Bulletin N°326

 

Subject: ON REFROM, REVOLUTION, AND REVOLUTIONARY REFORMS.


12 November  2007
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
I was recently reading the words of John Newton, the master of a slave vessel, who recounts that he was told by an American plantation owner, back in 1751, how he had calculated that it was cheaper to work slaves to death: "by little relaxation, hard fare and hard usage to wear them out before they became useless, and unable to do service; and then to buy new ones, to fill up their places." (cited by Philip Foner, History of Black Americans, p.140)

One aspect of the slave-master relationship is their level of understanding the relationship: Do the slaves understand the masters' strategy and do they adopt strategies of their own, or do they simply carry out tactics to avoid the worst aspects of the masters' strategy, i.e. work harder to avoid the lash?

A close look at the master/slave relationship can be instructive. American slave owners were disreputable in Europe after the 1810s. They were seen by most Europeans as being exceptionally brutal people, raping and beating other men and women at their own pleasure.

In her new book, La Pensée enchaînée (October 2007), Susan George writes about new European perceptions of Americans, today. A change has occurred in American culture, a change for the worse. Furthermore, George believes that this change is irreversible. America as many of us  knew it exists no more.  On the other hand, there are many people, like George herself, who have in mind the creation something new and different for the nation, something better and more just than ever existed before. For this, we need to know the nature of the beast, as it was and as it is . . . . Susan George's new book is a major contribution toward a deeper understanding of our American cousins.

Je veux montrer qu’un glissement tellurique de la pensée américaine vers la droite est à l'œuvre depuis au moins les années 1970; que ses maître spirituels ont acquis un pouvoir important et durable qui leur permet d'influer sur la politique; que ce nouveau système de pensée, tant laïc que religieux, a peu de chances de changer simplement parce qu'un parti, ou un président, est au pouvoir plutôt qu'un autre "Néolibéralisme" ou "néoconservatisme" sont les termes le plus souvent employés pour décrire ce système; et tous deux font référence à un ensemble cohérent de principes et d'idées. (Nous examinerons plus loin les nuances entre les deux mots.) Cette culture a été patiemment construite; elle a pénétré toutes les couches de la société américaine, depuis la classe dirigeante jusqu'aux échelons les plus bas, et elle n'est pas remise en question car ses prémisses sont habituellement tacites. Celles-ci ont néanmoins conduit à un déplacement sensible du centre de gravité de la politique américaine vers la droite. (p.10)

 

A "cultural revolution" based on lies, threats and disinformation, George argues, has displaced rational dialogue and democratic participation, and the groundwork for this revolution was laid decades ago, when the U.S. government found it could no longer shield U.S. corporate greed and advance imperialist expansion in South East Asia. They learned from their mistakes.

George observes that, "Beaucoup de gens, en particulier en Europe, continuent de vivre dans un monde pour l'essentiel rationnel, policé, avec des services publics et un certan niveau de protection sociale. Leurs société, en débit de nombreuses injustices, sont des endroits où il fait plutôt bon vivre".(p.18-19)

The United States of America, by contrast, is caught in a vicious spiral downward: "En ce qui concern la religion populaire," according to former New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism,

... la droite chrétienne radicale [constituent] une forme naissant de fascisme; version américaine. Les pauvres ainsi qu'une partie croissante de la classe moyenne menacée de précarité et instable sont plongés dans le désespoir, piégés dans des communautés sans âme, à l'uniformité abrutissante, où ils se sentent abandonnés, isolés, seuls. Ils trouvent souvent le réconfort dans les Églises qui leur promettent la solidarité, l'utopie et, pour nombre d'entre elles, la revanche. La plupart de ces pratiquants ne sont que des âmes égarées agrippées à leurs croyances, souvent bizarres; beaucoup sont d'authentiques idéalistes ou utopistes; la majorité ont une foi sincère et ne sont certainement pas de mauvaises gens. Il est néanmoins facile de les manipuler. (p.17)

Elsewhere, George cites from the 2001 U.S. census statistics, that the total adult population of the United States in 2001 was reported to be 208 million; that among this total adult population some 159 million (76.4%) declared themselves to be Christian, while 27.5 million (13.2%) said they belonged to no religion, 11 million (5.3%) refused to respond to the question, 7.7 million (3.7%) said they were Jewish, and 2.8 million (1.3%) declared themselves Muslims. The remaining (a minuscule 0.4%) were of various faiths, which included Buddhist, Hindus, and even Druids. Of the 159 millions Christians, nearly one-third (31.9%) said they were Catholics, and 21% declared themselves Baptists.(p.126)

Susan George writes that by her own rough calculations there probably exists in the United States today about 70 million born-again Christian Protestants. (Her independently derived figure was confirmed by the progressive investigative TV reporter, Bill Moyers, and also by the late right-wing Christian fundamentalist, Jerry Fallwell, who died in May 2007. It would appear that  there really are 70 million born-again Christian Protestants in the United States. But what does this mean? Her point is that this segment of the American population has been galvanized into a voting bloc that Republicans can rely on in every national election. But my born-again Christian friends from Texas oppose Bush. Last year one wrote me that she had prayed to God that Governor Bush would stop killing people on death row at the Huntsville Penitentiary, but she finally gave up on this prayer and began to ask God just to take him. Clearly not all of those who have embraced this Christian ideology are right-wing. In my opinion, the Christian discourse is largely a product of censorship, like the Jewish discourse, the Muslim discourse, the Hindu discourse, etc., etc.... I don't think Susan George would disagree with this.

But what are we to make of the ideological phenomenon of a Christian right-wing that is organized, militant, and electing right-wing lawmakers year after year?

Susan George offers an answer, which is reflected in the words of the author of another recent book, Mes Luttes, Nos Luttes pour une autre monde (October 2007), by Jo Briant. This autobiography, like any good autobiography, is the history of a generation. In this case the generation was living in the Grenoble region of southern France, and Briant's account is radically honest:

... jusqu'aux années 80 nous avions le sentiment que notre engagement militant, en soutien aux luttes des peuples, des plus opprimés, des plus exclus, pesait, même modestement, sur le cours des choses, que nous pouvions mesurer d’avancées et même des "victoires". Mais, en ce
début du 3e millénaire, je fais avec beaucoup; le constat effrayant que s'opère sous nos yeux une rupture profonde, un changement de nature: , marchandisation généralisée de la santé, de l'éducation, de l'éducation, de l'eau, des services publics; de la culture; du vivant; concentration accélérée des richesses et des lieux de décisions; marginalisation sociale et fragilisation d'un nombre croissant d'hommes et de femmes; recule des acquis sociaux, précarisation généralisée du processus et des conditions de travail; aggravation de la famine dans le monde: 854 millions d'individus sont gravement sous alimentés, alors que la production alimentaire mondiale pourrait suffire, selon la FAQ (Organisation mondiale contre la faim) à nourrir douze milliards d'êtres humaine, alors que nous sommes 6,5 milliards en 2007.

Oui, nous sommes bel et bien à un moment historique crucial. Ou bien nous nous contentons d'atténuer les effets de cette mondialisation capitaliste, de "gérer" le moins inhumainement possible les dégâts de ce libéralisme sauvage et particulièrement violent, comme le font les partis sociaux démocrates européens, le parti socialiste en France, ou bien nous luttons, avec les exclus d'ici et de là-bas, avec les peuples d'Afrique, d'Asie, des Amériques, pour une véritable transformation sociale, en nous attaquant aux racines du mal.

Les "leçons" que je tire de ces cinquante années de vie militante? Tout d'abord, l'extraordinaire chaleur, la fraternité que j'ai toujours ressenties au contacts quotidien avec ces milliers d'hommes et de femmes avec qui j'ai partagé tant de combats contre l'oppression, la guerre, les injustices, le racisme, l'exclusion, pour la dignité et les droits des sans-papiers . . . Ensuit, la conviction très forte qu'il faut dépasser l'attitude compassionnelle et humanitaire, toute respectable et nécessaire soit-elle, et agir en amont contre les causes sociales, économiques et politiques des maux que nous voulons combattre. Ce fut notamment, et c'est toujours la démarche de l'association dans laquelle je suis engagé depuis 1980, le Centre d'Information Inter-Peuples de Grenoble . . . .(17)

On a similarly personal note, Susan George --who like Jo Briant is a philosopher educated in the formal French intellectual tradition-- concludes her book, by addressing the question: "Pourquoi avoir entrepris ce livre?" The former Vice-President of ATTAC writes: "Je suis préoccupée par le fait qu'une grande partie de l'Amérique et beaucoup d'Américains --bien que ce soit loin d'être le cas pour tous, Dieu merci-- sont devenus étroits d'esprit, égoistes et pusillanimes; que les perceptions américaines ont changé; que ce ne sont plus celles au milieu desquelles j'ai grandi et qu'elles ne le seront plus jamais".  (287)

Then after a remarkable description of her own American family heritage, she concludes:

Néanmoins, si les Européens sont aujourd'hui déconcertés par l'Amérique, ils doivent se préparer à l'être encore plus. . . . Ma conviction est que les Européens doivent investir de manière très importante dans leur propre avenir en tant qu'entité géopolitique, ainsi que leurs infrastructures, leurs systeme éducatif et leur base intellectuelle. . . .

