[For Common Month Correspondences refer to Gnostic Pagan of Celebrated Calendar Days.]
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STOCK MARKET SOARS AS BLOOD
FLOWS
Like some obscene modern day Vampire Idol, the New York Stock Exchange soared as (highly censored) news of the Imperialist American and British Invasion of Iraq reached Wall Street. Blood and destruction of innocent people feed this World Capitalist Blasphemy, just as the ever-worsening conditions of the International Working Class encourage its voracious anti-social appetites.
How
is it that people have been so corrupted by this profanity of a rotten and
decaying Capitalist System that they seem paralyzed by its insane drive to
enslave the world and to destroy all beauty and meaning in it? What more proof
do we need in order to see that the so-called “American Dream” is the nightmare
creation of the Filthy Rich and highly paid lackeys in the Media, Industry,
Education, Arts and Sciences? Now a strutting, stuttering MORON who represents
everything vile and bullying and dishonest in the United States has even
usurped the deceitful Bourgeois Democratic process.
The policy of this site has been to refrain from calling the United States Government Fascist, and we have consistently denounced acts of random violence in political demonstrations.
BUT ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
The criminal invasion of Iraq (that makes 9/11 look like a PTA meeting) is a repeat of the U.S. attempt to destroy Viet Nam. There are three major differences: (1) Viet Nam was a DEFEAT of U.S. Imperialism. (2) The U.S. military machine was based on conscription. (3) The Soviet Union still existed and forced restraint on the colossal American EGO.
The United States Government has taken such a dramatically sinister turn with the ascendancy of the Bush Dynasty, backed by a decadent Oligarchy that would make Ancient Rome blush; and a Military Machine fueled by greed and brainwashed psycho brats—that FOR THE SAKE OF THE EARTH & THE FUTURE IT MUST BE DEPOSED NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES!!!
THERE IS NO “DEMOCRATIC” SOLUTION TO THE POLITICAL EVIL THAT HAS LATCHED ON TO AMERICA LIKE A LEECH.
SMASH THE BLOATED IDOL OF BLOOD!
DOWN WITH THE $$$ CAPITALIST $$$ EVIL EMPIRE!
REVOLUTION
NOW!!!
Some say
this call is premature—on the contrary, it has been too LONG DELAYED! The
longer U.S. Corporate State Capitalism is allowed to go unchallenged by the INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS,
the greater grows the power of the World Capitalist Monster.
STOP $$$AMERICAN
IMPERIALISM$$$!!!
FIGHT
BACK BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!
Thousands arrested
at US antiwar protests
By Rafael Azul
22 March 2003
Thousands of protesters were arrested across the United States on March 20 as people took to the streets to demonstrate against the war on Iraq. Over 1,300 were arrested in San Francisco and nearly 600 in Chicago. Arrests also took place in Portland, Oregon, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
The protest in San Francisco began at 7 a.m. on Thursday morning. Groups of demonstrators fanned out across the city blocking intersections and delaying traffic for hours. By midday the protests had blocked over 30 downtown intersections and surrounded several buildings. The mood of the protesters was more angry and bitter than at previous demonstrations. Many expressed frustration over the Bush administration’s contemptuous dismissal of mass antiwar demonstrations in the US and around the world, and the absence of any serious opposition from Congressional Democrats to the assault on Iraq.
While some of the demonstrators belonged to organized civil disobedience groups, thousands of others, the bulk of the protesters, had spontaneously joined the actions to express their revulsion over the unprovoked US invasion.
On Friday, large numbers of San Francisco Police officers took up positions at major intersections, arresting another 400 to 500 demonstrators.
The San Francisco Chronicle quoted officer Drew Cohen, who was filming the protests for the police department, as saying, “Our success will come when we arrest so many of them we have depleted their ranks.”
In Chicago, over ten thousand protesters marched into the downtown financial district and surrounded the Federal Plaza. As the rally grew, protesters marched down Lakeshore Drive until confronted by baton-swinging cops. Police arrested 550 people.
In Los Angeles, some 7,000 demonstrators, including Palisades High School students and UCLA college students, shut down a section of Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles on Thursday. A Los Angeles Police Department officer was filmed provocatively swinging his baton at protesters, hitting some in the chest and legs. About 40 demonstrators were arrested.
On Friday Los Angeles police corralled demonstrators away from the Federal Building in West Los Angeles toward a dead end area to prevent further acts of civil disobedience. A similar tactic was used against demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention in 2000, to isolate protesters and leave them vulnerable to police repression.
Protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco continued into Friday night.
In both New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over 100 demonstrators were arrested on Thursday. Some 35 were arrested in Portland.
Copyright 1998-2003
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
Baghdad market
massacre sheds ghastly light on nature of US invasion
By Henry Michaels
28 March 200
Wednesday’s atrocity in a Baghdad working class neighborhood has cast a grisly light on the real character of the US-British invasion. The final death toll from two US missiles that tore apart the Abu Taleb Street market in the suburb of Al Shaab is expected to approach 30.
Notwithstanding the predictable claims by the Pentagon, uncritically regurgitated by the Western media, that the bombing was either an Iraqi military attack on its own people or a US “mistake,” the civilian carnage is the direct and inevitable result of the war that the Bush administration has embarked upon.
As has been discussed in ruling circles in Washington and London for months, the subjugation of Iraq and the conquest of Baghdad—a sprawling city of 5 million people the size of Los Angeles or Toronto—will require the flattening of poor suburbs, the occupation of residential areas and the terrorizing of the population.
Two cruise missiles struck the heavily populated and impoverished Al Shaab area at midday, a time when Abu Taleb Street was at its busiest. Iraqi officials said 14 people were killed, but other reports said at least 20 people perished immediately, with 30 others injured, some badly.
It was the worst single reported instance of civilian deaths since the aerial assault by B-52 bombers, F-17 jet fighters and cruise missiles began a week earlier. The area that was hit was one of Baghdad’s poorest—consisting of overcrowded apartments, rundown shops and cheap restaurants.
Associated Press Television News video showed a large crater in the street, a smoldering building, demolished cars, and bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting in the back of a pickup truck. Flames could be seen rising above the burning shops. Men with buckets doused the wreckage of blackened automobiles, while women grabbed the hands of children and ran from the scene.
The streets were flooded after water pipes ruptured. Streetlights toppled over, trees were uprooted and some cars were overturned. At least half of the 17 damaged cars were completely gutted by fire, with only charred metal skeletons left. Other cars had their wheels blown off by the force of the explosion, while flying shrapnel damaged nearby apartments.
Hundreds of people milled around on the street in front of the gutted market. Some of them shook their fists in anger. “This is barbarian!” shouted Adnan Saleh Barseem. “It’s proof that their aggression is collapsing.”
Among the victims were 21 young people in a minibus. As dead and horribly burned survivors were brought into Al Kindi hospital, Tomma Hussein, a casualty ward doctor, said: “This enemy wants to kill all of us.”
These comments reveal not only the deepening outrage of ordinary Iraqi people, but an understanding that the bombing is part of a new and deliberate pattern following the collapse of Pentagon predictions that the Iraqi regime would quickly surrender or disintegrate.
Carnage and hostility
A number of Western correspondents recorded the carnage, and the hostility, in Al Shaab. Robert Fisk, writing in the British Independent, described the scene as “an outrage, an obscenity.” He wrote: “The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car...
“Abu Hassan and Malek Hammoud were preparing lunch at the Nasser Restaurant on the north side of Abu Taleb St. The missile or bomb that killed them landed next to the westbound road, its blast tearing away the front of the cafe and cutting the two men—the first 48, the second only 18—to pieces. A fellow worker led me through the rubble. ‘This is all that is left of them now,’ he said, holding an oven pan dripping with blood.
“At least 15 cars burst into flames, burning many of their occupants to death. Several men tore desperately at the doors of another flame-shrouded car in the centre of the street which had been tipped upside down by the same missile. They were forced to watch helplessly as the woman and her three children inside were cremated alive in front of them. The second missile or bomb hit neatly on the eastbound road, sending shards of metal into three men standing outside a concrete apartment block.”
Reporting for the Canadian National Post, Patrick Graham (the son of Canada’s Foreign Minister Bill Graham), described local people finding hands and other body parts of victims strewn across the area and waving them in the air in furious protests. Graham called the results of the bombing “gruesome” and quoted a local resident’s response:
“‘People inside the cars were melted,’ says Thamer Al Mutalib, his hands still covered in soot from pulling bodies from the wreckage... ‘It was to scare people and force them to give up,’ said Thamer... ‘This is terrorism. We’re not military people—we’re just shop owners’.”
