The 19-year-old Brown appeared in court on March 5 and was charged with two counts of felony assault for an incident in which 21-year-old Rihanna said he repeatedly hit, choked and threatened to kill her while they were having an argument.

For the most part, the media turned a serious topic into a sensation, exploiting every gory detail for no other purpose than to shock its viewers.

In the midst of the frenzy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey pulled together a show on dating violence in an effort to take the issue seriously, and reach out to women who might be living in violent situations.

Winfrey invited supermodel and talk-show host Tyra Banks to talk about her interviews with Rihanna, in which she described her parents fighting, and with Brown, who said he witnessed his mother’s abuse and swore he’d never put a women through what his mom went through. Banks also talked about her own experience of emotional abuse.

The show relayed the simple recognition that violence against women is rife in our society, and women aren’t to blame for it — observations that sadly not everyone shares. In a survey in the aftermath of the beating incident by the Boston Public Heath Commission, half of the teenagers surveyed, aged 12 to 19, boys and girls, said they thought that Rihanna was responsible for being beaten.

Statistics on dating violence and young women are shocking. According to the Family Violence and Prevention Fund, one in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a date, and 8 percent of high-school-age girls say that they have been forced by a boyfriend to have sex against their will. Forty percent of girls aged 14 to 17 say they know someone their age who has been hit by a boyfriend.

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, every year women in the U.S. experience 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes. According to the Bureau of Justice, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner in 2005 — an average of three women every day.

During the show, Winfrey and Banks repeated the advice that women must find the strength to get out of an abusive relationship. They made it seem as if abused women simply needed to summon the confidence inside to get themselves out of a nightmare. “When you feel great, you draw greatness to you,” said Oprah. You might as well tell a battered woman to pull herself up by her bootstraps.

Nowhere in this discussion was there any recognition of how difficult it is — financially and emotionally — for most women to get out of battering relationships, much less a real answer to why battering takes place.

Women escaping abuse often find themselves without the funds, credit or work history to find stable housing. A 2008 Equal Rights Center investigation of 93 rental properties in the District of Columbia found that, overall, 65 percent of test applicants seeking housing on behalf of a domestic violence survivor were either denied housing or offered less advantageous terms and conditions than an applicant not associated with domestic violence.

Shelters for women who seek to escape abuse and their children are scarce and pitifully underfunded.

A 24-hour census of domestic violence shelters and services by the National Network to End Domestic Violence found that more than 20,000 adult and child victims of abuse sought refuge in emergency shelters, and more than 10,000 adult and child abuse victims were living in transitional housing in a single day in 2008. According to the survey, on that same day, nearly 9,000 requests for assistance went unmet because of a lack of funding.

Of course, few people would look to Oprah Winfrey to provide all the answers to such serious questions as violence against women. But the discussion on her show with Banks says something about the way we are expected to view problems like domestic abuse and dating violence. The problem, like the solution, is always explained in terms of personal responsibility.

“Breaking the cycle of violence” is a favorite phrase of talk show advisors, but what does that mean exactly? That, by some force of nature, some men are batterers, and they pass this to their sons? The word “cycle” implies that violence is unstoppable and inevitable, until an individual man or woman makes it stop.

This isn’t to say that such individual solutions can’t and don’t happen — men and women change their situations for the better, despite the tremendous forces working against them.

But the “individual responsibility” way of looking at violence against women masks a greater, more systemic problem — that a society which treats women as less than equal opens the door for women to be abused.

In all sort of ways, our society views women as if they are of less value than men. This isn’t expressed only in music lyrics or sexism in popular culture, but in women’s overall status, including the unfair burden in the home that most women are expected to bear.

Add to this the difficult and contradictory relationships that can exist among family members. Inside families and relationships, the unexpressed frustrations of the outside world make themselves felt — and in some cases, the people closest and least responsible for the outside miseries become targets of abuse. It is little wonder that reports of domestic abuse have increased among military families, as the horrors of military services come back to haunt soldiers who take it out on their family members.

The answer to domestic violence lies in fundamentally changing the status of women in society. One first step would be to demand services, such as a safe place to live, for women who are facing abuse. Another is fighting for living wages, so that no woman feels the need to stay with an abuser because she cannot afford to leave. Likewise, free and accessible child care and health care would go a long way toward freeing women, and men, from the stresses and burdens of everyday life.

These things will come at no small price — and they certainly won’t be won by exhorting women to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

They have to be organized for and fought for — by women and men together, committed to ending women’s oppression.

Brown had begun receiving benefits of $380 a week to try to support himself, his wife and three children. Then the owners of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, just outside Washington, DC, filed an appeal, claiming he had been fired for being deceptive with a supervisor.

“A big corporation like that…it was hard enough to be terminated,” he said. “But for them to try to take away the unemployment benefits, I just thought that was heartless.”

When a Washington Post reporter showed up at Brown’s unemployment hearing in Maryland, the company dropped its appeal and refused to comment.

Kenneth Brown isn’t alone in what he faced. According to an Urban Institute analysis of Labor Department statistics, more than a quarter of people who apply for unemployment benefits have their claims challenged by their employer.

While unemployment benefits are paid out by the government, companies pay unemployment insurance taxes in most states. Although the formula varies from state to state, a company’s unemployment insurance rates are in large part based on the amount of benefits their workers collect when they lose their jobs.

More and more companies are deciding that they can save money by blocking former employees from receiving benefits. According to state and federal laws, workers who are fired for misbehavior or quit voluntarily are ineligible for unemployment benefits. The proportion of claims that were challenged on the basis of so-called misconduct has doubled since the 1980s to 16 percent, according to the Urban Institute.

Laws in some states have made it easier for companies to block benefits, broadening the definition of employee misconduct and putting the burden on the worker to prove his right to receive benefits. Thus, Texas and Florida have a higher rate of challenges “because the employers basically have to meet a lower bar to establish misconduct,” said Wayne Vroman, an economist and researcher at the Urban Institute. The courts also typically favor employers in their rulings.

Some companies spend the extra money to hire firms that specialize in helping them challenge former employees. The Post reported on a company named TALX, whose Web site boasted that it had removed “over $6 billion in unemployment claims liability annually.”

These aren’t the only vultures waiting to prey off of the unemployed. Some 30 states now provide debit cards through which unemployed workers can receive their benefits. The catch: checking a balance or withdrawing the benefits that they are owed comes with a fee.

Citigroup, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase and US Bancorp all have deals with states to handle the debit cards, with fees ranging from 50 cents to check a balance to a $20 overdraft fee. In many states, the debit card is the only option for unemployed workers to collect their benefits.

According to an Associated Press report, “Some banks, depending on the agreement negotiated with each state, also make money on the interest they earn after the state deposits the money and before it’s spent. The banks and credit card companies also get roughly 1 percent to 3 percent off the top of each transaction made with the cards.”

