A more valid criticism was that the Chinese government’s track record on human rights won’t win any medals. And to be sure, it must be recognized that some of those complaints were made by those with less than genuine motives. This was the topic of a recent discussion between twenty northern California labor leaders and a visiting high-level Chinese delegation from the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions (GZFTU).
The delegation, which is affiliated with the state-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), surprised us a bit when they said this was the first visit of top Chinese labor officials with leaders of a AFL-CIO Central Labor Council. Facing new challenges to organize multi-nationals, our guests emphasized they wanted to rapidly end their isolation from American unions.
GZFTU's Chairman Chen Weiguang began by acknowledging that China‘s unions had to be reformed. “We need to protect the rights and interests of the workers and elect leaders who will stand up for workers,” said Weiguang. “Of course, the bosses within the enterprises want a union chair who will be obedient to the company but we believe the union belongs to the workers, not the bosses.” Chen speaks from his experience as a major planner of the successful unionization of Wal-Mart in China.
China's “Economic Miracle”
Currently the seventh largest world economy, the country of 1.3 billion is on track to become the third largest by 2015. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at rates that are among the highest for any major country in the 20th century. (US Dept. of Agric., USDA 2004 report) There are many internal factors contributing to China's economic "miracle" such as a more-skilled workforce and unprecedented capital spending on roads, utilities, buildings, machinery and equipment.
Over time, infrastructure improvements result in big increases in labor productivity and mass production of quality products, something U.S. policy makers do not appreciate. Substantial foreign investment in new technology since the early 1990s has also helped spur productivity. Before the mid-1990s there were clear differences between state-owned "socialist" factories, which offered lifetime employment, housing, and medical care, and private sector factories, which provided little job security, low wages, and no fringe benefits.
Today, however, competition and persistent government efforts to privatize state-owned firms has led even these enterprises to offer less job security, fewer welfare benefits, and stricter labor conditions. (China Labour Rights Bulletin) As a result, wages of Chinese workers have remained very low. Experts estimate wages at around 12% of US workers, thus providing China an extremely favorable trade advantage. For example, the USDA reports that “furniture manufactured in China can enter the U.S. market at 25 to 35 percent of the cost of comparable furniture” made in the United States. This imbalance is representative of most Chinese exports. From these statistics, it should be clear that raising the wages and living conditions of Chinese workers is imperative. Solidarity is not just an abstract emotional impulse; it is an economic necessity that unites workers around the world.
Our goal should be to avoid divisive competition between ourselves by establishing uniform international labor standards.
A Conversation with Chinese Labor
Our meeting with the Chinese delegation proved to be a lively and frank exchange. I asked a question about the control of the Communist Party over the official trade unions. As reported by Paul Burton in the May 28, 2008, Labor, the San Mateo County Central Labor Council newspaper, Chen responded to the question by explaining the history of unions under the Communist Party.
“For a long time China was a 'command economy' and unions were subservient to it. There was no distinction between labor and capital because we were all part of the nation,” Chen said. “The Party worked hard for the development of the working class and to educate workers. Things have changed with the move to a market economy and differentiation in factories between bosses and workers.”
Chen said that over the past 30 years of economic reforms, workers have made great sacrifices and now that capital had become too powerful the Communist Party was rethinking the balance of capital and labor, enacting new labor laws as part of that change.
Apparently some progress is being made.
Burton summarized the meeting by observing that “with the enactment of recent pro-worker labor laws in China, the situation may be changing as workers exercise their rights under these new labor laws.
“The China Labor Bulletin (CLB, online at www.china-labour.org.hk/en/) reported that 'the number of labor dispute cases in Guangzhou for the first two months of 2008 equaled the total number of cases in 2001. More than 60 percent of all cases involved non-payment of salaries and over-time.'"
CLB director Han Dongfang wrote encouragingly that “by developing collective bargaining at the grassroots level, enterprise-level unions will be transformed into labor organizations that genuinely represent the rights and interests of workers.”
Let's wish them well. We all should work toward this common goal in each of our unions. But some would say it is not possible to achieve while the Chinese government retains exclusive control of the unions.
The role of Trade Unions in China
Founded in 1925, ACFTU has around 170 million members. It is the only union legally recognized but its membership is shrinking as privately-owned companies become a larger share of the economy. The numbers are staggering. In their Feb. 9, 2008, issue, ChinaDaily reports that 200 million were employed by 5.39 million registered private establishments in 2007. This is more than half of all companies in China. These firms alone generated 60 percent of the GDP.
ACFTU is responding to this challenge by mounting a huge organizing campaign in the private sector, especially among the foreign-owned. As a result, the Federation expects it membership to increase to 200 million by its September 2008 Congress. It also hopes to announce successful completion of a “100-day” bold unionization effort begun in June to organize 80% of the Fortune 500 firms.
This new thinking was forced upon Chinese unions after they encountered stiff opposition from notoriously anti union Wal-Mart. Labor officials, normally accustomed to dealing with state enterprises, were shocked when the company actually refused to even meet with union organizers, a tactic commonly employed in America.
ACFTU began a successful grass-roots organizing campaign, a first for the state labor body.
The union was finally recognized in 2006. Chen Weiguang played an important role confronting Wal-Mart as a hostile employer rather than as a friendly joint-venture partner with the government. The latter view has always compromised the union’s ability to represent workers.
For example, the ACFTU official website still clearly reveals its cooperation with management: "Trade unions of the foreign-invested enterprises in China have firmly centered on production and business operation to conduct activities and have given support to enterprises in their operation and management according to law; have educated workers to observe factory rules and regulations and discipline; organized workers to launch labor emulation campaigns; and aroused the enthusiasm of the workers for running the enterprises well, so as to contribute to the sound development of the enterprises."