British Guardian correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg reported that an oil tanker had parked in the area moments before the bombing. “Five cars were cabonized, and flames licked the first-floor windows of buildings.” A local man, Hisham Madloul, told her: “There were three families in the building upstairs and many children. We have committed no sin. We are not guilty. Why are they doing this? We are innocent people? What does Bush want?”
Pentagon lies
In his dispatch, Fisk noted that he had checked the neighborhood for military targets but found none. “Iraqis said there was a military encampment just over a kilometre from the street, though I couldn’t find it. Others talked about a firefighters’ headquarters, but that can hardly be described as a military target.”
Nonetheless, the US Central Command said in a statement that US aircraft used “precision-guided weapons” to target Iraqi missiles and launchers “placed within a civilian residential area” and that “most of the missiles were positioned less than 300 feet from homes.”
The Pentagon sought to blame Saddam Hussein’s government for the carnage, one way or another. “A full assessment of the operation is ongoing,” the statement said. “In some cases, such damage is unavoidable when the (Iraqi) regime places military weapons near civilian areas.”
Despite stating that the US had launched more than 600 Tomahawk missiles and 4,300 precision-guided weapons in six days, Major-General Stanley McChrystal told a Pentagon briefing that the Al Shaab bombs could have been Iraqi weapons.
Without offering details, Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke said Iraq placed missile launchers only 100 meters from residents’ homes and this was “a sign of the brutality of this regime and how little they care about civilians.” Clarke insisted that US war strategists had gone to great lengths to craft precision strikes on military targets in order to keep casualties low. “Any casualty that occurs, any death that occurs, is a direct result of Saddam Hussein’s policies,” she said.
Almost without exception, the American and other Western media uncritically echoed this line, referring to the massacre as a “blunder” and condemning the Iraqi regime for allegedly embedding its military in civilian areas, supposedly using citizens as “human shields.”
This black propaganda is seeking to prepare the American and British public, and world opinion, for a terrible new phase in the war. Having last week destroyed most military and government buildings in Baghdad—all of which had been vacated long before—the Bush and Blair administrations are turning to civilian targets.
Two days before the Al Shaab tragedy, a cruise missile struck Baghdad’s Al A’azamiah district just as the call for the Muslim noon prayers blared from mosque minarets. The strike killed five people and injured 27, flattening one home and damaging two others.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of missiles rained down on residential areas, hitting television stations and a corner of the Al Rashid Hotel complex. Iraqi Satellite TV, which broadcasts 24 hours a day outside Iraq, went off the air for about eight hours. Iraq’s domestic state-run television service, which was not on the air at the time, resumed broadcasting Wednesday morning as scheduled.
It seems that the Bush administration has determined that it must silence the Iraqi media in order to stifle coverage of the intensifying bombing of Baghdad and other cities. International law makes it a war crime to target such facilities, because they are staffed by civilian media workers and technicians. But Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for US Central Command, declared: “These targets are key regime command-and-control assets.”
The wider target is the Iraqi population, which has stunned the White House by fiercely resisting the US-British invasion force. The Al Shaab atrocity is an indication of what is already happening in Basra, Nasiriya, Karbala and other towns and villages where there are no reporters to witness the civilian death toll.
It is impossible to estimate the extent of the civilian casualties so far. For their own reasons, the Iraqi authorities appear to be understating the figure. On March 23, three days before the market bombing, the Iraqi government said 58 civilians had been killed and 469 injured throughout Iraq.
The Al Shaab massacre is a warning of what is to come once the ground assault on Baghdad begins. As the Pentagon planners have always anticipated, the Iraqi armed forces, augmented by local militias, have dug into positions throughout the metropolis. Boosted by the deep hatred for the occupying forces, the defense of the capital will be a largely guerrilla war, in which the army is mixed in with the population.
As the US political and military establishment found in Vietnam, a determined population defending its home territory and sovereignty can be defeated only by pulverizing entire residential areas and terrorizing the occupants into submission. President George W. Bush’s promise to wage a “relentless” war means attacking the very people he claims to be liberating, further intensifying the popular resistance.
Copyright 1998-2003
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
US-UK conflict
over the spoils of war
By Nick Beams
31 March 2003
A conflict has started to develop between British and American interests over how the resources of a post-conflict Iraq are to be exploited.
Last week the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that it had handed out its second lucrative contract—a deal worth $4.8 million under which the Seattle-based Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) will operate the barely-secured port of Umm Qasar.
