The Rag Blog

As everyone except for a dwindling band of Bush supporters now knows, the US is in a terrible situation in Iraq from which it cannot extract itself. For Bush and Cheney, their own pride and delusion are more compelling than US casualties, the destruction of Iraq and its people, and the inflaming of sectarian strife and anti-American violence throughout the Middle East.

Congress is complicit in the great strategic blunder. Republican flag-wavers led Americans like lemmings into the abyss. The Democrats have already abandoned the electorate that gave them Control of Congress six months ago in the false hope that the Democrats would corral the White House Moron and lead America out of the abyss.

Like the Republicans, the Democrats serve the few special interest groups that benefit, or believe that they benefit, from the war. By now we all know who these groups are: the oil industry, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby, AIPAC. This contrived war, based on lies and deception, serves no other interest.

There is no longer any question whatsoever, not a single sliver of doubt, that Americans were deceived into this disastrous war. The President of the United States lied to the American people, as did the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of Defense, as did every neoconservative in the Bush administration, think tanks, and media.

The fact that the American people were lied to and deceived does not absolve them from blame. The lie was transparent, the logic nonexistent, the true facts available and easy to discover.

America failed, because the American people failed. The American people failed, because their self-righteousness and their hubris made them easy saps for deception.

Even now after five years of a disastrous policy, Republicans cannot accept the facts about the US invasion and failed occupation of Iraq. At the recent “debate” between Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina, US Representative Ron Paul dared to tell the truth. Rep. Paul said that our difficulties in the Middle East are “blowback” from our government’s determined attempts to exercise hegemony over the Middle East.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani, a person who sunk so low as to frame innocents while serving as US Attorney in order to boost his name recognition , played the self-righteous card to extreme. How dare Ron Paul suggest that US policy toward Muslims has anything whatsoever to do with attacks on the US! With all the outrage he could muster, Guiliani asked Rep. Paul “to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

The thunderous applause from the Republican audience to Guiliani’s put-down of the only honest person present underlines that the Republican Party is incapable of leadership to end a futile and lost war that under international standards is a war crime, an unprovoked naked aggression based entirely on lies, deception and a secret agenda.

At other times, the Republican audience applauded in support of torture and greeted John McCain’s protest against the practice with cold silence.

In the opening years of the 21st century the Republicans have made it clear that they are willing to sacrifice the US Constitution and Bill of Rights in order to wage “war against terrorism.” This willingness makes the Republican Party a more dangerous threat to Americans than Muslim terrorists. Muslim terrorists cannot destroy our country’s reputation, trash our civil liberties and wreck our system of accountable government, but the Republican Party has done a thorough job of it.

The Democratic Party is complicit in the Republican Party’s crimes, but unlike the Republican electorate, the Democratic electorate does not support the occupation, the domestic police state measures, and the Bush administration’s decision to send more combat troops to Iraq. Although none of the current frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination are independent of the special interests that benefit from the war, it might still be possible for a Democrat to emerge who will represent the Democratic electorate instead of the special interests.

Republican support for Bush’s contrived war against Iraq has diminished the Republican party. Intelligent and decent people have abandoned the party, which has morphed into a Brownshirt Party with which fewer people are willing to be associated. The diminished Republican ranks will make it difficult for the party to steal any more elections.

The press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.

“A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refuelling during its 25 year of service. Since it makes its own oxigen and drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface,” was the statement to the BBC by Nigel Ward, head of the shipyards.

“It’s a mean looking beast”, says another.

“Looming above us is a construction shed 12 storeys high. Within it are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of construction,” assures yet another.

Someone says that “it can observe the movements of cruisers in New York Harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell phones”. “In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles for distances of 1,400 miles”, a fourth person declares.

El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.

The UK Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will go into service in January of 2009.

It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on giant plasma screens.

The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk torpedoes which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will be using fibre optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.

“BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other submarines of the same class,” AP reported. The total cost of the three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.

What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build 3 thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.

Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other countries as medical doctors.

In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding municipality who has the equivalent of a grade twelve education, using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.

The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student will be seeing together the doctor.