“They’re trying to use my money to make money,” said Arthur Santa-Maria, a laid-off engineer who lives just outside Albuquerque, N.M. “I just see banks trying to make that 50 cents or a buck and a half when I should be given the service for free.”

The AP calculated that Central Bank, which handles the cards for the state of Missouri — with 94,883 people claiming unemployment benefits through debit cards — stood to make an average of $6.3 million a year.

Existing unemployment rules already leave out thousands of workers. Even though the majority of jobless workers contributed to unemployment insurance, only 36 percent collect benefits, according to the Department of Labor.

Individual states decide on eligibility rules. Many deny benefits to several categories of workers — for instance, workers who are looking for part-time work only; workers who left their jobs for “compelling family reasons,” such as a child’s illness or domestic abuse; or workers who had previously exhausted benefits and are now in training programs.

Many workers don’t even seek out benefits, because they think they are ineligible or are confused by the rules in their state.

As part of the recently passed stimulus bill, the federal government is allotting $7 billion to try to entice states into broadening the categories of workers who will receive benefits.

The legislation would also offer money to states that agree to update their unemployment insurance rules so they use the most recent payment information when determining a worker’s benefits. Many states still exclude workers’ most recent three to five months of employment when determining if they have worked and earned enough to qualify for benefits, because the rules were instituted before widespread use of computers.

The stimulus plan will increase weekly benefits by $25 through 2009 and extend benefits for up to 33 weeks–an immediate improvement for a growing number of workers.

Joyce Burke has been trying to find a job for more than a year after losing her job at Chase Bank in Westerville, Ohio. “I’m only getting $200 a week in unemployment,” Burke told the Columbus Dispatch. “I’d never been on unemployment before. Now I eat one meal a day.”

The stimulus bill’s $7 billion is recognition that the safety net for unemployed workers as it exists today is grossly insufficient. But much more is needed to overcome the injustices that face workers after they’ve already suffered the blow of losing their job.

His claim was that the anti-poverty organization Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was trying to fix the election for Barack Obama by turning in fraudulent registrations. The charge didn’t seem to have any grounding in fact–since ACORN itself pointed out the questionable registrations to election officials.

The Republican complaints about ACORN make a mockery of the very real stories of disenfranchisement in the U.S.–most notoriously, hundreds of thousands of African American voters in Florida, who were struck from the rolls in 2000, assuring George Bush’s theft of the White House.

The fact that ACORN pays workers to go out and sign people up to vote–mostly in poor and minority neighborhoods–raises another problem. Why, if the right to vote is so important to the fabric of U.S. democracy, doesn’t the government make its own effort to register the disenfranchised?

The truth is that even when no one is stealing a vote or intimidating a voter, American elections are far from democratic.

Take the way the president is actually chosen. The president isn’t elected by popular vote, but by the Electoral College. Each state has electors based on their number of senators and representatives in Congress–which means every state gets at least three electors (for the two senators plus at least one member of the House of Representatives), no matter how many people live there. Because of this, states with small–and usually rural and overwhelmingly white–populations are overrepresented in the presidential election.

There are only two political parties in the U.S. that get a real hearing at election time. There have been times in U.S. histories when third parties threatened to shake up the two-party system–such as the 1930s, when there was sentiment for a labor party to represent workers–but these initiatives were almost always smothered.

Thus, third parties are kept out of most debates by rules and regulations written by the mainstream establishment, they are forced to jump through often insurmountable hoops to even appear on the ballot, and they are shut out of the media.

The Democrats and the Republicans, while they tout their differences during the election season, fundamentally represent the same interests–those few at the top of society who control the wealth.

So while the majority of people are supposed to believe that they are voting for a certain set of ideas or political positions represented by their party’s candidate, the reality is that the job of politicians, first and foremost, is to make sure that the interests of Corporate America are protected.

The U.S. calls itself the “world greatest democracy.” But there’s no real evidence to back up this claim. As Lance Selfa notes in his book The Democrats: A Critical History:

Although the Democratic Party is one of the longest-existing mainstream parties in the world, it doesn’t really compare to many of the world’s political parties on the most basic levels. It has no fixed membership or membership requirements…The party has no stated set of principles or programs…

As party conventions have developed into little more than trade shows rolling out that year’s model (the presidential candidate), the party platform is usually synonymous with the candidate’s talking points. In any event, the Democratic Party candidates–from the presidency to the city council–are free to follow or to ignore the party platform in their election drives…

The standard picture of a political party handed down to us from civics and political science classes is one of a collective body that people organize to get collectively from government what they can’t get as individuals. The political party in a democracy represents the citizens who indicate their preferences about what they want from government when they vote to put the party’s candidates in office. And yet it’s clear that the oversimplified model does not reflect reality.

A case in point, Selfa writes, is the overwhelming Democratic Party victory in 2006 congressional elections–which was mostly the result of voters’ opposition to the Iraq war and their determination to throw out the pro-war Republicans. Despite this, the Democrats didn’t lift a finger to end the war after taking control of Congress; rather, they continued to fund it.

This undemocratic democracy isn’t relegated to the U.S. It exists the world over in different forms. This is because at the heart of bourgeois democracy is the illusion that elected officials make decisions based on the best interests of the people who vote them into office.

It is not simply that politicians are bought and paid for by particular wealthy people or industries–though they are corrupted by the system of campaign contributions. Beyond this, politicians are part of a state machine whose job is to preserve the status quo.

Like the cop and the judge, the elected official ensures that the basic class relationship prevailing in society doesn’t change–that a tiny minority controls all the wealth that is produced by the vast majority, the working class. The state poses as a neutral body, but as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

There are also many crucial decisions about the direction of society that aren’t made through the ballot box. Voters don’t decide what is a fair wage, or whether they have health insurance, or whether their working conditions are too dangerous. The majority of the population sure didn’t have a say about the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street or the future of families hit by foreclosure.

But this doesn’t mean we’re powerless to make change. The actions of ordinary people have achieved extraordinary things–the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow segregation, the eight-hour day–because those people organized themselves and fought for what they wanted and needed.

There is a rich though hidden history of times when workers created the conditions in which a real democracy could take place, where workers took power and began making decisions about how to organize society in their own interests. There are examples across the globe–from Russia 1917 to Iran 1979–and even in the U.S.

In 1919, workers shut down Seattle in a general strike organized in solidarity with 35,000 longshore workers who had walked off the job for better pay. Many of the workers drew their confidence from the revolution in Russia two years before.

In order to ensure that the strike was successful, workers had to form a strike committee, which was elected out of the more than 100 striking locals in the city. In their meetings, they discussed how the strike would be carried forward, but also how essential services would be organized.

Seattle provides a glimpse of what workers’ democracy could look like. Workers took charge in the factories and workplaces, and began making decisions about how resources would be distributed. When employers refused to open dairies, the milkmen designed their own distribution service. A commissary department fed some 30,000 meals a day to strikers and the community.

