Another socialist blog

A lot of people opposed to capitalism in general, and the Bush administration in particular, have pointed out that those now in power have no particular love of democracy. Some of us have even made wild allegations that the Bush regime is simply fascist, and looking to dismantle what little democracy we presently enjoy in the U.S., and have been dismissed as hysterical for our trouble. Hold that thought.

Enter Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge follows the administration party line, unsupported by any evidence, that the September 11th attacks were motivated by hatred of democracy (as opposed to anger with American foreign policy). Ridge now asserts, again without presenting any evidence, that al Qaeda plans a terrorist attack to disrupt the U.S. elections this November. The political convenience of this claim is obvious: more terrorism fear is good for Bush, and if al Qaeda’s supposed target is the electoral process itself, then the terror will increase right up until election day.

But why stop at that? If they can postpone the election, they can prolong the terror, and just such a postponement is being openly contemplated. Bush may be permitted to put off the election until the time of his own choosing—i.e., whenever his propagandists have managed to turn around his poll numbers.

Let’s do the math together now: we are assured that the threat of terrorism is unending, therefore the so-called “War on Terror” is unending, which means the threat to disrupt the elections is ongoing, so therefore we may have to postpone the election for a long, long time. We’ll get back to you on that.

Stephen C. Pelletiere and Lt. Col. Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College have challenged one of the most cherished propaganda treasures of the U.S. war effort: that Saddam Hussein deliberately used poison gas against Iraqi Kurds.

A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Iran, not Iraq, carried out the gas attack at Halabja, which the U.S. has publicly blamed on Saddam. Further, evidence of the gas attack at Amadiyyah, also blamed on Saddam, is limited to eyewitness reports collected by the U.S. No bodies were produced to support the allegations of a gas attack, and the eyewitness reports did not describe symptoms that match any known chemical.

It would be shocking indeed if the Bush administration were caught using Big Lie tactics again, would it not?

See my previous entry on the gassing of Iraqis by the British, for which Winston Churchill was not punished but rather rewarded.

I’ve taken up the topic of electronic voting security on several previous occasions. Now The Register presents a well-thought-out article on getting electronic voting security right. The main point is not the obvious one:

[T]he paper trail remains security fool’s gold, made popular merely because it’s easily grasped. What’s needed instead are commonsense security protocols to make e-voting systems resistant to tampering, to make it evident when tampering has occurred, and to make it possible to stage a reliable recount.

Since the flags continue to fly at half-staff in memory of Ronald Reagan, it’s worth showing you this piece by Isaac Asimov on the subject of the Reagan Doctrine. Asimov dissects Reagan’s infamous comment, regarding the Soviet Union, that “No one who disbelieves in God and in an afterlife can possibly be trusted.”

If this is true (and it must be if the president says so), then people are just naturally dishonest and crooked and downright rotten. In order to keep them from lying and cheating every time they open their mouths, they must be bribed or scared out of doing so….

It’s a little depressing, if you come to think of it. By the Reagan Doctrine, there is no such thing as a person who keeps his word just because he has a sense of honor. No one tells the truth just because he thinks that it is the decent thing to do. No one is kind because he feels sympathy for others, or treats others decently because he likes the kind of world in which decency exists.

Reagan’s supporters did not think it strange then, and do not think it strange now, that a habitual liar would lecture us on whom we should trust.

NPR reported this morning on the damage to the ancient Babylonian temple caused by the construction of an American military base, Camp Alpha, directly on top of it. Archeologists describe the damage as “horrifying.” Among other things, large areas have been bulldozed.

I’ve discussed previously the apparent American indifference to Iraqi antiquities.

Wired is reporting that several major U.S. airlines have turned over sensitive passenger data to the Department of Homeland Security, including home phone numbers, credit card numbers and health data, without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission. The admission by Transportation Security Administration acting chief David Stone contradicts sworn testimony by TSA officials.

In November 2003, the senators … asked Stone’s predecessor, retired Adm. James Loy, whether “any contractors working on CAPPS II used any real-world data for testing purposes.” Loy led the TSA from July 2002 until he was promoted to the second-highest position in the Department of Homeland Security in October 2003.

Loy’s sworn written response was, “No. TSA has not used any (passenger) data to test any of the functions of CAPPS II.”