The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and practical experience accumulated for years have no possible comparison.

The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all noble hearts.

Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.

We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.

We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and leader, the United States.

Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today Blair says: Sink whatever remains of Great Britain’s prestige!

For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his “marvellous submarine” will be good for.

Democrats talked tough on trade to win a majority. Now they’re poised to enter into a deal with Bush and his cronies that not one labor, environmental, small business, public health or consumer group supports.

Just 100 days after the Democrats rode into Washington on a fair trade mandate, shock has morphed into rage over last Thursday’s surprise announcement by the Bush administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Ways and Means and Finance Committee Chairs Charles Rangel and Max Baucus, and a coterie of New Democrats and CAFTA 15’ers of a “Deathstar Deal” on trade. The deal could facilitate passage of various awful, pending Bush “free trade agreements” (FTAs), not to mention the danger it may pose to Democrats who go along with its terms. (See here and here for the blow by blow.)

Not one labor, environmental, small business, public health or consumer group supports the deal. Huge corporations praised it — they see it as essential to the passage of more corporate trade agreements. Among these monied voices was the Chamber of Commerce president, who celebrated the deal’s unveiling with a statement in which he said he was psyched about “assurances” he had received that the deal’s labor provisions “cannot be read to require compliance” with international labor standards.

Why would Democrats pass a politically poisonous trade deal with the Bush administration instead of launching their own proactive trade agenda? Why not propose a forward-looking strategy that could satisfy public demand for new trade rules that tackle the stability-threatening trade deficit, stagnant wages and other urgent problems?

Most Democrats are asking the same question. The Deathstar Deal was negotiated in secret, legal texts were not made public, and it was abruptly announced without warning to most Democrats or Democratic base groups.

Reaction from the majority-making House Democratic freshmen, key Democratic members and labor and other party constituents concerned with trade ranged from stunned to horrified. Former Teamster President Jim Hoffa summed up what many were thinking when he said that the Deathstar Deal “sells out American workers” and that his union “will fight like hell to oppose this shortsighted agreement.”

A growing group of American activists and politicians are on a mission to end our Cold War-era embargo on Cuba. They believe that business, not isolation, is a better way to change governments.

“Don” Albert Fox, a stocky Floridian who talks in a hushed, confidential tone, has his own custom cigar bands and a retired master cigar roller in Havana who keeps him well stocked.

The tiny labels contain a Cuban flag and an American flag, representing the friendships that Albert A. Fox, Jr. has been carefully nurturing since about 2000.

In the late 1990s Fox tried to take his aging mother to Cuba, her birthplace. The U.S. government denied them permission to travel there.

Since that first denial, the Tampa political operative has been to Cuba more than 60 times. He’s met with President Fidel Castro on nine of those visits and has contacts at many levels within the Cuban government.

And he knows his cigars.

Fox fancies Cuban shirts, because they have more pockets. To hold cigars. Every time I saw him, he had fat ones, long ones, sweet and smelly ones sticking out of every pocket. He handed them out everywhere. Slipping one from a pocket, his head bowed, he offered them slightly concealed.

“You smoke cigars?” he growled.

Occasionally he had one in his mouth. A glass of Bucanero, the best Cuban beer, in one hand.

Fox is among a small but growing clique of activists in the United States who are on a mission to end our Cold War-era embargo on the Communist-run nation just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Their foot soldiers include U.S. politicians like Idaho Gov. C. L. “Butch” Otter, the most recent in a string of state officials who have visited Cuba on what are generally billed as trade missions.

“They’ve gone to Cuba to sell grain, and then once they’re there, they see that we’re in the middle of one of the biggest foreign policy screw-ups in our history,” said Phil Peters, an expert on Cuba at the Lexington Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C.

Otter first visited Cuba in March 2003 with the Lexington Institute as a congressman. I traveled to Cuba in April to cover the Idaho governor’s fourth trip to the island.

“We’re doing the exact same things that we did in the ’50s when we cut Cuba off and threw them into the arms of the Russians,” Otter told me, riding in the front of an air-conditioned Havanatur bus. “We’re isolating ourselves from them, we’re not talking, we’re not doing business deals, we’re not exchanging products, thereby exchanging values. We don’t have to agree with everything they do. But understand it.”

