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HELP KEEP JROTC AND THE MILITARY OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS
COME TO THE NEXT BOARD OF EDUCATION MEETING
AND SPEAK UP!
TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2007, 7:00 P.M.
Board of Education
555 Franklin St
San Francisco
415/241-6427
To get on the speakers list call the day before between the hours
of 8:30 a.m., and 4:00 p.m. Or on the day of the meeting, Tuesday,
January 23rd from 8:30 a.m., and 3:00 p.m.

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RALLY AND MARCH TO END THE WAR ON IRAQ
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27, 2007, 12 NOON
POWELL AND MARKET STREETS, S.F.
Troops out of Iraq NOW!
Stop racism against Arabs and Muslims!
End the Occupation of Palestine!

Over 3,000 dead American soldiers, hundreds of thousands
of dead Iraqis. It's time to put a stop to the war machine.
Millions of people voted to get the Republicans out and
end the war, but we can't leave it up to the Democrats
to do the only reasonable thing:
BRING ALL THE TROOPS HOME NOW FROM IRAQ!

President Bush just announced his intent to escalate the
number of troops in Iraq by over 20,000 more troops.

It's time to get the anti-war movement back in the streets!
On January 27, hundreds of thousands of people will march
in Washington, DC to demand an end to the war.

We're bringing the same message to the streets of San Francisco.
Make your own signs and banners and march with your friends,
family, co-workers, class-mates, church, union or organization.
Join us to show Bush and the new Democratic Congress
that the anti-war movement is back.

There will be one last organizing meeting on Saturday,
January 20, 2 PM @ 110 Capp St., and everybody is encouraged
to attend. Please forward this far and wide and tell everybody
you know!

For more information, call 510-484-5242 or email
j27committee@gmail.com
or check out
www.myspace.com/januarytwentyseventh

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MARCH AND RALLY IN SAN FRANCISCO
SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2007
(The annual St. Patrick's Day Parade is taking
place on Sat., March 17 in SF.)
ASSEMBLE 12:00 NOON
JUSTIN HERMAN PLAZA -
MARCH TO CIVIC CENTER
For more information:
http://www.actionsf.org/#local4
answer@actionsf.org
Phone: 415-821-6545
Fax: 415-821-5782

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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Picking Up the Pieces
New York Times Editorial
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/opinion/14sun1.html?hp

2) Gunboat Diplomacy: The Watch on the Gulf
By JOHN KIFNER
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/weekinreview/14kifn.html?ref=weekinreview
Gunboat Diplomacy: The Watch on the Gulf (map)
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/01/13/weekinreview/20070114_MARSH_GRAPHIC.html

3) Nomadic Herdsmen Innocent Targets of Bombing in Somalia, Says OXFAM
By Joe De Capua
Washington
12 January 2007
http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2007-01-12-voa26.cfm

4) The Best We Can Hope For
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/weekinreview/14cooper.html?ref=weekinreview

5) Busywork for Nuclear Scientists
New York Times Editorial
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

6) Democrats Are Unified in Opposition to Troop Increase,
but Split Over What to Do About It
By JIM RUTENBERG and PATRICK HEALY
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/politicsspecial/15troops.html?ref=world

7) U.S. and Iraqis Are Wrangling Over War Plans
By JOHN F. BURNS
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/world/middleeast/15baghdad.html?ref=world

8) Opening a New Front in the War, Against Iranians in Iraq
News Analysis
By DAVID E. SANGER
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/politicsspecial/15strategy.html

9) New York Rabbi Finds Friends in Iran and Enemies at Home
By FERNANDA SANTOS
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/nyregion/15rabbi.html?ref=nyregion

10) Endgame:
The Biggest Police Operation in U.S. History
by Richard D. Vogel
January 15, 2007
[A detailed map is also at this site...bw]
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel150107.html

11) Worried about war, LI parents restrict access to recruiters
BY DENISE M. BONILLA
Newsday Staff Writer
January 15, 2007
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-enskul0114,0,7612715.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

12) The Smithfield Strike Victory
By The Editors of Socialist Viewpoint Magazine
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/

13) Community Work
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint Magazine
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/janfeb_07/janfeb_07_07.html

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1) Picking Up the Pieces
New York Times Editorial
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/opinion/14sun1.html?hp

It was surreal how disconnected President Bush was the other night,
both from Iraq’s horrifying reality and America’s anguish over this
unnecessary, mismanaged and now unwinnable war. Indeed, most
Americans seem far ahead of the president. They understand that
what the country urgently needs is for Mr. Bush to chart a way out
of Iraq that also limits the chaos that will be left behind.

The president’s disconnect goes far to explain the harshly critical
reaction of Congress and the public to his plan to further bleed
America’s overstretched forces by sending some 20,000 additional
troops in an attempt to impose peace on Baghdad’s vengeful streets.
He proposes to do that without any enforceable commitments
from the Iraqi government that it will take the necessary political
steps that are the only hope for tamping down a spiraling civil war.

There are no really satisfying answers in Iraq, since all of the
remaining options are bad. Still, some are notably worse than others,
and Mr. Bush has come up with possibly the worst. He would mortgage
thousands more American lives and what remains of Washington’s
credibility in the region to a destructively sectarian Shiite government
that he seems unwilling or unable to influence or restrain.

•

Unlike Mr. Bush’s views on the American military presence in Iraq,
our views have evolved as the evident realities on the ground
have changed. At the outset, although we opposed Mr. Bush’s
invasion, we hoped the United States military could provide
enough security to allow an elected government to build the
foundations of national unity and eventual democracy.

As it became increasingly clear that Iraqi political leaders had
other, less noble intentions, we still hoped that a substantial
American military presence could be used to shield innocent
civilians from the growing violence, train reliable and professional
Iraqi security forces to take over that task, and exert leverage
on Iraqi leaders to follow a less divisive and destructive course.

Now, with Mr. Bush unwilling or unable to persuade Prime
Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the minimum steps
necessary to justify any deeper American commitment, we
recognize that even that has become unrealistic. Mr. Maliki
gave the latest White House plan an even chillier reception
than it received in the United States Congress, boycotting
a Thursday news conference in Baghdad announcing it. He
apparently would have preferred to see American forces sent
to fight Sunni insurgents in western Anbar Province, leaving
Baghdad as a free-fire zone for his Shiite militia partners.

But even knowing all that, America cannot simply wash its
hands of Iraq and go home. The region’s problems, many of
them made worse by this war, are unavoidably America’s
problems as well. For starters, Iraq is in imminent danger
of violently breaking apart, driving millions of refugees
across its borders — who will bring with them their ethnic
grievances, and in some cases their weapons — and potentially
unleashing a chain reaction of regional conflicts that could
draw in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and perhaps others as well.

•

Whatever else happens, Iran has already become more
formidable and dangerous. Where it once had a hostile
Saddam Hussein on its western border, it now has a friendly
Shiite fundamentalist government. Its other longtime enemy,
the United States, has had its diplomatic and military clout
severely diminished by this war.

The expanding power of a revolutionary, Shiite Iran is
profoundly unsettling to the conservative Sunni-led governments
in most of the Arab Middle East, which have been America’s
traditional allies in the region. If the United States is to recoup
any of its standing and influence there, it will have to find
a way to contain the chaos in Iraq. And it will have to do
a lot more to address other concerns of these governments
and their people, starting with a genuine and sustained
effort to mediate a peace agreement between Israel and
the Palestinians.

If Mr. Bush does persist in sending more American troops
to Baghdad, despite Congress’s amply justified opposition,
he will have to establish clear lines of command that assure
that those troops can enter the strongholds of the Shiite militias
responsible for much of the violence without militia leaders’
being tipped off by allies in the Iraqi government.

And so long as any American troops remain in Iraq, Mr. Bush
must put serious pressure on Mr. Maliki to support the troops’
efforts with a genuine program of national reconciliation. That
must include, at a minimum, ridding the police and other security
services of killers, torturers and criminals and disarming
all sectarian militias.

The government must also assure that Iraqi oil revenues are
fairly shared out among the entire Iraqi population. And it
must move quickly to offer an amnesty to Sunni insurgents
willing to put down their weapons, and narrow the legal
restrictions on former Baath Party members so that Sunni
professionals can once again fully participate in Iraqi national life.

These benchmarks should be accompanied by fixed timelines.
And they must be accompanied with a clear message that the
United States is prepared to withdraw its troops if the Iraqis
continue to refuse to take responsibility for their own future.
Mr. Bush and other American officials need to make clear that
as much as the United States will suffer from a complete collapse
in Iraq, Iraq’s leaders will suffer far worse from the loss of their
American protectors.

Mr. Bush should reinforce that message by convening a conference
of all of Iraq’s neighbors to discuss how they can help stabilize
Iraq — and what they can do to contain the wider chaos should
it come. With nearly two million Iraqis already seeking refuge,
mainly in Syria and Jordan, it is far past time for American
officials to begin their own planning and relief efforts.

If Mr. Bush refuses to deliver this ultimatum to Mr. Maliki,
Congress will have to do so in his stead. That’s not the usual
division of labor between the executive and legislative branches,
but it is one that Mr. Bush has made necessary by his refusal
to face realities. The potential consequences of his failed
leadership are so serious that neither the new Democratic
majorities in Congress, nor the public at large, can afford
the luxury of merely criticizing from the sidelines.

•

So far, Congress is off to an encouraging start, holding substantive
oversight hearings and asking probing questions of administration
officials for the first time in too many years. Similarly encouraging
has been the bipartisan character of this reinvigorated oversight.
The Congress should continue asking hard questions. And it must
insist on real answers before acting on any new requests for money
to support Mr. Bush’s plans to send more troops to Baghdad.
Congress has the authority to attach conditions to that money,
imposing benchmarks and timetables on Mr. Bush, who then
would be forced to impose them on the Iraqi government.

