The Rag Blog

Smithfield Packing is a glaring example of how capitalism creates all kinds of victims of oppression, who when they take a broader view, can push the strategic weak point of the system and open a way for many others to win a victory.

Smithfield has spawned three different movements: one demanding the right of workers to organize a union and to collectively bargain with the company; another resisting environmental poisoning, and a third composed of immigrant workers and their allies fighting repression based on their nationality status.

Smithfield Packing is the second largest meat packing company in the U.S. and runs the world’s largest pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. Smithfield workers, primarily Latin and African-American, butcher and pack 176,000 hogs per week under harsh health and safety working conditions. These workers have been fighting to establish a trade union for 14 years.

The company has increased its level of viciousness to fend off workers’ efforts. It has played Mexican and Black workers against each other, women workers against men and young versus old. It has attempted to intimidate Latin workers by threatening to have the government deport them.

Dirt, danger and discrimination

While unionized in most locations outside of North Carolina, in this southern state Smithfield has fought vigorously to prevent its employees from forming a union. Elections to unionize the plant held in 1994 and in 1997 were initially lost. But a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge made a landmark decision overturning the results. The decision charged Smithfield with multiple violations of federal labor law, violations that destroyed the conditions for a free and fair election.

Since the plant opened, Smithfield workers have fought for the right to organize a union and to collectively bargain in the face of criminal and sometimes violent repression by the company, at times with the state’s collusion.

In addition to the challenges to organizing any union in the U.S. South, especially with a very multinational workforce of mostly African-American and Latin@ workers, workers have faced spies, deportation and plant-closing threats, false arrests, police attacks and racist hate speech.

In 2006, after having been found guilty of a long list of illegal anti-union policies in the previous union election, Smithfield is now calling for a new election. Having experienced the threats, illegal firings and physical attacks at the previous election, workers are instead demanding full recognition of the union immediately.

As one worker, Ronnie Simmons, put it: “If the company held another election, they would just intimidate and violate our rights again and then we’d have to wait another ten years for it to wind its way through the courts. We need help now and we need our voices to be heard and respected now. We’ve been fighting for far too long. Our workers want a union now. It’s long overdue.”

The Employee Free Choice Act, which the U.S. Senate will debate next week, would allow all workers to form a union without having to be subjected to undemocratic elections where, like at Smithfield, workers are subject to attack and harassment by management. Some senators have threatened to filibuster to prevent a vote, and Bush has promised a veto.

To force the company to recognize the union, workers are building a more permanent movement rather than following traditional union strategies. Workers are simultaneously building community and political pressure on the company, while fighting for winnable gains inside the plant.

“Help us and ask questions,” read the note, secretly passed to a visitor from an immigrant child incarcerated in a Texas prison.

Based on their visits and interviews, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are calling for the immediate shutdown of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas.

Local activists have brought national and international attention on this facility, owned by the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA), which imprisons children and their families for profit under the same horrendous conditions as when it was a prison for adults.

War profiteer. It used to be one of the dirtiest slurs in American politics, potent enough to sully the reputations of the rich and powerful. Now it’s a calling card, something you might find highlighted in a defense contractor’s corporate prospectus as a lure to attract investors looking for bulging profits and escalating dividends.

In the summer of 2000, the defense industry was mired in a prolonged slump, as was the US economy, which under the unforgiving lash of its neo-liberal architects had become dependent on the financial engines of the munitions makers. Unhappily for the defense industry and its investor class, the Soviet Union had disintegrated before their very eyes and the People’s Republic of China, long considered the bogeyman state in waiting, had lustily embraced state capitalism instead of stepping up to the plate as a brawny military rival.

The big ticket items of the Cold War, from Stealth bombers to nuclear subs, from aircraft carriers to the Star Wars scheme, that had sustained the industry to the tune of tens of billions every year no longer had the slightest pretext for continued production, except as the most extravagant form of corporate welfare. Those weapons systems that weren’t obsolete, such as the B-2 bomber and F-22 fighter, simply didn’t work, such as Star Wars-lately remarketed as Ballistic Missile Defense.