Ronald Wilson Reagan died Saturday. The media will be filled with praise for this “great” American president for the next week. Few commentators are likely to review Reagan’s record of terrorism, war crimes, and lies. Let us scratch the surface.

Reagan funded the contra terrorists in their war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Among other atrocities, the contras targeted volunteer literacy teachers and health care workers for murder. For this Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters”. Not all our aggression against Nicaragua was through proxies; Reagan had the CIA mine Nicaragua’s harbors in an illegal effort to destroy that country’s economy. The Sandanistas took their case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (popularly known as the World Court) and won, though the administration refused in advance to recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

Reagan prosecuted a war of aggression against Grenada, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. Perhaps 500 civilians were killed. Reagan claimed that the invasion was a “rescue mission” for American medical students, but there is convincing evidence that this was a lie.

The medical school’s chancellor, Charles Modica, polled students and found that 90% did not want to be evacuated. Despite repeated inquiries as to whether Washington was considering military action, he was told nothing of the sort was being considered. As the invasion commenced, Dr. Modica angrily denounced the invasion as totally unnecessary and a far greater risk to the students’ safety than Grenada’s domestic crisis. Vice-chancellor Geoffrey Bourne and Bursar Gary Solin also declared their steadfast opposition. The U.S. media focused great attention on the students who were first evacuated and “debriefed” by U.S. officials who generally supported the invasion. However, virtually no attention was given to those who stayed behind, who tended to be more familiar with the island and who largely opposed U.S. intervention. There were no confirmed reports of any American civilians harmed or threatened before or during the invasion. It was three days after U.S. troops initially landed before they decided to take control of the second medical school campus, raising questions as to whether the safety of Americans was really the foremost priority.

Reagan lavished U.S. government support on every right-wing government or movement in Central America, no matter how brutal.

The death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

By comparison with these crimes, Reagan’s telling lies about his military record pales by comparison.

On November 29, 1983 Reagan told Isreali Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he himself had assisted in the liberation of the Nazi death camps. On February 15, 1984, he repeated this clain to Simon Wiesenthal. On March 3, 1984, Cannon wrote a column confirming that both Shamir and Wiesenthal had heard the preposterous claim. Shamir had even retailed the story to the Isreali Cabinet, an incident corroborated by the Cabinet Secretary, Dan Merridor. In The Nation for March 4, 1985, Alexander Cockburn made some pithy comments on the claim in the light of Bitburg. Just after his column went to press, Reagan told a group of foreign journalists: “Yes, I know all about things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself.” Even the minor detail is a lie here: Reagan’s war service was notoriously confined to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps at the Hal Roach studios in Hollywod, where he never donned a uniform.

Never mind the phony Medal of Honor story that he featured in his stump speeches:

His infamous WWII anecdote, delivered to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in 1983, involved a damaged B-17’s captain who told his trapped gunner, “We’ll ride it down together,” after the rest of the crew had bailed out. Except it wasn’t real at all: it came from the film, A Wing and a Prayer, a fact that most ignored when Reagan explained that the noble captain was posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor himself.

or this anti-Sandinista whopper:

Reagan once told a story about agents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government pulling a freedom-loving newspaper editor from his home and executing him in front of his pleading children. He related this tale with unbridled anger and contempt for cowards who would do such a thing. But like many a Reagan tale told with utter conviction, it was an utter fabrication. When the Great Communicator’s press office was asked for the details of this atrocity, they had to admit it hadn’t happened — or anything like it.

Public commons or corporate tollway? Nigel McFarlane writes that the new browser war is Microsoft versus the Web.

Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it’s really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s blocking tactic: never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun, and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.

The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global infrastructurea global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of stock market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For Microsoft, the best possible outcome is for the standards-based web to be reduced to the profitless: a few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, and the disaffected. Few others will want to go there; so every day there will be fewer traditional websites, every day less relevance.

sys·tem·at·ic
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin systematicus, from Greek systEmatikos, from systEmat-, systEma
1 : relating to or consisting of a system
2 : presented or formulated as a coherent body of ideas or principles <systematic thought>
3 a : methodical in procedure or plan <a systematic approach> <a systematic scholar> b : marked by thoroughness and regularity <systematic efforts>

It’s been reported that American soldiers and the officers who commanded them attempted to hide the systematic abuse of Iraqi inmates from the Red Cross. And this allegation isn’t from some anti-war peace politician, but from no less than Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former head of US military prisons in Iraq, who has nothing to gain by exaggerating the crimes committed under her command.