Cuba is not an easy place to understand.

A recent story in the Miami Herald, citing a dozen people in positions to know, asserted that Washington “is now largely ignorant of what is happening within the inner circles in Havana as Cuba undergoes a transfer of power” from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul.

And as I prepared for my recent trip, I got a not-so-subtle message that Cuban spin doctors are weary of Norteamericano reporters coming down to the island to speculate on the impending implosion of Caribbean Socialism.

The question often asked is, what will happen when Cuba opens up? But the growing coalition of Congressional bedfellows who oppose the embargo, like to remind us that it is not Cuba that is closed. It is the United States.

WHAT KIND OF TANK?

On my last night in Cuba, an older European woman who has lived there most of her life asked me about think tanks.

She wanted to know if it was “tank” as in fish tank or as in army tank.

I was momentarily stumped.

Is the growing support in places like Idaho for normalized relations with Cuba a result of thoughtful humanitarian motivations (aquarium) or an imperialistic bent (M1 Abrams)?

Folks like Peters at the Lexington Institute and libertarian-minded politicos like the Idaho governor are not exactly the type of people you’d expect to be doing the bidding of socialist stalwarts like Fidel Castro. Not if there isn’t anything in it for them, or at least for the economy.

“I’m not a fan of Communism at all,” Peters told me. “I would hope that the Cubans could find their own way toward a more open society with political and economic freedom.”

Idaho’s Governor Otter, who sold french fries all over the world for Simplot International before entering the political sphere, is no fan of Communism either.

While the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons known as “Complex 2030.”

Only days before the fifth anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush addressed military officers in Washington to warn that nuclear-armed terrorists could “blackmail the free world and spread their ideologies of hate and raise a moral threat to America.”

This alarmist vision was accompanied by the White House’s release of “A National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” which painted a picture of a “troubling potential WMD terrorism nexus emanating from Tehran.” The administration is building the case for war against Iran — a job made easier by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent announcement that Iran can now enrich uranium on an industrial scale — despite the fact that many Iran-watchers and nuclear experts consider their claims of enrichment capacity to be an overblown boast.

This is not the first time the “no-nuclear-weapons-for-you” ploy has been used to lay the groundwork for a war. On Oct. 7, 2002, while making the case for regime change in Iraq, President Bush said: “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Yellow cake, aluminum tubes and histrionics about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities followed … all of which were challenged at the time, and have turned out to be completely fabricated. And, when not grinding the axe of pre-emptive war as counter-proliferation strategy, the administration periodically raises the specter of nuclear terrorism, in the form of dirty bombs and suitcase-sized warheads.

But while the United States demands that other countries end their nuclear programs, the Bush administration is busy planning a new generation of nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the United States is allocating more funding, on average, to nuclear weapons than during the Cold War.

The Bush administration is pumping this money — more than $6 billion this year — into renovating the nuclear weapons complex and designing new nuclear weapons. Such hypocrisy is one of the main obstacles to nuclear arms reductions because it runs the risk of shattering the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in which the nuclear-armed states pledged to begin the process of disarmament if the non-nuclear states opted not to pursue the deadly technology.

The centerpiece of the administration’s move toward developing a new generation of nuclear weapons is “Complex 2030,” a multiyear plan introduced last April by the National Nuclear Security Administration (the semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons program).

Complex 2030 calls for the construction of new or upgraded facilities at each of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s eight nuclear weapons-related sites throughout the country. The plan also calls for building a new nuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), inside the old warheads. The program was conceived in response to concerns that the cores of existing nuclear weapons could be wearing out and need to be replaced. But RRW development has gone much further than that.

The Department of Energy (DOE) notes in its summary of Complex 2030 that one of the major goals of the program is to “improve the capability to design, develop, certify and complete production of new or adapted warheads in the event of new military requirements.” In short, while the Bush administration has publicly stressed reductions in nuclear weapons, it is working to produce new, more usable nuclear weapons.