Yet, soon after the Wal-Mart victory, the ACFTU website announced: “This successful experience in setting up Wal-Mart unions is groundbreaking in that we have discovered a new line of thinking. It not only will influence other foreign and private investors to quickly abide by the law to allow unions to be established, it also brings to trade unionists a new mission. Following the new logic in setting up unions, new adjustments in union work will be needed, be it in methods, in organizational structure, ways of identifying backbone activists, down to how to use union funds….”
We are obviously observing the wavering contradictions of a mass labor organization of millions trying to define for itself a new role and trying to discover for itself a new voice that speaks more sharply to the needs of Chinese workers.
The big question is whether the announced changes in union structure and purpose enacted from “above” will be sufficient to satisfy millions of Chinese workers “below” who so desperately need an organization representing their class interests. So far, the government is walking a delicate tight rope of enacting reform without relinquishing control.
Fresh off the success of their grand Olympic production, the state retains the stage with the home crowd anxiously awaits their next major performance of reforming the trade unions. Hundreds of millions of desperate workers still suffering under conditions most observers describe as horribly primitive have so far been relatively quiet.
Chinese officials hope they remain in their seats.
But a “thumbs down” review might end up with a rebellious audience itself taking over the stage.
Examples abound. A party secretary in a public institution waited years for a promotion only to see his deputy, married to a high-ranking cadre in another institution, promoted over his head, despite a lack of professional qualifications. A rich businesswoman, who was not a party member, succeeded in placing her son in the senior management of a public enterprise. He had no qualifications, although he spent three years in a foreign university. For intellectuals, party membership provides leeway. According to a journalist: “Being a party member gives you greater freedom of speech.” There is no paradox here. Party members have access to an inner circle in which discussion is freer. That was a theme of the party democratization issue raised at the 17th Party Congress - which might be empty rhetoric by a party that has failed to democratize society, and so offers token liberalization. However, there are different realities behind the official party line, starting with the discussions that began a few years ago in the party schools about a “conservative democracy”.
There is a great deal at stake: how can the party retain power (personal interest) and maintain stability (collective interest) while creating a space for expression and political choice? The answer lies in the formation of intra-party trends, which will give a voice to social classes. The CCP will always maintain its centralized hold, but in the manner of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party after the second world war, an example explicitly mentioned. Or possibly, as in Europe and the United States, within a system controlled by two main political parties who agree on the basic issues and ensure consensus in conflict, and therefore stability. Democracy within an elite circle would reform the regime and avoid political instability. Party leaders have pursued this discussion since 2002. Their use of slogans (harmonious society, clean wealth and, more recently, the science of development) shows that they are taking account of the demands of society. There have been concrete measures, such as the limited but genuine extension of the social security system, a reduction in the tax burden on farmers and a less brutal control of migration and social movements.
Behind the static facade, a reforming gradualism is altering the political balance. There is no question of organizing elections in the short or medium term. Party democratization means limited experiments that provide a narrow framework for reform. Just as the controlled democracy granted to villages a few years ago is restricted to internal village matters, so intra-party democracy limits the space for discussion and protest to a select audience of responsible individuals. It is a question of damage control. The conservative democracy scenario does not seem much when compared with the second democratic wave (after the second world war), or the third (that of the former eastern European bloc). But it is possible to compare it with the first democratic wave in western Europe. All the 19th-century political debates concerned the contradictions between democratization (seen by the elite as inevitable and even desirable), and the fears it provoked among the ruling classes. Alexis de Tocqueville praised the people (honest reasonable citizens), but held the populace in contempt (the crowd, the masses, the revolutionaries). The major democratic systems grew out of a fear of revolution, but a greater fear that bad leaders might be elected (demagogues, and also ignorant and inexperienced leaders) long prevented any radical change.
If fear of revolution is replaced with fear of social unrest, we have the Chinese dilemma. The ruling elite is trying to find a formula for a trouble-free democratization that ensures “correct” leaders. “What is more dangerous,” asked a cadre in charge of village elections, “an unstable society deprived of the vote (unstable in part because it has no means of expression) or a society in chaos because it has the vote?” The ruling classes and most party members are doing what they can to avoid both pitfalls. Democracy is often mocked, sometimes by the Chinese, but it is not an empty threat. Beside social protest, or rather behind it, party members are taking political action. Lawyers, deputies, civil servants, teachers, entrepreneurs and heads of mass organizations such as the All-China Women’s Federation or the All China Federation of Trade Unions, act in the media and in NGOs, as well as behind the scenes in government, to defend underprivileged social classes. Some inform newly arrived migrants of their rights or publish articles linking the protest movements to social injustice and the defence of civil rights. Others support or even finance initiatives to help the poor or those whose homes have been expropriated, or defend national heritage, or promote the redistribution of profit.
Recently, some public figures have supported associations of co-owners who have been the victims of embezzlement by property developers and unscrupulous building managers with connections in local government. What is at stake is the important issue of recognizing the rights of the middle classes to enjoy that cornerstone of their aspirations: property ownership. Now the large Beijing high-rise housing projects can elect their own representatives. Local authorities have been quick to find ways of making these elections ineffective, but the reform marks the recognition of homeowners’ rights. Several journalists have denounced scandals relating to pollution or the treatment of migrant workers or farmers, or the plight of city-dwellers who have lost their homes. This new activism owes a great deal to a rigid elitist party membership faced with young people, business people and graduates (see “A middle-class party”).
These “reformists” are not revolutionaries or dissidents, but they do share a militant past. They are in their fifties and most lived through the major Maoist upheavals, such as the Cultural Revolution and the movement to send educated youth to the countryside, as well as periods of opposition, especially 1979 and 1989. They have long mastered the official jargon as well as ways of disputing it; but having experienced crackdowns, have no desire to be sacrificed again. They can be found in all areas of government and sometimes have surprising affinities with the arts or government, education or business, because their paths crossed in the Maoist era. Take Zhang, once an educated young man sent into the countryside, who is now director of the administrative offices of a major municipality. He has remained close friends with a well-known artist with whom he spent three years in Mongolia. Or a former Red Guard turned businessman, who is a close friend of one of his former adversaries. All these people have a certain empathy, share similar responses and a common language. “Most of us have discarded the myth of revolution as well as a belief in democracy and elections,” one told us. “That is all dangerous stuff, we need to find a middle way.”