Quoi qu'il en soit, la tâche politique de tous ceux qui s'opposent à cette tendance [aux Etats-Unis vers le fascisme] qu'ils soient américanes ou non, semble claire. Nous devons combattre cette idéologie et tirer les enseignements de la "longue marche à travers les institutions" de la droite améreicaine. Les personnes et les organisations qui en ont les moyens devraient financer la production et la dissémination d'idées nouvelles et progressistes (ainsi que de beaucoup de vieilles idées toujours bonnes). Les intellectuectuels et les éducateurs devrqient contirbuer à les faire naître ; les étudiants devraient les étudier; les citoyens devraient en discuter ; chacun devrait être fier d'elles.(298-300)

In a word, the advice of both authors is: ORGANIZE! --organize as if your life depended on it, for in fact, in the opinion of these experienced  intellectuals, it does !


The 7 items below serve as illustrations of the asymmetrical struggle, in which one side is well organized with strategies, a variety of appropriate tactics, and essential logistics, while the other is largely demoralized and in disarray. We see the much needed effort to transcend the mere search for new tactics and begin the attempt to establish new strategies that would free us from the bondage of repeated defeats by a well-armed minority of ill-willed experts in social control and venal profiteering, called "corporatism."


Item A. from Professor Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics at the University of Massechussets and an editor at Monthly Review, is a reply to my inquiry about his opinion on the articles in Alternatives Economiques.

Item B., from Lenni Brenner, is on the historic Israeli-South African connection with the politics of racism and the imposition of Apartheid.

Item C., from Professor Edward Herman, is an article from Academics for Justice on "Intellectual terrorism" & a new target for the Israel Lobby: the progressive Israeli newspaper Haaretz,

IItem D., from National Security Archives, is a report on newly declassified documents showing the "Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War."

Item E., from Professor Fred Lonidier, is an article from the American Labor Education Center on "World Wide Work."

Item F., from Fred Lonidier, is a article by Alan Howard on "The Future of Global Unions".

And item G. is a short essay by Richard Wolff suggesting a dialectical relationship between the electoral defeats of progressives and the possibilities for social revolution, as radical as the one that brought the present political economy into power in the first place.


Finally, we share with CEIMSA readers the rhe recent newsletter from William Blum, author of the several books on U.S. foreign policy, including the indispensable classic which has been translated into French, "Killiing Hope" :


Anti-Empire Report, November 6, 2007
http://killinghope.org/aer51.htm


Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Universit Stendhal Grenoble 3
http ://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
 

_________________
A.
from Richard Wolff :
10 November 2007
Subject: reponse a votre dernier courriel/email


Rick,

What do you think of this review which I've been receiving regularly for more than a year?
Francis

Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:38:35 +0100
From: "Alternatives Economiques" <redaction@alternatives-economiques.fr>
To: francis.feeley@u-grenoble3.fr
Subject: Lettre d'information Novembre 2007

[] 


Croissance, emploi : Sarkozy peut-il russir ?
Avec une croissance plus faible que prvu et un paquet fiscal qui prive lEtat de moyens, le volontarisme du prsident ne suffira pas amliorer la situation conomique. (lire l' introduction)

Dear Francis,
            I read the lead article on Sarkozys economic dilemma. To be brutally brief, here is what I think. This is by now the conventional left economic analysis across the globe. It has come to mean now (it did not always) a kind of left Keynesianism: the solution is always more social-welfare friendly government interventions and regulations that both (1) leave in tact and in place private corporate boards of directors, and (2) provide them with incentives/rewards to undertake economic growth activities and, when circumstances allow, to undo previous Keynesian reforms (which is, after all, what neoliberalism is). The differences then among those leftists pursuing such policies lies only in the relatively greater or lesser emphasis on how friendly to mass welfare vs how friendly to corporate profitability the mix is. Such leftism is what confronts the neoliberal/ globalist program which panders utterly to business while telling the masses about the importance of global competitiveness, sacrifice and the long-term benefits to be gleaned from short term losses for them.
            Both sides of this endlessly repeated and sterile debate between neoliberalism and left Keynesianism neither ask nor answer questions about why the maintenance of the existing class structure of production is their shared presumption and how it may well be the basic obstacle to the socially shared prosperity that neither side achieves.
        Europes decline relative to the Anglo-USA and the Far East in large economic terms is stunning to watch from here. Almost as stunning, I should say, as the paralysis of the left in terms of producing a real critical assessment and alternative to the old, tired, and largely irrelevant dance of the neoliberals and Keynesians. To be fair, that paralysis we share on this side of the Atlantic too. Which is what I work on and why I react to this review with such impatience.
Rick

 
__________________
B.
from Lenni Brenner :
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 14:42:53 EST
Subject: When Israel Was Apartheid's Open Ally - By Lenni Brenner
www.smithbowen.net/linfame/brenner



When Israel Was Apartheid's Open Ally
November 5, 2007
by Lenni Brenner


Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has opened up much of the American public to serious discussion of Israel's realities. He's no expert on Zionist history, but the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel propagandists must now work 25 hours a day, 366 days a year, trying to discredit equating Israel and apartheid South Africa. Curiously, Carter only mentions South African apartheid 3 times. He relates how, on his 1973 visit to Israel, "General Rabin described the close relationship that Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade (he had returned from there a day or two early to greet us) but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive."

He also tells us that "Israeli leaders have embarked on a series of unilateral decisions, bypassing both Washington and the Palestinians. Their presumption is that an encircling barrier will finally resolve the Palestinian problem. Utilizing their political and military dominance, they are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories. The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land. There has been a determined and remarkably effective effort to isolate settlers from Palestinians, so that a Jewish family can commute from Jerusalem to their highly subsidized home deep in the West Bank on roads from which others are excluded, without ever coming in contact with any facet of Arab life."

And he presents the 3 unattractive options in front of Israel's public. One is"A system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed, although many citizens of Israel deride the racist connotation of prescribing permanent second-class status for the Palestinians. As one prominent Israeli stated, 'I am afraid that we are moving toward a government like that of South Africa, with dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship. The West Bank is not worth it.'"

Beyond that, his only citation re post-apartheid South Africa is listing Nelson Mandela as supporting the "Geneva Initiative" Israel/Palestine peace plan that Carter was involved in drawing up.

In reality, Israeli and American Zionist ties to racist Pretoria were so close that there can be no doubt that Zionism's leaders were accomplices in apartheid's crimes, including murderous invasions of Angola and Namibia.

Israel denounced apartheid until the 1973 Yom Kippur war as it sought to diplomatically outflank the Arabs in the UN by courting Black Africa. But most Black states broke ties after the war, in solidarity with Egypt, trying to drive non-African Israel out of the Sinai, part of Africa. Jerusalem then turned towards South Africa.

During WW ll, Britain had John Vorster interned as a Nazi sympathizer. But in 1976 Israel invited South Africa's Prime Minister to Jerusalem. Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's PM, hailed "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence." Both confronted "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness." Israel, alone in the world, allowed Bophuthatswana, SA's puppet 'black homeland,' to open an embassy.

In 1989, Ariel Sharon, with David Chanoff, wrote Warrior: An Autobiography. He told of his 1981 trip to Africa and the US as Israel's Defense Minister:

"From Zaire we went to South Africa, where Lily and I were taken to see the Angola border. There South Africans were fighting a continuing war against Cuban-led guerrilla groups infiltrating from the north. To land there our plane came in very high as helicopters circled, searching the area. When the helicopters were satisfied, we corkscrewed down toward the field in a tight spiral to avoid the danger of ground-to-air missiles, the Russian-supplied SAM 7 Strellas that I had gotten to know at the Canal.

On the ground I saw familiar scenes. Soldiers and their families lived in this border zone at constant risk, their children driven to school in convoys protected by high-built armored cars, which were less vulnerable to mines.

I went from unit to unit, and in each place I was briefed and tried to get a feel for the situation. It is not in any way possible to compare Israel with South Africa, and I don't believe that any Jew can support apartheid. But seeing these units trying to close their border against terrorist raids from Angola, you could not ignore their persistence and determination. So even though conditions in the two countries were so vastly different, in some ways life on the Angolan border looked not that much different from life on some of our own borders."