Three small steps forward

As a candidate for president in 2000, and during his first months in office, Bush suggested that the United States should significantly cut its nuclear arsenal. In his first address before a joint session of Congress, the new president went so far as to pledge: “We can discard Cold War relics and reduce our own nuclear forces to reflect today’s needs.” He followed through on this promise with the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which calls for reducing the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals from 6,000 each — the limit established under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads each over a 10-year period.

With over half of America’s 1 million active and reserve soldiers enlisted as teens, the military is luring kids as young as 13 using a PR machine that would make Joe Camel proud.

Congratulations: You have lived long enough to cringe at the bad decisions you were seduced, dared, stoned, bullied, or inspired into making as a teenager.

Thousands of America’s children, however, are not so lucky. Almost 600,000 of America’s 1 million active and reserve soldiers enlisted as teens. The military lures these physiologically immature kids with a PR machine that would make Joe Camel proud.

While the age of legal and cultural adulthood can vary, science is now able to determine the physiological markers of maturity. A recent study headed by Jay Giedd of the National Institutes of Health using MRI scans shows that the brain of an 18-year-old is not fully developed, with the limbic cortex-brain structures, the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex still undergoing substantial changes.

As of March 31, the U.S. military included 81,000 teenagers. Its 7,350 17-year-olds needed parental consent to enlist, and only this April were all barred from battle zones.

But the military aims even lower, marketing itself to children as young as 13 with multimedia videos, school visits and cold calls to teens’ homes and cell phones. In Junior ROTC, kids get uniforms, win medals, fire real guns and play soldier, while adults trained in psychological manipulation steer them toward the army. The Army’s JROTC website lists such motivating activities as “eating at concession stands.”

A mature prefrontal cortex, “the area of sober second thought,” is vital not only to deciding whether to enlist, but also to choices made under the stress of deployment and the terrors of combat. But the prefrontal cortex, “important for controlling impulses, is among the last brain regions to mature,” according to Giedd, and doesn’t reach “adult dimensions until the early 20s.”

Teenagers’ brains simply lack the impulse control that can prevent a lifetime of regret, psychological and physical disability, and preventable deathstheir own, their fellow soldiers’ and those of civilians.

The child soldier problem Is global and so is America’s part in it. More than 300,000 children around the world, some as young as seven, serve as soldiers, or, in the case of girls, as military sex slaves. The State Department reports that 10 countries are violating international treaties against child soldiers. Washington provides military assistance to nine of these outlaw nations: Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Uganda.

The reason the United States and other militaries target children is their need for cannon fodder, coupled with the vulnerability of youth. In 2002, almost half of Marine recruits were 17 or 18. A Pentagon survey found that “for both males and females, propensity [to enlist] is highest among 16- and 17-year-olds.” That “propensity” quickly declines with age.

A 2004 Pentagon database listed the number of 16- and 17-year- olds who applied for active service enlistment at 69,000 and 18- year-olds at 73,000. By 19, the count had dropped to 49,000 and by age 24 had plummeted to 9,700.

The Department of Defense (DoD) spends more than $4 billion a year on recruiting, with $1.5 billion for advertising and maintaining the recruiting stations staffed by more than 22,000 recruiters. Much of that money goes to convincing children to become soldiers.

“Supporting The Troops” And Suppressing A National Discussion

Of all the slogans that are used to stifle opposition to America’s aggressive foreign policy, the most infamous is “Support Our Troops.” At once after dispatching its massive force across the Atlantic, the American “public relations industry” threw this phrase into the public forum. [1] A scheme undoubtedly contrived for the effect it would have, the American public began probing itself for those who did not “support the troops.” The intended effect of suppression took root and all discussion about America’s fighting force was off the table. A national discussion about the composition, effectiveness, or readiness of America’s armed forces was, therefore, absent. It was a three-pronged plot to asphyxiate opposition, divert people’s attention, and drum up support for the war policy.