One immediate step could be a set of bipartisan resolutions
spelling out the broad policy directions Congress expects the
president to pursue on Iraq. That would send a useful message
to the American people that lawmakers are listening to their
concerns, if Mr. Bush is not, and also to Iraq’s leaders.

It’s now up to Congress to force the president to live up to his
constitutional responsibilities and rescue this country from the
consequences of one of its worst strategic blunders in modern
times.

History will surely blame Mr. Bush for leading America into Iraq,
but it will blame Congress if it does not act to push him onto
a more realistic path.

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2) Gunboat Diplomacy: The Watch on the Gulf
By JOHN KIFNER
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/weekinreview/14kifn.html?ref=weekinreview
Gunboat Diplomacy: The Watch on the Gulf (map)
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/01/13/weekinreview/20070114_MARSH_GRAPHIC.html

THE United States Central Command stretches across some of the
world’s most volatile real estate from Kenya in the southwest through
all of the Middle East to Kazakhstan in the northeast. It encompasses
two active combat theaters: Afghanistan, which is landlocked, and Iraq,
with a tiny uncontested shoreline.

In both, the main fighting is counterinsurgency, largely the task of light
infantry like the Marines and the Army’s 10th Mountain or 82nd
and 101st Airborne Divisions. CentCom, as it is known, has always
been run by a four-star general from the Army or Marines.

So why name a sailor — Adm. William J. Fallon — as CentCom’s new
commander, as President Bush did earlier this month?

One word: Iran.

Admiral Fallon’s appointment comes amid a series of indications
that the Bush administration is increasingly focused on putting
pressure on Iran and, perhaps, veering toward open confrontation.
They include the dispatching of a second Navy carrier battle group
to the Persian Gulf; a blunt singling out of Iran in Mr. Bush’s speech
Wednesday night, warning that America will “seek out and destroy
the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our
enemies in Iraq,” followed by a dawn raid Thursday on an Iranian
office in the Kurdish city of Erbil in which five Iranians were seized
along with files and computers.

The important thing is that Admiral Fallon is a naval aviator.

Now the ranking officer in the Pacific — the Navy’s traditional fief —
his résumé includes 24 years of flight assignments beginning with
combat in Vietnam and including commanding the air wing on the
carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the first Iraq war.

Iran thus far has been the principal beneficiary of the American
enterprise in Iraq, exerting influence over the Shiite parties it
nurtured in exile and expanding its own regional prestige. The
Iranians’ confidence and defiance have been bolstered by the
knowledge that American ground forces are stretched near the
breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But introducing more air and sea power, with their long reach,
in the gulf could change the military balance and options.

It is classic gunboat diplomacy.

The American naval presence in the gulf is the Fifth Fleet, based
in Manama, Bahrain. It usually numbers around 20 ships, capable
of putting 15,000 sailors and marines afloat. Its principal component
is a carrier battle group, so adding a second will, in effect, double
its air and sea power.

A carrier battle group typically consists of a Nimitz-class carrier
like the Eisenhower, a floating city so huge one can see the horizon
rise and fall without feeling the swell of the sea, and capable
of carrying as many as 85 aircraft, along with protective escorts.
These usually include two guided missile cruisers, two destroyers,
a frigate, two submarines and a supply ship. These smaller vessels
could be used for other tasks, like escorting tankers through the
narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s
oil passes, or enforcing sanctions or a blockade on Iran.

The Fifth Fleet also normally has a Marine landing force of 2,200,
roughly equally divided between ground troops and air support,
aboard three specialized ships that can be used in raids or other
operations.

Will this cow the Iranians? Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council
on Foreign Relations, thinks not. More likely, he said, is that “the
more radical militants will use this to berate the more moderate”
and “the notion of accommodating Western audiences will diminish.”

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3) Nomadic Herdsmen Innocent Targets
of Bombing in Somalia, Says OXFAM
By Joe De Capua
Washington
12 January 2007
http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2007-01-12-voa26.cfm

The relief organization OXFAM says nomadic herdsmen have been
innocent targets of bombing in the south of the country. Beatrice
Karanja, a spokesperson for OXFAM in Nairobi, tells VOA the
bombings have affected some of the agency’s humanitarian
water and sanitation programs.

“Oxfam has been receiving reports from our partner organizations
in Somalia that nomadic herdsmen have been targeted in recent
bombing raids. And what this has been is bombs have hit vital water
sources, as well as the nomads and their animals, who had been
gathering around large fires at night in order to ward off mosquitoes.
What OXFAM is concerned about is that under international law
there’s a duty to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
But this principle isn’t being adhered to and eventually, as we see,
innocent people are paying the price,” she says.

Karanja says OXFAM and other humanitarian organizations need
greater access in Somalia to help those who’ve been displaced
or affected in other ways by the recent fighting.

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4) The Best We Can Hope For
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
January 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/weekinreview/14cooper.html?ref=weekinreview

NOBODY will quibble with President Bush’s line Wednesday night that
in Iraq, “Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers
achieved; there will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.”

Of course, that calls to mind his victory landing on the deck of the
carrier Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California in May 2003,
which he followed with a speech declaring that, “in the battle of
Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

But let’s not digress. Mr. Bush has now scaled back his strategy
for victory to a strategy for the best-we-can-hope-for. So, it must
be asked, what exactly is the best we can hope for?

“In the best-case scenario, we’ll be in Iraq for 15 or 20 years,” said
Stephen Biddle, author of “Military Power: Explaining Victory and
Defeat in Modern Battle.” He offers the example of the Balkans,
where everyone seems to have forgotten about the United States
troops who have been there for years, helping keep a peace
brokered in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

Under the best result Mr. Biddle said he could imagine, the
United States would cajole or force warring Shiites, Sunnis
and Kurds to agree to the standard-cookbook negotiated
ending to a civil war. There would be some kind of power-
sharing deal among the key combatants, yielding an uneasy
cease-fire that would have to be policed for a long time by
outside peacekeepers, since no warring side would trust another.

Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? Except, Mr. Biddle said,
“If I had to bet my house mortgage on a scenario, it wouldn’t
be on that one.”

Before we get to the outcome on which Mr. Biddle is willing
to bet his piece of the American dream, we should, at least,
examine the second, optimistic resolution that Iraq experts
offer. This is the ending which, they said, President Bush
should embrace with both arms — if he can get it.

Remember the Spanish Civil War? The best America can hope
for, some experts said, would be for Iraq to turn into today’s
version of the Spanish Civil War.

For readers without immediate access to Wikipedia, the
Spanish Civil War lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939,
when the Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco, defeated the
Loyalists of the Second Spanish Republic. The death toll was
huge — estimates put it between 500,000 and one million.
People in just about every European country were passionate
about the fight: the Loyalists got weapons and volunteers
from the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists received help
from Italy, Germany and Portugal.

But, in the end, the Spanish Civil War stayed Spanish. The
Europeans sent money and arms and even volunteers, but
they didn’t let the war engulf the continent. (Probably because
the continent was busy getting engulfed in World War II, but
let’s not be too technical.)

The biggest worry in Iraq is not that Iraq will descend into
a civil war — most experts say that is a done deal — but
that an Iraqi civil war will not stay Iraqi. The fear is that
a civil war will engulf the entire region, with Saudi Arabia
and Jordan defending the Sunnis, Iran backing the Shiites,
and Iraqi Kurds declaring their independence, a move sure
to draw in Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish population.

“There’s a difference between the Saudis providing help and
them actually sending in forces; there’s a difference between
everybody playing in the troubled waters of Iraq and actually
allowing it to spread beyond Iraq’s borders,” said Gideon Rose,
managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. “Given the
alternative, the Spanish Civil War was better than World War I.”

The Spanish Civil War script doesn’t bode well for Iraq itself.
The death toll would be enormous, and Iraqi Sunnis, who make
up only about 20 percent of the population, would face particular
hardship. But such a war wouldn’t become World War III. The
United States would eventually pull its troops out, the Iranians
would finance the Shiites, and the Saudis would support the
Sunnis, but neither neighbor would engage militarily itself.

America’s image abroad would suffer a blow, but not a fatal one,
and in the end, the United States would still be the sole world
power. “That’s the best we can expect,” Mr. Rose said. “Disaster
in Iraq, problems in the Middle East and a several-year period
to recover the losses in American foreign policy.”

Critics have been unstinting in their disapproval of Mr. Bush’s
plan to send more than 20,000 additional American troops,
mostly to Baghdad, where they will embed with Iraqi brigades.

The idea is that the presence of the American troops will prevent
the Iraqi soldiers, who are mostly Shiite, from slaughtering the
minority Sunnis. Eventually, the thinking goes, the Sunni
population in Baghdad will come to trust the Iraqi soldiers,
and reconciliation will happen between Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites
and Kurds.

The problem with Mr. Bush’s plan, said Vali Nasr, a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is that it doesn’t
provide enough American troops to do much more than stay
the course, to use Mr. Bush’s now-abandoned lexicon. The
way Mr. Nasr sees it, 20,000 additional troops is too few to
change the dynamic on the ground, but enough to escalate
tensions further.

“The best we can hope for is pretty much the same thing
we’ve had for the last year,” said Mr. Nasr, author of “The
Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.”
“More of the same for another two years, but keep in mind that
it could potentially get much worse.”

That worst-case scenario is pretty scary, Mr. Biddle said. In that
picture, the United States would pull its troops out of Iraq, the
civil war would accelerate, and the Shiites, financed by Iran,
would conquer one Sunni village after another, driving the
Sunnis over the borders and into refugee camps in Saudi
Arabia and Jordan.