As Jeremy Brecher describes in the book Strike!:

Garbage wagon drivers agreed to collect wet garbage that would create a health hazard, but not paper and ashes. Fireman agreed to stay on the job to handle emergencies…

Employers and government officials, as well as strikers came before the strike committee to request exemptions. According to one correspondent, “The extent to which the city recognized the actual rather than the titular government of the community is apparent to anyone who has read the record of the strike committee, and observes what was actually done. Before the committee… appeared a long succession of businessmen, city officials and the mayor himself, not to threaten or bully, but to discuss the situation and ask the approval of the committee for this or that step.

The sight of workers making day-to-day decisions about the workings of society and conducting debates about what way forward in the struggle flew in the face of the lies we’re told–that only the “experts” can lead.

The general strike ended in five days–but not before Seattle showed that workers’ power was possible, even in the so-called “world’s greatest democracy.”

A quote flies onscreen from a Wall Street Journal opinion article by conservative Stanley Kurtz: “The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming ‘guilt by association.’ Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation.”

What?!?

With his campaign sagging and Obama surging ahead, the McCain campaign was getting desperate last week. McCain let vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin denounce Obama for “paling around with terrorists” (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed out, note the plural on “terrorists”).

Then it was McCain’s turn. As he told ABC’s Charles Gibson, “I think it’s a factor about Senator Obama’s candor and truthfulness with the American people. I don’t care about Mr. Ayers, who on September 11, 2001, said he wished he’d have bombed more. I don’t care about that. I care about [Obama] being truthful about his relationship with him. And Americans will care.”

McCain’s McCarthyite story about Obama’s ties to “terrorism” couldn’t be more obvious as a bottom-feeding attempt to distract from the disaster of the economy and chip away at Obama’s lead.

However, to the geniuses of the right, it was a political masterstroke. For columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, McCain’s only mistake was not doing it sooner:

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama’s associations . . . [E]ven more disturbing than the cynicism is the window these associations give on Obama’s core beliefs. He doesn’t share the Rev. Wright’s poisonous views of race nor Ayers’s views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years, he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

It’s important to recall that the Ayers connection isn’t just a Republican line of attack. It was Hillary Clinton who first publicized the accusation back in April during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, rescuing this bit of trivia from the corners of right-wing blogosphere where it lurked.

So what is the Ayers-Obama connection?

Obama worked with Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on the board of the not-for-profit Woods Fund of Chicago from 1999 through 2002. According to its Web site, the fund provides support to “those organizations and initiatives that focus on enabling work and reducing poverty within Chicago’s less-advantaged communities.”

Pretty subversive stuff.

Today, the Woods Fund board includes such shadowy figures as a former Illinois state senator and executives from the BP oil company, UBS investment bank and Sahara Enterprises.

Ayers has also sat on boards with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose father sicced the cops on antiwar protesters like Ayers 40 years ago at the Democratic National Convention. In 1997, Daley gave Ayers the city’s “Citizen of the Year” award.

In 1996, Ayers hosted a get-together at his home to introduce neighbors to Obama, who was then running for state senate. Obama’s presidential campaign was launched elsewhere. As the Obama campaign points out, Obama was 8 years old when Ayers was in the Weather Underground.

What the Obama campaign refuses to take on, however, is the slander of 1960 radicals as bloodthirsty terrorists. Maybe this mischaracterization of the social movements of that era is enough for Sarah Palin and Charles Krauthammer, but it flies in the face of the facts.

Ayers was a leading member of the Weather Underground, one organization out of many during the radicalization of the 1960s and ’70s that included the antiwar struggle, the women’s movement, the Black Power movement, and the gay and lesbian liberation movements.

The strategy proposed by the Weathermen–that the participation of the masses in the antiwar struggle could be sparked by bold action, such as exploding a bomb–was just one road that a few activists took. Such tactics proved to be not just ineffective, but counterproductive. Rather than draw people to the movement, they drew more police repression on activists.

Even so, the right wing’s attempt to tie the Weather Underground to latter-day terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda is bogus.

The Weathermen took credit for bombings at the U.S. Capitol, Pentagon and other government buildings, but as the Chicago Sun-Times noted, “The bombings were designed to cause property damage, not hurt people. Ayers never has been accused of killing anybody . . . three Weather Underground members accidentally killed themselves while making bombs in New York City in 1970. In 1981, two police officers and a security guard were killed when other members of the group committed an armed robbery.”

After 10 years in hiding, Ayers turned himself in to authorities in 1980. The charges against him related to the Weathermen’s bombings were dropped because of the authorities used illegal means, such as wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, to gather evidence.

The depiction of 1960s activists and radicals as bent on violence is grossly inaccurate. There may have been many different ideas about how change would come about–some more positive, and some, like Ayers’, less so–but there was a common thread among those who participated in the actions and the protests that a more just world was not only possible, but worth struggling for. For many, it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to a different vision of society.

Ayers has renounced the tactics of the Weather Underground, but not the determination to stop the barbaric US war on Vietnam and to make a new world. But his words from a New York Times interview — coincidentally published on September 11, 2001 — have been systematically distorted. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers told the reporter. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers felt it was important to clarify the meaning of his comments in a follow-up letter to the editor:

I never said I had any love for explosives . . . I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact, we didn’t do enough to stop the war.

While the front-page news is about McCain’s attempts to paint Obama as “other” for his association with radicals like Ayers who opposed the Vietnam War, the real crime is painting the activists and organizations of the 1960s as “other” to the millions of people who today oppose the war in Iraq.

A few people couldn’t be happier to heap new condemnations on the Rosenbergs following the New York Times interview in which Sobell–who until now has maintained his innocence–said he’d spied.

Take Ronald Radosh, who has made an academic career out of justifying the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s. Radosh wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

[A]fter Sobell’s confession of guilt, all other conspiracy theories about the Rosenberg case should come to an end. A pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered. The Rosenbergs were actual and dangerous Soviet spies. It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies, and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.

But the facts are more complicated than Radosh admits. In Sobell’s Times interview about spying (”Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he said. “I never thought of it as that, in those terms.”), he said he gave military secrets to the Soviet Union–but during the Second World War, when the U.S. was supposedly an ally fighting Nazi Germany, and not “atomic secrets,” but information about radar and artillery devices.

Sobell, a former classmate of Julius Rosenberg at the City College of New York, was tried in 1951 alongside the Rosenbergs and refused to incriminate himself or the Rosenbergs. He was sentenced to 30 years behind bars, and served 18 years, in Alcatraz and other federal prisons.

While the media were quick to re-prosecute Sobell and the Rosenbergs, Sobell wrote in a letter to the Times afterward: “As for me, I helped an ally (admittedly illegally) during World War II. I chose not to cooperate with the government in 1950. The issues are now with the historians.”