To make matters more fraught for the weapons industry, the Pentagon was poised to put the finishing touches on its Quadrennial Defense Review, which sets procurement, budget and policy goals for the Defense Department. Of course, the Pentagon would never slash its own budget and, in fact, many anticipated that the QDR would call for increasing annual defense spending to something approaching 4 percent of the gross domestic product. However, it seemed likely that the generals would call for the termination of many of the multi-billion dollar relics of the Cold War in exchange for massive increases in spending on newer killing technologies geared for what has come to be known as “4th Generation Warfare.”

Then 9/11 happened and all the anxieties of the weapons lobby evaporated in the flames of one fateful morning. The QDR, once so threatening, was simply another fat white paper that came and went without leaving so much as a scratch on the old Imperial Guard.

As we revealed here in CounterPunch, the Taliban offered Osama Bin Laden, and his top associates, the Bush administration on several occasions after the attacks of 9/11. Bush refused. They wanted a prolonged and ever-escalating war, not a deftly executed police action and not justice for the families of those slain and maimed by Bin Laden’s kamikazes.

Instead, thousands of Cruise missiles were ordered up and, just like that, Boeing and Lockheed were back in business. For months, cruise missiles, J-DAM bombs and CB-87 cluster munitions shredded the hamlets and hovels of Afghanistan, killing more than 3,500 civilians in the early days of that one-sided war. But this was simply a bloody prelude to a more profound slaughter. For Afghanistan, in the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, wasn’t a “target rich” environment. But Iraq certainly was. And only hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld and his neocon coterie of laptop bombardiers began plotting the war on Saddam and the domestic propaganda campaign for how to sell it to a psychologically shattered and anxiety-ridden American public. The civilian body count in Iraq would climb much higher, topping 650,000 by the winter of 2007, with more than 200 Iraqis dying every day.

The Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were misguided, counter-productive and illegal ventures, although entirely predictable outbursts of imperial vengeance. What is truly perverse is the fact that while one wing of the Pentagon was planning wars against a “faceless enemy” and a “rogue state”, another wing was lobbying congress on behalf of the weapons companies to approve tens of billions in funding for all of the baroque artifacts of the Cold War, from Star Wars to Stealth fighters. Congress was only too happy to help. From the fall of 2001 through the end of 2002, not a single funding request for a big-ticket item went denied, from unneeded aircraft carriers to unwanted Boeing tankers.

But in order to fund these bailouts to the defense lobby for making weapons for a war that no longer existed, Congress had to rob other budgetary accounts. And here’s where it gets truly bizarre. Intent on satiating the cravings for pork from their political patrons, the leadership of the Defense Appropriations committees, chaired until 2007 by Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican, paid for these costly and useless projects by reprogramming billions from the so-called Operations and Maintenance accounts, which were being used to fund the logistics work for the on-the-ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the normally docile Office of Management and Budget raised a warning, writing in a letter to Stevens dated December 6, 2002: “These [Operations and Maintenance] reductions would undermine DoD’s ability to adequately fund training, operations, maintenance, supplies and other essentials. They would seriously damage the readiness of our armed forces and undermine their ability to execute current operations, including the war on terrorism.”

That warning letter (and thousands of documents like it), ignored by the war-hungry US press, is the congressional equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In order to shell out billions for Star Wars and the F-22 fighter, Congress took money from accounts that would have improved the terrible logistical planning in Iraq and bought essential items for the protection of US combat troops, such as body armor and armored Humvees. The blood of many a soldier maimed or killed in Iraq is indelibly stained on the hands of Stevens and his colleagues who choose to put the welfare of Boeing and Lockheed above the grunts in the field.

“Preservation, justification, and expansion of the military–industrial colossus, especially of the armaments industry and other Pentagon contractors, have become critical big business objectives in themselves.”

How Escalation of War and Military Spending Are Used as Disguised or Roundabout Ways to Reverse the New Deal and Redistribute National Resources in Favor of the Wealthy

Critics of the recent U.S. wars of choice have long argued that they are all about oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war.

It can be demonstrated, however, that there is another (less obvious but perhaps more critical) factor behind the recent rise of U.S. military aggressions abroad: war profiteering by the Pentagon contractors. Frequently invoking dubious “threats to our national security and/or interests,” these beneficiaries of war dividends, the military–industrial complex and related businesses whose interests are vested in the Pentagon’s appropriation of public money, have successfully used war and military spending to justify their lion’s share of tax dollars and to disguise their strategy of redistributing national income in their favor.