There would be a huge refugee crisis in the Sunni Arab countries,
where a dispossessed, bitter and highly politicized refugee
population would appeal to Saudi and Jordanian rulers to
make a last stand for Sunnis in Iraq. But since it would have
taken about 5 to 10 years to get to this point, guess who,
by then, would have acquired a nuclear bomb?

Iran.

“In the worst case, you could be looking at a couple of nuclear
weapons dropped on major cities — Baghdad, Riyadh, Tehran,”
Mr. Biddle said.

That possibility makes the one that Mr. Biddle views as most
likely seem almost palatable. Here it is:

“We get out, the civil war escalates,” Mr. Biddle said. “It’s funded
by all sides but they don’t send their own troops across the border.
The war just bumps along for 5 or 10 years and everybody eventually
gets so weary that diplomacy finally gets going, and there’s a cease-
fire, power-sharing deal. During that period, Iraqi oil output crashes,
there’s huge instability in the region and oil prices rise. And there’s
a humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq.

“That’s not a very happy scenario,” Mr. Biddle acknowledged. “But it
beats the heck out of nuclear war in the Mideast.”

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5) Busywork for Nuclear Scientists
New York Times Editorial
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The Bush administration is eager to start work on a new nuclear
warhead with all sorts of admirable qualities: sturdy, reliable and
secure from terrorists. To sweeten the deal, officials say that if they
can replace the current arsenal with Reliable Replacement Warheads
(what could sound more comforting?), they probably won’t have
to keep so many extra warheads to hedge against technical failure.
If you’re still not sold, the warhead comes with something of
a guarantee — that scientists can build the new bombs without
ever testing them.

Let the buyer beware. While the program has gotten very little
attention here, it is a public-relations disaster in the making
overseas. Suspicions that the United States is actually trying to
build up its nuclear capabilities are undercutting Washington’s
arguments for restraining the nuclear appetites of Iran and
North Korea.

Then there’s the tens of billions it is likely to cost. And the most
important question: Nearly two decades after the country stopped
building nuclear weapons, does it really need a new one? The
answer, emphatically, is no. This is a make-work program
championed by the weapons laboratories and belatedly
by the Pentagon, which hasn’t been able to get Congress
to pay for its other nuclear fantasies.

The Rumsfeld team’s first choice was for a nuclear “bunker
buster” to go after deeply buried targets. The Pentagon got
concerned about “aging” warheads only after it was clear that
even the Republican-led Congress, or at least one intrepid
House subcommittee chairman, considered the bunker buster
too Strangelovian to finance.

One crucial argument for the new program took a major hit
in November when the Jason — a prestigious panel of scientists
that advises the government on weapons — reported that most
of the plutonium triggers in the current arsenal can be expected
to last for 100 years. Since the oldest weapons are less than
50 years old, supporters of the new warhead have fallen back
on warnings that other bomb components are also aging,
and that the nuclear labs need the work to attract and train
the best scientists. But the labs are already spending billions
on studying and preserving the current arsenal.

Then there’s that guarantee that there will be no need for
testing — one of the few arms-control taboos President Bush
hasn’t broken yet. While experts debate whether the labs can
really build a weapon without testing it, the more important
question is whether any president would stake America’s
security on an untested arsenal.

America would be much safer if the president focused on
reducing the number of old nuclear weapons still deployed
by the United States and the other nuclear powers. The new
Congress should stop this program before any more dollars
are wasted, or more damage is done to America’s credibility.

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6) Democrats Are Unified in Opposition to Troop Increase,
but Split Over What to Do About It
By JIM RUTENBERG and PATRICK HEALY
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/politicsspecial/15troops.html?ref=world

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 — The White House sought Sunday to head
off building pressure in Congress to cut off or limit financing
for sending more troops to Iraq.

But even as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made
it clear that they would proceed with their plan to increase the
United States military presence in Iraq in the face of opposition
from the House and Senate, Democrats exhibited splits within
their ranks over how aggressively to oppose the plan.

Speaking on “This Week” on ABC News, Representative
John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the subcommittee
on military appropriations in the House, said he expected
Congress to move to restrict financing for new troop deployments
— or at the very least tie approval to stringent conditions the White
House would have to meet first.

“If we have our way, there will be some substantial change and
tremendous pressure put on this administration to change
direction,” Mr. Murtha said.

But Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the new chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CNN on Sunday that
he did not believe Congress should “use the power of the purse”
to halt the president’s plan and that it should go no further than
approving nonbinding resolutions opposing it.

While most Democratic leaders have not endorsed taking steps
beyond seeking to pass nonbinding resolutions opposing the troop
increase, pressure has been mounting in the past week from
opponents of the war to take more direct and assertive action
to block Mr. Bush.

In an interview on “60 Minutes” that was broadcast Sunday night
Mr. Bush said: “Listen, we’ve got people criticizing this plan before
it’s had a chance to work. They’re saying, ‘We’re not even gonna
fund this thing.’ ”

“I will resist that,” he added.

On “Fox News Sunday” Mr. Cheney acknowledged that Congress
had fiscal oversight of the war but said, “You also cannot run
a war by committee.”

Mr. Cheney said the Democrats would be undercutting the troops
if they moved to block the president’s plan, adding, “I have yet
to hear a coherent policy out of the Democratic side with respect
to an alternative.”

Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said on
“Meet the Press” on NBC News that the White House had sufficient
money in its control to deploy troops as planned, and he
suggested that once they were in place, Congress would be
reluctant to cut off financing.

“I think once they get in harm’s way, Congress’s tradition is
to support those troops,” Mr. Hadley said.

The growing pressure on Democrats to confront the White House
was highlighted by a speech delivered Sunday by John Edwards,
the former Democratic senator from North Carolina who is
seeking his party’s presidential nomination. Mr. Edwards, who
voted to authorize the war when he was in the Senate in 2002
but has since said that it was a mistake, said Congress had
a moral duty to cut off financing.

“If you’re in Congress and you know this war is going in the
wrong direction, it is no longer enough to study your options
and keep your own counsel,” Mr. Edwards said at Riverside Church
in Manhattan, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once gave
a speech denouncing the American campaign in Vietnam. “Speak
out, and stop this escalation now. You have the power to prohibit
the president from spending any money to escalate the war — use it.”

Mr. Edwards also called on fellow Democrats to support the
immediate withdrawal of 50,000 troops.

In making his speech, Mr. Edwards staked out antiwar turf in the
nascent Democratic presidential primary contest while challenging
others to do the same — most notably Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton of New York, who also voted to authorize military action
in Iraq in 2002 but has yet to take a position on legislative options
like withholding money. She visited Iraq on Saturday to speak with
military commanders, and plans to explain her views in fuller detail
when she returns Tuesday.

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Clinton, criticized
Mr. Edwards’s remarks by taking aim at the former senator’s image,
promoted by aides during the last presidential election, as an optimistic
and unifying figure. “In 2004 John Edwards used to constantly brag
about running a positive campaign,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Today, he has
unfortunately chosen to open his campaign with political attacks
on Democrats who are fighting the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.”

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, another likely Democratic candidate
and a longtime war critic, has stopped short of calling for a clamp
on financing for Mr. Bush’s plan.

While Congressional Democrats have been fairly unified in their
opposition to the president’s plan, the splits that have emerged
center on how to proceed against it. Some say that Democrats
won control of Congress with promises to force change and have
a responsibility to do so; others warn that the party could incite
accusations of undercutting the troops by limiting funds for them.

But with opinion polls showing overwhelming opposition to the
president’s plan — and support for some kind of intervention by
Congress — the trajectory over the past two weeks has moved
toward more aggressive Congressional action.

Two Democratic senators have backed away from earlier remarks
in which they expressed openness to a temporary increase in troops:
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is the majority leader of the Senate,
and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, a declared candidate
for the 2008 presidential election.

Mr. Dodd said in a statement on Sunday that he planned to introduce
a bill requiring Congressional authorization for the troop increase that
would be similar — but not identical — to one that Senator Edward
M. Kennedy of Massachusetts introduced Wednesday.

Public frustration with the war, and political moves like Mr. Edwards’s
on Sunday, will only heighten the pressure, especially on Democrats
running for president, to put real limits or conditions on the White
House war plan.

Advisers to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama — neither of whom is
a declared candidate — said in interviews that the senators had
yet to conclude that the financing issue was the best way to
fight Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama, on “Face the Nation” on CBS News, said: “The president
has already begun these additional deployments. We, unfortunately,
are not going to be voting on funding for several weeks, perhaps
months.”

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7) U.S. and Iraqis Are Wrangling Over War Plans
By JOHN F. BURNS
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/world/middleeast/15baghdad.html?ref=world

This article was reported by John F. Burns, Sabrina Tavernise and
Marc Santora, and written by Mr. Burns.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 14 — Just days after President Bush unveiled a new
war plan calling for more than 20,000 additional American troops
in Iraq, the heart of the effort — a major push to secure the capital
— faces some of its fiercest resistance from the very people it
depends on for success: Iraqi government officials.

American military officials have spent days huddled in meetings
with Iraqi officers in a race to turn blueprints drawn up in Washington
into a plan that will work on the ground in Baghdad. With the first
American and Iraqi units dedicated to the plan due to be in place
within weeks, time is short for setting details of what American
officers view as the decisive battle of the war.

But the signs so far have unnerved some Americans working on
the plan, who have described a web of problems — ranging from
a contested chain of command to how to protect American troops
deployed in some of Baghdad’s most dangerous districts
— that some fear could hobble the effort before it begins.

First among the American concerns is a Shiite-led government
that has been so dogmatic in its attitude that the Americans
worry that they will be frustrated in their aim of cracking down
equally on Shiite and Sunni extremists, a strategy President
Bush has declared central to the plan.