For their part, the Rosenbergs’ sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, repeated in a statement what they said in 1975, when they first began to request that the government release information about their parents’ case:

“The truth is more important than our personal political position.” We meant it. Though we believed then that this material would prove our parents’ and Morton’s innocence, we have always been willing to accept whatever the record showed…

Morton’s statement…moves us to acknowledge that Julius did, in fact, participate with others in passing along military information. But at the same time, we believe the still-evolving record makes it even clearer that Julius did not “steal” or transmit the “secret of the Atomic Bomb,” the crime for which he was executed.

Meanwhile the National Security Archive, an independent research group at George Washington University, gained the release of testimony of all but three of the 46 witnesses who appeared before the grand jury in the Rosenberg case from August 1950 through March 1951.

The transcripts are a chilling addition to the “trial of the century,” in which the Rosenbergs were railroaded through coerced or patently false testimony.

Most importantly, the grand-jury testimony shows that Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s sister-in-law, falsely incriminated Ethel to win a lighter sentence for her husband David.

During the trial, David Greenglass claimed that he gave the Rosenbergs secrets–including a sketch of the atomic bomb–that he stole from his job as an Army machinist at the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory. During her 1951 trial testimony, Ruth claimed that Ethel typed David’s notes on the atomic bomb. But her recently released grand-jury testimony from 1950 doesn’t say anything about Ethel typing notes. In fact, Ruth originally claimed that she herself handwrote the so-called atomic notes.

During the trial, David also implicated his own sister Ethel–which played a key role in convicting Ethel and getting her a death sentence. Decades later, David admitted to Sam Roberts for his 2001 book The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case that he had lied about Ethel. “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember,” Greenglass said.

“You know, I seldom use the word ’sister’ anymore; I’ve just wiped it out of my mind,” Greenglass said, adding, “My wife put her in it. So what am I going to do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife.”

Greenglass has blocked the release of his own grand-jury testimony.

As the Meeropols pointed out in their recent statement,

Obtaining the full record is essential, because both David and Ruth testified about the typing at the trial. In fact, in his summation to the jury, the prosecutor drove home the case against our mother by referencing Ethel’s alleged typing when he declared, “Just so had she on countless other occasions sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.”

Ultimately, the government used the threat of executing Ethel–even though there was no evidence implicating her–to try to coerce Julius into a confession. “They created a case for my mother,” Michael Meeropol told the Washington Post. “They put a gun to her head and said to my father, ‘Talk, or we kill her.’”

Julius and Ethel were executed for giving away the so-called “atomic secret”–what the prosecution portrayed as the one piece of information that made it possible for the USSR to develop the bomb.

This is ludicrous, since there was no “atomic secret.”

As a 1949 report by the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy stated, “The basic knowledge underlying the explosive release of atomic energy–and it would fill a library–never has been the property of one nation…The Soviet Union, for its part, possesses some of the world’s most gifted scientists…men with the abilities and whose understanding of the fundamental physics behind the bomb only the unrealistic were prone to underestimate.”

And if there was a secret, David Greenglass couldn’t have relayed it in the garbled drawing that he passed off as evidence to prosecutors.

But the point of the trial–and the executions–wasn’t just about alleged atomic spying. The U.S. government had a message it wanted heard–if you oppose our policies, we will execute you. If you are a Communist, you are a suspect.

The fact that the Rosenbergs were an average couple in many ways made them the perfect target. They came from working-class Jewish immigrant families in New York’s Lower East Side and, radicalized by the poverty of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, joined the Communist Party like many others did. They took part in the struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys and collected funds for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. By 1943, they were no longer active in the party.

Their trial was dominated by fierce anti-Semitism and hysterical talk about the so-called Communist threat to the “American way of life.” What the federal government showed with its highly publicized trial was that if the Rosenbergs could be sent to the electric chair for their political affiliations, then no one was free from suspicion, and no one was safe.

Whether or not there was spying, what is crystal clear is that the government’s prosecutors didn’t let anything get in the way of orchestrating a trial and executing the Rosenbergs to send a chill through the left.

As Julius wrote in a letter to their lawyer Manny Block:

This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for contempt of court, but we’re gonna kill ya!

Meredith Fuchs of the National Security Archive drew an analogy with the “war on terror” today. “The Rosenberg case illustrates the excesses that can occur when we’re afraid,” she said. “In the 1950s, we were afraid of communism; today, we’re afraid of terrorism. We don’t want to make the same mistakes we made 50 years ago.”

As the Meeropols wrote: “All that we have learned in the last two weeks, coupled with all that we have gleaned from the information already available, reinforced the biggest lesson of our parents’ case: The U.S. government abused its power in truly dangerous ways that are still very relevant today.”

It isn’t the Rosenbergs who should be, once again, on trial–55 years after their murder–but the federal government, which still persists in whipping up fear and hysteria.

Widespread recognition of this fact has pushed health care reform to the center stage of the battle over who will be the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton accuses Barack Obama’s plan of “leaving out” 15 million people from “universal coverage,” and Obama charges that by mandating that everyone have insurance, Clinton’s plan penalizes those who can’t afford it.

Angry rhetoric aside–”Shame on you, Barack Obama!” Clinton chastised after Obama supposedly misrepresented her plan in campaign literature–both Democratic candidates are far from proposing the kind of changes necessary to guarantee people the health care they need.

In fact, in important ways, the two Democrats’ plans could make matters worse for people desperate to get quality health coverage, but left with no alternative but a private insurance industry bent on making more profits.

But in the meantime, the debate between Obama and Clinton has created an opportunity for opponents of health care business-as-usual to put their case forward–for a truly universal, single-payer health care plan.

Obama’s and Clinton’s plans do share some long-needed and welcome proposals, including bans on insurance companies using the excuse of “pre-existing conditions” to keep people from obtaining insurance, and requirements for insurance companies to charge the same premiums, regardless of clients’ age or health.

Beyond these, however, Obama and Clinton disagree on who will be insured and how.

Clinton promises a federal mandate that would require everyone to have insurance, but it is unclear about how the mandate would work. Clinton says there would be some sort of help, likely a tax credit, for people who make too much money to apply for Medicaid, but can’t afford high insurance costs. Beyond that, her proposal has been vague on the details.

Though she denies it, Clinton’s plan resembles the 2006 health care law passed by Massachusetts that requires everyone in the state get insurance.

Under the law, people who make up to three times the poverty line–$30,630 for individuals and $41,880 for couples–get a subsidy to help them with purchasing insurance. More than that, and they pay the full price of insurance–which can be anywhere from $1,464 a year for young adults to $9,600 a year for those over 55.

It’s no wonder that, despite the threat of fines that are set to increase to $2,000 in 2008, only 7 percent of the 244,000 people who are uninsured in Massachusetts had bought insurance by December 1, 2007.

