The Left, Labor and Occupy (tags)
Barely half a year after it burst on the scene, the Occupy Wall Street movement is splintering left and right. This was inevitable in a movement that was united only in what it opposed and could never put forward a positive program, whether of reformist "demands" on the capitalist state or of revolutionary action against it. Liberals, who latched onto Occupy hoping it could pressure the Democratic Party in a more populist direction, want to expel "black bloc" anarchists. Reformist social democrats rail against "ultraleftists" in Occupy and cozy up to the labor tops. On the other side, many (but not all) anarchists oppose unions. Some are simply arrogant petty-bourgeois labor haters. Others are grappling with real problems, but with skewed analysis and dead wrong conclusions. Discussion of recent workers' struggles, from Wisconsin to West Coast longshore, underlines that the key question is leadership, but not just replacing one set of bureaucrats with another. Unions have always faced vicious anti-labor laws, but we have the power to defeat them. It is necessary to drive out the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, the labor lieutenants of capital, in order to turn the unions into instruments of revolutionary class struggle.
The Great Game: U.S., NATO War In Afghanistan: Is the Entire World the Target? (tags)
"The longest war in American history prior to the current one was that in Vietnam. U.S. military advisers were present in the country from the late 1950s onward and covert operations were carried on in the early 1960s, but only in the year after the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident - 1965 - did the Pentagon begin major combat operations in the south and regular bombing raids in the north. The last American combat unit left South Vietnam in 1972, seven years later. The U.S. (and Britain) began bombing the Afghan capital of Kabul on October 7, 2001 with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships and submarines and bombs dropped from warplanes and shortly thereafter American special forces began ground operations, a task that has been conducted since by regular Army and Marine units. The bombing and the ground combat operations continue more than eight years later and both will be intensified to record levels in short order."
of useless bloodshed
Unqualified Slogans: “Win” and “Way Forward” (tags)
As America faces the most calamitous military misadventure in its history, the administration offers unqualified slogans rather than detailed plans to remedy the horror it created in Iraq. The American mass media is now buzzing with the sound of nothing meaningful. The Bush administration has resorted to contextually meaningless slogans in its efforts to dupe an increasingly sceptical public. The latest inane slogans saturating the airwaves are “win” and “way forward”. Only adolescents and the daft invest meaning in unqualified slogans – shall we test the latest two slogans and attempt to determine the ruse behind the deception?
U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney, today praised the outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, for his contribution in spreading ‘democracy and liberty’ to the Middle East; Cheney also claimed that Rumsfeld was the “best” Secretary of Defence in U.S. history – additional evidence that the U.S. administration is INSANE is no longer required!
A symbol of American manufacturing’s decline: Ford to slash 44,000 jobs (tags)
Ford Motor Company on Friday announced a plan to drastically downsize its North American operations, cutting about a third of its salaried employees and offering buyouts to all of its hourly workers in the United States. The move—an acceleration and intensification of the company’s “Way Forward” plan announced in January—is aimed at cutting annual operating costs by $5 billion.