“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that
is actually part of the problem,” said an American military official
in Baghdad involved in talks over the plan. “We are being played
like a pawn.”

The American military’s misgivings came as new details emerged
of the reconstruction portion of Mr. Bush’s plan, which calls for
more than doubling the number of American-led reconstruction
teams in Iraq to 22 and quintupling the number of American
civilian reconstruction specialists to 500. [Page A7.]

Compounding American doubts about the government’s
willingness to go after Shiite extremists has been a behind-the-
scenes struggle over the appointment of the Iraqi officer to
fill the key post of operational commander for the Baghdad
operation. In face of strong American skepticism, the Iraqi
prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has selected an officer
from the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq who was virtually
unknown to the Americans, and whose hard-edged demands
for Iraqi primacy in the effort has deepened American anxieties.

The Iraqi commander, Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, will be part of
what the Americans have described as a partnership between
the two armies, with an American general, Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr.,
commander of the First Cavalry Division, working with General
Aboud, and American and Iraqi officers twinned down the
operational chain.

For the Americans, accustomed to clear operational control, the
partnership concept is troublesome — full of potential, some
officers fear, for dispute with the Iraqis over tough issues like
applying an equal hand against Shiite and Sunni gunmen.

It remains unclear whether the prime minister will be in overall
charge of the new crackdown, a demand the Iraqis have pressed
since the plan was first discussed last month, American officials
said. They said days of argument had led to a compromise under
which General Qanbar would answer to a so-called crisis counsel,
made up of Mr. Maliki, the ministers of defense and interior, Iraqi
national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and the top American
military commander in Iraq.

The Americans said that while they had reluctantly accepted General
Qanbar, they had won concessions from the Iraqis in the appointment
of two officers favored by the American command for the two deputy
Iraqi commanders, one for the areas of Baghdad west of the Tigris
River, the other for districts to the east.

Still, the new command structure seemed rife with potential for
conflict. An American military official said that the arrangements
appeared unwieldy, and at odds with military doctrine calling for
a clear chain of command. “There’s no military definition
for ‘partnered,’ ” he said.

Along with those problems, the Americans cite logistical issues
that must be solved before the new plan can begin to work. Intent
on using the large numbers of additional American and Iraqi troops
that have been pledged to the plan to get “boots on the ground”
across Baghdad, they are planning to establish perhaps 30 or
40 “joint security sites” spread across nine new military districts
in the capital, many in police stations that have been among the
most frequent targets in the war.

But in many areas, there are no police stations, at least none suitable
as operational centers, so the planners are seeking alternate locations,
including large houses, that will have to be fortified with 15-foot-high
concrete blast walls, rolls of barbed wire and machine-gun towers.

There are no solutions yet to longstanding problems like who — the
American forces, or the Iraqis’ own anemic logistics system — will
supply the fuel required to keep Iraqi Humvees and troop-carrying
trucks running, at a time when the American supply chain will face
new strains in supporting thousands of additional American troops.

The plan gives a central role to the National Police, viewed as widely
infiltrated by Shiite militias and, despite an intensive American retraining
program, still suspected of a strongly Shiite sectarian bias. One American
officer said that the National Police commanders have been “dragging
their feet” over their role in the new plan and that they could seriously
compromise the operation.

Against those concerns, American officers cite several factors they
believe will lend impetus to the new offensive. The five additional
brigades of American troops committed by President Bush —
approximately 21,500 American soldiers, about 80 percent of them
to be deployed in Baghdad — will roughly triple the numbers of American
soldiers available for ground operations, as a relatively small proportion
of the new troop strength will be needed for “force protection,” the
military term for troops who safeguard bases and ensure the safety
of other soldiers.

Since the resignation of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
after the November elections, American commanders here have been
more candid in acknowledging something Mr. Rumsfeld often disputed:
that the commanders have had to play shell games with thinly stretched
troops, and that many crucial operations, including previous attempts
to secure Baghdad, have failed because troops have often been moved
on to other operations, allowing insurgents and militia groups to retake
areas vacated by the Americans. The new plan, the Americans say, will
go a long way toward redressing that problem, at least in Baghdad.

Another positive cited by American officers is the appointment by
President Bush of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus as the new overall American
commander in Iraq, succeeding Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who will leave
next month after more 30 months in command of the war. General
Petraeus, who has already completed two 12-month tours in Iraq, has
a reputation among officers who have served under him as an imaginative
commander who enlists strong loyalties among his troops.

Many officers interviewed for this article said they still believed the
tide of the war here can be reversed, with the additional troops, the
focus on regaining control of Baghdad and the more consistent military
strategy they said they expected from General Petraeus. The 54-year-
old native of upstate New York, a marathon runner, will come to Baghdad
after overseeing the Army’s reworking of its counterinsurgency manual,
parts of which he redrafted himself.

American officials in Baghdad and Washington have said that they
have limited time — perhaps no more than six to nine months — to
show gains from the new American push before popular support erodes
still further and the onset of the 2008 presidential campaign leads
American politicians to push harder for a troop withdrawal. There are
also questions of how long the overstretched American military can
sustain the stepped-up presence here.

Together, those factors have thrust American military planners into
the equivalent of a two-minute drill, trying to develop a plan that
will yield rapid gains in regaining control of Baghdad neighborhoods
that have slipped into near-anarchy as Sunni insurgents and Shiite
death squads have run rampant. While American officers are confident
the additional troops will make a major impact, they worry about what
will happen when the American troop commitment is scaled down
again, and Iraqi troops are left facing the main burden of patrolling
the city.

That prospect raises the specter of repeating what has happened
on several other occasions in Baghdad: Americans clearing
neighborhoods house-by-house, only for insurgents and militiamen
to reappear when Iraqi security forces take over from the Americans
and prove incapable of holding the ground, or compliant with the
marauding gunmen. That was the pattern with Operation Together
Forward, the last effort to secure Baghdad, which began with an
additional 7,000 American troops over the summer, and effectively
abandoned within two months when Iraqi troops failed to hold
areas the Americans handed over to them.

Another concern is that the target of the new Baghdad plan —
Sunni and Shiite extremists — may replicate the pattern American
troops have seen before when they have embarked on major
offensives — of “melting away” only to return later. Some officers
report scattered indications that some Shiite militiamen may already
be heading for safer havens in southern Iraq, calculating that they
can wait the new offensive out before returning to the capital.

“This is an enemy that will trade space for time,” one officer said.

Shiite neighborhoods present special challenges. Tightly woven
networks of militias backed by the government, the areas have
been largely off-limits to American forces. An early test will be
Sadr City, the largest Shiite enclave in the capital, and the main
stronghold for the Mahdi Army militia, led by the renegade cleric,
Moktada al-Sadr. American officers say it is far from clear that the
Maliki government will permit American troops to operate freely
in the enclave.

The number of Americans to be based at the new joint security
centers is another matter under debate. At a minimum, according
to officers involved in the planning, there will be an American platoon,
about 30 to 40 troops, working from each new center, with another
platoon patrolling nearby, serving as both a quick reaction force to
quell any surge of violence in the area and also to protect the
Americans stationed with the Iraqis.

That places American soldiers directly in neighborhoods where, until
now, they have appeared only transiently on patrols and raids. Under
the new plan, they will work closely with the Iraqi Army and police in
an attempt to establish a trust that has been elusive. The approach
has been modeled on a successful American campaign effort
18 months ago in Tal Afar, a northern city that saw dramatic drops
in violence and is now regarded as one of the few success stories
of the American campaign.

The Tal Afar strategy was developed by Col. H. R. McMaster,
commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment at the time.
Colonel McMaster, who is widely regarded within the Army as one
of its most creative counterinsurgency thinker, as well as something
of a maverick, has been involved in Pentagon planning for the new
Baghdad operation. But unlike Tal Afar, Baghdad is at the heart
of the country, with nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population, and
American officers say that success here will be far more complex
than in the operation masterminded by Colonel McMaster.

Another senior officer involved in developing the new plan said that
the new crackdown would have been much easier to implement
if it had been adopted earlier. He said that when he returned to
Iraq for a second tour in the fall, he was shocked to see how far
the American war effort had regressed, something he attributed
to muddled strategy. “When I got back three months ago, the
hodge-podge called Baghdad was like a Rubik’s cube gone
awry,” he said.

In embattled West Baghdad, the plan is to place the new security
centers squarely where the sectarian fighting has been fiercest.
One of the first centers expected to begin operating is in Ghazaliya,
a Sunni enclave that has repeatedly come under assault from
Shiite militias.

That seems certain to pose early on the central question that
confronts American commanders as they start the plan: will
the Maliki government agree to operations aimed at Shiite
extremists, or resist them and push for the focus to be laid
on Sunni extremists attacking Shiite areas?

American officers say that only time will tell, but that they will
be surprised if Mr. Maliki and his top aides change colors,
despite the assurances the Iraqi leader is said to have offered
President Bush. As described by American commanders, the
pattern in the eight months since Mr. Maliki took office has
been for the Shiite leaders who dominate the new government
to press the Americans to concentrate on Sunni extremists.

The argument is that Shiite death squads, which have accounted
for an almost equal number of deaths, are engaged in retaliatory
attacks, and that those will cease when the Sunni groups
are rooted out.

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8) Opening a New Front in the War, Against Iranians in Iraq
News Analysis
By DAVID E. SANGER
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/washington/politicsspecial/15strategy.html

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 — For more than two years after Saddam
Hussein’s fall, the war in Iraq was about chasing down insurgents
and Al Qaeda in Iraq. Last year it expanded to tamping down
sectarian warfare.

Over the past three weeks, in two sets of raids and newly disclosed
orders issued by President Bush, a third front has opened —
against Iran.