Their own experience has led them to democratic conservatism, and a belief that political reform means evolving towards a process that guarantees order and the reproduction of the elite, but with a strong dose of social mobility. They toe the party line but support a reinforcement of the legal system, especially to guarantee the fundamental rights of the disadvantaged: those whose homes or land have been expropriated, exploited migrants, that segment of the urban population which has lost out in the economic reforms, home owners battling against property companies, or residents protesting against air pollution and dirty water. They want to find legal channels for expressing their discontent and they teach people to use lawful means of protest against unscrupulous businesses and corrupt bureaucracies. Social classes (such as landowners, the expropriated, the poor, migrants) must assert themselves by protecting their rights (weiquan).
None of these “reformers” will risk stepping out of line. The revolutionary era is over, they say, do not interfere in politics. They will do anything to avoid direct confrontation with the regime. That choice is not purely tactical, since many of them are part of the system and belong to the social categories that have most benefited from the economic reforms: technicians, managers of major companies, business people and teachers. Like their leaders, they promote stability and are afraid of losing their hard-won privileges, which are all the more valuable since they came so late. Their actions show courage but require discretion - for their status (if not their freedom) depends on it. The results of their actions are meager, but important. The image of migrant workers has considerably improved in popular opinion and it is now rare for them not to be paid. More people are taking legal action and there is more awareness of pollution. Homeowners’ rights are considered legitimate. These may be modest achievements but they far exceed anything achieved by outright dissidence, which has little popular support and runs the risk of severe repression. This reformist trend has its enemies but they are not in government, nor are they party members. They are individuals within the administration, business and universities who want to continue milking the system but refuse to provide a framework (legal, formal, legitimate) for their prerogatives. They have yet to learn that if they want to hold on to their privileges, government methods must evolve and integrate all of society’s aspirations.
Appearance of a middle class
The emergence of new social strata, gathered in that nebulous category, the middle class, forms another piece in the political jigsaw. This new class includes many communists who now have enough income to buy a home and car and to travel. But their political stance is ambivalent. They are critical of wealth accumulated by bribery or through the privileges (tequan) of family connections, while they depend on their own merit and salaries, which are heavily taxed. Yet they favour improved legal protection of property and greater freedom of speech and association. They are opposed to elections, which they view as a potential source of social tensions, violence and political fragmentation. Their view may be summed up as “Who can say that elected leaders will be any better than the people governing China today?”. Members of this new middle class stress the importance of migrant workers’ contribution to current prosperity and support measures to improve their living conditions. But they also insist on the need to “civilise” those peasants before granting them urban citizenship.
The new political context is a response to the major contradictions in contemporary Chinese society. The frenzied pace of growth with consequent social problems has generated frustrations and desires that cannot be satisfied by economic growth alone. The eternal promise of a better future is no longer enough; people want guarantees. The political trends that have emerged since the 1990s do not provide an adequate response. The return to tradition in the form of neo-Confucianism is hardly in line with economic growth and is at odds with the desire to experiment with new lifestyles. The groups and individuals that make up China’s “new left” advocate a national renewal, but their desire to re-collectivize the economy and return to social egalitarianism does not attract a population hooked on the pleasures of consumerism. As for political liberalism, both the intellectuals and the Chinese man on the street feel that smacks of Tiananmen-type chaos.
The new reformist current has a different viewpoint. It does not promote a recipe from the past or from outside China, but seeks a solution to the stalemate caused by economic growth. Its proponents believe that social discontent is on the rise because it has no legitimate channels of expression. Social advancement is paralyzed. If a downturn in the economy were to deprive people of their faith in a better future, their frustrations could result in political meltdown. According to the sociologist Chen Yingfang, “if an urban middle class, with a capacity for legal action and a political rationale, does not have the means to defend its interests efficiently, or if the government systematically prevents it from doing so by using the law or political action, or even by threats and violence, then citizens may decide on revolutionary action. That is a more costly option in terms of social subversion and political risk”.
To ward off this danger, the new reformists suggest that the scattered social movements and associations involved in the protests should unite. Together they could alter the flow of social mobility without stepping into the political arena. That would entail forcing the state, and especially local administrations, to adopt social policies and laws. A former professor, now a businessman, told me: “Society is the only force that can modernize the country and expand the scope for liberty and social justice.” This tactic fits in with recent analyses by economists who want to boost domestic demand by increasing the revenues of the least favoured segment of the population and protecting their standard of living in order to stimulate consumption. Understandably, that argument finds favour with the leadership. A society that feels understood, with modernized institutions, would maintain the status quo.
Such a project is hardly revolutionary and would bypass any issue of regime change while reinforcing the CCP. It establishes a close connection between political options and individual interests, it preserves both adventurism and repression while leaving a space for social issues. And, undeniably, that fits in with sociological evolution. The most active social strata, the middle class, may be vocal in defending its interests, but it is not advocating any brutal change to the political system. However, the strategy of circumventing the political sphere (not touching the cornerstone of power) by means of the social sphere (respecting individual rights and social justice) is not without pitfalls.
Defending rights does not guarantee the same treatment for all. The law is the product of political struggle. The middle class would have the necessary legitimacy, if only because they are consumers, to become the pillars of this conservative democracy. Disadvantaged social classes, such as the migrants, would have trouble making their voices heard and might be tempted by more revolutionary action. There is another potential obstacle: resistance to change by local bureaucracies and part of the top echelons of government. The exploitation of migrants and land control generate such substantial profits that it may not be easy for central government to reform current practices.
After signing the peace deal, Prachanda jettisoned his war rhetoric and the Maoists won the election on the promise of creating a new Nepal.
Prachanda says Nepali Maoists are not "dogmatic communists" and globalisation is a fact of life. He has promised land to tillers in a country where 80 percent of the 26.4 million people live on farm income.