Sharon went to Washington to deal with a range of Middle Eastern questions. He also "took the opportunity to discuss with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger, and CIA Director William Casey other issues of mutual interest. I described what I had seen in Africa, including the problems facing the Central African Republic. I recommended to them that we should try to go into the vacuums that existed in the region and suggested that efforts of this sort would be ideally suited for American-Israeli cooperation."

By 1989 it was certain that apartheid was about to close down, hence Sharon's "I don't believe that any Jew can support apartheid." But a 12/14/81 NY Times article, "South Africa Needs More Arms, Israeli Says," gave a vivid picture of Israel's earlier zeal for its ally's cause:

"The military relationship between South Africa and Israel, never fully acknowledged by either country, has assumed a new significance with the recent 10 day visit by Israel's Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, to South African forces in Namibia along the border with Angola.

In an interview during his recent visit to the United States, Mr. Sharon made several points concerning the South African position.

First, he said that South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa and southwestern Asia that is trying to resist Soviet military infiltration in the area.

He added that there had been a steady flow of increasingly sophisticated Soviet weapons to Angola and other African nations, and that as a result of this, and Moscow's political and economic leverage, the Soviet Union was 'gaining ground daily' throughout the region.

Mr. Sharon, in company with many American and NATO military analysts, reported that South Africa needed more modern weapons if it is to fight successfully against Soviet-Supplied troops. The United Nations arms embargo, imposed in November 1977, cut off established weapons sources such as Britain, France and Israel, and forced South Africa into under-the-table deals....

Israel, which has a small but flourishing arms export industry, benefited from South African military trade before the 1977 embargo.

According to The Military Balance, the annual publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the South African Navy includes seven Israeli-built fast attack craft armed with Israeli missiles. The publication noted that seven more such vessels are under order. Presumably the order was placed before the 1977 embargo was imposed....

Mr. Sharon said Moscow and its allies had made sizable gains in Central Africa and had established 'corridors of power,' such as one connecting Libya and Chad. He said that Mozambique was under Soviet control and that Soviet influence was growing in Zimbabwe.

The Israeli official... saw the placement of Soviet weapons, particularly tanks, throughout the area as another danger.

South Africa's military policy of maintaining adequate reserves, Mr. Sharon said, will enable it to keep forces in the field in the foreseeable future but he warned that in time the country may be faced by more powerful weapons and better armed and trained soldiers."

American Zionists were equally committed to apartheid. The 5/86 ADL Bulletin ran "The African National Congress: A Closer Look." It revealed the organization's hatred of the movement leading the liberation struggle in South Africa. The ADL sent its tirade to every member of the US Congress!

It formally bowed to political correctness: "Discussion of the political scene in South Africa properly begins with the self-evident stipulation that apartheid is racist and dehumanizing." But "this is not to suggest closing our eyes to what may emerge once apartheid is gone.... We must distinguish between those who will work for a humane, democratic, pro-western South Africa and those who are totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli and anti-American.

It is in this context that the African National Congress (ANC), so frequently discussed as an alternative to the Botha government, merits a close, unsentimental look.... The ANC, which seeks to overthrow the South African government, is a 'national liberation movement' that, plainly said, is under heavy Communist influence. The ANC has been allied with the South African Communist Party (SACP) for 50 years.... The fall of South Africa to such a Soviet oriented and Communist influenced force would be a severe setback to the United States, whose defense industry relies heavily on South Africa's wealth of strategic minerals."

ADL spying on America's anti-apartheid movement, for BOSS, South Africa's secret police, became public in 1993 when San Francisco papers revealed that Tom Gerard, a local cop and ex-CIA man, illegally gave police information to Roy Bullock, ADL's man in SF.

Gerard pled no contest to illegal access to police computers. The ADL made a 'we didn't do it and won't do it again' deal with the DA. It agreed to an injunction not to use illegal methods in 'monitoring' the political universe. ADL National Director Abe Foxman said that, rather than go to trial, where -- of course! -- they would certainly have been found innocent, ADL settled because "continuing with an investigation over your head for months and years leads some to believe there is something wrong."

Despite the slap-on-the-wrist deal, Bullock's activities were documented. The ADL claimed that he was a free-lance informer whose activities for the apartheid regime were unknown to them. But (FBI) FD-302, a 1993 FBI report on an interview with Bullock, takes up a letter found in his computer files, "prepared for transmission to the South Africans." It said that, "during an extended conversation with two FBI agents," in 1990, they asked "'Why do you think South African agents are coming to the West Coast? Did I know any agents' they finally asked?.... I replied that a meeting had been arranged, in confidence, by the ADL which wanted information on radical right
activities in SA and their American connections. To that end I met an agent at Rockefeller Center cafeteria."

The FBI said that "Bullock commented that the TRIP.DBX letter was a very 'damning' piece of evidence. He said he had forgotten it was in his computer." Of course he hastened to tell the FBI that "his statements to the FBI that the ADL had set up his relationship with the South Africans were untrue."

The ADL was so anti-ANC that only fools could think that they didn't know that Bullock was working with the South Africans. Isn't it more likely that he told the truth in 1990 and lied in 1993? The feds came on another matter in 1990, surprising him with questions re South Africans. They interviewed him in his lawyers' office in 1993. Be certain that they told him what not to say. He also knew that if he wanted ADL help in his FBI troubles concerning South Africa, he had to claim that they had nothing to do with his BOSS connection. In any case, the ADL continued to work with Bullock. And NY's 7/27/93 Village Voice reported that Irwin Suall, its Chief Fact-finder, i.e., head spy, told the FBI that "he didn't think dealing with South African intelligence was different than dealing with any other police agency."

Time hasn't been kind to the ADL. The ANC runs its country and is a model of ethnic and religious tolerance. It never was anti-Semitic and there are Jewish ANCers in the Pretoria parliament. But Foxman always has a cleanup for Israeli and ADL infamies. On October 11th, he spoke at a NY Barnes & Noble bookstore on his latest book, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. It has a chapter denouncing Carter. I was in his audience and challenged him: "You brought up the fact that Jimmy Carter used the word apartheid in his title. But I would remind you that of course that Israel was allied to apartheid South Africa. I'm looking at the December 14, 1981 New York Times, "South Africa needs more arms, Israeli says," Israeli meaning Ariel Sharon, the Minister of Defense, who was on a tour, as it were, with the South African army as it was invading Angola. And then, in May 1986, Foxman: I get the point.

Brenner: Excuse me! The ADL sent this to every member of Congress, denouncing the African National Congress as pro-Soviet and wicked, yes, and anti-Semitic and so on and so forth."

I sat several rows from him. Two words on my tape are indistinct and tentatively printed here in caps. But they don't effect general understanding of his statement, even with its grammatical irregularities as he grappled with my surprise accusations:"OK. The African National Congress during the fight for SUFFRAGE, the struggle for AFRICAN liberation, was anti-Semitic, it was pro-Communist, it was anti-Israel, it was, where ever it could, become friends and allies of Arab, Palestinian terrorism, etc.

I had the privilege, I had the privilege of flying to Geneva to meet President Mandela, before he was President, after he was freed and before he came to the United States on his 1st visit. I had the very, very special privilege of spending 5 hours with him and several American Jews who came to meet with him in advance of his visit, to better understand. And he said to us, 'if,' he said, 'I understand why Israel made friends with apartheid South Africa. Because Israel was boycotted all over the world, Israel couldn't have relations with other countries in the world, Israel wasn't sold arms to defend itself, so I do not judge Israel, I understand why Israel, you need not to judge me, for the friends that I make. I make friends with the PLO, I make friends with those who supported our liberation movement, and if you don't make it as a prerequisite that your enemies have to be my enemies, I will not make it a prerequisite for me.'

So Mandela, who was a heroic fighter in the struggle for, understood, very well, that just like he had to make deals with the devil, he made deals for support with people that he didn't agree with, that he didn't like. You certainly know from his record, he was not a Communist, yet he took the support of Communists, because they were the only ones, he understood, and respected, that Israel was dealing with South Africa.

South Africa was one of the few countries that sold it arms. Now these were the years that America wouldn't sell Israel arms. Those were the years that Europe wouldn't sell Israel arms. So he understood it. Was it pleasant for everybody? No. Did we send the stuff about the ANC then? Yes. And today things are changed, very dramatically changed."

How accurately did he recall Mandela's remarks? We know that the ANC made a deal with apartheid's leaders. Blacks got their rights and hearings were to be held on what repressive crimes actually happened during the racist era. But white military and other officials retained their posts under the new Black-led government. So if Mandela said what Foxman claims he said, it was in that reconciling spirit: 'You did what you thought you had to do, same with me, now lets move on.'