Administration officials say the goal is limited to preventing
Iranians from aiding in attacks on American and Iraqi forces inside
Iraq. But in recent interviews and public statements, senior members
of the Bush administration have made it clear that their agenda
goes significantly further, toward foiling Iran’s dream of emerging
as the greatest power in the Middle East.

In an interview on Friday, before she left on her latest Middle East
trip, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described what she called
an “evolving” strategy to confront “destabilizing behavior” by Iran
across the region. Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen
J. Hadley, said Sunday on the NBC News program “Meet the Press”
that the United States was resisting an Iranian effort “to basically
establish hegemony” throughout the region.

Even some of Mr. Bush’s fiercest critics do not question that the
administration’s conviction that Iran’s ambitions are large is correct.
A few midlevel administration officials wondered even in 2003 whether
Iran was a far more potent threat than Mr. Hussein.

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, administration officials argued
that deposing Mr. Hussein would send a powerful signal to Iran
and North Korea, the two countries that Mr. Bush identified along
with Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union address as part
of an “axis of evil.”

“You heard this argument in meetings all the time,” a senior
official on the National Security Council, who has since left the
administration, recalled recently. “Iraq would make the harder
problems of Iran and North Korea easier.”

But the opposite happened. North Korea tested a nuclear device
in October. And Iran has sped ahead with a uranium enrichment
program.


Now, despite the urging of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group
to engage with Iran, Washington is moving in a more
confrontational direction. It is stationing more naval, air and
antimissile batteries off Iran’s coast; has persuaded many
international businesses to cut off dealings with Iran; and
it has interfered with Iranians inside Iraqi territory.

“The administration does have Iran on the brain, and I think they
are exaggerating the amount of Iranian activities in Iraq,” Kenneth
M. Pollack, the director of research at the Saban Center at the
Brookings Institution, said Sunday. “There’s a good chance that
this is going to be counterproductive — that this is a way to get
into a spiral with Iran that leads you into conflict. The likely
response from the Iranians is that they are going to want to
demonstrate to us that they are not going to be pushed around.”

Administration officials say ignoring Iran’s activities will only lead
to escalation with the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“There’s no question that everything that has gone wrong in Iraq has
made life easier for the Iranians,” one senior White House official
said recently. “The question is what you do about that.”

The answer, shaped in the National Security Council, is for the
American military to make targets of Iranians whom they believe
are fueling attacks, a decision that Mr. Bush made months ago
that was disclosed only last week.

At least twice in the last month, in raids in Iraq that have infuriated
officials there, American soldiers have detained Iranians. On Sunday,
Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, called for the release
of five Iranians taken in the most recent raid, which occurred
early on Thursday in Erbil. On CNN’s “Late Edition,” he said that
while the five were members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,
the group “in fact is part of the Iranian political system.”

The potential strategic split with the Iraqi government over how
to handle the Iranians is only one of the questions raised by
Washington’s new approach. First among them is whether the
effort will stop at Iran’s borders. In Congressional testimony,
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has said that he sees
no need to enter Iranian territory.

Yet American officials have been careful not to rule out the
possibility of American actions inside Iran. Pressed on the
ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday about excluding
the option of going after Iranians inside Iran, Mr. Hadley said
that for now, Iraq was “the best place” for the United States
to take on the Iranians.

“So, you don’t believe you have the authority to go into Iran?”
the host, George Stephanopoulos, asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Mr. Hadley responded. “This is another issue.
Any time you have questions about crossing international borders,
there are legal issues.”

A second question is whether Mr. Bush will step up covert as
well as overt efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program. So far, the
evidence collected by the International Atomic Energy Agency
suggests that Iran’s nuclear efforts have run into technical
obstacles, but concerns remain that inspectors are missing
secret facilities. A third question is what Washington would
do if the Iranians looked for ways to strike back.

Escalating tensions are the fear of American allies in the region,
who worry about Iran, but worry more about provoking it.

On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney argued that America’s
actions were intended to protect allies in the Persian Gulf —
though it is far from clear that Iran’s Sunni Arab neighbors have
signed on to the strategy. “If you go and talk with the gulf states
or if you talk with the Saudis or if you talk about the Israelis
or the Jordanians, the entire region is worried,” Mr. Cheney
said on “Fox News Sunday.” He described how the Iranians
“sit astride the Straits of Hormuz” and its oil-shipping channels,
and how they support Hamas and Hezbollah.

“So the threat that Iran represents is growing,” he said, in words
reminiscent of how he once built a case against Mr. Hussein.
“It’s multidimensional, and it is, in fact, of concern to everybody
in the region.”

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9) New York Rabbi Finds Friends in Iran and Enemies at Home
By FERNANDA SANTOS
January 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/nyregion/15rabbi.html?ref=nyregion

MONSEY, N.Y. — It was a bizarre sight: a cadre of Orthodox Jews,
with their distinctive hats, beards and sidelocks, standing alongside
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran last month at a conference
in Tehran debating the Holocaust.

Among them was Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman and assistant
director of a small anti-Zionist group with a foothold in this town
in Rockland County, home to one of the nation’s largest communities
of Hasidic Jews.

Unlike Mr. Ahmadinejad and most of the others present, including
the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Rabbi Weiss does not
deny or question the Holocaust; his grandparents died at Auschwitz,
as did several of his aunts and uncles, he said. What he and the Iranian
president have in common, he explained, is their belief that the Holocaust
has been exploited to justify the existence of Israel.

“We went to Iran because we had to let the world know, especially the
Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are not their enemies,” he said
in an interview, a Palestinian flag with the phrase “A Jew Not a Zionist,”
written in Hebrew, English and Arabic pinned to the lapel of his coat.
Below the Palestinian flag was an Israeli flag with a red line across it.

Rabbi Weiss and four other members of his group, Neturei Karta, received
a warm reception in Iran, he said, dining with state officials and posing
for photographs with Mr. Ahmadinejad, whom Rabbi Weiss had met
at least twice before.

Back home, Rabbi Weiss and the others were met with anger and scorn.
Since their return, they have been ostracized by synagogues, denied
service at kosher stores and vilified in Jewish discussion boards
on the Web. Posters have surfaced in the Satmar Hasidic enclaves
of Brooklyn, calling the members of Neturei Karta “rebels” and
“outcasts” and asking Orthodox Jews to “totally cut off ties with
this gang.”

On Jan. 7, about 300 people, most of them Orthodox Jews, including
several Holocaust survivors, protested outside Neturei Karta’s base
on Saddle River Road here, chanting and holding signs that read,
“Neturei Crackpots, Leave Monsey.” A much smaller contingent of
Rabbi Weiss’s supporters held a counterprotest nearby.

“In some ways, I feel odd; this is about Jew against Jew, after all,” said
one of the protesters, Rabbi Herbert W. Bomzer, a professor of Talmudic
law at Yeshiva University and the president of the rabbinical board
of Flatbush, which represents about 200,000 Orthodox Jews who
live in Brooklyn. “But to join together and shake hands with the
mad leader of Iran is unacceptable.”

He added, “If you shake hands with a Holocaust denier, you’re
on his team.”

Mordechai Levy, the national director of the Jewish Defense
Organization, a militant group that helped organize the protest,
said other demonstrations were being planned, with the goal
of “running Neturei Karta out of town and out of America.”

Founded in the 1930s to counter the Zionist movement in what
was then Palestine, Neturei Karta, which translates to “guardians
of the city” in the ancient language Aramaic, has a few thousand
members — in New York, the United Kingdom, Canada and in Jewish
settlements in the West Bank, among other places. They believe that
according to the Torah, Jews were exiled from Israel because they
sinned and that God has forbidden the formation of a Jewish state
until the Messiah arrives.

Many Jews who back the state of Israel abhor the group, and even
ultra-Orthodox Jews who share its theological views have distanced
themselves from Neturei Karta because of its vocal support
of Middle Eastern leaders like Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has
expressed in numerous pronouncements his disdain for Jews.

“I think they’re crazy,” said Ed Devir, founder of the online newsletter
MonseyNY.com and chief executive of HireIsrael.com, a nonprofit
group that finds technical jobs for United States citizens living in Israel.
Mr. Devir said he supports the state of Israel. “For too long, we tried
to ignore them, but that was a big mistake.

“Everyone knows that they’re a joke,” Mr. Devir added. “But the bottom
line is, they support groups that want to kill Jews.”

Rabbi Weiss, 54, grew up in the Orthodox neighborhood of Borough
Park, Brooklyn, the son of Hungarians who fled Eastern Europe before
Hitler’s troops closed its borders to Jews. He married 18 years ago
and has six children. The family moved to Monsey seven years ago,
solidifying Neturei Karta’s presence in the town.

During the group’s first trip to Tehran, last March, Rabbi Weiss released
a statement to Iran’s official IRIB radio in defense of Mr. Ahmadinejad,
saying that “it is dangerous deviation to pretend that the Iranian president
is anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.” Rabbi Weiss also met with Mr. Ahmadinejad
when he visited New York last year to speak to the United Nations
General Assembly.

“He is extremely friendly and he understands the difference between
the Zionists and the Jews who do not embrace the state of Israel,”
Rabbi Weiss said in an interview last week.

“We don’t look at him as an enemy,” he said. “But is he a potential
enemy? Well, every person who continues to be incited is one, but even
when we’re dealing with an enemy, we’re supposed to approach
them with dialogue and try to placate them. Aggression is not
going to be successful.”

Rabbi Weiss and his group are no stranger to controversy. He traveled
to France in October 2004 to take flowers to the ailing Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat, who died the next month. In the past, Neturei
Karta members have attended the annual Salute to Israel parade
in Manhattan, burning the Israeli flag and holding signs with messages
like “Authentic Jews will never recognize the state of Israel”
and “Israel is a cancer for Jews.”