In response, the Obama campaign has argued that Clinton’s universal mandate will penalize the middle class. His plan limits mandated insurance to coverage for children alone.

“The only difference between Sen. Clinton’s plan and mine is that she thinks the problem for people without health care is that nobody has forced them to get health care,” Obama said at a Democratic debate in Las Vegas last year. “What I see are people who would love to have health care and can’t afford it.”

But if Obama wanted everyone to have access to affordable health care, he’d support a national single-payer health care plan that covers everyone. Five years ago, he said he supported such a plan.

In 2003, Obama told an audience at an AFL-CIO conference: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody…

“[E]verybody in, nobody out–a single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because, first we’ve got to take back the White House, and we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”

Now, however, Obama claims he would only support single-payer if he were “starting from scratch”–and, as he told the New Yorker in May 2007, “We may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

Obama’s talks like he’s ready for substantive change, but the truth is that he’s holding it back.

“Obama references two papers by PNHP co-founders Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Steffie Woolhandler: Their seminal paper on medical bills as a contributor to bankruptcy (Health Affairs, 2005) and their groundbreaking study on the 31 percent administrative overhead in the U.S. health system (New England Journal of Medicine, 2003),” Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) Executive Director Dr. Ida Hellander wrote last May.

“Unfortunately, he doesn’t show any understanding of the implications of either.

“For example, he continues to rely on private health insurance (75 percent of people bankrupted by medical bills had insurance) and insists (like Hillary Clinton) that computers can reduce administrative burdens in the health system (only a single payer can do that, as demonstrated in their research).”

Obama said one thing when faced with a trade union audience in favor of single-payer health care. Now, on the presidential campaign trail, he says he’d do another.

Without pressure forcing him to take up single-payer, Obama is bound to opt for what is seen by the Democratic Party establishment as the more reasonable, “not-so-disruptive” solution.

That dynamic should be familiar to followers of Hillary Clinton. During her campaign, she regularly invokes her record of fighting for health care reform during the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton claims she learned a valuable Washington lesson at the time about tempering her demands for reform. However, health care activists who met with her learned a different lesson–the old bait and switch.

In early 1993, Hillary Clinton met with health care rights activists like the PNHP’s Quentin Young and David Himmelstein. They were told outright that a single-payer plan didn’t have a prayer with the Clinton White House. The eventual proposal from the White House trumpeted toothless “universal” coverage, but even that was too much to get past the health care industry and its mouthpieces in Congress.

In the end, the feeble “Health Security Act,” centered largely on private health maintenance organizations (HMOs), withered and died before even coming to a vote in Congress. Thus, even in the context of widespread public expectations that the Clintons would win health care coverage for every working and poor American, the administration covered for the health care industry’s bottom line instead.

For this reason, a better way to figure out how committed the candidates are to far-reaching change in health care would be to follow the trail of campaign contributors.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), Clinton so far tops the list of presidential candidates to receive donations from the health care industry with $3.9 million. But Obama isn’t far behind with $3.2 million. John McCain came in at $1.2 million–but former Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani each attracted almost twice as much as McCain.

Even more telling is the fact that campaign money from the health sector is going to Democrats ahead of Republicans this year–donations to Democrats are beating out Republicans by about $4 million. This is in contrast to previous election years, when the Republicans roundly beat Democrats.

Among the top 10 health-sector donors is Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, which lobbied fiercely against prescription drugs benefits coming under Medicare and opposed attempts to get more generic drugs on the market. So far this election cycle, Pfizer has split its money evenly between Democrats and Republicans–a big departure from its typical heavy lean toward the Republicans.

Figures for the drug giants Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline are similar. Meanwhile, among Obama’s campaign team is Moses Mercado, a lobbyist with Ogilvy Government Relations, whose client list includes Pfizer and United Health Group, a managed health care company.

Meanwhile, ordinary people continue to suffer the consequences of a for-profit health care system. Some 47 million people–roughly one in every six Americans–goes without health insurance. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.2 million people were added to ranks of the uninsured in 2006 alone.

Last year, Michael Moore’s film Sicko corroborated what so many people experience firsthand–that even if you have insurance, it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed health care.

The reality of the “health insurance plan” in the U.S. is that it is none of these things–it isn’t healthy, no one is actually ensured care, and there doesn’t appear to be a plan.

In the long run, Clinton and Obama’s health care plans share more than the candidates would like us to think. Both leave out undocumented immigrants, whether they are children or adults. Neither requires insurance companies to cover abortion or a range of other reproductive health issues for women.

Both plans rely primarily on employers to provide insurance to their workers, which too few actually offer–and when they do, employees usually have to pay a significant amount, and the coverage is a far cry from complete.

While their plans may offer some coverage for people to buy if they aren’t covered at work, it will be based on the private, for-profit insurance industry. The heads of these giant companies will still call the shots, and undoubtedly, millions of people will remain unable to afford medical care, and will therefore go without.

Rather than representing an incremental step toward winning affordable health care for everyone, these plans go in the opposite direction.

“The leading Democrats’ health care plans, if enacted, are a prescription for failure by giving the private insurance industry another bonanza: a carte blanche opportunity to sell more limited-benefit policies to healthy people and prevent a structural health care fix,” Dr. John Geyman wrote in Tikkun magazine.

“They would further raise costs, increase bureaucracy, enrich market stakeholders at the expense of patients, families and taxpayers, and perpetuate markets treating health care as just another commodity to be bought and sold. Wall Street would prosper as Main Street hurts.”

In Akron, Ohio, 500 people braved a harsh winter storm on February 12 to apply for possible jobs at FirstEnergy Corp. When company spokespeople arrived, 50 people were huddled on the snow-covered sidewalks, waiting for the doors to be unlocked for the job fair.

The next day, in Sacramento, Calif., 48-year-old Irene Maciulla was scouring the binders of job listings at the state Employment Development Department. Eight months ago, Maciulla lost her job as an in-home care provider. She was recently denied a temp job stuffing and licking envelopes. “The man told me I had to have a year’s experience,” Maciulla told the Sacramento Bee.

The national unemployment rate jumped from 4.7 percent to 5 percent in December, and according to government statistics, the number of jobs in the U.S. fell in January by 17,000, the first decline in overall employment in five years.

Such figures tell an ugly story for the future of U.S. workers–but it’s only one part of the story.

For a growing number of workers, being unemployed means being unemployed for a very long time. According to the Department of Labor, 1.4 million people have exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment compensation, but are still actively trying to find work. That’s the population of San Francisco–times two.

For all of 2007, about 17.6 percent of those who were jobless had been out of work six months or more, according to a report at CNN Money. That compares to 11.4 percent in 2000. “You have to understand that 5 percent unemployment today is worse than 5 percent unemployment 10 to 15 years ago,” Jason Furman of the Brookings Institution told CNN Money.