Although Sher Bahadur Deuba, a three-time former prime minister from the centrist Nepali Congress party, is also contesting the post, it is likely to go to Prachanda, who led the decade-long war.
The Maoists control 227 seats in the assembly that currently has 595 members and the winner must get at least 298 votes. The Maoists say they have the support of the Communist UML party and the Madheshi People's Rights Forum that jointly control another 160 votes. Some other smaller parties were also expected to support the Maoists.
"We'll respect the aspirations of the Nepali people for peace," the bespectacled Prachanda flanked by his new allies told reporters after putting in his papers for election on Thursday.
"And we'll work for the preparation of a new constitution and for the forward-looking transformation of the society."
The new constitution would cap a peace process that began two years ago.
The Maoists scored a surprise win in a special assembly election in April but did not get a parliamentary majority, prompting a battle for power that left Nepal struggling to form a new government four months after the polls.
"We'll try to bring other political parties on board as well," Prachanda said.
But the Nepali Congress, the second biggest party in the assembly, has refused to join the Maoists.
It says the former rebels were yet to shun violence completely and return the property seized during the conflict in line with their commitment in the peace deal. The Congress has ruled Nepal for most of the past 18 years and says it will sit on the opposition bench.
The Maoist-led new government faces the tricky task of rehabilitating more than 19,000 former guerrillas housed in 28 U.N.-supervised camps and arrange for more than 200,000 people displaced by the conflict to return home.
This is the key for lasting peace in a nation emerging from the conflict and years of political turmoil.
Impoverished Nepal, tucked between Asian giants, China and India, also faces shortages of fuel, food inflation, rising unemployment and growing crime.
BEIJING - Just nine months before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government's news agency, Xinhua, reported that gymnast He Kexin was 13, which would have made her ineligible to be on the team that won a gold medal this week.
In its report Nov. 3, Xinhua identified He as one of "10 big new stars" who made a splash at China's Cities Games. It gave her age as 13 and reported that she beat Yang Yilin on the uneven bars at those games. In the final, "this little girl" pulled off a difficult release move on the bars known as the Li Na, named for another Chinese gymnast, Xinhua said in the report, which appeared on one of its Web sites, http://www.hb.xinhuanet.com
The Associated Press found the Xinhua report on the site Thursday morning and saved a copy of the page. Later that afternoon, the Web site was still working but the page was no longer accessible. Sports editors at the state-run news agency would not comment for publication.
If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States on Wednesday and clinched China's first women's team Olympic gold in gymnastics. He is also a favorite for gold in Monday's uneven bars final.
Yang was also on Wednesday's winning team. Questions have also been raised about her age and that of a third team member, Jiang Yuyuan.
Gymnasts have to be 16 during the Olympic year to be eligible for the games. He's birthday is listed as Jan. 1, 1992.
Chinese authorities insist that all three are old enough to compete. He herself told reporters after Wednesday's final that "my real age is 16. I don't pay any attention to what everyone says."
Zhang Hongliang, an official with China's gymnastics delegation at the games, said Thursday the differing ages which have appeared in Chinese media reports had not been checked in advance with the gymnastics federation.
"It's definitely a mistake," Zhang said of the Xinhua report, speaking in a telephone interview. "Never has any media outlet called me to check the athletes' ages."
Asked whether the federation had changed their ages to make them eligible, Zhang said: "We are a sports department. How would we have the ability to do that?"
"We already explained this very clearly. There's no need to discuss this thing again."
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has said repeatedly that a passport is the "accepted proof of a gymnast's eligibility," and that He and China's other gymnasts have presented ones that show they are age eligible. The IOC also checked the girls' passports and deemed them valid.
A May 23 story in the China Daily newspaper, the official English-language paper of the Chinese government, said He was 14. The story was later corrected to list her as 16.
"This is not a USAG issue," said Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics. "The FIG and the IOC are the proper bodies to handle this."
In the face of a large-scale military response by Russia, Georgia claims to have withdrawn its forces from South Ossetia. Russian forces are now in control of Tskhinvali, the republic’s capital.
Underlying the military confrontation is US imperialism’s drive to isolate Russia and establish American hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and their transit routes through the Caucasus, utilizing the Saakashvili regime as its cat’s paw. The Russian ruling elite, for its part, is seeking to reassert its control over a region that was ruled by Moscow for two centuries before the break-up of the USSR.
Russian forces have carried out attacks beyond the borders of South Ossetia, including air attacks on the Georgian town of Gori that reportedly killed at least 60 civilians in two apartment blocks. There are reports that Russian jets bombed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, but failed to damage it. The Russian Black Sea fleet has moved to blockade the Georgian port of Poti, which was attacked by Russian jets on Saturday. Tbilisi airport and military facilities near the airport have also come under air attack.
At least two Russian fighters have been shot down. The Georgians claim to have downed six Russian jets.
By Sunday the conflict threatened to extend to other parts of the Caucasus, as forces of Abkhazia, another Russian-backed breakaway republic, launched attacks on Georgian positions in the upper Kodori Gorge. Russian jets were reported to be supporting the Abkhaz ground troops.
“At this point we are particularly concerned that the conflict appears to be spreading beyond South Ossetia into Abkhazia,” the UN assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping, Edmond Mulet, said.
A war on three fronts seems to be opening up as the Abkhazian border, South Ossetia and the area of Gali and Zugdidi come under attack from Russian and Russian-backed forces. Georgian President Saakashvili has appealed for a ceasefire and for international help to open up corridors for the evacuation of wounded and trapped civilians.
Refugees fleeing into Russia described how Tskhinvali and surrounding villages came under heavy bombardment from Grad missiles and tanks as the Georgian forces advanced. There are claims of Georgian atrocities against the civilian population.
The outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia is the culmination of long-escalating tensions. It can be understood only in the context of US foreign policy in the former Soviet republics and the former Yugoslavia.
Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Washington pursued a policy of weakening Russia by isolating it and curtailing its influence in the former Soviet spheres of influence in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia, encouraged by both the US and the Western European powers, was directed above all against Moscow, which had long considered Belgrade an important ally. This reached a culmination in the 1999 US-led NATO air war against Serbia, followed in 2000 by the toppling of the Milosevic regime in the first of the US-engineered “colour revolutions” of this decade.
Saakashvili was brought to power in Georgia by the so-called “Rose Revolution” of 2003. Like the “Orange Revolution” of 2005 in Ukraine, it was engineered by Washington to place a pro-American regime in power on Russia’s doorstep.
Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was forced to resign and was replaced by a group of younger Georgian politicians who had been among his protégés. Saakashvili was one of this group. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he presented himself as a suitable figure to act as the US point-man in the Caucasus, with a mission to introduce “free market” economic measures and protect the vital Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipelines.
Since the US-engineered regime change in Georgia, Washington has flooded the country with military aid and deployed 160 military advisers to build up its armed forces.
US policy in Georgia is part of a strategy to incorporate former Soviet republics into NATO, create military bases and deploy anti-missile defence systems on Russia’s borders. The US has established military bases in former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Baltic states.
President Bush promised Saakashvili NATO membership at the NATO summit earlier this year. Washington’s NATO allies in Western Europe, however, blocked any early admission of Georgia into NATO, seeing such a move as an unnecessary provocation against Russia, upon which they defend for energy supplies.
Tensions between Georgia and Russia over the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were exacerbated by Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia last February. Washington was the prime mover behind Kosovo’s secession, which was carried out in violation of a number of international agreements. Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened at the time to use the precedent of Kosovo to support South Ossetian and Abkhazian demands for separation from Georgia, and soon after, Moscow granted Russian passports to citizens of the two nominally Georgian republics.
The eruption of military conflict between Russia and Georgia was all but inevitable given the highly aggressive and provocative character of US policy in the region and the nationalist and expansionist aims of the Putin regime in Moscow. There is little doubt that Washington gave Tbilisi the green light to attack South Ossetia. The Georgian offensive came only weeks after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Tbilisi and held talks with Saakashvili. Rice denounced Russia during her visit and reiterated US backing for Georgian membership in NATO.
After the fighting erupted last week, the US agreed to fly home the 2,000 Georgian troops who make up the third largest contingent of “coalition” forces in Iraq.
The response of US and its Western allies to the conflict between Russia and Georgia has been thoroughly hypocritical. President Bush, who is in Beijing for the Olympic Games, on Saturday demanded “an end to the Russian bombing.” Backing Saakashvili’s call for a cease-fire, he declared, “Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.” He urged “a return by the parties to the status quo of August the 6th.”
Bush failed to square his concern for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia with the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.
Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the US presidency, responded in almost identical terms. “I condemn Russia’s aggressive actions and reiterate my call for an immediate ceasefire,” Obama said in a statement. He also demanded that Russia withdraw its ground forces from Georgia.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain likewise placed the entire blame for the war on Russia, saying, “For many years, I have warned against Russian actions that undermine the sovereignty of its neighbours.”
A statement from the European Union took a similar tone. It expressed “commitment to the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Georgia” and urged Russia to respect Georgia’s borders.
It is widely recognized that the US and its Georgian client regime badly miscalculated in launching last week’s offensive against South Ossetia. Moscow’s rapid and massive military response evidently took them both by surprise. Russia has seized on the Georgian provocation to consolidate its control over the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and demonstrate its ability and readiness to use military force to secure the interests of the nationalist regime in the Kremlin.
In a thinly veiled attack on the United States, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday, “Those who have been supplying arms to Georgia, I believe they should feel part of the blame for the loss of life of civilians, including many Russian citizens and peacekeepers. I think those who have been appeasing Mr. Saakashvili’s aggressive intentions and who helped create a feeling of impunity among the Georgian leadership should think twice.”
The eruption of war in the Caucasus, containing the threat of a direct military confrontation between the US and Russia—the two biggest nuclear powers—reflects the extraordinarily tense and explosive state of international relations. The sharpening of conflicts between the major powers is itself a product of the deepening economic crisis of world capitalism, which finds its most concentrated expression in the decline in the global economic position of the United States. The reckless and provocative character of US foreign policy, and its increasing reliance on military violence, are bound up with the attempt of the American ruling elite to offset its economic decline by utilizing its continued military dominance.
The Russian ruling elite, for its part, wants to utilize its newfound oil wealth to promote its imperial ambitions in the former Soviet sphere of influence while whipping up Great Russian chauvinism within its own borders.
The conflict in the Caucasus contains the seeds of a far wider conflagration, raising the spectre of a new global eruption of imperialist war. Alluding to the events that followed the June, 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and culminated in the outbreak of World War I two months later, Dmitri Trenin, senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and deputy director of its Moscow centre, issued the following warning in a piece published on the Washington Post web site on Sunday:
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States government dropped atomic bombs on two densely-populated Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 300,000 civilians. Commemorations of the atomic bombings often focus on the need to destroy nuclear weapons. But the anniversary raises another issue that is no less important, for the bombings had specifically targeted Japanese civilians. The military tactic of targeting civilian populations in times of war was nothing new, with deep historical roots extending back to Biblical times when armies would lay siege to entire cities. More recently, US military manuals of the 1920s and 1930s had promoted such tactics not just for the potential scale of destruction but also for the psychological effects on civilians. Air Corps doctrine, for example, praised air raids as "a method of imposing will by terrorizing the whole population," and before World War II advocated "attacks to intimidate civil populations" [2]. Secretary of War Henry Stimson later made a similar point, boasting that "the atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon" [3].