About 200 people protested outside the Park House Hotel in
Borough Park late Saturday, demanding the departure of one
of its guests, Moshe Ayre Friedman, Neturei Karta’s leader in
Austria and one of the participants at the conference in Iran.
Mr. Friedman, who at the conference questioned the number
of deaths during the Holocaust, left the hotel under police escort.

“We’re constantly disparaged, belittled, but we’re the ones trying
to make peace with the Arabs,” Rabbi Weiss said. “But we don’t
look at the Zionists with animosity. We just wished they would
give us a chance.”

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10) Endgame:
The Biggest Police Operation in U.S. History
by Richard D. Vogel
January 15, 2007
[A detailed map is also at this site...bw]
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel150107.html

The recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that
paralyzed Swift and Company across the heartland of America were
part of Endgame, a massive immigration enforcement operation launched
by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003. Ultimately,
it promises to be the biggest police operation in U.S. history. The
stated objective of Endgame is to "remove all removable aliens"
from the U.S. by the year 2012.

This DHS goal could eventually entail the arrest, detention, and
deportation of 12-15 million undocumented migrants, mostly
Mexicans and Central Americans, currently residing and working
in the U.S. Once Endgame is in full swing and receives mass media
coverage, the intimidation effect will likely spark substantial voluntary
repatriation and significantly reduce the number of police actions
required to execute the operation.

Though the stated objective of Endgame is clear enough, the hidden
agenda of the operation remains officially undeclared -- that agenda
is to capture the undocumented migrants working in the U.S. and
recruit serviceable individuals in a so-called "guest worker" program
that will reduce them to a condition of transient servitude and further
undercut the value of all labor in the U.S.

The historical precedent of Endgame is Operation Wetback, the forced
deportation campaign that was conducted by the U.S. Border Patrol
against Mexican migrants during the 1950s. Though the operations
are separated by over a half a century in time, the economic goals of
both are essentially the same -- to capture desirable workers in
servitude and deport the rest.

The scope of the current labor scheme, however, eclipses that of its
predecessor. In the 1950s, the bilateral Bracero Agreement was used
primarily to secure cheap Mexican labor to work in the fields of the
American Southwest; this time, the pending national guest worker
program will be used to recruit low-cost labor from south of the
border to serve all sectors of the U.S. economy.

The infrastructure that will be needed to execute Endgame is already
in place or under development.

The locations of the DROs at Miami, Guantanamo Bay, and Aquadilla
suggest that they will be used to process migrant workers from Central
America and the Caribbean.

In addition to infrastructure development, ICE is currently recruiting
and training the substantial manpower that will be required for the
execution of Endgame at the various Federal Law Enforcement
Training Centers (FLETC) located primarily in the American South
and Southwest.

The current training and equipping of ICE reflect the increasing
militarization of U.S. immigration policy. While the U.S. Border
Patrol was reorganized along military lines and outfitted in smart
military style uniforms in preparation for Operation Wetback, ICE
conducts its operations as special forces units, dressed in black
uniforms and armed with state-of-the-art assault weapons.

The immigration reform proposals that embrace a guest worker
program pending in the U.S. Congress accommodate the expansion
of U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, and DRO facilities needed to enforce the
program. (For a full discussion of the pending U.S. guest worker
program and its ramifications see: Richard D. Vogel, "Transient
Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program for Exploiting Mexican
and Central American Workers," Monthly Review, January 2007
at:

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107vogel.htm

The need for the militarization of U.S. society for security reasons
is a legitimate issue open to political debate. However, the exploitation
of the issue of homeland security as a cover to impose an unacceptable
guest worker program on the nation is a different matter.

The legitimization of mass transient servitude in the U.S. will degrade
the position of all working people in the U.S. vis-à-vis monopoly
capital and must be confronted before it becomes entrenched
in the national economy.

The future of free labor is jeopardized in any nation that embraces
transient servitude.

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11) Worried about war, LI parents restrict access to recruiters
BY DENISE M. BONILLA
Newsday Staff Writer
January 15, 2007
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-enskul0114,0,7612715.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

At Lindenhurst High School, a military recruiter showed up at a faculty
meeting with refreshments in hand and an offer to help teachers
in their classrooms.

At Bellport High School, during homecoming, the Army tossed tiny
footballs emblazoned with the words "Go Army" into the crowd.

At Hauppauge High School, a Marine recruiter set up a table in the
cafeteria and chatted with students during lunch.

A high school is a military recruiter's dream, a centralized location
of hundreds of potential enlistees eager to find their paths in life.
But as the war in Iraq nears its fourth anniversary, some Long Island
parents have begun voicing concern over recruiter access to their
children, and schools have started to tighten their grip.

"A 15- or 16-year-old shouldn't be spoken to regarding their
future without their parents there," said Patchogue-Medford High
School principal Manuel Sanzone.

Sanzone said recruiters have never had unrestricted access to his
school, but that recent parental concern has led to a new, stricter
policy this year limiting recruiters to only two evenings on campus
a year, during college and career nights.

Marine school visits are not random. On the walls of the Smithtown
Marine Corps station hangs a giant map dotted with the locations
of high schools and colleges, along with a tally of male seniors.
Recruiters look for enlistees at football games and wrestling
matches. They stop by pizza parlors, arcades or any other popular
student hangouts. Recruiters also attend rock concerts or look
for new recruits at the beach, where they hold competitions
with free military-inscribed trinkets as prizes.

The Army offers a complete high school recruiting handbook with
a month-by-month guideline. Recruiters are encouraged to attend
school activities, eat lunch in the cafeteria often, deliver donuts
and coffee to faculty and assist coaches and summer school
teachers. "Be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene
that you are in constant demand," the 2004 handbook advises.
"Remember, first to contact, first to contract ... that doesn't
just mean seniors or grads. It means having the Army perceived
as a positive career choice as soon as young people begin
to think about the future. If you wait until they're seniors,
it's probably too late."

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to provide
the military with contact information for seniors or risk losing
federal funding. A national opt-out form is available, but
participation varies among schools, and counter-recruiters have
begun asking districts to make the forms more readily available.
In a court settlement with the NYCLU last week, the Department
of Defense agreed to change some methods of recruiting --
such as collecting student Social Security numbers.

Recruiter access to high schools on Long Island varies widely
by district. Some high schools -- such as Bellport and South Side
High School in Rockville Centre -- limit their presence to college
fairs and career nights and scheduled one-on-one meetings with
interested students in the guidance office. Others give more access.
At Hauppauge, recruiters are allowed to set up a table in the
cafeteria once a month and talk with students during lunch
periods.

Limits on recruiting

At Brentwood High School, which has seen four former students
killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, recruiters can't eat lunch in the cafeteria,
pull students out of class or talk to students in the hallways, according
to Principal Thomas O'Brien, citing a longstanding policy.

"Why does it seem to be a more acceptable career option in
Brentwood than in Roslyn?" he asked. "In a working-class community
like Brentwood, [the salary and college money] is certainly something
that sweetens the deal."

Counter-recruiters have asked for equal time in the schools to give
presentations about the dangers of war and ways to obtain money
for college that doesn't involve the military. "We're not trying to
get recruiters out of the schools," said Moriches mom Karen
Sackett. "But we feel kids should join the military with knowledge
and understanding of what they're getting themselves into."

Sackett began her efforts two years ago, after she opened her
front door one day to find two Navy officers in their dress whites
asking to speak to her 14-year-old son, Richard. The next day,
her 16-year-old daughter, Sara, was at Smith Point Beach when
her mother said she was approached by recruiters who told her
she could have a singing career in the military.

The group, which includes members of the Long Island chapters
of Veterans for Peace and Pax Christi, the international Catholic
peace organization, is also trying to form a speakers' bureau.
The veterans said they want to talk to students about their
experiences in war and warn them they may not get all benefits
promised by recruiters.

"We want to come and inform them of what we perceive to be
the truth from our experiences," said Vietnam War veteran Mac
Bica, of Smithtown. "Then we say, 'OK, now you have all of this
material, you decide what you want to do.'"

New York State Council of School Superintendents chief Bob
Lowry said districts are reluctant to let anti-war groups on
campus to make presentations out of concerns over politics.
For some parents, even a JROTC program is considered a military
influence and a tool for recruitment, even though federal
guidelines forbid using the program for such goals.

Lindenhurst High School principal Dan Giordano said only
a handful of about 600 seniors enlist every year, and only
some come from their Marine JROTC program.

The good and the bad

Maj. James Sureau, instructor of the JROTC program, said
that when students approach him about enlisting, he tries
to show the benefits and dangers of military life. "For some
of these kids, it changes their entire life," he said. "But I don't
want to go to any funerals of my kids."

Lindenhurst faculty ate the donuts, but didn't accept the Army
recruiter's offer to help in the classroom. And Bellport principal
Lois Etzel got wind of some complaints over the Army's presence
at homecoming. She said they have always taken part, and like
other groups in the community, were invited. "There are commercials
on TV, too," Etzel said. "It's not like we're making students
sit at the table and sign recruitment papers."

Recruiters can only meet with students if the student arranges
the meeting, and it must be held in the guidance office, Etzel said.
About a dozen students enlist each year out of a senior class
of roughly 300.

Many school officials around Long Island said recruiters, while
persistent, are respectful of limitations. "They do a really good job
in pushing kids to go to class and graduate," said Ben Baglio, interim
chairman of guidance at Brentwood High School.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.

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12) The Smithfield Strike Victory
By The Editors of Socialist Viewpoint Magazine
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the strike victory by
the more than 5,000 workers employed by Smithfield Corporation, at its
meatpacking plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina—the largest hog-slaughterhouse
and processing plant in the world.