The ANC's generous peace didn't retrospectively make apartheid less criminal. If Mandela wanted relations between his new government and Israel to go to a friendlier level, that didn't make Israeli and ADL collaboration with racism even a speck less felonious. And of course ANCers still denounce Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was emphatic at a Boston "End the Occupation" rally in 2002: "You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal. To criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic.... People are scared to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful. Well, so what?

For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."

Five years later, Israel is still very powerful. But in time it too shall be replaced by a democratic secular binational Palestinian/Israeli state. The model for that is today's South African constitution. Most whites there say that they as well as blacks are the better for it. And when secular binationalism finally wins, Israelis as well as Palestinians will likewise rejoice in their equality, peace and prosperity.

_________________
Lenni Brenner is the author of 4 books, "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators", "The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir", "Jews in America
Today", and "The Lesser Evil, a study of the Democratic Party". They have been favorably reviewed in 11 languages by prominent publications, including the London
Times
, the London Review of Books, Moscow's Izvestia and the Jerusalem Post.

In 2002 he edited "51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis". It contains complete translations of many documents quoted in "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators" and "The Iron Wall". In 2004 he edited "Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism".

He blogs at : www.smithbowen.net/linfame/brenner

He can be reached at : BrennerL21@aol.com


________________
C.
from Edward Herman :
Subject: [AcademicsforJustice] Intellectual terrorism & The Israel Lobby Targets Haaretz
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ghada_karmi/2007/10/intellectual_terrorism.html


Francis,
Dont miss the second part below which describes the threat posed by an uncontrolled Haaretz.
Ed Herman


 

PART 1
The arms of the Israel Lobby reach far and wide:

Intellectual terrorism

by Ghada Karmi

The newest and least attractive import from America, following on behind Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Friends, is the pro-Israel lobby. The latest target of this US-style campaign is the august Oxford Union.

This week, two Israeli colleagues and I were due to appear at the union to participate in an important debate on the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine. Also invited was the American Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein. At the last minute, however, the union withdrew its invitation to him, apparently intimidated by threats from various pro-Israel groups.

The Harvard Jewish lawyer and indefatigable defender of Israel, Alan Dershowitz, attacked the topic of the debate as well as the Oxford Union itself. In an article headlined "Oxford Union is dead", he accused it of having become "a propaganda platform for extremist views", and castigated its choice of what he termed anti-Israel and anti-semitic speakers.

Yet Dershowitz could have restored the balance as he saw it; he was the first person invited by the Oxford Union to oppose the motion but he declined due, as he put it, to "the terms of the debate and my proposed teammates".

Dershowitz's article attacking the Oxford Union appeared in the Jerusalem Post in Israel and Frontpage magazine in the US. [Because of British defamation laws Cif has been advised not to provide a link - Ed.]

Dershowitz and Finkelstein were protagonists in a much-publicised academic row in the US, though it is unclear whether this has any relevance to the Oxford Union spat.

In solidarity with Finkelstein and to oppose this gross interference in British democratic life, the three of us on the "one state" side - myself, Avi Shlaim, of St Anthony's College, Oxford, and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe - decided to withdraw from the debate. This was not an easy decision, since the topic was timely and necessary given the current impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, where innovative solutions are in short supply.

Dershowitz and the other pro-Israel activists may rejoice at their success in derailing an important discussion. But it is of little comfort to those of us who care about freedom of speech in this country. Last May, Dershowitz interfered in British academic life when the University and College Union voted overwhelmingly to debate the merits of boycotting Israeli institutions. He teamed up with a British Jewish lawyer, Anthony Julius, and others, threatening to "devastate and bankrupt" anyone acting against Israeli universities.

In another example of these bullying tactics, the Royal Society of Medicine, one of Britain's most venerable medical institutions, came under an attack this month, unprecedented in its 200 year history. It had invited Dr Derek Summerfield, a psychiatrist (who has also documented Israels medical abuses against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories), to its conference on Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health. The RSM was immediately bombarded with threats from pro-Israel doctors demanding Dr Summerfield's removal on the grounds that he was political and biased, and that the RSM's charitable status would be challenged if he remained. Intimidated, the RSM asked Dr Summerfield to withdraw, although they later reinstated him.

The power of the Israel lobby in America is legendary. It demonstrates its influence at many levels. Campus Watch is a network that monitors alleged anti-Israel activity in US academic institutions. The difficulties of promotion in the US for scholars deemed anti-Israeli are notorious. The notable Palestinian academic, Edward Said, was subjected to an unrelenting campaign by pro-Israel groups at Columbia University with threats on his life. His successor, Rashid Khalidi, is the current object of the same campaign of vilification and attack. Finkelstein himself has been denied tenure at his university and everywhere else. The authors of a recent study of the Israel lobby's influence on US foreign policy have been called anti-semites and white supremacists. Former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: peace not apartheid, has earned him the label of "Jew-hater" and Nazi sympathiser. The British publisher, Pluto Press, is likely to be dropped by its American distributors, the University of Michigan Press, because pro-Israel groups accuse it of including "anti-Semitic" (ie pro-Palestinian/critical of Israel) books on its list.

Such activities are familiar in the US. People there are hardened or resigned to having their freedom of expression limited by the pro-Israel lobby, and the threats of Dershowitz would cause no surprise to anyone. But Britain is different, naively innocent in the face of US-style assaults on its scholars and institutions. No wonder that those who have been attacked give in so quickly, nervous of something they do not understand. The UCU leadership, shocked and intimidated by the ferocious reaction to the boycott motion from pro-Israel groups, resorted to legal advice to extricate itself and announced in September that a call to boycott Israeli institutions would be "unlawful". The Oxford Union jettisoned one of its participants rather than stand up to the threats of its critics. The RSM tried to distance the offending speaker from its conference to protect itself from abuse.

All this is understandable, but it is exactly the wrong response. Appeasing bullies like Dershowitz will not stop them. It will rather encourage them to go further. The question is, do we in this country want a McCarthyite witch hunt? If not, then we must confront the bullies and expose them for the intellectual terrorists they are, bent on destroying the values of a free society. To do otherwise will invite the fate of all repressed people, cowed and intimidated, hating their tormentors, but too afraid to say so.



 *******
PART 2
The Israel Lobby Targets Haaretz
by Mondoweiss



http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/10/the-israel-lobb.html             
It takes me a while to understand stuff I see with my own eyes. In my post last night about CAMERA's conference on Israel's Jewish defamers (which I paid $40 to attend), I failed to linger on executive director Andrea Levin's important speech about Ha'aretz. At some point I will transcribe her comments and provide them. But here is the gist of them.

No other newspaper in Israel matters, Levin says, because Ha'aretz is an elite publication and it has such an amazing English-language website. It is read by millions around the world. "None of the other papers is having international impact." All true.

"We feel directly affected by Haaretz... we feel we should be directly interacting as much as possible... putting more resources into that, because of its direct effect on all of us." I believe that Levin said she had even appealed to government bodies in Israel, including the IDF, to do something about Haaretz stories. The speech ended with the call to arms, for CAMERA members to start pressuring Haaretz. "Write, phone, challenge, speak out... Haaretz is now affecting all of us."

The heart of Levin's concern was the American discourse. When Haaretz was just published in Israel, CAMERA didn't care about its statements about the occupation and the destruction of Palestinian hopes and dreams and olive trees. "This all happened in Hebrew... causing little outward impact.."

Outward impact. She means: now Haaretz is affecting U.S. opinion and foreign policy. The most important statement Levin made was that she gets the brushoff from Amos Schocken, the Haaretz publisher, but with the American media, "there is an unwritten contract between them and us." (Verbatim transcript to come later, when I have a little time...) 

An unwritten contract: to be fair to Israel, to print CAMERA members' letters, to pick up the phone.

Isn't that amazing and scandalous? Levin is explaining why there is a free debate  in Israel and not here. Because of the lobby and its "unwritten contract." Because

U.S. support is crucial to Israel's existence. And so Americans, who supposedly so love the Middle East democracy that they support it out of the goodness of their hearts, must not read the news from Israel.


SOURCES:

Posted at 05:25 AM in Journalism

U.S. Policy in the Mideast |

Permalink
__._,_.___
Visit http://academicsforjustice.org

Contact your representatives and elected officials: use
http://cflweb.org/congress_merge_.htm

For other ways to help, see http://BoycottIsraeliGoods.org
,_._,___


_______________
D.
from National Security Archives :
Date: 5 November 2007
Subject: National Security Archive Update
.
http://www.nsarchive.org


THE RECORD ON CURVEBALL
John Prados


[Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War]


CBS News' 60 Minutes exposure last night of the Iraqi agent known as CURVEBALL has put a major aspect of the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq back under the spotlight.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan's charges that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons and the mobile plants to produce them formed a critical part of the U.S. justification for the invasion in Spring 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's celebrated and globally televised briefing to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on CURVEBALL as the main source of intelligence on the biological issue.