When World War II started, however, such strategies were frequently condemned in international circles. Although military technology had developed rapidly in recent decades, the previous century had also witnessed notable national and international agreements designed to limit the brutality of warfare. Building on a centuries-old moral and legal distinction between soldiers and civilians, the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions had banned the "bombardment, by whatever means" of urban residential areas [4]. The 1925 Geneva Protocol had added to wartime prohibitions, condemning the use of chemical and biological weapons. In 1939, then, widespread acceptance of the targeting of civilian populations such as occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki six years later was by no means a foregone conclusion. Yet those acts enjoyed enormous support, and not only within the upper echelons of government: 85 percent of the US public approved of the Hiroshima bombing in an August 8, 1945, poll [5].
How did the sort of logic that condoned the targeting of civilian populations prevail over the countervailing moral norms codified in international law in previous decades? As historians have pointed out, the development of the military tactic of "area bombing" early in the war was a crucial stepping stone to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Area bombing refers to the aerial use of explosive and/or incendiary bombs against entire geographic areas, usually cities, rather than against conventional military targets. The logic of area bombing expands the definition of "military" to include industries, residential areas, and even the working population of laborers involved in economic production. As a theoretical and moral development, then, area bombing was unique in that it implied no hesitancy about killing noncombatants, and often sought specifically to do so [6]. An examination of the process by which area bombing gained practical acceptance as military strategy during World War II can help shed light on several issues: the ways that Allied leaders justified the bombing of cities; the reasons why the US public usually accepted those justifications; the ways that area bombing help paved the way for the use of the atomic bombs in August 1945; and finally, the long-term legacy of launching air raids against civilian populations in the years 1940-45.
The Path to Area Bombing
The area bombing of cities during World War II in fact followed a number of historical precedents. Roman military leaders, for example, had followed a comparable logic in the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. Although traditionally executed from the ground prior to the invention of airplanes, full-scale attacks on entire cities were common in ancient times. Since the early 1900s European powers had also engaged in the deliberate bombing of cities. Germany, France, and Great Britain had all bombed cities in World War I, and both France and Britain had used aerial strikes in the 1920s and 1930s to punish "intransigent tribesmen" in colonized territories in Africa, India, and the Middle East (the US also did so in Nicaragua around the same time) [7].
Area bombing was unique, however, in that it sought indiscriminate annihilation of entire places. Hitler's 1940 air raid on Coventry, England, destroyed much of the city's infrastructure and was one of the first instances of "indiscriminate bombing" during the war [8]. Nazi attacks on London, Moscow, and various European countries throughout the war also fall under the category of area bombing. But even so, area bombing was largely an Allied practice, especially from 1942 onward. Whereas most German and Japanese aerial attacks involved "tactical," "strategic," and/or "terror-bombing" (which certainly inflicted large civilian casualties at times), British and US aerial bombing was more often directed toward wiping out entire urban areas. By the end of World War II the Allies had carried out more area bombing missions than had the Axis [9].
Although US officials had planned to firebomb Japan as early as 1940, US military practice early in the war, with some exceptions, did not generally involve area bombing of urban locations. Instead, military strategies went through several escalations in their level of brutality. The Doolittle raid on Japan in April 1942 was the first large-scale use of incendiary bombs against civilian populations. Between 1943 and early 1945 the number of Allied incendiary raids gradually increased, punctuated by the mid-1943 US-British attacks on Hamburg, Germany, and the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. After the US Army's Chemical Warfare Service successfully developed napalm in 1943, the Allied use of incendiaries increased [10]. During the war roughly 593,000 civilians died in bombing raids on German cities, and at least 780,000 civilians in Japan died as a result of incendiary raids alone [11]. The latter figure excludes civilian fatalities from both explosive raids and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which followed three months after the Tokyo raid.
In summary, it would be difficult to name a single ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) that Obama has not been critical of, or to name one that he has supported. Can this be mere coincidence?
The fact that Obama says he's willing to "talk" to some of the "enemies" more than the Bush administration has done sounds good, but one doesn't have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It's only change of policy that counts. Why doesn't he simply and clearly state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else?
As to Iraq, if you're sick to the core of your being about the horrors US policy brings down upon the heads of the people of that unhappy land, then you must support withdrawal –- immediate, total, all troops, combat and non-combat, all the Blackwater-type killer contractors, not moved to Kuwait or Qatar to be on call. All bases out. No permanent bases. No permanent war. No timetables. No approval by the US military necessary. No reductions in forces. Just OUT. ALL. Just like what the people of Iraq want. Nothing less will give them the opportunity to try to put an end to the civil war and violence instigated by the American invasion and occupation and to recreate their failed state.
Obama's terms of withdrawal equals no withdrawal. Literally. Has he ever said that the war is categorically illegal and immoral? A war crime? Or that anti-American terrorism in the world is the direct result of oppressive US policies? Instead he calls for a troop increase and "the first truly 21st century military ... We must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world."[7] Why of course, that's what the people of the United States and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the people in this sad world desperately desire and need -- greater American killing power! Obama is not so much concerned with ending America's endless warfare as he is with "succeeding" in them, by whatever perverted definition of that word.
And has he ever dared to raise the obvious question: Why would Iran, even if nuclear armed, be a threat to attack the US or Israel? Any more than Iraq was such a threat. Which was zero. Instead, he has said things like "Iran continues to be a major threat" and repeats the tiresome lie that the Iranian president called for the destruction of Israel.[8]
Obama, one observer has noted, "opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism."
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
For a time, it seemed that nothing at all was learned. The U.S. and Soviet governments competed with one another to build bigger and more destructive nuclear arsenals. And, soon thereafter, they were joined by Britain, France, China, and Israel.
But then something extraordinary occurred. Millions of people rose up to resist this nuclear arms race – assailing nuclear testing, nuclear weapons buildups, and other preparations for nuclear war. As a result, government officials began to temper their nuclear ambitions. They agreed upon a broad range of arms control and disarmament treaties. Others decided against building nuclear weapons, turned their countries into nuclear-free zones, or abandoned nuclear weapons altogether. Perhaps the most important of the treaties was the nuclear nonproliferation treaty of 1968, under which the non-nuclear powers agreed not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear arsenals. The number of nuclear weapons declined sharply and the menace of nuclear war began to recede.