The strike erupted on November 16 and ended on the morning of the 17th, when
the company asked for a meeting and made important concessions to strikers’
demands. The ramifications of this stunning victory go far beyond this one
plant, one company, one industry, or one small part of the American working
class.

Highlighting the extraordinary importance of this walkout is the unusual
reason why they walked—to demand that Smithfield’s bosses reinstate over 75
allegedly undocumented workers. No less remarkably, 1,000 of the company’s
5,000 workers, 60 percent of whom are immigrants and 30 percent Black, along
with the white minority, stuck together and forced Smithfield bosses to
reinstate those fired—and to make further concessions as well. Here are the
most important:

• The Company agreed to reinstate those workers who had been fired.
• There is to be no more firing.
• No disciplinary actions of any kind will be taken against those employees
who participated in the walkout.

And to top off their acceptance of the first three demands of the strikers:

•Smithfield also agreed to meet with a 14-member committee, to be elected by
the workers on the basis of one from each of the 14 departments on both
shifts, to deal with “concerns” raised by the workers—a diplomat’s euphemism
for the 12-year-long struggle for better wages and working conditions, union
representation, and an end to the dangerously inhuman pace at which
employees are compelled to work.

Although these concessions testify to the intrinsic power of organized
workers to force their employers to come to terms, the big issues for which
these workers struck—wages, hours, safer working conditions, and their
longstanding demand for a union contract—have yet to be resolved.

Even so, striking workers have profoundly shifted the balance of power from
Smithfield bosses to these newly empowered workers. The latter had twice
filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for union
certification elections, once in 1994 and again in 1997, and lost both
elections. But only because Smithfield fired, harassed, and beat up enough
union supporters to edge out a majority vote against the union.
But workers learned a valuable lesson from the first two attempts.
Consequently, on their third try, they decided to follow the old-fashioned,
direct-action route to union organization by marching and picketing outside
instead of working inside.

Moreover, they were able to keep secret their planned action long enough to
catch their bosses by surprise with the sudden appearance of 500 chanting
and marching militant pickets outside, and that many fewer workers inside to
begin the slaughtering and processing of more than 30,000 hogs in the next
24 hours. When the second shift arrived, another 500 workers joined the
marching pickets.

But this part of the strike scenario needs to be explained for the reader to
fully appreciate its impact on Smithfield’s bottom line.

Surprise, of course, is an important factor in wars between nations and
classes—and a strike is, indeed, class battle. In this case, because the
logistics of planning such a complex operation involving 30,000 pigs and
5,000 packinghouse workers, and the scores of trucks and drivers needed to
transport the finished product to their varied destinations around the
country, means that the surprise and impact of 1,000 missing workers caused
far more than a loss of only one-fifth of production on the first day. More
worrisome yet to Smithfield management is the uncertainty of how many
workers will show up on following days.

This is the equivalent of strikers throwing a legal “monkey wrench” into a
very complicated machine with thousands of moving parts.

Now, no matter how this battle turns out in the end, Smithfield strikers
learned two lessons that they are not likely to forget and that will greatly
improve their effectiveness in the months and years to come. They learned
that workers can only get what they’re strong enough to take.

But let’s take a closer look at why direct action by the workers themselves
is a far better road to follow than relying on an election organized and
controlled by the indisputably pro-capitalist, anti-worker government of the
United States.

What you can get from direct action that you can’t get from an NLRB election

Winning union recognition via direct action has two big advantages over a
government organized and controlled election. First, bosses can steal such
an election, but they can’t steal a victory over a strike—they have to
overpower and crush striking workers and their strike! The fact that the
company didn’t try to do this demonstrates that they had reason to believe
that the strike would continue snowballing when the time came for each
subsequent shift to come to work.

And second, if workers win a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election,
the employer is compelled only to go through the motions of negotiating a
final settlement. But it is under no compulsion to make anything more than
token concessions to prove that it is indeed negotiating.

But by winning the right to collectively bargain over wages, hours, and
working conditions by strike action, workers have also gone more than
halfway toward winning an acceptable labor contract. They have forced a
reluctant employer to recognize their union by hitting them hard where it
hurts most—in the pocketbook. The union also has sent a convincing message
that now, with the confidence gained by their first strike victory under
their belts, workers are sure to fight longer and harder for the kind of
contract they think they deserve and can get.

Smithfield strikers are now in a stronger position than if they had filed
for and won an NLRB election. Nevertheless, they still have not yet achieved
their goal of improved wages, benefits, and significantly safer working
conditions. In other words, though they have convinced Smithfield bosses
that these seemingly powerless workers are a force to be feared and
respected, the final outcome of this struggle still hangs in the balance.
However, Smithfield Corporation and its workforce are not the only
combatants. Also intimately involved in this struggle is capitalist America
on one side, and working-class America on the other. Therefore, which way
the struggle in Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant goes, for or against its
rebellious workforce, depends to a great extent on how capitalist America
and its government on one side, and the U.S. working class and its unions on
the other, respond to the challenge.

The capitalist government counterattacks

Not quite a month had passed before the inevitable happened. As Smithfield
bosses had confidently expected, the U.S. government came to their rescue.
On December 12, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff retaliated
against Smithfield’s striking workers and the United Food and Commercial
Workers International Union (UFCW), whose organizers had helped them
coordinate their strike. Chertoff launched simultaneous dawn raids on six
Swift & Company meatpacking plants, in six states—all of which were under
contract with the UFCW.

The federal government’s Homeland Security cops swept across the six plants,
arresting nearly 1,300 UFCW members on the charge of illegally living and
working in the United States. To further demonize these workers in the eyes
of the public, he charged them with having stolen the identities of American
citizens. But nothing was stolen. Because undocumented workers are unable to
get real Social Security numbers, all they need to do when applying for work
is to simply put down a fictitious nine-digit number. Thus, some of these
fake numbers coincided with real Social Security numbers owned by real
people. But nothing is stolen. In fact, the Social Security and income taxes
deducted from the paychecks of undocumented workers are automatically
credited to the real owners of the Social Security numbers.

But all of this begs the question: How did 11 million undocumented
immigrants get to be living and working in the USA?

It all started in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War.
That’s when the so-called “guest worker” program was first introduced in a
treaty signed by the Mexican and American governments. Guest workers were a
brand-new kind of immigrant invited to come live and work in this country,
but only for a specified time and only for the lowest-paid jobs, mostly in
agriculture.

Its temporary nature was the beauty part of this scheme cooked up by your
typical money-hungry capitalists to create an ever-expanding army of
superexploited and doubly oppressed workers. This new category of
third-class workers is an updated version of colonial America’s indentured
servants. But unlike the originals in the 13 colonies, who gained the right
to be free workers after serving the required time bonded to their masters,
the latest version of de facto chattel slaves are obligated to pack up and
go home, and worse for these church-mouse-poor workers—under their own power
and at their own expense!

Just imagine

Now, picture this: Imagine that you are one of those desperately poor
workers who had earned minimum wages or below for one or two harvest seasons
as legal temps. Another employer offers you a job as a now illegalized
worker—but with no time limit. Remember, too, while you’re imagining, that
you probably have loved ones in your homeland that depend on you for
survival, so that a part of your meager wages must of necessity go to them.
Maybe you were ready to bum your way back home, but someone offers you a job
as an illegalized worker. Let’s also suppose you ask around to find out what
happens if you stay and work illegally and get caught. And you are told that
you might not get arrested for some time or maybe ever—depending on how
badly the farmers and other employers in the region need cheap and
trouble-free workers who don’t dare complain to the authorities if they are
cheated or otherwise mistreated.

So what would you do if you were in such a pickle? If you knew that if you
stayed and got caught by the immigration cops you’d be picked up and jailed
for an uncertain period, but eventually given a free ride home—albeit in
handcuffs? The odds heavily favor your grabbing the opportunity of a job
that let you feed yourself and your family for a little while…or even a
whole lot longer.

That in a nutshell is how the 11 million undocumented workers got here; and
it’s how another 11 million will probably get here too, if the present
rotten setup is allowed to continue.

Now put yourself in the shoes of one of the many indigenous American workers
who are competing for the same jobs doing the same kind of work as the 11
million illegalized workers. Well, if you know your way around trade-union
and socialist circles, you understand that the intensified competition means
that the wages of all those taking such jobs will tend to decline, according
to the capitalist economic law of supply and demand. But you also would know
that when the average wage of the lowest-paid workers declines, the wages of
all those higher up on the economic ladder will also fall!

Let’s now imagine that you find yourself in the shoes of such a worker, who
is also class conscious and militant—as are a very large number of workers
born and raised in Mexico or almost any other country south of the border.
If you were this kind of worker, you would know that workers in practically
all other countries are far more likely to be class conscious and familiar
with what the class struggle is all about. Well, in that case, you would
also know that if workers stick together they can win, and would have
learned a thing or two about the right and wrong way to organize and fight
for your rights. You’d probably follow the example set by at least those
1,000 Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, N.C. who walked and the other 4,000
who would probably have followed if the bosses hadn’t come to terms after
the first day.

Nationalism, class consciousness and the working class

Now we come to another lesson that can be learned from the recent events in
Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant. We refer to the Latino immigrant majority and
the second-largest grouping there, the African American workers—both of whom
are oppressed nationalities as well as being doubly exploited and oppressed
members of the working class.

Not all nationalisms are the same. In fact, the nationalism of the oppressed
and the nationalism of the oppressor are diametrically opposed. But like the
slave and the slave owner, the two are organically intertwined. An
understanding of the interaction between capitalist exploitation and
oppression is the high road to a deeper understanding of the laws of the
class struggle in America and the world that were played out in the struggle
in Tar Heel, N.C.