Accordingly, those who feared being accused of not “supporting the troops” became subservient to an empty slogan; a slogan that was supposedly a verbal display of admiration for those who volunteered to put their lives on the line so that others did not have to. [2] The population became immersed in a squabbling match, which continues today with no end in sight, about who “supported the troops” and who did not. Even more, Jingoists came out of the woodwork and slapped magnetic ribbons on their vehicles with the empty, suppressive slogan, “Support Our Troops,” to show their devotion to keeping their mouths shut about their nation going to war. It was a genius plan with impeccable timing. However, out of all the consequences—intended or unintended—to have come out from this ruse, one of the most disastrous has been the suppression of a national discussion about the reality of America’s “all-volunteer” fighting force.

Economic Forces Behind The “All Volunteer” Fighting Force

Undoubtedly there are many patriotic individuals who seek to genuinely defend the United States. Hence, they choose to join the armed services. However, not all of the men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces are enlisted by choice. In fact, a large portion is not. Though the media figure heads would have people believe otherwise, with their talking-points about the “all-volunteer” fighting force, many people do not join the armed services because they want to; they join because they have to.

The United States, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, stands as “the most unequal among advanced industrialized nations.” [3] The gap between the rich and poor in America is enormous with a “scale of poverty among the poorest… comparable to that [found] in parts of the Third World.” [4] The domestic economic system, which has been immensely restructured in the past seven years, is currently running at full capacity to benefit “a tiny minority,” while the general population is feeling the effects of “downward mobility.” [5] In March the Commerce Department reported that “the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record, with data going back to” the year of when the Great Depression began. [6] It also noted that the “share of national income captured by corporate profits, in contrast, was at its highest level on record.” [7] With massive corporate profits and huge tax cuts for the rich that have redistributed the country’s wealth in a way never before seen, working wages have steadily “stagnated or declined.” [8] The proliferation of “[l]ow-wage jobs, houses under foreclosure, and the inability to afford food and medical care” has led to experiences of plight across the spectrum. [9]

The priorities in the “New American Century” are obvious; the swelling poverty rate says it all. [10] The proportion of “Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high,” as “millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line.” [11] Moreover, “the number of severely poor Americans” has grown more than “26 percent” since 2000; millions are living in severe poverty. [12] It is no wonder that the United States has the “second worst newborn death rate” in the developed world. [13] That is, equal to that of Malaysia. [14]

If all this was not enough, the Center for Disease Control recently released a report titled “Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, January – September 2006.” It concluded that at the time of the interview nearly 45 million people of all ages were uninsured, 31 million had been uninsured for more than a year, and 55 million had been uninsured for at least part of the year prior to. [15] Hence, not only is a steady amount of the population going without healthcare, there is also a steady fluctuation of individuals being able to acquire “partial coverage” part of the time.

Education And Enlistment

In February the New York Times reported that “the most recent test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the national report card,” showed “that American 12th graders are… performing worse in reading” than they have in the past ten years. [16] Moreover, “performance in reading has been distressingly flat since 2002 and only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading.” [17] Hence, “a majority of the country’s 12th graders have trouble understanding what they read fully enough to make inferences, draw conclusions and see connections between what they read and their own experiences.” [18]

According to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, approximately “1 in 3 high school students in the Class of 2006 [did] not graduate.” [19] In California alone, the “graduation rate dropped to [a] 10-year low… as a third of the Class of 2006 left without a diploma,” according to Department of Education numbers. [20] If this was not enough, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication, National Review, recently reported that a study conducted by Michigan State University political scientist Jon D. Miller found that “216 Americans are scientifically illiterate.” [21] The report noted that this is a dangerous situation for a democratic society “that assumes a baseline of citizen knowledge,” where only “a cadre of elites knows and understands the essentials of the science that underpins [its] civilization. [22]

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, emphasizes “testing rather than education.” [23] Inquiry and discovery, the heart of human progress, is greatly lacking in the classroom. Requirements for teaching the youth how to do, instead how to think, are abundant in the curriculum. Educators around the country have been persistent in pointing out that the act’s concentration on standardized assessment is part of the problem in the plight of the public school education system, the dumbing-down of new generations of Americans, and dwindling graduation rates. [24] Yet, the current administration claims it to be a policy for the improvement thereof.