The time that workers are spending without employment is expanding, and so are the kinds of workers being affected. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released October 2007 showed that workers who didn’t graduate from high school were not only more likely to be unemployed, but more likely to be long-term unemployed.

Between 2001 and 2003, the report stated, “one in six of the adults who experienced any unemployment and one in five of the adults who experienced a long-term unemployment spell did not have a high school diploma.”

But now, it’s common for long-term unemployment to hit workers who might previously have had an easier time finding a new job–workers with years of work experience, skills, training or education. In fact, prior experience–what is typically viewed as an asset to prospective employees–appears to be having an opposite effect in many cases.

According to the New York-based National Employment Law Project’s analysis of Labor Department data, workers 45 years or older make up 27 percent of the total workforce, but they are 37 percent of the long-term unemployed.

One of them is Deborah El, a 64-year-old resident of Pittsburgh. She was laid off from her job as a program coordinator at a nonprofit literacy agency, and her 26 weeks of unemployment benefits are set to expire this month.

El, a diabetic, cares for her 26-year-old disabled daughter Orissa while she looks for a job and a place to live. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told the Associated Press. “I’m really scared. I’ve never been like this before. I’ve always been employed, I’ve always worked. I went back to school a few years ago and got a master’s degree, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

Of the recently recorded jobs lost, most came from the manufacturing and construction industries, as well as state governments. The Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) Establishment Survey, which calculated an average job growth over the last three months, showed that only 42,000 jobs had been created per month. This, compared to 169,000 a month over the comparable period a year ago.

The housing crisis is a large part of the reason for many of the job losses–hiring in construction has spiraled downward, and the end is nowhere in sight. According to the BLS report, construction unemployment is double the overall rate, at 11 percent.

These numbers will probably get worse. According to projections by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)–based on a forecast that the unemployment rate will have increased to 6.2 percent by the last three months of the year, and the historical relationship between the unemployment and the share of the jobless who are long-term unemployed–some 1.9 million workers will probably be out of a job for the long term by the end of 2008.

To make ends meet, unemployed workers have to use whatever savings they have–then they start borrowing. “We’ve burned through all of our retirement trying to survive,” Les Tarlton, a father of five who worked in the telecommunications industry for eight years when the company he worked for in Dallas shut down in January 2003, told CNN.

One makeshift solution: more and more working people are moving in with relatives. A New York Times article on the exodus of jobs from Ohio noted “an upending of the traditional pattern, in which middle-aged children take in an elderly parent.

“As $15-an-hour factory jobs are replaced by $7- or $8-an-hour retail jobs, more men in their 30s and 40s are moving in with their parents or grandparents, said Cheryl Thiessen, the director of Jackson/Vinton Community Action, which runs medical, fuel and other aid programs in Jackson and Vinton Counties.

“Other unemployed or low-wage workers, some with families, find themselves staying with one relative after another, Ms. Thiessen said, serially wearing out their welcome.”

When the long-term jobless do find new work, the jobs usually come with a substantial wage cut. According to a study of workers who lost full-time jobs between 2001 and 2003 and found a new job before they were interviewed in 2004, the average pay cut for the new position was 17 percent–about double the average loss for workers displaced in the late 1990s.

Darrel McKenzie worked as a maintenance man at Meridian Automotive Systems and grossed more than $60,000 a year before the Jackson, Ohio, auto parts plant shut down. Now, he’s had to start all over again as a union pipefitting apprentice and expects to make $20,000 this year. His family just “does less,” McKenzie told the New York Times.

Jeffrey Evans also worked for Meridian–and lost his job after 30 years. Now, he’s moving in with his mother, another laid-off Meridian worker with 28 years on the job. “I lost everything I worked for all my life,” he said.

In some cases, workers who have been unemployed for more than half a year stop looking completely. According to the October 2007 CBO report, “Spells of unemployment often ended with the job seekers leaving the labor force rather than taking a job. About 70 percent of the unemployment spells begun by adults during the 2001-2003 period ended with the individuals taking a job; 25 percent ended with them stopping their search; and the remaining spells were still in progress when the survey ended.”

So at least one out of four unemployed workers had totally given up–and is therefore doomed to fall through the cracks.

Seldom mentioned, too, are workers who are employed only part-time, even though they are seeking full-time positions–those considered “underemployed” in the government’s statistics. In January, 9 percent of workers were underemployed, according to the BLS–the highest level in two years.

In spite of these statistics, however, the Bush administration and Congress couldn’t manage to include an extension for unemployment benefits in the multibillion-dollar economic stimulus plan passed by Congress last month. This even though a similar benefits extension was passed in March 2002, when the number of unemployed workers who had exhausted their benefits was fewer than today.

Workers who are falling behind will face an even worse situation unless the jobless benefits they’ve earned are protected–and extended.

Some 57 percent of the record primary turnout were women, and 47 percent of them cast their ballots for Clinton, more than reversing her narrow loss of women’s support to Barack Obama in Iowa five days before.

Analyses of the voting and exit polls show that Clinton is winning support especially among older women — like Ruth Smith, an 87-year-old who drove 160 miles to Des Moines from Buffalo Center, Iowa, to go to Clinton’s first rally in Iowa.

“I told her that my grandmother was the first person in town to vote, and my mother was the second,” Smith told the New York Times. “And I told her I was born before women could vote, and I want to live long enough to see a woman in the White House.”

In speeches, Clinton invokes her candidacy as great step for women, as she confronts “the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in America.

This image of Clinton as the “candidate for women” has become more prominent in her campaign in the last week — an example being a prominent opinion article in the New York Times by feminist writer Gloria Steinem.

On the day of the New Hampshire primary, Steinem advocated a vote for Clinton because “[t]his country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: ‘I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.’”

Clinton also has the backing of the establishment liberal women’s organization, the National Organization for Women, whose political action committee launched a “Make History with Hillary” campaign in March 2007.

But the question remains: Will a Hillary Clinton presidency really stand up for women and the issues that effect their lives?

If there was any question that sexism still permeates U.S. society, the treatment of Clinton and her campaign for president certainly shows the answer. Sexism does exist.

Take the South Carolina campaign event for John McCain, where a woman asked McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?” to wild laughter. Or the Clinton campaign stop in Salem, N.H., where hecklers yelled, “Iron my shirt!” at her. Or the conservative Web sites that feature the sexist, anti-Clinton T-shirt “Life’s a bitch, so don’t vote for one.”

Then there’s the patronizing tone adopted toward Clinton by the media establishment after her defeat in Iowa — symbolized by nonstop replay of video from the moment in New Hampshire when her eyes filled with tears in response to a question about the difficulties of her campaign.

Clinton’s main opponents didn’t speak up against any of this. Obama made no comment on the media’s ridiculous double standards in judging Clinton’s “likeability” — and Edwards chose the moment after Clinton’s supposed “breakdown” to emphasize that he thought a commander-in-chief needed to be strong.