Nevertheless, starting in the late 1990s, the nuclear danger began to revive. In the U.S. Senate, Republicans blocked U.S. ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty. Pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to fulfill their disarmament pledges, India and Pakistan exploded their first nuclear weapons, while North Korea moved forward with its own nuclear program. Most dramatically, the new administration of George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the ABM treaty, ended U.S. participation in nuclear disarmament negotiations and pressed Congress to fund the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons.
Yes, the Bush administration launched a war over what it claimed was the possession of nuclear weapons by Iraq (although, in fact, Iraq didn't possess any) and today is taking a very hard line toward Iran (which also does not possess them and might not even be developing them). But, in defiance of the disarmament commitment of the nuclear powers, the President seems thoroughly comfortable with his own command of some 10,000 nuclear weapons and his proposals for more.
Now there's pressure to get back on track toward a nuclear-free world. Peace and disarmament organizations, of course, have long championed nuclear abolition, and continue to do so. But they have now been joined by an important segment of the foreign and defense policy establishment. In dramatic columns published in The Wall Street Journal in January 2007 and 2008, George Shultz (Ronald Reagan's secretary of state), Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon's secretary of state), William Perry (Bill Clinton's secretary of defense), and Sam Nunn (former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee) argued that the time has come to press forward toward a nuclear-free world.
These are popular positions. An opinion survey in the summer of 2007 found that the abolition of all nuclear weapons, through an enforceable agreement, was supported by 74 percent of the public in the United States, 85 percent in Britain, 87 percent in France, and 95 percent in Germany and Italy.
After a single gunshot was heard, the police blasted thousands of rounds of ammunition into the home. The cops’ fusillade was so intense that one of their officers, James Ramp, was killed in their own cross fire. Though cops claimed the original gunshot came from the MOVE house, witnesses, including a reporter for KYW radio, identified the gunfire as coming from a building behind the police lines. When the adults emerged from the gunfire, police publicly beat, dragged, kicked and stomped nearly to death a shirtless Delbert Africa. The outrage sparked by Delbert’s savage beating, captured by news cameras and televised in slow motion, ultimately led to a federal civil rights lawsuit and indictments against three of the cops. When chilling photos of the beating appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 400 cops picketed the newspaper. After the assault, the police completely bulldozed the house, destroying evidence of their own wrongdoing and proving that the MOVE members’ only “crime” was to survive.
The Philadelphia in which the MOVE organization emerged in 1972 was a racist hellhole lorded over by a force of killer cops led by Frank Rizzo, first as deputy police commissioner, then commissioner and later mayor. Any expression of black dissent was met with brutal police repression, centrally meted out by Philadelphia’s notorious “red squad”—the Civil Affairs unit—and the “Stakeout” squad, an urban death squad of police sharpshooters. For the cops, arbitrary stops, beatings and arrests of MOVE members were standard procedure. In 1973-74, some 40 MOVE members were arrested 150 times, fined approximately $15,000 and given sentences of up to several years in jail. In 1976, blackjack-wielding cops descended on a MOVE celebration, and in the resulting melee Janine Africa’s newborn infant was trampled to death.
In 1978, then-District Attorney Edward Rendell declared that the police would have been “within their rights to have, subsequent to the shooting of Officer Ramp, stormed the house and killed all of the 12 people in the basement.” In August 1981, nine MOVE members including Delbert Africa were sentenced to prison terms of 30 to 100 years on false charges stemming from the death of Ramp. At the time, standing alone among journalists in defense of MOVE was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is today America’s foremost class-war prisoner (see article, page 12). By the time of the 1978 assault, Mumia had already interviewed victims of police brutality and was acquiring a reputation as the “voice of the voiceless.” In December 1981, only months after the MOVE 9 conviction, Mumia himself was arrested on false charges of killing Officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. The D.A. Rendell, who prosecuted the MOVE 9 and Mumia Abu-Jamal, is Pennsylvania’s current governor and a leading player in the national Democratic Party. He is one of a number of leading figures in the Pennsylvania state government for whom the vendetta against MOVE and Mumia has played a key role in building their careers. Free Mumia now!
On 13 May 1985, the MOVE prisoners watched in horror from their Pennsylvania cells as the Philadelphia police under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, in league with federal authorities, came to finish the job they had started in 1978, dropping a high-powered explosive bomb on MOVE’s Osage Avenue home. Eleven people, including five children, were burnt to death and an entire black neighborhood was left in smoldering ruins. This coordinated act of racist state murder must never be forgotten.
American politicians and journalists have repeatedly made the same mistake in Iraq over the past five years. This is to assume that the US is far more in control of events in the country than has ever truly been the case. This was true after the fall of Saddam Hussein when President Bush and his viceroy in Baghdad Paul Bremer believed that what Iraqis thought and did could safely be ignored. Within months guerrilla war against American forces was raging across central Iraq.
The ability of America to make unilateral decisions in Iraq is diminishing by the month, but the White House was still horrified to hear the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki appearing to endorse Barack Obama’s plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops over 16 months. This cut the ground from under the feet of John McCain who has repeatedly declared that ‘victory’ is at last within America’s grasp because of the great achievements of ‘the Surge’, the American reinforcements sent to Iraq in 2007 to regain control of Baghdad.
The success of ‘the Surge’ is becoming almost received wisdom in the US. This is strange since, if the US strategy did win such an important victory, why do America generals need more soldiers, currently 147,000 of them, in Iraq than they did before ‘the Surge’ started? But belief in this so-called victory is in keeping with the American tradition of seeing everything that happens in Iraq as being the result of actions by the US alone. The complex political landscape of Iraq is ignored. US commentators have never quite taken on board that there are not one but three wars being fought out in the country since 2003: the first is the war of resistance against the American occupation by insurgents from the Sunni Arab community. The second is the battle between the Sunni and Shia communities as to who should rule the Iraqi state in succession to Saddam Hussein. The third conflict is a proxy war between the US and Iran to decide who should be the predominant foreign power in Iraq. The real, though exaggerated, fall in violence in Iraq over the last year is a consequence of developments in all three of these wars, but they do not necessarily have much to do with ‘the Surge’.