This cynical strategy of disguised redistribution of national resources from the bottom to the top is carried out by a combination of (a) drastic hikes in the Pentagon budget, and (b) equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy. As this combination creates large budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending as a way to fill the gaps that are thus created. As a result, the rich are growing considerably richer at the expense of middle– and low–income classes.

Despite its critical importance, most opponents of war seem to have given short shrift to the crucial role of the Pentagon budget and its contractors as major sources of war and militarism—a phenomenon that the late President Eisenhower warned against nearly half a century ago. Perhaps a major reason for this oversight is that critics of war and militarism tend to view the U.S. military force as primarily a means for imperialist gains—oil or otherwise.

The fact is, however, that as the U.S. military establishment has grown in size, it has also evolved in quality and character: it is no longer simply a means but, perhaps more importantly, an end in itself—an imperial force in its own right. Accordingly, the rising militarization of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is driven not so much by some general/abstract national interests as it is by the powerful special interests that are vested in the military capital, that is, war industries and war–related businesses.

The Magnitude of U.S. Military Spending

Even without the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast surpassing half a trillion dollars, U.S. military spending is now the largest item in the federal budget. Officially, it is the second highest item after Social Security payments. But Social Security is a self-financing trust fund. So, in reality, military spending is the highest budget item.

The Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year (2007) is about $456 billion. President Bush’s proposed increase of 10% for next year will raise this figure to over half a trillion dollars, that is, $501.6 billion for fiscal year 2008. A proposed supplemental appropriation to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “brings proposed military spending for FY 2008 to $647.2 billion, the highest level of military spending since the end of World War II—higher than Vietnam, higher than Korea, higher than the peak of the Reagan buildup.” [1]

Using official budget figures, William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, provides a number of helpful comparisons:

• Proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined.

• At $141.7 billion, this year’s proposed spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Total U.S. military spending for FY2008 is roughly ten times the military budget of the second largest military spending country in the world, China.

• Proposed U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

• The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

• The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.

• The FY 2008 military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs: education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans’ benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items. [2]

Although the official military budget already eats up the lion’s share of the public money (crowding out vital domestic needs), it nonetheless grossly understates the true magnitude of military spending. The real national defense budget, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, is nearly twice as much as the official budget. The reason for this understatement is that the official Department of Defense budget excludes not only the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a number of other major cost items. [3]

These disguised cost items include budgets for the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security; nuclear weapons research and development, testing, and storage (placed in the Energy budget); veterans programs (in the Veteran’s Administration budget); most military retiree payments (in the Treasury budget); foreign military aid in the form of weapons grants for allies (in the State Department budget); interest payments on money borrowed to fund military programs in past years (in the Treasury budget); sales and property taxes at military bases (in local government budgets); and the hidden expenses of tax-free food, housing, and combat pay allowances.

President Bush recently said that “there’s a lot of differences” between the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War.

As fighting in Iraq enters its fifth year, an increasing number of experts in foreign policy and national strategy are arguing that the biggest difference may be that the Iraq war will inflict greater damage to U.S. interests than Vietnam did.

“In terms of the consequences of failure, the stakes are much bigger than Vietnam,” said former defense secretary William S. Cohen. “The geopolitical consequences are . . . potentially global in scope.”

About 17 times as many U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War — the longest war in U.S. history — as have been lost in Iraq, the nation’s third-longest war. Also, despite widespread public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, the debate over it has not convulsed American society to the extent seen during the Vietnam conflict. However, Vietnam does not have oil and is not in the middle of a region crucial to the global economy and festering with terrorism, experts say, leading many of them to conclude that the long-term effects of the Iraq war will be worse for the United States.

“It makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk,” said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, a veteran of the Vietnam War. The domino theory that nations across Southeast Asia would go communist was not fulfilled, he noted, but with Iraq, “worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen.”

Iraq is worse than Vietnam “in so many ways,” agreed Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army officer and author of one of the most respected studies of the U.S. military’s failure in Vietnam. “We knew what we were getting into in Vietnam. We didn’t here.”

