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H O M E
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November, 2002
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US midterm elections 2002
Bush and the crisis get vote of no confidence: 66% of registered voters stay at home.
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US Department of Homeland Security
The banks and the bosses plan ahead for the war at home against the US working class and people.
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Looking ahead to the coming class battles sure to result from the growing attacks against the working class and people, US Imperialism is planning ahead for repression, with the excuse of "national security"
Creation of the so-called "Department of Homeland Security"
Vicente Balvanera
Infamous repressor Tom Ridge –former Governor of Pennsylvania who twice signed Mumia Abu-Jamal's death warrant-- officially became a member of the cabinet last week as the new "Homeland Security" Czar. But months earlier, he had personally called International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) President Jim Spinosa "suggesting" that a strike would be contrary to "national security interests." So the US working class have had prior warning of what they are now up against: one of the chief aims of the Department of Homeland Security is to obliterate the right to strike.
Even he right of workers to organize in unions now seems severely compromised. One of the most outrageous provisions of the 500 page bill which was recently passed into law (so quickly the legislators had no time to read it) is the privatization of almost a million Federal workers, who for reasons of "national security" will not be allowed to have union representation. As Bush himself put it in a recent speech, the federal government can't be subject to "constant protests" that would undermine its efficiency. Of course, Bush must know what he is talking about, in view of the bosses plans to make the working class pay for the growing economic crisis: stripping away working class rights, attacking unions, lowering wages, shutting down plants as well as idling and laying-off hundreds of thousands of workers.
The bill became law soon after the Democrats predictably dropped their token "resistance" to this measure depriving Federal workers of the right to unionize, true to their pattern: when the workers most needs their support, they remain true to the interests of the bosses. In spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars and an equal amount of volunteer time labor always spends working for their election. This should be a wake up call for all workers who still harbor illusions that the Democratic party may ever be true to anything except the bosses interests.
The real aim of this "greatest reorganization in the history of the US government" is anything but greater efficiency in government: it is the stripping away of working class and democratic rights, in order to attempt to squash growing opposition to the imperialist war and to the war at home: the attack on the unions, on working class gains, growing unemployment and misery, and new expropriations of the working masses (such as the under-funding and devaluation of corporate pension plans), cuts in health and education, criminalization of those who struggle, and wholesale attacks on immigrant workers.
"The new department will bring together 170,000 workers and portions of 22 different government agencies into a new super-agency designed to secure the country borders, protect critical infrastructure and co-ordinate emergency responses to future terrorist attacks. It will mark the most substantial re-organisation of the US government since the formation of the Defence Department and the Central Intelligence Agency following the outbreak of the cold war in 1947." (New York Times, November 18, 2002). The law also includes provisions to continue government underwritten insurance against "terrorist attacks" to the end of August, 2003.
Voted by a lame-duck Congress which refused to extend unemployment insurance coverage ending December 31st which will affect hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, the Homeland Security Department is not at all new. It was conceived during the Reagan era by Dick Cheney (current Vice-President) who then headed the Department of Defense. After 9/11 conditions have been created by the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon as an excuse to support not only mammoth military budgets, but this wholesale attack on working class and democratic rights. La nueva ley creará una base de datos central donde van a figurar todos los datos (llamados telefónicos, correo electrónico, transacciones bancarios y con tarjetas de crédito, etc.) sobre el "perfíl" de cada habitante del país.
The US working class is only beginning to flex its muscles and is rubbing its eyes as if after a long sleep. On November 18, 2002, Reuters reported that "workers at the Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, plan to vote by the end of the year on joining the international union representing most refinery employees in the United States," following the footsteps of workers in other US refineries, who have also voted to become locals of PACE, which represents over 30,000 US workers in collective bargaining agreements every four years. A local union official explained "We're just taking a beating in negotiations. We feel like we need to be in an international." And on Nov. 10, about 9,000 workers at a Chicago division of third-ranked U.S. grocer Safeway voted to reject the company's contract offer, imitating over 500 workers at Noranda Ltd's Horne copper smelter in Quebec, Canada, who have been on strike for four months, and have just voted against the bosses latest proposed collective agreement. Hospital workers threatened strike action last week in California, and support for rejecting givebacks is growing in many companies that are imposing job cuts, such as Boeing and United Airlines. The west-coast dockworkers, who will soon be voting on a new contract proposal, the details of which have not been made public, have been made to negotiate under the full force of the Taft-Hartley law, as well as government threats of using the Army and Navy to occupy and run the ports. Los Angeles Waste-disposal Teamsters have announced their intention to strike and have rejected the bosses contract proposal. They are asking for a 70% wage and benefit package increase. Workers at the Ralcorp food processing plant in Carriage House New York are also on strike, after their contract expired. While over 1200 workers at the Kennecott Copper mines and plants in Utah continue to reject management contract offers, as they have been doing since last September 30. And a whole movement involving student and labor activists aimed at organizing the union resistant Wal-Mart stores is moving into high gear. And in Oakland, California, on December 7, workers from the most combative trade unions, including dockworkers, transport workers, teamsters, hotel workers and hospital workers, will join labor activists in holding a "National Conference against the Taft Hartley Act."
The US bosses, however, which this week announced job cuts of between 3% and 10% of personnel in over 20 companies (covering the banking, investment, telephony, aircraft, electric energy, gas, oil, chemical, auto parts, construction materials, biotech, airlines, and of course telecommunications and information technology industries) is fully anticipating the tremendous battles to come if it to break the back of the working class in order to avoid the inevitable consequences of its economic, social and political bankruptcy.
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Monday, November 25, 2002
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