All together, Americans are facing an economic downward spiral and an ever increasing struggle to survive and feed their families. Moreover, young, poorly educated Americans (by way of legislation), with or without a high school diploma, are facing an unforgiving, fast-paced, technology-based society and have very limited options and/or no direction. Hence, enlistment appears to be the only viable option. In other words, they are forced to volunteer for the “all-volunteer” fighting force, as it provides relief from the despair and uncertainty they face. The “modest but steady wages, the guaranteed housing allowance, the solid retirement plan and the health benefits of the armed forces” is appealing when the rest of society is moving “in the opposite direction.” [25]

The Power Differential And Recruitment

The armed forces is comprised of many individuals “who commonly join up to advance themselves” in light of the dismal alternatives presented to them. [26] These alternatives include: “difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and expensive higher education.” [27] Hence, there is eventual enrollment, attributable to miniscule prospects in the civilian world, by “those to whom other channels of advancement are often blocked.” [28]

Knowing this, divisions of recruiters are dispatched by every branch of the armed forces to scour the country in search of those looking to escape the depressing alternatives before them. Hence, this is where the funneling of those less fortunate, ignorant, and lost into the armed forces begins. At malls, sporting events, community gatherings, residences, and public school grounds recruiters disseminate their message of the “benefits” of “volunteering.” Additionally, millions are spent on a public relations campaign and creative ways to lure people, especially the youth, into signing up. [29] Pro-war films, commercials, decorated t-shirts, toys, video games, and Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps are used to make enlistment appealing and life in the armed forces a place where one can be all one can be in substitution for a world where one seems like one is nothing. [30]

Some have been keen to point out that “despair is the most powerful force driving” movements within American society that promise better alternatives. [31] Conscription is no different. Facing blocked avenues and having a “deep pessimism about the future,” individuals are forced to turn towards the offered benefits and “financial security” of the armed forces. [32] Hence the use of “creative ways” to draw in, even re-draw, recruits amid a war that is “stretching ranks to their limits” and pushing America towards imperial collapse. [33]

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because they’re opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

Last week, a majority of Iraqi lawmakers demanded a timetable for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave their country. The very next day, the Al Fadhila party, a Shi’ite party considered moderate by the (often arbitrary) standards of the commercial media, held a press conference, in which they offered a 23-point plan for stabilizing Iraq.

The plan addressed not only the current situation in Iraq — acknowledging the legitimacy of Iraqi resistance, setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal of occupation troops and rebuilding the Iraqi government and security forces in a non-sectarian fashion — but also the challenging mission of post-occupation peace-building and national reconciliation. It included provisions for disbanding militias, protecting Iraq’s unity, managing Iraq’s natural resources, building relationships with other countries based on mutual interest and the principle of non-intervention in domestic issues, and healing the wounds of more than 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and foreign occupation.

An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition. More significant even than proposals made by Iraqi political parties are those put forth by the country’s armed resistance groups — the very groups that have the ability to bring a halt to the cycle of violence. Comprehensive plans have been offered by the Baath party that ruled Iraq for three generations, The Islamic Army in Iraq and other major armed resistance groups and coalitions. The plans vary on a number of points, but all of them shared a few items in common: the occupation forces must recognize them as legitimate resistance groups and negotiate with them, and the U.S. must agree to set a timetable for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. That’s the key issue, but Iraq’s nationalists see it only as the first step in the long path to achieving national reconstruction and reconciliation.

But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

Last year, a comprehensive, 28-point proposal for stabilizing Iraq was offered by the nascent Iraqi government itself after long meetings with different Iraqi groups. According to local polls and political leaders, most Iraqis believed it was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel — the plan was attractive to the vast majority of the public, even those Iraqis affiliated with violent resistance groups. But the plan wasn’t acceptable to Washington, and was watered down so as to be unrecognizable under U.S. pressure.

Paul Wolfowitz’s departure from the World Bank signals the end of an ideological era in Washington

As Tony Blair was bidding farewell to President George W Bush in the Rose Garden on Thursday, the World Bank was preparing to kick out Paul Wolfowitz as president. Allies to the left and right in the Iraq war were falling by the wayside that day.