Also, President Richard M. Nixon used diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union to exploit the split between them and so minimize the fallout of Vietnam. By contrast, Krepinevich said, the Bush administration has “magnified” the problems of Iraq by neglecting public diplomacy in the Muslim world and by not developing an energy policy to reduce the significance of Middle Eastern oil.

In strategic terms, the Vietnam conflict was understood even by many of its opponents as part of a global stance of containment, a policy that preceded the war and endured for 15 years after Saigon fell, noted retired Army Col. Richard H. Sinnreich, a veteran of two Vietnam tours of duty. “I’m not sure we can count on a similarly prompt strategic recovery this time around,” he continued. “Bush’s preemption strategy was controversial even before Iraq, and the war itself has been so badly mismanaged that even our allies doubt our competence.”

Gary Solis, who fought as a Marine in Vietnam and more recently taught the law of war at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said he is hearing more such discussions. “Most of my military acquaintances agree that the issues in our departure from Vietnam will pale beside those that will be presented by an Iraq withdrawal,” Solis said.

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

“These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview on Friday.

There are, to be sure, significant differences between the torture scandal currently engulfing Ottawa and the one that rocked the Bush administration three years ago. There are no gruesome photos and, unlike the U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture in Afghanistan is being done by Canada’s local allies.

But in many ways this scandal is equal to the outrage of Abu Ghraib. With the photographic evidence of the abuse in Iraq, even old Donald Rumsfeld could not have pulled the straight-faced performance of Stephen Harper and Gordon O’Connor in the House of Commons this week.

Faced with the shocking accounts from Afghan detainees featured in The Globe and Mail this week, Harper had the audacity on Tuesday to dismiss the reports as “allegations of the Taliban.”

Graeme Smith, The Globe and Mail correspondent in Afghanistan (and, by the Prime Minister’s appalling logic, a Taliban spokesperson), conducted weeks of research touring “medieval nightmare” prisons and interviewing 30 detainees. Smith recorded accounts of beatings, electric shock, whipping, freezing and starvation among the methods employed by the security forces to which Canadian soldiers turned over their detainees.

On Wednesday, The Globe and Mail delivered the knockout punch to Harper’s and the Conservatives’ evasions and denials. The headline summed it all up, “What Ottawa doesn’t want you to know: Government was told detainees often faced ‘extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial’.”

A 2006 report on Afghanistan compiled for Foreign Affairs Canada provides proof that the Conservative government knew about all of this, contrary to everything O’Connor and the PM have been saying for months – and what they, incredibly, continued to assert in the House this week. Key passages of the Afghanistan report were blacked out, but The Globe and Mail obtained an original copy. The censored content, what Ottawa didn’t want us to know, includes the following passages:

“Despite some positive developments, the overall human rights situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in 2006…

Extra judicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common. Freedom of expression still faces serious obstacles, there are serious deficiencies in adherence to the rule of law and due process by police and judicial officials. Impunity remains a problem in the aftermath of three decades of war and much needed reforms of the judiciary systems remain to be implemented.” (The Globe and Mail, A1, April 25, 2007)

It is important to note that the torture scandal that has exploded in recent days is something that the anti-war movement and human rights activists have been trying to expose for years. Lawyers Against War, Amnesty International and academics like University of British Columbia professor Dr. Michael Byers have long been sounding the alarm that Canada was in violation of the Geneva Convention by handing over detainees to almost certain torture and abuse.

This includes, lest we forget, handing over prisoners to U.S. authorities, who have established their own facilities for “enemy combatants” at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and the infamous Guantanamo base on occupied Cuban territory.

Canada’s complicity in torture has also been a motivation for the many groups across the country advocating for troops out of Afghanistan. Those who have defended the current NATO mission as a “humanitarian intervention” have lost a lot of credibility this week.

For instance, in a recent feature essay in This Magazine, Vancouver journalist Jared Ferrie does not mention torture once and makes a bold assertion, “for all its flaws, the current Afghan government’s human rights record is light years ahead of any in the past three decades.”

Rather than “light years ahead,” Afghanistan’s current situation looks like more of the same that the country has endured for decades:

Counter-insurgency war, corrupt government, “medieval” prisons and widespread torture. This has accompanied the long tradition of foreign intervention, pursued in turn by the UK, the USSR and the U.S.