SSA, which oversees cargo administration at the Port of Seattle and 150 other locations around the world, is well pleased with its latest venture which it won against the UK operator P&0.
“It is a nice piece of business, and we are excited about it,” Bob Watters, the vice president of the company’s Asian operations told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “But the real thrill for us to be able to bring aid cargo into Iraq and supporting our military people.”
No wonder the SSA chief was pleased. One could hardly imagine a better business outcome in which profits are combined with patriotism and humanitarianism.
USAID’s decision to award the Umm Qasar contract to SSA follows an earlier decision to give a contract to put out oil fires and repair facilities to Kellogg, Brown & Root, part of the Haliburton group formerly headed by US Vice president Dick Cheney. This decision has given rise to fears in non-US companies that they are going to miss out on some rich pickings.
Earlier this month USAID invited five US firms to submit bids for reconstruction work in Iraq worth up to $900 million with UK construction firms reported to be furious about being excluded. According to a BBC report, British companies have now pressed for government intervention to ensure that they get a cut. So far the best they seem to be able to hope for is to secure some sub-contracting work from the US firms—an economic relationship that might well be regarded as symbolic of the political situation.
A statement issued by the British Consultants and Construction Bureau following a meeting with government officials pointed to the concerns of the British firms.
“Our concerns were strongly expressed in the meeting with the government that we did not want to see a rerun of the Kuwait liberation in the early 1990s when the US sewed up the majority of the contracts through their Corps of Engineers,” the statement said.
British Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt telephoned USAID to lobby for British firms. Hewitt has emphasised that while Britain is not involved in the war for “commercial gain” there has to be a “level playing field” in the awarding of contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq.
Hewitt’s remarks point to some of the commercial interests at work in the differences between the US and Britain over the role of the United Nations in a “post-conflict” Iraq. Hewitt told the BBC it was “essential” that authority for reconstruction be handed over to a civil administration backed by the UN.
“Once we move into a UN mandate for a civilian-led administration then I hope we will all want to see a level playing field in which the best companies—and I am quite confident those will include a number of British companies—are all in there working with Iraqi companies and above all with the Iraqi people to ensure their economy can finally get the investment and development it needs.”
And looking further afield to the future involvement of British banks and financial institutions, she added that UN involvement was needed not only for “humanitarian aid” but also to ensure that “the international financial institutions can come in and help to support and provide the investment.”
It has been said that in the colonisation of the South Pacific, when trade was so often accompanied by campaigns to convert the island populations to Christianity, the missionaries came to do good and ended up doing well. However, the activities of the 19th century traders and colonisers are put into the shade by the modern day humanitarians.
There is much profit to be extracted from the “reconstruction” program but the really big money is in the exploitation of oil resources. Here, however, there is a political problem. It is rather difficult to square the declarations of Bush and Powell that Iraq’s oil “belongs to the Iraqi people” with a handover to the giant oil corporations.
It is a problem that the “spinmeisters” in the mass media, fresh from their efforts at presenting the war on Iraq as the “liberation” of its people, are already starting to work on. The general line of their argument, which we can expect to see repeated ad nauseum in the coming months, was set out last Tuesday by Financial Times columnist Amity Shlaes, one of that newspaper’s most fervent advocates of the “free market”.
According to Shlaes, the problem with oil belonging to the people is that it tends to translate into oil belonging to the government.
“And the assumption that government-controlled oil can benefit the Iraqis is tricky. Indeed, one can argue that state ownership of oil has cursed Iraq. And that, come reconstruction time, the single most important thing that the US and Britain can do to facilitate stability is to privatise Iraq’s reserves—even if that means cutting deserving Kurdish leaders out of the bounty. And even if it means being accused of creating a ‘Texas on the Tigris.’”
Shlaes insists that “control of the oil bounty could corrupt any new Iraqi political leader within a few years.” Accordingly a “measure of the legitimacy of any would-be leader should be his willingness to promise to separate a new government from oil.”
In other words, a “legitimate” government in post-war Iraq—one recognised by the US and Britain—would have to agree that Iraq should hand over the control of oil to the international oil conglomerates, in the recognition that this was for good of the Iraqi people.
It surely speaks volumes for the nature of this war that while not a single “weapon of mass destruction” has been discovered, less than two weeks after its commencement there is a desperate scramble by its perpetrators to carve up the anticipated spoils.
Copyright 1998-2003
World
Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
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