It can also be said, however, that there is a difference between how class
consciousness is perceived by the two oppressed national minorities, African
and Latin American. While African Americans see their superexploitation and
oppression as a product of white ideology, Latin American immigrants
perceive it as just an extreme expression of the class exploitation and
oppression they experienced in their homeland, where they could clearly see
it as class-based since they were a part of the ethnic majority and not a
minority.

But that’s not all that differentiates the perception of the source of their
problem by each of these nationalities. Immigrants from south of the border
could clearly see that they suffered social, economic, and political
injustices because they were exploited wage workers. Whereas, African
Americans, who have never been treated as equals by workers with a lighter
skin color, perceive their problem as racial primarily, and class
secondarily.

That’s why it was the Latino workers who initiated and led the workers’
rebellion in Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant in North Carolina. But it is to the
credit of black workers that they could empathize with the victimization of
another superexploited nationality and were among the first to walk out in
support of a strike to reinstate the 75 fired workers—with many
union-conscious white workers joining because of class, not nationalist
solidarity.

But all this is entirely in accord with the inexorable tendency of working
people toward class consciousness and class solidarity, irrespective of
race, religion, or national origin. It happens to be the most reasonable,
logical, and natural response to the divide-and-conquer strategy and tactics
of the capitalist class. What’s good for the working class is also in the
best interests of all the exploited and oppressed—who together constitute as
much as four-fifths or more of the human race.

We need to make one more clarification of where we stand on the question of
nationalism. There’s no qualitative difference between the nationalism of
the oppressed and the class consciousness of the workers. This is because
oppressed nationalities are mostly workers and their superexploitation and
double–oppression generates working-class consciousness. It can also be said
that the condition of the oppressed in capitalist society is an objective
force making them more class conscious than the rest of us.

The outcome of the Smithfield strike inspires an optimistic perspective on
the coming rise of mass class consciousness and a militant working class
fighting side by side with Latino, black, and all other victims of
capitalist social economic and political injustice. This takes us to our
final question: What needs to be done to maximize the possibilities opened
up by the Smithfield strike victory?

‘The art of politics is knowing what to do next’ 1

We saw a good example of what a high level of class consciousness and class
solidarity can produce in the Smithfield strike victory. But we also saw an
excellent example of capitalist class consciousness and solidarity on the
part of the “executive committee of the capitalist class,” the capitalist
owned and controlled United States government!

But what about the executive committee of the working class—the General
Executive Boards of both labor federations, the American Federation of
Labor, and Change to Win. How did they respond? Not at all like their
counterparts in the ruling class. The leaders of both federations pretty
much did what the UFCW leadership did when faced by this mortal attack on
their union. Unlike the leaders of American capitalism, who ordered their
army of Homeland Security cops into action against their class enemy, the
workers and their unions, the union officials saw ordering their lawyers to
seek injunctions from the courts as “what to do next.”

There’s nothing wrong with using the courts against the system when you can,
but if that’s all that the official leaders of the American working class
have done or will do, then they have failed the acid test of working-class
leadership.

But it’s not too late. Far from it. The job of the left wing of the economic
and political institutions of the working class is to get the high and
mighty leaders of the unions off their hind ends, to do their duty by their
dues-paying members. That is exactly what United Mine Workers president and
founding president of the CIO told the official leaders of the AFL and CIO
when those bureaucrats failed to mobilize the 32 million members of the
labor movement at the time for mass action against what all agreed at the
time was the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley Act.

To be sure, old John Lewis was a high-handed bureaucrat, but he strongly
believed in giving union members their money’s worth; and best of all, more
often than not, he practiced what he preached.

Who will start building a fire, as hot as possible, under these
far-too-comfortable and self-satisfied labor fakers who proudly assert their
partnership with corporate America? There is a force that is fully capable
of getting such a fire burning, and burning higher and hotter as we go
along.

We refer to the tens of thousands of militant trade-union activists, the
more worker-friendly bureaucrats, and last but not least, the vanguard of
the working class. They must begin working overtime to establish
collaborative relations with the rank and file, with the leaders of the
Latino and black civil-rights movements, and most importantly, with the
already stirring rank and file that recently fought the good fight inside
the UAW for a program of class struggle against the ever-increasing
capitalist offensive.

1“The art of politics is knowing what to do next.”—James P. Cannon, a
working-class fighter and leader who had served his apprenticeship in the
Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World of
Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John, and later became a founding leader of
the U.S. Communist Party and a founding leader of the Trotskyist, Socialist
Workers Party.

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13) Community Work
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint Magazine
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/janfeb_07/janfeb_07_07.html

I came across an email from the Direct Action & Research Training (DART)
center—a self-described national network of 21 congregation-based community
organizations working toward social and economic justice—touting their good
community work. One paragraph stood out in their appeal in particular. It
brags about one of their trainees winning a sales-tax increase to fund
desperately needed healthcare for indigent patients:

“As a result of her work, the organization won the approval of a permanent
half-cent sales tax that will provide over $35 million annually to fund one
new health clinic a year for the next five years and increase indigent
patients seen from the current 2,000 to 45,000 patients per year.”

Punishing the victim

Sorry, but raising taxes on the poor (sales-tax increases) are not the
solution. In fact, it’s a major part of the problem. It’s the wealthy that
should be paying their fair share of the taxes. Increasing the sales tax is
not community service; it’s community shakedown. The poor are told, “You
must pay more out of your own pocket for all nonfood, necessary items to
support the meager and insufficient services that will become available!”
How is that economic justice?

Cigarettes: The hypocrisy of a regressive tax system

How is it justice to charge tobacco smokers extra taxes for the poison they
have been made addicted to? Smokers already are victims of the wholly
unscrupulous multi-trillion-dollar business of manufacturing, marketing, and
obscenely profiting off the slaughter and addiction of billions of people
across the globe.

During WWII and before, the cigarette companies had huge contracts with the
government to pack cigarettes into the rations of our troops, ensuring the
lifelong addiction of tens of millions of men and women. U.S. military bases
in France at the time were named after the different cigarette companies:
Camp Old Gold; Camp Chesterfield; Camp Phillip Morris; Camp Herbert
Tareyton; Camp Home Run; Camp Pall Mall; Camp Lucky Strike; Camp Twenty
Grand; Camp Wings.

But it didn’t stop there. At the very start of the TV age, one of the
tobacco companies—claiming that its cigarettes were “smoother” than
others-featured a doctor in its ads, wearing a white coat and a stethoscope
around his neck. And each manufacturer claimed its cigarettes were not
harmful at all! This wasn’t accidental; it was planned to get masses of
people puffing away.

It was during WWII that a big push was made to get more women to smoke. This
trend had already permeated Hollywood. Nick and Nora Charles of the famous
“Thin Man” series were never seen without either a cocktail or a cigarette
in their hands. How many Hollywood leading men had cigarettes as trademarks?
John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart immediately come to mind. And both died from
lung cancer, by the way. (And let me point out here that it’s much easier to
battle lung cancer surrounded by the most skilled medical professionals and
every luxury money can buy than in a cold tenement or out in the streets
burdened by years of poverty, receiving minimal healthcare or none at all!)

Cigarettes were embedded into every aspect of our lives through every form
of mass communication at the tobacco companies’ disposal—newspapers,
magazines, and billboards. In movie newsreels and in all the movies and TV
programs, cigarettes were incorporated as part of normal adult life and
something to strive for if you were a child. (Born in 1945 I began smoking
in 1954, when I was nine, and stealing cigarettes from my parents. My
younger sister set fire to the bathroom curtain when she was sneaking a
smoke at about the age of 11. When I set out looking for work as a young
woman of 17, I made sure there were ashtrays around and that I was permitted
to smoke on the job or I wouldn’t take it. I smoked until sometime in my
50s.)

Tobacco industry subsidized by tax dollars

Today cigarette companies are still getting tax breaks and even in some
cases being subsidized by the government! A PBS “Online Forum” dated July
11, 1997, debated an agreement among the attorneys general of 40 states and
the tobacco companies to go before Congress to “put in place the first truly
comprehensive nationwide system designed to drive down the number of
children who become addicted to tobacco products each day, and help adults
who are already addicted to quit.” The forum described such subsidies and
how they work:

“The agreement calls on tobacco companies to: pay billions of dollars for a
host of public education and health programs; reimburse states for the cost
of treating tobacco-related illnesses; set aside a multi-billion-dollar fund
to compensate smokers who win individual lawsuits against the tobacco
companies; and severely curtail marketing and advertising cigarettes,
especially to teenagers.... The settlement took months of intensive
negotiation. The tobacco industry is rich, powerful, and until recently,
doggedly determined to fight any efforts to reform its marketing tactics. To
maintain its position, it has even allegedly lied under oath to Congress
that it was unaware that nicotine is addictive. So, sign the deal?

“‘Not so fast,’ says Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) whose committee leaders
of the tobacco industry allegedly were lied to during a 1994 House
investigation. ‘The agreement eliminates class action suits, the state
lawsuits, and the right of individuals to bring addiction claims; it caps
what individuals can recover annually,’ wrote Waxman in a recent Washington
Post article. ‘And it allows the industry to pay for judgments against
it—including judgments based on future wrongdoing—by reducing its payments
for child health insurance and other public health needs.’ ... On the
regulatory side, the settlement gives the industry ‘something equally
unprecedented: It effectively bars the FDA from regulating the nicotine
content of cigarettes.’

“One provision mandates that the industry pay for the settlement by raising
cigarette prices, not by reducing profits. Another makes all industry
payments (to states and education programs) tax deductible, in effect
forcing taxpayers to pick up 35 percent of the costs.”

Someone else wrote on the same site:

“‘The Federal government already provides price supports for tobacco. Under
this agreement,