Canada is now deeply complicit in all of this, and neither the denials of Stephen Harper nor the rationalizations of liberal interventionists will be able to change that fact.

Four years ago the U.S. and Britain unleashed war on Iraq, a nearly defenseless Third World country barely half the size of Saskatchewan.

For twelve years prior to the invasion and occupation Iraq had endured almost weekly U.S. and British bombing raids and the toughest sanctions in history, the “primary victims” of which, according to the UN Secretary General, were “women and children, the poor and the infirm.” According to UNICEF, half a million children died from sanctions related starvation and disease.

Then, in March 2003, the U.S. and Britain –possessors of more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined –attacked Iraq on a host of fraudulent pretexts, with cruise missiles, napalm, white phosphorous, cluster and bunker buster bombs and depleted uranium (DU) munitions.

The British Medical Journal The Lancet published a study last year estimating Iraqi war deaths since 2003 at 655,000, a mind-boggling figure dismissed all-too readily by the British and American governments despite widespread scientific approval for its methodology (including the British government’s own chief scientific adviser).

On April 11, 2007, the Red Cross issued a report entitled “Civilians without Protection: the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq.” Citing “immense suffering,” it calls “urgently” for ” respect for international humanitarian law.” Andrew White, Anglican Vicar of Baghdad added, “What we see on our television screens does not demonstrate even one per cent of the reality of the atrocity of Iraq”

The UN estimates two million Iraqis have been “internally displaced,” while another two million have fled –largely to neighbouring Syria and Jordan, overwhelming local infrastructure.

An attack such as that on Iraq, neither in self-defence nor authorized by the United Nations Security Council is, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal that condemned the Nazis, “the supreme international crime.” According to the Tribunal’s chief prosecutor, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, such a war is simply mass murder.

Most Canadians are proud that Canada refused to invade Iraq. But when it comes to Afghanistan, we hear the same jingoistic bluster we heard about Iraq four years ago. As if Iraq and Afghanistan were two separate wars, and Afghanistan is the good war, the legal and just war.

In reality, Iraq and Afghanistan are the same war.

That’s how the Bush administration has seen Afghanistan from the start; not as a defensive response to 9/11, but the opening for regime change in Iraq (as documented in Richard A. Clarke’s Against all Enemies).That’s why the Security Council resolutions of September 2001 never mention Afghanistan, much less authorize an attack on it. That’s why the attack on Afghanistan was also a supreme international crime, which killed at least 20,000 innocent civilians in its first six months. The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to launch an open-ended so-called “War on Terror” –in reality a war of terror because it kills hundreds of times more civilians than the other terrorists do.

That the Karzai regime was subsequently set up under UN auspices doesn’t absolve the participants in America’s war, and that includes Canada. Nor should the fact that Canada now operates under the UN authorized International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mislead anyone. From the start, ISAF put itself at the service of the American operation, declaring “the United States Central Command will have authority over the International Security Assistance Force” (UNSC Document S/2001/1217). When NATO took charge of ISAF that didn’t change anything. NATO forces are always ultimately under US command. The “Supreme Commander” is always an American general, who answers to the American president, not the Afghan one.

A new attack against health freedom, drug safety, and dietary supplements was launched last week by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) with major support from Michael Enzi (R-WY). It is called the Food and Drug Administration Revitalization Act (S1082). This legislation was planned over the past few years working hand-in-glove with the FDA’s dysfunctional management and legal team – meaning this legislation was written for the profits of Big Pharma and Big Biotech AT THE EXPENSE OF SAFETY AND HUMAN HEALTH.

S1082 is a Trojan Horse bill that pretends to address safety issues. Unbelievably, the bill turns the FDA into a drug development company that will expose Americans to new and dangerous biological drugs that have little testing to prove safety or effectiveness. And to top it off, the bill gives broad new regulatory powers to the FDA that can be used to frivolously attack dietary supplements and forward the FDA management’s anti-American globalization agenda.