That word “systematic” is the interesting part of this story. Gen. Karpinski describes not isolated instances, but “patterns of abuse.” While the White House insists that abuses of prisoners “will not be tolerated,” and “do not reflect the nature of the American people or American troops in Iraq,” it’s painfully clear that were tolerated and do reflect the nature of the American troops in Iraq, as evidenced by the fact that the abuses were widespread and involved officers.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, U.S. policy will be changed to “do not abuse the prisoners.”

International Workers Day, or May Day, is a day of celebration, remembrance and solidarity. On the first of May, workers throughout the world demonstrate for better working conditions, socio-economic equality, universal healthcare and education, and the right to unionize and strike. But, to best understand why workers in America should celebrate May Day, we need to know its history.

The 19th century witnessed some of the worst acts of barbarity in the workplace. Women, children and immigrants were used as a source of cheap and obedient labor, working conditions were outrageous, unions were small and brutally repressed, and workers spent 10, 12 or 14 hours a day making profit for the bosses. It was capitalism at its best.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) passed a resolution demanding the eight-hour workday, starting from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike; by April 1886, over 250,000 Americans had heeded the call. The eight-hour movement was growing rapidly and radically, especially in Chicago.

On May 3, 1886, following some successes, strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory in Chicago faced police batons and bullets. Four workers were killed and many injured. Immediately afterwards, a local group of anarchists organized an anti-police brutality rally in Haymarket Square. On May 4, thousands came out for the evening rally without incident.

As the last speaker took to the platform the rally had dwindled down to a couple hundred, and nearly 200 police officers moved in to disperse the crowd. In the shuffle, a bomb was thrown among the police, killing one and injuring dozens, resulting in police gunfire, which killed or injured an unknown number of workers.

This event became known as the Haymarket Tragedy (or "Haymarket Riot"), and saw a sharp increase in police repression of anarchists, socialists and unionists.

Eight prominent Chicago anarchists — August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg and Oscar Neebe — were arrested, tried and convicted of conspiracy in the Haymarket bombing by a rigged jury and biased judge, with little evidence and even though only one was actually at the rally (and he was a speaker on the platform).

Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887; Louis Lingg committed suicide the day before his execution on November 10, 1887; Illinois Governor Altgeld pardoned Fielden, Schwab and Neebe on June 26, 1893.

In 1889, the founding congress of the Second (Socialist) International met in Paris, France, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, and called for a worldwide demonstration for the eight-hour day.

May 1, 1890, saw mass demonstrations throughout Europe and the Americas. Frederick Engels, who attended the first May Day demonstration in London on May 3, wrote: "As I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces; it is mobilized for the first time as one army, under one flag, and fighting for one immediate aim: an eight-hour working day."
In 1904, the Second (Socialist) International declared May 1 an annual day of demonstration "for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat and for universal peace."

Unfortunately, May Day began to lose importance in the United States, its place of origin. In 1894, the U.S. government declared the first Monday in September as Labor Day, with the aim of pulling the labor movement away from the radical nature of May Day. The American Federation of Labor (successor to the FOTLU) was becoming one of the largest unions in America and, by 1905, had gone with the government in supporting Labor Day and disavowing May Day altogether.

To add insult to injury, the American Bar Association declared May 1 a celebration of the principles and practices of capitalist law and order — Law Day. Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower established Law Day by proclamation in 1958. It’s especially ironic that May 1 would be used to celebrate the power of law, which is exactly what was used to murder Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel.

Today, International Workers’ Day is celebrated throughout the world and is recognized as the official workers’ holiday in almost every country, except the United States. Each year, millions of workers demonstrate, wave flags and carry banners, sing and dance, educate, organize and agitate for a better, peaceful tomorrow.

As workers of the world, it is our duty to remember our past and to use that strength to carry our class into the future. As the great socialist and unionist Eugene V. Debs said in 1907, "This is the first and only International Labor Day. It belongs to the working class and is dedicated to the revolution."