Was he responsible for Blair’s departure from office, Bush was asked. There had to be a reason why a prime minister who had never lost an election was being dumped. “Could be . . . I don’t know,” the president mused above the distant chant of war protesters outside the White House gates.

And what did he make of Wolfowitz’s likely resignation? “I respect him a lot and I’m sorry it has come to this,” Bush said, leaving the World Bank head to his fate.

If Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-president, are the last men standing with responsibility for the Iraq war it is only because they are protected by their four-year terms of office. One former Bush stalwart told me: “If we had a parliamentary system, Bush would have lost a vote of confidence and have resigned by now.”

Away from the Rose Garden the funeral cortege for the fundamentalist Rev Jerry Falwell was being assembled in the heart of Bush country in Lynchburg, Virginia. The portly 73-year-old televangelist had done his utmost to assemble the coalition of conservative Christians that went on to provide Bush with two presidential victories. Now he is dead and the government sustained by his followers is looking more and more like a corpse.

The writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Wolfowitz and foe of Falwell, says: “The main noise in Washington right now is that of collapsing scenery. The Republican party is in total disarray. They’ve been dropping their most intelligent people over the side while the presidential candidates are all outbidding each other to be nice about the revolting carcass of Falwell.”

Wolfowitz, the cerebral neocon, and Falwell, the braying theocon, had nothing in common personally. Indeed, Falwell blamed “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians” for provoking the 9/11 attacks, an explanation uncomfortably close to the views of the Taliban. But the unlikely alliance between their two movements provided the brains and the brawn behind Bush. Now the neocons have been ousted, one by one, from their positions of influence and trust while the Republican party base is desperately thrashing around for a successor to Bush that it can back in 2008.

The cleavage between the two marks the end of an era in which Bible Belt conservatives became the surprise champions of radical nation-building in the Middle East in the hope of crushing terrorism and halting the march of militant Islam. After Bush, such reforming zeal is unlikely to be repeated.

The fall of Wolfowitz is already entering the annals as a morality fable for the Bush administration in which the arrogant, narcissistic former Pentagon official and a handful of his cronies were foisted on an unwilling international institution until it finally found a way to spit them out. By this reckoning, Wolfowitz’s appointment as president of the World Bank in 2005 was an “Up yours” similar to the way the Iraq war was imposed by Bush against the wishes of the international community – with predictably dire results.

According to Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan and a persistent critic of the Iraq war: “Wolfowitz has demonstrated a penchant for cronyism and for smearing and marginalising perceived rivals as tactics for getting his way. Indeed, these tactics are typical of what might be called the neoconservative style.”

Capital and the state of all three countries of the North American Free Trade Agreement have worked together to push down wages and working conditions, undermine the social safety net, and privatize anything that could be turned into a source of profit. The aim of both NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership – the project of “Deep Integration”) is to constitutionalize the rights of capital and undermine the rights of workers and the public. By incorporating Mexico into the geography of continentally integrated production, capital has been able to lower its wage bill and increase its power over labour. Relocation and the threat of relocation has been a powerful tool in forcing concessions on flexibility, wages, and working conditions.

Workers and unions have not effectively developed strategies of continental-wide solidarity and or fight-back. There have been some efforts in that direction in terms of solidarity with specific struggles, worker to worker exchanges, increased union contacts. A coalition of Mexican unions has now proposed a strategy of struggle that could open up the door to a more class-wide and continental approach to union and workers’ struggles. While the initial proposal focused on the minimum wage, it could be broadened to include the needs of the unwaged poor as well as other rights of workers – the right to a job, the right to safe conditions of work, the right to housing. A continental fight-back around class-wide demands could reinvigorate the labour movements in all three countries. The article below focuses on the Mexican proposal and labour movement. In addition to describing the proposal, we put forth a description and analysis of Mexican unions and their role in Mexico’s deep and ongoing crisis. Mexican workers are faced not only with a neoliberal assault on their rights and standards of living but also with an increasingly brutal and repressive state veiled in a corrupt and thin electoral process.