On April 18, 2007, S1082 was approved by the HELP committee (which Kennedy and Enzi control) and now moves to the floor of the Senate. In a slick move, Kennedy has attached his long-planned FDA/Big Pharma “reform” measures to the renewal of Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA). Current PDUFA law expires later this year and must be reviewed by Congress. PDUFA allows Big Pharma to pay the FDA fees to speed the approval of its drugs. The new Kennedy bill will increase these FDA bribes to 380 million dollars in 2008, well over 50% of the FDA budget for new drug approvals. This is like paying the mob for protection. Kennedy, by replacing the existing PDUFA law with this new bill (S1082), is ensuring that his twisted legislation is the one that will be put before the Senate for a vote.

The FDA Drug Company, an Agency with New Regulatory Power

It is hard for anyone to comprehend that the agency that is supposed to be in charge of drug safety is about to become a drug company. It is astonishing that the FDA will now manage a full scale business activity that uses a “non profit” foundation as a shield to avoid international patent problems, protect proprietary rights of its commercial drug-development enterprise, and massively expands FDA regulatory powers to quickly remove anything from the market that is competition to its own products and licensing agreements.

This new FDA business enterprise is called the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration (see pages 105-125). In previous versions of the Kennedy bill it was going to be an independent drug company within the FDA (the Reagan-Udall Institute for Applied Biomedical Research). In the current bill it is a “non profit” collaboration of the FDA, private industry, government funding, and private funding. It is run directly by the FDA even though it pretends to not be part of the government. Under this scam taxpayers will foot the bill for drug development and then be charged outrageous prices for the drugs. Furthermore, the new bill seeks to allow a massive expanse of FDA regulatory power through this new foundation. For example, on pages 106-107 the bill states:

“The purpose of the Foundation is to advance the mission of the Food and Drug Administration to modernize medical, veterinary, food, food ingredient, and cosmetic product development, accelerate innovation, and enhance product safety….The Foundation shall [take] into consideration the Critical Path reports and priorities published by the Food and Drug Administration, identify unmet needs in the development, manufacture, and evaluation of the safety and effectiveness, including post approval, of devices, including diagnostics, biologics, and drugs, and the safety of food, food ingredients, and cosmetics.”

I recently sent you a heads up about the Bill Moyers special that aired last night on PBS. (Transcript and replay) For this I am deeply ashamed, and I apologize. I told you that this would be a good thing to watch, that it would shed some needed light on the media industrial governmental conspiracy to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Well, I was wrong. Wrong squared. I suspended my disbelief for one minute, put my bullshit detector on pause, and bammo. The Moyers show was a gigantic crock. He committed precisely the same egregious errors he so piously attributed to the bad guys. He sold us a lie.

Only ONE sentence of anything approaching the real truth was allowed to stick its head outside the sheets of complicity that shrouded Moyers’ whitewash. Only Phil Donahue said it: “It’s good for business.” Moyers played the same game which got us into Iraq, and has gotten us into myriad wars of overthrow and regime change since the nineteenth century. (The concept of the “embedded” journalist was in fact created in the nefarious Mexican War of 1848.)

Moyers limited his sources to the same major media co conspirators (CBS, CNN, Wash Post, NY Times) who colluded last time, and have colluded every single time the Government and their big business bosses have decided it was “good for business” to have a war. He paraded Dan Rather and many similar pimp media Meas who Culpa’ed all over the screen, but Moyers never got to the true story. The war, as all others before it, was begun solely to further the venal and rapacious interests of American business and power. The war was justified on totally mendacious grounds, invented by the government, and spread like fungus by major media. The major media depends on the kindness and advertising of the very people who benefit the most from the war, and it participated with great vigor in the selling of the war and its justification, moral and otherwise.

The business interests that wanted the war, paid the government, and elected officials to create a scenario where the war could be justified and prosecuted. The business interests that wanted the war, paid the media and its journalists to not just go along but play a strong and active role in selling the lie. One so-called “progressive” voice was heard- that of Norman Solomon, ( of the so-called Progessive Democrats, if your stomach can take it) who got the job of explaining gosh how did this all happen ? Solomon appears to be angling to run for something pretty soon. He has turned to a Politicians’ Ptolemaic Progressiveness– perchance he will run on the Ostrich Party ticket. “Well”, Norman explained, “we were all bamboozled.”
Oh.