All this underlines the fact that few men face the same type of scrutiny regularly paid to Clinton — about her clothing, her makeup, her weight, whether she cries or not, whether she prefers diamonds or pearls, whether she is soft and tough.

No matter how few expectations there may be that Clinton will be a force for real change, there is no denying that it is a social sea change to see a woman as a presidential frontrunner. And while the Clinton campaign denies that it’s trying to make gender an issue in the campaign, it has. As Clinton recently joked, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. And I’m very much at home in the kitchen.”

At the same time, it should be said that Clinton and her supporters have also used issues of oppression in a backward way. Steinem’s op-ed article, for example, plays at ranking forms of discrimination — Clinton’s gender versus Obama’s race, with women trumping African Americans in Steinem’s eyes.

“[T]he Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change,” Steinem argued. “Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).”

If the candidate, Steinem continued, “had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago.”

This is a cynical attempt to play on divisions in society, to the benefit of her preferred candidate — and the Clinton campaign itself has been implicated. In mid-December, the chair of Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, Bill Shaheen, publicly speculated about whether Obama had ever been a drug dealer.

Clinton herself didn’t help matters last week when she suggested that Martin Luther Kings Jr.–like Obama, in her implied analogy — was mere bluff and bluster, and it took a Southern Dixiecrat to finish the job that the civil rights movement started.

“I would point to the fact,” she said in an interview with Fox News, “that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964–when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do . . . [I]t took a president to get it done.”

Not only does Clinton relegate King’s historic role to that of a “dreamer,” but she also belittles the role of thousands of Blacks whose sit-ins and other organizing forced the government to do something about Jim Crow segregation. Clinton would rather identify herself with Johnson, a Southern politician who was unrelentingly hostile to the civil rights movement as he came to power.

In contrast to the cynical maneuverings of Clinton supporters like Steinem, however, many women who support Hillary Clinton do so in the hopes that issues which affect their day-to-day lives will actually be addressed. But what is Clinton’s actual stance on these issues?
Her campaign is hardly frontloading the issues ordinarily associated with improving conditions for women, such as reproductive rights. The word “abortion” does not actually appear in her “A Champion of Women” page in the “Issues” section of her Web site.

So while Clinton supports women’s right to choose, she is not going to make it a prominent part of her platform — because this might alienate conservative voters.

Clinton is notorious in arguing for the need to find “common ground” with the right wing on the question of women’s reproductive rights. In 2006, she joined forces with anti-choice Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to promote the “Prevention First Act.” While the measure included some good provisions that make contraception easier for women to obtain, by and large, the focus of the bill was downplaying the importance of women’s access to abortion.

Clinton’s stance is that abortion is a “sad, even tragic choice” — as she told an audience of New York state abortion providers in 2005 — for women, not a fundamental right that only the woman should have a say in deciding. “Yes, we do have deeply held differences of opinion about the issue of abortion,” she said. “I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.”

If women are going to put their hopes in a new Clinton White House to defend the dwindling right to choose, they might want to look at the last time a Clinton occupied the Oval Office.

Hillary Clinton certainly wants you to. At the 2004 pro-choice “March for Women’s Lives” in Washington, Clinton touted the record of her husband’s administration. “We didn’t have to march for 12 long years,” she bragged, “because we had a government that respected the rights of women.”

The truth of the matter, though, is that more restrictions on abortion rights were put into effect during Clinton’s eight years than the 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.

Clinton emphasizes the idea of furthering women’s advances into positions of power — more women holding government office and sitting on the boards of corporations. Meanwhile, the issues that affect working-class and poor women are left in the dust.

From 1986 to 1992, Clinton sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart — she was the first women to do so. During all that time, however, Clinton never lifted a finger to defend the rights of women workers at Wal-Mart, a viciously anti-union company with a history of discriminating against its female employees.

Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which “ended welfare as we know it,” effectively destroying the social safety net and throwing millions of poor people to fend for themselves. In 2002, she joined Republicans like Orrin Hatch to support a bill that increased already punitive work requirements imposed on welfare recipients.

Clinton makes a priority of “fiscal responsibility.” She said in a December debate, “We don’t have to go back very far in our history, in fact just to the 1990s, to see what happens when we do have a fiscally responsible budget that does use rules of discipline to make sure that we’re not cutting taxes or spending more than we can afford. I will institute those very same approaches.”

Translation: deep cuts in social spending in the name of a responsible, balanced budget policy–and workers and the poor will pay the price for a bloated military budget.

One face that’s been seen flanking Clinton on the campaign trail is Madeleine Albright — one of those women Clinton talks so much about, who carved out a place for herself among the seats of power.

During her tenure as secretary of state, Albright oversaw some of the bloodiest military campaigns of the Clinton-Gore administration, including sanctions and air strikes against Iraq.

The support of this “great woman leader” tells you a lot about what will be in store for the people of Iraq — women and men alike — if Hillary Clinton makes it into the White House. Clinton is an unapologetic hawk who voted to give Bush the go-ahead for war on Iraq, and then later Iran.

Having Hillary Clinton in the White House won’t be better for women — or anyone who is concerned with these issues. She, like the other leaders of the Democratic Party, is committed to preserving the status quo.

The key to winning real change isn’t relying on politicians like Hillary Clinton, but organizing at the grassroots to give concrete expressions to the hopes that so many people have for change in Washington.

The libertarian Texas congressman has won over a group of antiwar writers and others on the left who say he is the only candidate in either party’s presidential primaries worth supporting.

Paul gained these left endorsements because he has taken a stand against the occupation of Iraq and the U.S. “war on terror” that few Democrats dare to. He voted against last year’s war funding bill, supports repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act and opposes an attack on Iran.

But that’s not all Ron Paul stands for — far from it.

He also, for example, regularly claims that the “American way of life” is under assault, and fighting back means “strengthening the borders” — i.e., cracking down on Mexican immigrants. Paul is opposed to abortion rights — apparently, his libertarian defense of individual freedom doesn’t apply to women.

He says he’s proud to stand in the tradition of Ronald Reagan — who Paul was almost alone among Republican officeholders in supporting when Reagan first ran for president in 1976. In between the Reagan quotes on his Web site, Paul makes it clear that he believes in “small government” — by which, he means eliminating the federal government’s already shredded social safety net, not to mention the Department of Education.

These positions have certainly been as important as his antiwar views in attracting a following on the right — encompassing conservatives fed up with the neoconservatives’ grip on U.S. foreign policy, as well as rabid anti-immigrant forces, open white supremacists, admirers of Pat Buchanan’s anti-free trade economic nationalism and assorted 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Given this, why is Paul even getting the time of day from antiwar activists? This phenomenon can only be understood in the context of the disarray in the antiwar movement and the lack of a viable left-wing independent alternative in the elections.