The Mexican Coalition

A coalition of progressive Mexican unions, democratic currents in other unions and popular movements, such as the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO),have made a bold proposal for a continental workers’ struggle to raise the minimum wage in all three countries, limit the work day to eight hours, and enforce a ban on child labour. In Mexico, it is a response to the dramatic fall of real wages and the beginning of a fightback against the deepening neoliberal assault promised by the new, fraudulently elected President Calderon. The coalition campaign as the Jornada Nacional y Internacional Por la Restitución del Salario y Empleo (National and International Campaign for the Restoration of Wages and Jobs). It believes that the battle can only be won and consolidated on a continental scale. If the minimum salary and wages are raised in one country, those companies that can simply relocate to those areas where wages remain lower will do so. The floor has to be raised in all three countries

The coalition is aware that a minimum wage increase in the U.S., without an increase in Mexico, will simply increase the incentive for companies to move to Mexico. They want jobs in Mexico but not at the expense of job loss in other countries and starvation wages in Mexico. They feel that these three minimum demands create the basis for a common struggle in all three countries. And while they feel the struggle should start in the three NAFTA countries, they want to spread it later to include all of Latin America and become a global campaign.

Beyond Borders: A Call for Solidarity

This proposal is a call from workers in the South to workers in the North to engage in a joint struggle against the corporations and governments that seek to play them off against each other in order to continue the downward slide of wages and living and working standards everywhere. NAFTA is part of the neoliberal assault on workers in Canada, Mexico and the United States. This assault on workers is the major part of the reason that over ten million Mexicans have been forced to leave their homes and families to work in the U.S. as the only means to survive. The proposal seeks to unite workers – Mexican, US, Canadian, Quebecois; white, Latino, and Black; those with stable and those with precarious employment, those with unions and those without, those with legal rights and those without – in a common struggle that will unite workers in all three countries. Success will bring real and desperately needed gains in the short run while building the bases for an international workers movement in the longer run. The campaign entailed by such a proposal seeks to move beyond solidarity as support for other peoples’ struggles and toward solidarity as a common struggle.

The minimum wage in Mexico has fallen in real purchasing power by 75% in the last thirty years. During the presidency of Vicente Fox alone from 2000-2006, it fell by 22%. Ten million workers, 24% of the economically active population, make the minimum wage or less. Fifty million Mexicans live below the poverty line. Of these, 30 million live on 30 pesos per day ($3 US), 10 million live on 22 pesos daily, another 10 million on less than 10 pesos daily. In order to buy what is officially defined as a basic household basket, a worker would have to work 48 hours daily! As well, the minimum wage affects vast layers of workers receiving more than the minimum wage as many collective agreements and labour contracts are formally or informally tied to changes in the official minimum wage.

Hey, aren’t we the most exceptional nation in history? George Bush and his pals thought so — and they were in a great American tradition of exceptionalism. Of course, they were imagining us as the most exceptional empire in history (or maybe at the end of it), the ultimate New Rome. Anyway, explain this to me: Among all the exceptional things we claim to do, how come we never take credit for what may be the most exceptional of all, our success of successes, the thing that makes us uniquely ourselves on this war-ridden planet — peddling more arms to Earthlings than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why do we hide this rare talent under a bushel? In the interest of shining a proud light on an under-rated national skill, I asked Frida Berrigan to return the United States to its rightful place in the Pantheon of arms-dealing nations. Tom

After all, what does a drug dealer do? He creates a need and then fills it. He encourages an appetite or (even more lucratively) an addiction and then feeds it.

Arms dealers do the same thing. They suggest to foreign officials that their military just might need a slight upgrade. After all, they’ll point out, haven’t you noticed that your neighbor just upgraded in jets, submarines, and tanks? And didn’t you guys fight a war a few years back? Doesn’t that make you feel insecure? And why feel insecure for another moment when, for just a few billion bucks, we’ll get you suited up with the latest model military… even better than what we sold them — or you the last time around.

Why does Turkey, which already has 215 fighter planes, need 100 extras in an even higher-tech version? It doesn’t… but Lockheed Martin, working the Pentagon, made them think they did.