Today the National Security Archive posts the available public record on CURVEBALL's information derived from declassified sources and former officials' accounts.

While most of the documentary record on the issue remains classified, the materials published today underscore the precarious nature of the intelligence gathering and analytical process, and point to the existence of doubts about CURVEBALL's authenticity before his charges were featured in the Bush administration's public claims about Iraq.

Visit the Web site of the National Security Archive for more information about today's posting.

http://www.nsarchive.org


__________________
E.
from Fred Lonidier :
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 12:07:42 -0700
Subject: World Wide Work



WORLD WIDE WORK

[This edition of the free bulletin, World Wide Work, is published by the American Labor Education Center, an independent nonprofit founded in 1979.]

A controversy about media ethics that's brewing in Colorado reminds a lot of people of the old days of company towns where Hearst-style newspaper owners openly and directly attacked workers who tried to form unions, along with anyone who supported them.
 
Ever since Gov. Bill Ritter (D) was elected last year, state employee associations have been working with him on a partnership ( www.statepartnership.org) that focuses on improving service quality and accountability as well as giving employees a voice on pay and benefits. But instead of applauding this approach, Republicans and corporate lobbies have been playing politics with it.
 
When Ritter issued an executive order last week to allow state employees to form unions, even though they still would lack collective bargaining or the right to strike, Denver Post owner Dean Singleton took the extremely rare step of publishing an editorial on the front page http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_7354651, vowing that Ritter would be a one-term governor and indicating that the paper would oppose all of Ritter's future initiatives on other major issues such as health care. Singleton, who according to the Columbia Journalism Review lives in a Denver mansion with 11 bathrooms ( http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/2/dean-sherman.asp), has a record of breaking employees' unions at newspapers he's acquired (http://americanrightsatwork.org/antiunionnetwork/dean_singleton.cfm.)
 
Immediately making good on his threat to destroy Ritter and the new partnership, the "independent" news side of the paper just happened to come out of the box with such balanced headlines as "Ritter Sidesteps Statehouse in Union Deal." "State Workers' Wages High." "Business Leaders Cry Foul."
 
Fortunately, the rise of the Internet means that other voices can be heard.  A blog entry by Jim Spencer, former Denver Post columnist (www.spencerspeaks.com ), is likely to be just the beginning of a larger debate about Singleton's actions.
 
The paper's editor, Gregory Moore, can be reached at gmoore@denverpost.com.
 
New and worth noting
 
BOOKS
*Death at the Old Hotel
by Con Lehane (St. Martin's Minotaur). A contemporary murder mystery whose heroes are Irish reformers fighting union and Mob corruption in New York hotels. The author draws on his experience both as a union staffer and as a bartender in New York.
*The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green). A detailed biography of Tony Mazzocchi, a longtime leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, tells how he inspired a generation of occupational health and safety activists, pioneered labor-environmental alliances, pushed for a renewed focus on helping nonunion workers organize, and fought for fundamental health care reform.
*Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake (Shoemaker & Hoard). An engrossing novel that tells the story of a family whose lives, like the West Virginia mountains they love, are torn up by strip mining. It's a book that could only be written so well by someone who grew up in Appalachia and spent many hours interviewing local people before writing.
*Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson (Clarion). A well crafted, 270-page historical novel for junior high and high school readers that focuses on two children in their early teens who are caught up in the great textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. The author makes the characters real by giving them faults and dilemmas instead of turning them into one-dimensional heroes.
*Highway 99 edited by Stan Yogi, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida (Heyday). An outstanding 500-page, multicultural collection of poems, stories, and excerpts from longer works about life in Californias Central Valley.
*Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant (Crown ). This book about the white, nonunion working poor in the authors hometown of Winchester, Virginia has plenty to offend everyone. He argues that instead of alienating these natural allies by pushing issues like gun control, middle-class urban liberals should become "leftneck" organizers who reach out to "educate" working class whites about how they are being exploited by big corporations and Republican politicians.
*Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation by Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp (Harvard Education Press). Unions in many service fields are struggling with how to maintain essential workers rights while at the same time meeting the desire of both the public and workers themselves to improve the quality of services the community receives. This book describes how progressive leaders of the Denver teachers' union grappled with proposals to tie salaries to evaluated performance, professional development efforts, willingness to work with at-risk populations, and student achievement.
*The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster). An editor for Esquire reads that between one-third and one-half of Americans believe that every word in the Bible is literally true and decides to spend a year following the Good Book's dictates to the letter. Below the surface of his quirky, irreverent humor, Jacobs begins to actually learn something about religious history and explores how the same holy book is a reference for both conservative and progressive activists.
*Disability and Business by Charles A. Riley II (University Press of New England). Setting aside issues of ethics and morality, this professor of business journalism argues that corporations should employ and market to people with disabilities as a way to increase profits.
*U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition by Kim Moody (Verso). One of the founders of the publication, Labor Notes, argues that the decline in living standards and rights for working people will be reversed not by projects such as Change to Win that are led by national organizations but instead by local rank-and-file union reform movements and worker centers that support immigrant organizing.
*My Daughter's Eyes by Annecy Baez (Curbstone). 14 interrelated stories about young Dominican women in the Bronx. One in particular stands out: a simple story about two little girls who report sexual abuse to their mother only to have her protect the abuser.
*Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States edited by Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto (Duke University). A comprehensive reader with 26 essays that examine in more than 670 pages the issue of reparations to African Americans for slavery and segregation, from the reasoning behind it to possible ways to implement it to ideas for building a movement to achieve it.
 
MUSIC
*Crowd Favorites
by Claire Lynch (Rounder). An impressive set of songs that are mostly in the bluegrass genre but draw on country, Cajun, and swing styles as well.
*Beautiful by Women on the Move (Red Coyote). 17 songs by 14 women in a wide variety of styles. Subjects range from relationships to abuse to chocolate to cosmetic surgery.
*Down at the Sea Hotel (Secret Mountain). A collection that both young children and their parents can listen to, featuring lullaby-like songs written by Neil Young, Tom Waits, Nanci Griffith, Don Henley, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Billy Joel and performed by others.
 
VIDEOS
*Thirst
(bullfrogfilms.com ). As the world moves toward a day when wars will be fought over water as well as oil, this hour-long film focuses on three communities, in the U.S., Bolivia, and India,  facing the drive by global corporations to turn water into a profit-making commodity.
*Supreme Injustices ( www.allianceforjustice.org). This free 14-minute film focuses on two of the many backward steps taken by the Bush Supreme Court. One involves a woman from Alabama who was paid less than her male counterparts but denied a remedy by a convoluted Bush Court decision. The second was the overturning of a voluntary school integration plan in Louisville.
 
CONFERENCES
*Indigenous, Immigrant, Migrant Labour & Globalization is the timely theme of the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Labour History Association in Vancouver BC June 6-8, 2008.  Proposal deadline is January 14, 2008. See www.pnlha.org.
*True Spin is a national conference in Denver from Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 2008 for progressive PR practitioners to exchange ideas and tactics. See www.truespinconference.com.
 
Free tools for effective grassroots organizing and communication, as well as back issues of World Wide Work, are available at www.TheWorkSite.org.


_______________________
F.
from Fred Lonidier :
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 12:11:48 -0700
Subject: Unions are Globalizing: Solidarity is Rising, Patriotism Falling.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=942

The Future of Global Unions: Is Solidarity Still Forever?
by Alan Howard

Last November in Vienna, fifteen years after the demise of the Soviet Union and well into the third decade of corporate-driven globalization, the international trade union movement was reorganized to eliminate its debilitating cold war political divisions and to enhance coordination across industrial lines made obsolete by globalization. The founding of this new organization, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 168 million workers in 153 countries, was hailed as historic by the few dozen people who follow these things, which it may well be, though you probably missed the coverage in your local newsp aper.

Earlier this year AFL-CIO president John Sweeney met with Iraqi trade unionists in Jordan (there being no place secure enough in Iraq to hold such a meeting) to support Iraqi union resistance to an array of Bush administration policies, particularly on the privatization and denationalization of the oil industry; Teamster president James Hoffa and Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern were in China with a delegation of Change to Win (CTW) unions, the group that split from the AFL-CIO, meeting with communists and capitalists to exchange views on worker rights in the global economy. In Ottawa, Steelworker president Leo Gerard announced a merger that would bring together nearly three million American, Canadian, British and Irish workers in one union, and Communication Workers president Larry Cohen was in Athens to raise the visibility of an organizing campaign aimed at the world's largest cell phone service company, which operates in twenty-five countries on four continents. These events reflect the realization at the highest levels of organized labor that unions have no future if they do not become truly global institutions. What is not said publicly, but known only too well, is that unions may have lost so much ground on the international playing field and have been so weakened over the past half century that they will no longer be able to provide an effective counterweight to the inequities of capitalism.