Never mentioned: the hundreds, the thousands of anti war blogs, organizations, newspapers, monthlies, writers, and just plain folks, who saw and loudly and demonstratively spoke the truth and who were purposefully ignored, derided– and often persecuted- for their actions. Never even whispered: the fact that millions of people marched and demonstrated and fought to stop the wars.

Moyers did exactly what he accused the bad guys of doing- he pursued a willful ignorance, refusing to recognize or reveal that many of us were right, and were loud and were ubiquitous, and were purposely ignored by ALL of those who benefited from the war. The facts were all out there. WE were not bamboozled. WE were ignored, vilified, and hounded by Homeland Security. The press did not snooze. The press was not fooled, nor bamboozled nor tricked.

It is not enough that these whores apologize.

Apology NOT accepted.

What are they gonna DO about it ? Thass what I wanna know. Selling us another pile of doggie poop and telling us its Mount Ararat is NOT gonna be OK. Moyers and PBS proved to be two more allies in selling us the big lie, and should be hounded outta town for it. Even better, they should be ignored. We have serious and brilliant sources for truth available to anyone and everyone. They are NOT on network or cable TV.

The third summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for America (ALBA) is set to begin April 28 and end the next day in Barquisimetro, Venezuela. ALBA is a socioeconomic and political organization of Latin American and Caribbean states that fosters development and integration of its members through fair trade and wide-ranging cooperation, rather than by imperialist exploitation and the so-called “free trade” touted by the US imperialists.

The idea of the international organization was formulated in 2004 by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and it quickly won the support of Cuban President Fidel Castro. The two leaders formally launched the organization in April 2005 at a summit between them in Havana. At the 2005 summit, the two leaders signed about 50 deals that have in only two years more than quadrupled trade between the two countries.

The 2005 ALBA deal between Cuba and Venezuela was bilateral in genesis but multilateral in effect. The two countries started a program under ALBA which they called Mission Miracle which aims to restore the sight of over 2,000,000 blind people in Latin America and Caribbean. In the beginning, Cuba provided the medical services and Venezuela provided the money for the program. Today, ALBA’s Mission Miracle has restored the eyesight of almost 500,000 Latin Americans and Caribbeans from 28 different countries, who, for the most part, have been flown to Havana or to Caracas for eye surgery. Transportation, surgery, dinners, and housing in Havana and Caracas are free of charge. Another ALBA program intends to graduate 200,000 physicians in 10 years in Latin America and the Carribean. Already two Schools of Medicine functioning, one in Cuba and one in Venezuela, and more are planned in other countries.

Mission Miracle is a glorious display of revolutionary humanism which bourgeois society, utterly decadent, cannot comprehend or otherwise appreciate.

The astonishing success of the ALBA relationship between Venezuela and Cuba stimulated the interest of other Latin American and Caribbean countries in the organization. At the 2006 summit in Havana, Bolivia joined ALBA under the leadership of newly elected President Evo Morales. Both Venezuela and Cuba have since poured billions of dollars of aid into Bolivia, the poorest country in South America.

Among other things, Cuba has already dispatched well over a 1000 doctors to Bolivia. They are treating the Bolivian population without charge. They have built over a dozen hospitals and clinics of various kinds and equipped these facilities with the latest medical equipment and supplies, most of which were manufactured in Cuba. Cuba has also launched the world famous “Yes, I can” program that aims to wipe out illiteracy in Bolivia in 30 months. In the sphere of fair trade, Cuba and Venezuela have agreed to purchase all of Bolivian soy exports, if necessary, after the US imperialists, led by Mr. George W. Bush, indicated that US market access will be denied to Bolivia soy in favor of soy exported from Colombia. Soy is Bolivia’s main agricultural export.

Venezuelan trade and cooperation with Bolivia under the auspices of ALBA is so massive and wide-ranging that the people and leadership of other Latin America and the Caribbean countries are amazed. Venezuela has helped Bolivia with its current energy needs and with the development of Bolivia’s immense reserves of natural gas. Venezuela has also helped Bolivia escape from its bondage to predatory international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter American Development Bank, all three institutions are totally dominated by the US imperialists.