The reduction in violence is in any case only in comparison to the bloodbath of 2005-7 when Baghdad and central Iraq was ravaged by a sectarian civil war. There were 554 Iraqis killed in the fighting in June 2008, which is only a third of the figure for the same month a year earlier. This is progress, but it still makes Baghdad the most dangerous city in the world. Asked on television about the security situation, Iraqis often respond that ‘things are getting better’ and so they undoubtedly are, but people usually mean that things are better than the terror of two years ago. Foreign television correspondents laud the improved security in the Iraqi capital and are pictured apparently strolling down a peaceful and busy street. What the television viewer does not see are the armed guards standing behind the cameraman, without whom the correspondents would not dare set foot outside their heavily guarded offices.
I do drive around Baghdad without armed guards and have always done so. But I sit in the back of a car with an Arabic newspaper and a jacket or shirt on a hanger masking the window next to me. I have a second car behind me in contact with us by field radios to make sure that we are not being followed. It is true that security is better, but this can be overstated. Each district iin Baghdad is sealed off by concrete walls. There are checkpoints every few hundred yards. Sunni and Shia do not visit each other areas unless they have to. The best barometer for the real state of security in Baghdad is the attitude of Iraqi refugees, particularly the 2.4 million people who fled to Jordan and Syria. Though often living in miserable conditions and with their money running out, the refugees are generally not coming home to Iraq and, when they do, they seldom return to houses from which they have been forced to flee. If they do try to do so the results are often fatal. Baghdad has few mixed areas left and today is 75-80 per cent a Shia city. The demographic balance in the capital has shifted against the Sunni and this is unlikely to change. The battle for Baghdad was won by the Shia and was ending even before ‘the Surge’ began in February 2007.
It was the outcome of the struggle for the capital that caused a large part of the anti-American resistance to make a dramatic change of sides, switching suddenly from fighting to supporting US troops. The attempt by al-Qa’ida in Iraq to take over the whole of the anti-occupation resistance in late 2006 was important in forcing other insurgent groups to ally themselves with the US as al-Sahwa or the Awakening movement. But perhaps a more important reason for the rise of al-Sahwa was that there was no point in the Sunni insurgents attacking the Americans if they were being driven from Iraq by the Shia. There are now some 90,000 former Sunni resistance fighters on the American payroll, but they happily express open hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government. Sectarian divisions in the country remain very deep. In the Fallujah area, for instance, it is very dangerous for either the Sunni chief of police or the al-Sahwa commander (they are brothers) to enter Baghdad. This is because Abu Ghraib at the entrance to the city is controlled by the much-feared and heavily-Shia al-Muthana Brigade, who might kill either of them on sight.
Another reason why violence has fallen in Iraq over the last eighteen months has little to do with ‘the Surge’, but is the consequence of the Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army being stood down by its leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The one constant theme in his strategy, ever since he fought the US Marines in Najaf in 2004, has been to avoid direct military conflict with the US armed forces or his Shia rivals when backed by US firepower. This was true at the start of ‘the Surge’ in February 2007 and Muqtada has sought truces and ceasefires ever since. He did so after fighting with the Iraqi police in Kerbala in August 2007 and he renewed the truce six months later. In March this year the Iraqi army launched a military offensive to take Basra from the Mehdi Army, an attack which at first failed to make headway until backed by US airpower. But in Basra and later in Sadr City in Baghdad, Muqtada agreed to ceasefires which allowed his former bastions to be taken over by the Iraqi army. Muqtada did not fight because he knew his men must lose at the end of the day. For a military confrontation with the Iraqi army and the US he would need the support of Iran and this was not forthcoming.
McCain and other American politicians who believe that ‘the Surge’ has brought them close to victory, seldom understand the role Iran has played in Iraq in the last two years. Paradoxically, Iran and the US together are the two main supporters of the present Iraqi government. For Iran, Nouri al-Maliki in power in Baghdad leading a coalition of Shia religious parties allied to the Kurds is as good as it is going to get. The Iranians may vie with the US for influence over this government, but both want it to stay in power. “People fail to realise that the success of ‘the Surge’ was the result of a tacit agreement between the US and Iran,” one Iraqi leader told me. “There really is an Iranian-American condominium ruling Iraq these days,” said another.
Suppose McCain is elected US president in November and acts as if the US is the only decision maker in Iraq then he will face a renewed war. Iraqis will not accept the occupation continuing indefinitely and Iran will not allow itself to be marginalized. If McCain were to try to win a military victory in Iraq he could find the supposed achievements of ‘the Surge’ rapidly evaporating.
Unbalanced U.S. trade with China since 2001 has had a devastating effect on U.S. workers. Between 2001 and 2007, 2.3 million jobs were lost or displaced, including 366,000 in 2007 alone (Scott 2008). These jobs were displaced by the growth of the U.S. trade deficit with China, which increased from $84 billion in 2001 to $262 billion in 2007.
Growing China trade deficits between 2001 and 2007 eliminated jobs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Jobs displacement exceeded 2.0% of total employment in Idaho, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Oregon, California, Minnesota, Vermont, Texas, and Wisconsin (see Map). The effects of growing trade deficits with China have been felt widely across the United States and no area has been exempt from their impact. While traditional manufacturing states such as Wisconsin, Tennessee, and the Carolinas were certainly hard hit, so too were states in the tech sector such as California, Texas, Oregon, and Minnesota. Rapidly growing imports of computers and electronic parts accounted for almost half of the $178 billion increase and eliminated 561,000 U.S. jobs. Idaho, which lost an estimated 9,000 jobs in computer and electronic products alone, was the hardest-hit state in the country in terms of share of total state employment.