'This is a race against time, and the stakes are very high. As weak as it is, organized labor, with its global reach, its billions in assets, tens of millions of members, thousands of employees, and historic vocation for uplifting the downtrodden, is the largest social movement on the planet and perhaps the last, best hope we have for averting the rendezvous with disaster that our profit-crazed ec onomic system seems determined to keep.

Union structures look much as they did a hundred years ago, rigid but not necessarily coherent hierarchies, from the broad, sprawling base of increasingly diverse workplaces to local union hall to national headquarters reaching a pinnacle in the recently formed ITUC. Alongside the ITUC are ten global union federations, previously known as international trade secretariats, entities formed by the last wave of globalization a century ago. With headquarters located in the grand

capitals of Europe and full-time staffs that in some cases do not exceed a dozen people, these global union federations have to organize and promote the rights of the tens of millions of workers in their various overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions around the world.

These are structures, one also has to say, in which all too often the energy and creativity of many talented and selfless people are smothered by a lethal bureaucratic mentality and more than a few leaders whose first priority is to defend their own feudal powers, no matter how stagnant or rapidly shrinking their fiefdoms may be. It would be difficult to design an apparatus more dysfunctional for the purpose of organizing workers in the global economy--including the 200 million of them who have done their own globalizing by crossing borders to work in other countries--than what we now have. But structure flows from function and function from conceptions about the purpose of an institution. This is not a problem with a simple solution. How has organized labor dug itself into this hole and how will it dig itself out?

UNIONS TEND TO be conservative institutions.

Historically, as they have evolved with the development of capitalism, they have passed through episodes of militant and even insurrectionary activity followed by longer periods of consoli dation and recuperation--periods that can last decades marked by caution and defensive strategies. Cycles of expansion and contraction have also been international in character, such as the growth of unions during the wave of globalization that crested in the last decades of the nineteenth century and crashed with the outbreak of the First World War. We are just now emerging from one of those long periods during which the behavior of unions has been characterized by caution and narrow focus. Like any bureaucracy in a defensive posture, the force of inertia usually defeats all but the most marginal--or determined--changes in behavior. You could fill volumes with stories about the enormous difficulty that unions in this country and others have had in adjusting to new realities, especially when dealing with the world beyond their national borders, but one from my own experience will illustrate the point.

During the 1990s , when I worked for the garment workers' union, UNITE, it had been hemorrhaging members for fifteen years. Some UNITE leaders were taking grim satisfaction from their repeated warnings to other unions that their industry was the canary in the coal mine of American manufacturing--the demise of clothing to be followed by auto, steel, and all manner of goods in the relentless logic of capital seeking ever lower wages, and now with the technological capability to produce anywhere in the world.

For years the strategy of the union was aimed at restricting imports, in alliance with manufacturers who would be inconvenienced by moving production offshore. The strategy was spectacularly unsuccessful. Then the union tried something new, based on its own history of "following the work." Early in the last century, as manufacturers moved production from the original centers of the industry in New York City, first to the outer borou ghs and then across the Hudson River to what was referred to as "The Foreign Zones" of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond, the union followed them and eventually organized well over half of all the clothing and apparel workers in the United States.

So why couldn't we follow the work to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, where over a million unorganized workers were producing clothing for U.S. manufacturers sold by U.S. retailers to U.S. consumers? The plan was not unanimously endorsed. "How many members do we get out of this?" the famously no-nonsense Bruce Raynor, now president of UNITE HERE, wanted to know (disclosure: Raynor fired me in 2001, in what was probably his first official act as president of UNITE). It was a very pertinent question, insisting in its raw way that we think about solidarity in practical terms. Unions are not-for-profit organizations, but they are not charities.

From 1994 throu gh 1997, at a fraction of the cost it took to organize apparel workers in the United States and Canada, UNITE helped unions in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Honduras organize nearly 10,000 workers who gained union recognition and signed contracts in a dozen plants in Free Trade Zones where unions had been prohibited for decades. The numbers were relatively small, but a few of us believed they reflected a strategic breakthrough, proving it was possible to organize some of the most exploited workers in the Global South--workers that global capital assumed would not and could not be organized. There was another ingredient in the high hopes of this period--because organizing workers ultimately requires a supportive political environment. An awareness of global sweatshops had burst into the national consciousness, as nongovernmental organizations and activists exposed Nike factories in Asia and produced the pricel ess spectacle of Kathie Lee Gifford weeping on national television about her--and Wal-Mart's--sweatshops in Honduras. When President Bill Clinton convened a task force on what to do about global sweatshops, it seemed like one of those moments when an issue reaches a political ripeness and the problem will get fixed. But like other big and complicated problems, this one will take longer to solve.

At one point in 1997, I was dispatched to Guatemala to investigate three factories working for a Philadelphia clothing manufacturer with whom the union had a nasty contract dispute. Conditions in Guatemala were predictably terrible, including dozens of underage workers, which I duly reported. Our campaign people in Philadelphia were delighted to have such damaging information to use against the employer, who would eventually sign a new contract. Meanwhile, the underage workers in Guatemala were fired, and our union allies b egan to organize workers in the three factories. It was an pportunity to build on an organizing campaign that only a month earlier had won the first contract in the Guatemala maquila industry, which then had 80,000 unorganized workers.

When I reported the firings of the underage workers and the other developments, the union couldn't digest the news. Our people in Philadelphia were in campaign mode and didn't want to deal with anything that could possibly make the company look good, such as not using child labor anymore. Furthermore, the situation in Guatemala was getting even more complicated. The underage workers were legally permitted to work limited hours if they also attended school, so we were talking with a local NGO about monitoring the situation with the underage workers while the union went about its organizing tasks. However, to organize the three plants would require UNITE to put pressure on some other man ufacturers and retailers in the United States; and anyway, more than a few UNITE officers and organizers wanted to know, how could we honestly fight for the rights of Guatemalan workers when their employment took jobs away from our own members? And the Guatemalan minister of labor had gotten into the act, indicating she could be helpful in this situation if UNITE would speak with the U.S. Department of Labor about some problem with an unrelated grant. It was around this time that the union began to withdraw from its international organizing projects.

That we were not prepared to deal with such complications was emphatically confirmed that same year when the Guess apparel company moved its production from Los Angeles to Mexico to avoid an organizing drive. Although the union had developed contacts inside Guess's Mexican factories, a strategy of following Guess across the border was never really considered. This was see n as different from our organizing project in Central America and the Caribbean. It wasn't just about extending the hand of solidarity to our exploited sisters and brothers to the South. It was also about helping ourselves in a major organizing drive, serious stuff that was hard enough to do without the cultural, legal, and political complications of figuring out how to organize apparel workers on Mexican soil. It was a slippery slope. Once you crossed the Rio Grande, where did you stop?

It is a prudent and responsible question, variations of which absorb a good deal of time and energy in the institutions of our global political economy. Because whether you are a corporation, a union, a person looking for work--or an imperial army--crossing any national border means a new and often unpredictable complexity in your life for which it is difficult to prepare but fatal to ignore.

ALTHOUGH UNITE'S CANARY in the coal mi ne is not dead yet, most American unions have gone through a similar evolution over the past thirty years: initially not realizing how serious the problem was; allying with "their" employers to restrict imports; agreeing to all kinds of concessions to save jobs that eventually were not saved; reaching out to unions or friendly NGOs in other countries--and discovering how complicated the world is.

"The challenge is to make these relations ongoing and not merely incidental," says one veteran of international labor work. "Right at the moment you need help you can't just turn on the solidarity spigot. What a lot of this is about is just developing contacts and mutual understanding. It takes time. We're not good at that."

European unions have had a much steeper learning curve. For years they didn't understand the Americans' alarm about the oxygen running out. Now that  transnational capital has become so completely i ntegrated and seeks to apply in Europe the labor discipline methods it gets away with in the United States, European unions understand all too well what is at stake, a realization that has spurred the greater degree of cooperation evident among unions in the Global North, which includes Japan and other industrialized countries.