When Bolivia joined ALBA at the 2006 summit in Havana, Daniel Ortega was present as an observer. At the time Ortega was a presidential candidate in Nicaragua. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez walked up to Mr. Ortega and said “Daniel, you should come back to this meeting next year [April 2007] as the president of Nicaragua.” Since then the people have elected Ortega as their president in another sweeping democratic victory for the left in Latin America. On Saturday, April 28, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is expected to be in Barquisimetro, Venezuela at the third summit of ALBA. But Ortega didn’t wait for the 2007 summit; Nicaragua joined ALBA on the same day that Ortega took the oath of office in January 2007.

Nicaragua, which was a close ally of US imperialists until the November 2006 presidential election, is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere after Haiti. Bolivia is the poorest in South America and the third poorest in the hemisphere.

Expecting the same kind of aid that Bolivia has received, not even the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie, which ordinarily grovels before US imperialists, has seriously criticized Nicaragua’s decision to join ALBA. The Cubans are now doing their thing in Nicaragua in the fields of health care, education, engineering, security, etc. The Venezuelans are doing their thing, again on a truly massive scale, with special emphasis in the fields of energy cooperation, financial assistance, health care, education, agriculture, and housing.

Positive results from ALBA in Nicaragua are already discernible after only four months of membership.

In February 2007, Hugo Chavez visited three English-speaking Caribbean countries –Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda. The heads of government of the three countries are respectively Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, Prime Minister Ralph E. Gonsalves, and Prime Minister Winston Baldwin Spencer.

The three Caribbean heads of government signed a memorandum of understanding that says their countries support the “principles” on which ALBA is based.

It is still unclear what, if anything, this means. We know that trade and cooperation agreements between the three English-speaking Caribbean countries and Venezuela and Cuba have existed for years, even before the ALBA relationships that involve Bolivia and Nicaragua. So, this signed memorandum of understanding contemplates something more than mere “principles,” because Venezuelans and Cubans are already working in the three countries in a variety of fields. The three Caribbean countries are already members of Petrocaribe through which Venezuela supplies oil and gas to them on preferential terms.

The three Caribbean gentlemen named above don’t come off as card-carrying revolutionaries like Chavez, Castro, Morales, and Ortega. Rather Skerrit, Gonsalves, and Spencer resemble middle class liberals; so one has to be cautious about the legal effect of ALBA memorandum of understanding that they signed. Whatever their political and ideological identity, they are political winners in their respective countries and they have a voice in Caricom, OAS, UN and number of other important international bodies.

Indeed, the three countries seem to support ALBA more in practice than in principle.

What appears to be the case is that the three English-speaking Caribbean countries have some kind of relationship with ALBA that lies between membership and non-membership. Perhaps, their relationship will be more clearly defined this week at the third ALBA summit in Barquisimetro, Venezuela, if they show.

There is a possibility that Ecuador may join ALBA. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is now engaged in a bitter political fight to rewrite the constitution of Ecuador. So, now may not be the most opportune moment to enter ALBA formally although Correa may show at the summit in Barquisimetro this week as an observer.

In May 2007, ALBA will launch its international TV network for member countries and others to promote among other things, socialism, democracy, proletarian internationalism and anti-imperialism

Now, finally, to the big and burning question.

Who will represent Cuba at Barquisimetro?

The idea of a summit implies a meeting of either heads of state or of government. The president of Cuba is both the head of state and of government. However, Fidel Castro, 80, is recovering from a serious illness and his brother Raul serves as acting head of state and government. With Fidel in the hospital, it is unlikely that Raul will leave the country. The third ranking official in the Cuban government seems to be Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida, a vice president of the council of state like Raul, but Almeida doesn’t go abroad often.

This leaves, among a few others, Carlos Lage, yet another vice president of the council of state or Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Rogue to head the Cuban delegation to Barquisimetro. The requirements of protocol imply that it will be Lage because he, as a Cuban vice president, seems closer in status to a head of state than the foreign minister.

In the unlikely event, that Fidel has sufficiently recovered, it’s possible that he will pop up at Barquisimetro and shock the world. This is the kind of thing he likes to do. Again, this is … lamentably … unlikely.

Given the pathological attempts by the US imperialists to isolate Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA is an extraordinary achievement for all of the seven or so countries involved and especially for the Venezuelans and their exceptionally talented president.