión del caso dentro yfuera de los Estados Unidos, Gerardorecibe entre 5 a 10 cartas por día proce-dentes de todas partes del mundo y al igualque los otros 4 patriotas Cubanos, se haganado el corazón de miles de personasamantes de la paz y la justicia. Su mayorpreocupación es no tener suficiente tiempopara contestar todas esas cartas pero tratade responder a todas las personas que leescriben, aunque la respuesta tenga que de-morar en llegarles. Su deseo es expresar suagradecimiento por todo el apoyo y buenosaugurios que le llegan de todas partes, y asu vez disculparse por no tener el tiemposuficiente para contestar con prontitudcada una de las cartas que recibe diaria-mente. Para él, las cartas de solidaridad sonmuy alentadoras y lo estimula saber quehay tanta gente que lo apoya.

Lo que es evidente en Gerardo, es su ha-bilidad para permanecer fuerte y compro-metido con la lucha para defender a supueblo y a pesar de las adversidades, con-serva su gran sentido del humor. Gerardono tiene ninguna duda de que un día serálibre y podrá regresar a su amada patria.

Desde hace dos meses, Gerardo está soloen su celda ya que su “celly” como le lla-man allí a un compañero de celda fue en-viado a otra prisión. Para él, ésta es unagran ventaja, ya que al estar solo, esta unpoco más cómodo y además puede adornarla celda a su gusto. Él tiene en su celda dosmurales que consiguió con mucha persis-

tencia, adornados con fotos de Fidel, el Che,Mandela, imágenes del pueblo cubano enlas tribunas abiertas y marchas, dibujosque le enviaron los pioneros y fotos de man-ifestaciones de los grupos de solidaridad.

En lo posible, uno de los dos días del finde semana, trata de salir al patio despuésdel almuerzo para hacer ejercicio y tomarsol y el otro día del fin de semana loaprovecha para lavar y secar su ropa,limpiar su celda y continuar con la corre-spondencia acumulada. Los sábados sonespeciales para él ya que en lo posible escuando trata de llamar a Cuba y hablar consus seres queridos.

En la prisión de Lompoc hay alrededorde 20 cubanos y en la unidad donde estáGerardo, son 6 incluyéndolo a él. Todos sonMarielitos y aunque muchos de ellos ya hancumplido sus sentencias, están retenidospor Inmigración, por tiempo indefinido.Algunos de ellos llevan desde diez, quincey hasta veinte años presos. Esta situaciónha sido creada por el cruel e inmoral blo-queo económico impuesto por los EstadosUnidos en contra de Cuba desde hace 43años, y debido a ello, no existe tratado deextradición entre ambos países. Lasituación de los cubanos detenidos in-definidamente no es solo un fenómeno dela prisión de Lompoc; lamentablementeson miles y se encuentran en todas las pri-siones del país.

Muchos de los cubanos que están en laprisión con Gerardo, no tienen ningún con-tacto con sus familiares y él, en una mues-tra de solidaridad y buenos sentimientos,ha ayudado a algunos de ellos a localizar asus familiares en Cuba. Gerardo se hizoalgo conocido debido a este noble gesto yhasta presos norteamericanos le han pe-dido que los ayude a localizar a sus famil-iares. Muchos de los Cubanos que se en-

cuentran en prisión con Gerardo,consideran que haber salido deCuba ha sido el error más grandede sus vidas y algunos se declaranabiertamente revolucionarios.Muchos de ellos le han pedido aGerardo fotografiarse con ellos yhan enviado las fotografías a susfamiliares en Cuba. Otros hancompartido con él las cartas quereciben de sus familiares donde

les piden que cuiden a Gerardo, y que seansolidarios con el.

Pero el caso de Gerardo al igual que elcaso de los otros cuatro patriotas Cubanos,también es conocido por otros presos. Var-ios han leído los alegatos y algunos le hanpedido que les regale un libro firmado porel. Hay varios presos negros que regular-mente le piden prestado algunos de los ma-teriales en ingles que él recibe, para leer-los. Muchos de ellos siguen muy de cercael caso de Mumia Abu-Jamal y varios lehan expresado a Gerardo su admiraciónpor Fidel.

Gerardo tiene una radio y su mayor an-helo es sintonizar una radio proveniente desu patria. Como buen cubano, acostum-brado a resolver cualquier problema, hahecho varios intentos por sintonizar RadioHabana Cuba. Después de varios intentos,logró sintonizar la BBC de Londres dondea cierta hora puede escuchar un servicioen español y además, después del servicioen español Gerardo logra sintonizar RHCen Ingles. Aunque con muy baja frecuen-cia, y casi sin poder escuchar lo que dicenen la radio, sin embargo puedo alegrar sucorazón escuchando música y sobre todocomo bien dice Gerardo, se “carga lasbaterías” con el Himno.

A diferencia de otros prisioneros en losEstados Unidos, Gerardo, Ramón, René,Fernando, y Antonio, son los únicos pri-sioneros políticos que tienen el apoyo in-condicional de todo su pueblo. Ellos aden-tro de prisiones norteamericanas y la in-mensa mayoría del pueblo Cubano libranla misma batalla. La batalla por la libre au-todeterminación de ese pueblo heroico yel derecho de defenderse en contra de todotipo de agresiones.

Ellos mas temprano que tarde regre-sarán a su patria. �

Los días de Gerardo enla prisión de Lompoc

Ramón Labañino, René González.

WW PHOTO: ALICIA JRAPKO

De izquierda a derecho:Gerardo Hernández, AntonioGuerrero, Fernando Gonzalez