DIFFERENT UNIONS TODAY are at different stages of this process and have responded in different ways to those complications. UNITE had the bad luck to be hit first and to be organized in the most labor-intensive of industries, where "following the work" in the twenty-first century means locating and organizing hundreds of companies and thousands of work sites, not the four or five or even forty or fifty that other unions face, and where tangible victories for one's own members could be years in the making. So it is not surprising that what appeared to be insoluble dilemmas to my colleagues a t UNITE ten years ago have proven to be difficult but manageable challenges for other unions in other industries.

No union has forged a more effective program of international work than the Teamsters. They have been doing it for a while, most dramatically in the 1997 United Parcel Service strike, when solidarity actions by an international network of UPS workers were a critical factor in winning that high-stakes strike. The Teamsters international affairs department--now called Global Strategies--has been integrated into its organizing and bargaining operations. A few other unions have been restructured this way, reflecting both the resolution of a major strategic question for American unions as well as an ongoing tension. The question that has been resolved is the priority of organizing, which is given lip service by unions that still don't do much of it. The tension lies in the problem that UNITE faced between its m embers in Philadelphia and those workers in Guatemala. Critics accuse some American unions of thinking only about their own immediate campaigns, seeking help from unions in other countries without paying attention to what those unions need. This happens less than it used to for a simple reason. It doesn't work. Word gets around that this or that union sees the relationship as a one-way street, and nobody wants that kind of relationship.

The Teamsters have a method for addressing this challenge. What the union did in 1997 and has since refined is to bring all the unions involved with a targeted company around the table for an honest discussion about what each union is looking for from the company and how they can work together to get it.

What that discussion aims at producing is a flexible network with common strategic objectives, not only for the immediate campaign but longer range. On a wall of the "war room" at T eamsters headquarters in Washington you can see the diagrams of these networks marking work sites in a dozen companies as diverse as Coca-Cola and UPS, these lines and organizing nodes virtually humming with the energy of workers on the march across five continents.

SEIU, the 800-pound gorilla of American unions, doesn't like to be told there's something it can't do, so nobody was surprised a couple of years ago when it pursued some multinational companies resisting an organizing drive in the United States to their United Kingdom base of operations, and then upped the ante dramatically by launching a high-profile campaign to organize property service workers in dozens of cities around the world--a kind of "Justice for Janitors" goes global. There are three remarkable aspects to these campaigns: (1) This is about service industries, supposedly a sector of the economy that, unlike manufacturing, was not  threatened by gl obalization; (2) SEIU has poured millions of dollars from its own treasury into this international work; and (3) in typical fashion it is accompanied by a controversial strategy paper.

"At no time in history has there been a greater urgency or opportunity to form real global unions whose goal is to organize tens of millions of workers to win economic and social justice by counterbalancing global corporations on the world stage even as the power of the state declines," writes Stephen Lerner, an SEIU vice president who has played a key role in the inspirational "Justice for Janitors" campaign in cities across the United States.

What SEIU discovered as it organized these property service companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities is that the union was dealing with a handful of increasingly global firms in an increasingly concentrated industry. Lerner identifies forty to fifty "global cities" that function as the "engine rooms" of multinational capital and envisions this new SEIU-initiated global union of the poorest and least skilled workers challenging corporate dominance of the world.

Although there is plenty to argue with in Lerner's thesis, like its distorted emphasis on the decline of state power and its sweeping dismissal of other global organizing experiences, even critics acknowledge that SEIU's efforts are a valuable contribution to the project of developing global unions. And SEIU itself is discovering how complicated this work can be as it becomes increasingly engaged in the dynamics and crosscurrents of labor movements in other countries. "We need to create relationships where everyone grows," says Tom Woodruff, SEIU executive vice president. "We're not there yet. We're learning as we go."

A Steelworkers union official made a similar observation in describing the seventeen-year process lead ing up to the announcement this spring of the unprecedented merger with the U.K.-based Amicus and Transport & General Workers Unions, which is now running on a twelve-month clock. Whatever the outcome of this particular initiative, how the unions got to this point is instructive.

It goes back to the 1990 Ravenswood Aluminum strike, when the Steelworkers realized that they could not win that battle without launching an international campaign, demonstrating it was necessary--and possible--to confront employers with a variety of tactics beyond the borders of a single country. By the mid-1990s, the Steelworkers had begun to build a series of strategic alliances with unions in different countries around common industrial sectors and employers that involved exchanges of personnel, sharing of research and bargaining data, and limited forms of joint bargaining with major employers. As this process matured, the  Steelworker s and many of their allies saw the need for an intermediate structure between the still useful but cumbersome global union federations and the bilateral relationships between individual unions from different countries. These alliances were the first step. The next, if they can bring it off, will be the aforementioned transatlantic merger.

These alliances are geared to campaigning but are also multilevel and wide-ranging, particularly in regard to political and policy questions. A critical moment that reinforced the merger process with the U.K. unions, for example, came when union analysts took a careful look at certain policies of the U.K.'s Labour Party and the U.S.-based Democratic Leadership Council--and saw they were confronting the same sophisticated ideological assault on both sides of the Atlantic.

At one point in the mid-1990s I was surprised to see the Steelworkers throw themselves into a sweatshop strugg le in Central America. But the Steelworkers do this sort of thing consistently, for what the union's international affairs director Jerry Fernandez calls "philosophical reasons: we can't just be concerned with ourselves." He does not use the word "solidarity," though, of course, that is what he is describing.

CURIOUSLY, THERE IS some ambiguity in unions these days about the idea of solidarity. It goes back to the bruising debate within the AFL-CIO a decade ago about organizing, when any activity associated with international solidarity was characterized by some partisans of organizing as little more than "labor tourism" and a waste of money. Now that almost everyone understands the connection between organizing and international relationships, we do not hear much about labor tourism, but a lingering confusion about solidarity remains.

Sometimes it is still juxtaposed to organizing, as in generosity versus self -interest, idealism versus practicality. If American unions were not so ideologically exhausted, it would be more apparent that these are not mutually exclusive terms. In this context, the vitality of each depends precisely on the synergy of their relationship. Strategy and structure are sterile without the fervor and moral force of solidarity. And of what use is solidarity without the strategies and structures and commitment of resources to organize tens of millions of workers around the world?

Questions about strategy related to the international work mirror the stunted debate prior to the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO. On the one hand, you hear the mantra of growth and greater density and how until that is achieved there's little point in engaging, from our current position of weakness, institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank, or state power in any but its most vulnerable forms. On the other, is the< BR>view that unions have to walk and chew gum at the same time and that you won't get the growth without the political engagement. This debate generates more heat than light, because in practice the best "organizing" unions do plenty of politics and the best "political" unions do plenty of organizing. The question is whether they will do both seriously or just go through the motions.

There has also been some progress on the question of solidarity and self-interest, at least conceptually and to a degree in practice. Whether we are talking about what the Teamsters call "simultaneous solidarity" or the Steelworkers' "not being concerned just about ourselves" or what the Communications Workers refer to as "the inner life of unions," it is the recognition that to go forward unions must also go back. To navigate the new global economy and move masses of people, they must reexamine the inspirational ideas that gave birth to the labor movement, reexamine them in the light of new circumstances, ideas that have sustained the working class of many nations through its darkest hours and most enduring victories. No idea in human history is more powerfulaO"or more useful in the ideological warfare of this ominous first decade of the twenty-first centuryaO"than the idea of solidarity: that across the divides of nation and language, of regions, races, and religions, ordinary working people are responsible for each other. It is the oxygen of any organizing campaign that truly lives and breathes, whether that campaign takes place in Dhaka or Detroit.

We see this beginning to happen, not only in the large-scale mergers and campaigns but also in more modest efforts, like the decade-long alliance between the United Electrical workers union and Mexico's independent FAT federation that has produced solid organizing gains for both; even the AFL-CIO's Soli darity Center, often depicted as remote from organizing, has created a unit that does work very similar to the various organizing alliances I have been describing.

There is something else that all of these activities have in common. The structures created to carry them out do not resemble traditional union structures. They are fluid networks in which the agenda is set by participants directly linked to the shop floor. Sometimes they include organizations that are not unions but are integral to the process. They can turn on a dime and discuss anything they think is relevant to their mission. What their relationship will be to the existing global union federations or even their own national centers remains to be seen, but these organizing networks are the seeds of the global unions of the future.

AS THIS PROCESS unfolds, however, American unions have to deal with their own particular political problem of being ba sed in the world's only (for now)  Superpower, with the advantage of their unique access to that power and the disadvantage of being held responsible for all the policies imposed by that power on the world.

For more than a century, unions in this country have cooperated, reluctantly or enthusiastically, with the U.S. government's foreign policy. During the cold war they did this more or less on automatic pilot, except for the turbulence caused by the Reuther brothers' opposition to the Vietnam War and a decade later the revolt within the AFL-CIO against Ronald Reagan's Central American policy. The 1995 election of John Sweeney to the AFL-CIO presidency marked a turn toward

a more open and pragmatic international policy. Then came the 1999 "Battle in Seattle" and its glimpse of a new political alliance--the labor, environmental, and global justice movements--with a staggering potential for making this world a better place.

September 11, 2001, set back this process, but the war in Iraq has accelerated it. Just how much could be seen earlier this year when Republican and Democratic presidential candidates spoke at a forum attended by 3,000 building trades officials in Washington. The one pro-war candidate was booed off the stage and the more outspoken antiwar candidates got a standing ovation. For those of us old enough to remember building trades guys busting the heads of antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam War, it was an iconic moment. American unions today are opposed to the war in Iraq, not opposed enough for some activists and officials, but clearly, institutionally and viscerally opposed.

Having broken, at least momentarily, the powerful ideological link between patriotism and war, unions are struggling to work their way out of the conceptual confines that have so inhibited them from understanding the way the world is chan ging around them. If, for example, they mobilize members to write letters, march, leaflet, and even on occasion sit in or go out on strike to organize new members here or win a contract there or lobby for a piece of legislation, by what logic do they not mobilize with equal or greater intensity to end a war that grows like a cancer on the democratic life of our country? This political timidity is a legacy of the cold war, which still casts its shadow over the new global politics.

WHEN HUGO Chavez was briefly ousted from power in Venezuela by a military coup in 2002, the AFL-CIO was accused by some of being up to its old tricks  because of its support for the principal Venezuelan union federation (CTV), which was and still is a major Chavez foe. The AFL-CIO adamantly denied that it was conspiring with the Bush administration to overthrow Chavez, but suspicions persisted. The image of American unions as junior pa rtners of the American government is harmful for American unions trying to forge new relationships and alliances with unions around the world. "This is not a good time for any U.S. institution taking the lead because the U.S. is more unpopular than anytime in the last century," says Neil Kearney, the longtime secretary general of the Brussels-based textile global union federation, which has tried without much success to organize what Kearney estimates to be at least thirty million apparel workers toiling in sweatshops around the world. "The depth of hostility to the U.S. is like nothing I've ever seen," Kearney says. "Nobody wants to cooperate with U.S. unions."

This image of U.S. unions subservient to the foreign policy of the U.S. government is also unfortunate because it is no longer true, as the scene at the building trades convention suggests. You could also ask the Iraqi oil workers union. In early June its members went on strike with one of their key demands being opposition to the proposed petroleum law, which would open up 70 percent of Iraqi oil to foreign oil companies. With arrest orders issued for its leaders and U.S. fighter planes buzzing its picket lines, the Iraqi union reached out for support from unions around the world--including the Americans--and got it. Political affinity between the AFL-CIO and the Bush administration is nil; they can't agree on underwear imports from China, let alone on governments to overthrow.

But the Venezuela contretemps reminds us of the need to look at the world as it is, with all of its inconvenient complications. There is no question that Hugo Chavez has done some very good things for the Venezuelan working class and has challenged neoliberal policies throughout Latin America. There is also no question that he has steadily consolidated his power at the expense of democratic righ ts normally associated with an open political process and has made quite clear his intention to destroy the CTV, the union federation that represents over 80 percent of Venezuela's organized workers--"reduce it to cosmic dust" in Chavez's colorful locution. The CTV has lots ofproblems that can not be blamed on Hugo Chavez. But  does that mean that the Venezuelan government has the right to replace it with a federation that supports the government?

There is a problem with the AFL-CIO's overreliance on U.S. government funding for international work, but this could be readily resolved if its affiliates recognized just how valuable the soft power of the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center operations are for global organizing, paid a share of the center's expenses, and took ownership of its work. There's no reason why this shouldn't happen across the AFL-CIO/CTW fault line, either, just as the two federations have developed wor king relationships on central labor councils and on some national political issues. There's not much point to every union trying to maintain its own miniature--and necessarily inadequate--State Department.

AS AMERICAN UNIONS become more involved in China, as they inevitably must, they are faced with questions similar to those that arose in Venezuela--on a much larger scale--about their relationship to official government unions and to dissidents, about the relationship between development and democracy, about the meaning of solidarity in the post-cold war world. It used to be that when a factory closed in the United States and moved to China, it was the end of the discussion--except possibly for some racially tinged grumbling about foreigners stealing American jobs. But this past April a meeting took place in New York City that suggests something fundamental has begun to change in this picture. Union officials and activists had come to the meeting to hear an adviser to China's official All China Federation of Trade Unions ask for their

support on labor law reform. No, not the "card check" bill in Washington that unions were lobbying furiously for, but legislation proposed by the Chinese government that would make some modest improvements in protecting Chinese workers against arbitrary and detrimental policies of employers. The reason that Liu Chen, director of the Social Law Institute at Shanghai Normal University, was in the United States is that the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai was waging a high-powered campaign to kill or neutralize the proposed reform measure. Liu thought that American unions (he had also notified  European unions about European Union multinationals doing the same as their American counterparts) should know about this and would want to weigh in when they did. He had just come from a meeting in W ashington with AFL-CIO and other union leaders and was gratified to report that he had indeed gotten their support--so that American unions were now fighting transnational capital on labor law reform simultaneously in Washington and Beijing.

Labor ended up batting .500 on this one. Within a week of each other, the U.S. Senate shot down card check and the National People's Congress approved China's new Labor Contract Law. In describing and analyzing the dire condition of the Chinese working class, which now provides one out of every five industrial workers to the world economy, Liu spoke of the need for "moral solidarity in our global village" and urged his audience to remember the words of Martin Luther King. "The arc of history is long," he said, "but bends toward justice."

Throughout this article I have not used the terms "organized labor" and "labor movement" interchangeably. Workers organized in unions constit ute organized labor, which means that 87 percent of the work force in the United States and probably even a greater proportion in the world at large, fall outside of that category. The labor movement exists wherever workers are in motion and advocates have taken up their cause. There are hundreds of worker centers, NGOs, women's, immigrant, community, and research organizations in this country and around the world that defend the rights of workers and function as their advocates before governments and the general public.

Unions need a more sophisticated approach to working with these allies, particularly around issues dealing with the Global South. Union strength is concentrated in the developed economies of the Global North, and the alliances described in this article tend to be concentrated in that geographical area. There are exceptions, and the resource-starved global union federations do what they can to bridge t he North-South gap. But organized labor does not have a coherent strategy or the semblance of a practical program for organizing and raising the living standards of the additional 1.5 billion workers, mostly in the Global South, who have entered the global economy over the past two decades. Until this reality is addressed, unions will face a constant and powerful pressure on the wages and living standards of their members are not to mention the inhumanity of a system that keeps more than half the population of the world living on less than two dollars a day.

Whether we are talking about formal and official mergers of entire institutions or the global networks growing organically with specific campaigns, unions have begun a process of global integration that could indeed prove to be historic. Even Bruce Raynor and my former colleagues at UNITE have, by a somewhat circuitous route, become converts to global unionism. W ith the dramatic decline in U.S. apparel and textile production, the union shifted its organizing focus to targets it believed could not run away, like retail distribution centers and industrial laundry services, a shift reinforced by its merger with the hotel and restaurant workers union. But a funny thing happened on the way to growth and greater density. Like SEIU discovering that property service firms were global, like public employee unions learning that municipal and state governments were using call centers in India and Kenya, UNITE found that the warehouse it was organizing in Indiana was owned by a French company and that big casinos can expand their operations in Macao if Las Vegas gets too expensive.

"My thinking on this has changed," Raynor told me recently. "For many years I didn't see the point of international affairs, but we've learned a lot in the past few years. What's happening to unions in this co untry can't be separated from what's happening to unions everywhere else. We're going to rise or fall together." UNITE HERE has begun to build organizing alliances with unions in a half-dozen countries, a process it expects to expand. "We will continue to put resources into this," Raynor says. "This is the future." It is even possible that the next time the union thinks seriously about organizing the apparel industry and the question is inevitably asked, "How many members do we get out of this?"--the answer from some intrepid soul will be, "At least thirty million."

____________________

Alan Howard is a writer and an adviser to international labor rights campaigns. He was assistant to the president of UNITE from 1992 to 2001. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and public television.

From George Orwells essay on Kipling :

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.  We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living and hence our "enlightenment," demands that the robbery shall continue.

 

 From Edward Dowling, editor and priest, Chicago Daily News, July 28, 1941 :

The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.


____________________
G.
from Richard Wolff :
4 November 2007
Subject: Social change after the elections in France.

 

French Election's Deeper Meaning
by Richard Wolff


http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/publications/Scholars/2007.6.html