The Democrats — both in Congress, and the main contenders for the party’s presidential nomination — have done nothing to meet people’s hopes that they would stand up to the Bush administration on the war. Yet most liberal organizations, including within the antiwar movement, will fall in line behind the Democrats, tailoring their activities to the need to “get an ally in the White House.”

For those who resist the pro-Democratic tide, all this can lead to some cynical conclusions — including the idea that the future lies not with organizing among progressives who will likely vote Democratic, but with reaching out to conservatives who support Paul.

“Many, if not most, of [Paul's] supporters are new to the electoral game,” wrote Joshua Frank, co-editor of the Dissident Voice Web site. “Sure, some may indeed be rednecks, but what the hell is so wrong with hard-working folks who oppose Empire? Disregarding or pooh-poohing Paul’s movement because he’s not a progressive and some of his followers have odd world views makes us look like elitist snobs.”

Since when is it “elitist” to speak up for immigrant rights or a woman’s right to choose? Or the dangerously radical proposition that there should be a right to free public education?

By Frank’s logic, these issues should be set aside because Paul opposes the war. But does that mean, for example, that the left should have supported the far-right presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992 — since Buchanan opposed the Gulf War the previous year.

Antiwar activist Stan Goff makes this myopic proposition — that none of Paul’s reactionary positions matter as long as he’s for withdrawal from Iraq — explicit in a recent article on the CounterPunch Web site.

“I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, ‘I won’t endorse this-n-that position’ liberal-left,” Goff wrote. “Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was antiwar before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.”

Setting aside the sneering tone, does Goff understand what he’s saying? That issues like abortion and immigrant rights must be judged as “less important”? Would he like to say so to the millions of people who marched for immigrant rights on the last two May Days?

The bizarre image of a resurrected pro-imperialist Eugene Debs — a man who, after all, went to federal prison for opposing war — is a pretty pathetic excuse for climbing on Paul’s bandwagon.

The formula of supporting a candidate with antiwar views, no matter how right wing they are on other issues, is disastrous for anyone who wants to rebuild the left.

Consider this quote from another one-time presidential candidate: “We stand with Cindy Sheehan and the memory of her son which should spur all truly patriotic Americans to demand an end to this war for Israel, this war against America, the Iraq War.”

The author of those lines is neo-Nazi David Duke.

Goff may believe that Paul’s antiwar platform is the primary point of his campaign, but Paul and his supporters are pushing the complete package.

In Iowa, for example, as the caucuses approached, Paul used his Internet-raised millions to fill the TV airwaves with a xenophobic ad about “protecting” U.S. borders. It begins with images of people swimming across the Rio Grande and warns in a menacing voiceover, “Today, illegal immigrants violate our borders and overwhelm our hospitals, schools and social services.”

Paul’s promise: “Physically secure the border. No amnesty. No welfare to illegal aliens. End birthright citizenship. No more student visas from terrorist nations.”

For his supporters on the left, this bigotry is excused by claiming that Paul has found a way to win the support of “hard-working folks” who the leftist “elite” have ignored. But the unstated assumption here is that the “hard-working folks” are white, and the only antiwar candidate they’d support has to be anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and “passively racist.”

For one thing, this is a condescending — not to mention, completely wrong — stereotype of working-class white people.

But more importantly, “hard-working folks” are also immigrants, Blacks, Latinos, Arabs and Muslims. They are gays and lesbians (Paul voted to bar gays from adopting children). They are women who depend on their right to legal abortion under Roe v. Wade, which Paul has called “the worst of all rulings” and said should be overturned.

If the point of supporting Paul is to make the antiwar voice in the U.S. stronger, then you have to ask how diverse groups of people will be drawn to any movement against the war associated with a candidate who heaps abuse on some of them.

Building a stronger antiwar movement isn’t simply about reaching “beer-drinking rednecks from Tennessee or pot smokin’ hippies from Oregon,” as Joshua Frank puts it, but building solidarity with others in their struggles and furthering the kind of politics that makes our side stronger.

That can’t be accomplished by sidestepping ideas used to divide people, like racism, sexism and homophobia. Any progressive movement that hopes to grow, whatever the issue, needs to take on such arguments directly whenever they arise.

Unfortunately, when Sherry Wolf of the International Socialist Review argued for confronting Paul’s bigotry in a recent piece on CounterPunch, she was painted as a “sectarian” — a word that’s typically reserved for vilifying the socialist left.

Opposing right-wing ideas that make any movement weaker isn’t “sectarian.” It’s basic solidarity. The proudest moments in the history of the U.S. left are bound up with struggles to defend the principles of solidarity, by any means necessary. It’s a sign of the disorientation of the left today that such ideas can be looked upon so cynically.

This isn’t, as Goff and Frank suggest, an argument for having a checklist of political requirements for someone to be involved in the antiwar movement. If Paul wants to bring a blimp to the next antiwar protest, I don’t really care.

But it is an argument for rejecting a candidate who doesn’t believe in what you believe in. We say it about the Democrats — and we should it all the more loudly about a reactionary like Ron Paul, even if he does oppose the war.

Did he say Europe? Romney should have said Massachusetts, his home state, since Clinton’s plan resembles in many ways the one he signed into law when he was governor–which requires individuals who aren’t covered by an employer’s health care plan and who aren’t poor enough to be eligible for public assistance to spend their own money on coverage from a private insurance.

Hardly what you’d call “socialized medicine.”

But by and large, the line in Washington and in the media was that Hillary Clinton had “learned her lesson” from her last attempt to reform the health care system during the presidency of her husband 14 years ago. “We tried to do too much too fast,” Clinton told a 2006 conference of the Federation of American Hospitals. “I still have the scars to show for it.”

So Clinton won’t fool around with socialist health care plans that cover every person–like the one Michael Moore proposes in his movie Sicko. This time around, the argument goes, Clinton is going to be “realistic.”

But if you look at the actual history of the Clinton administration’s health care reform proposal, you’ll see just how “realistic” Hillary Clinton was all along.

Despite widespread public excitement about the possibility of a health care plan that would cover everyone in the U.S., the Clinton administration’s health care debacle was a series of half-measures and compromises that fizzled away and died.

Expectations were high among workers in the run-up to the 1992 election of Bill Clinton. After eight years of George Bush Sr., and more than a decade of take-from-the poor-and-give-to-the-rich Reaganomics, it looked like the tables would finally be turned on what was known as Corporate America’s “decade of greed.”

Along with other promises like a bill banning employers from permanently replacing strikers, Bill Clinton took over the White House vowing that every person would gain access to health care. At the time, some 37 million people were without health insurance.

Clinton set up a “Task Force on National Health Care Reform” and put Hillary Clinton at the helm.

One common myth about the Clinton plan–in fact, one that Moore’s Sicko repeats–was that the administration came up with an otherwise excellent proposal, but big business blocked it from being enacted. The reality is that the Clintons never intended to propose anything that would cut into Corporate America’s profits–even if that meant killing the goal of universal health care.

Hillary Clinton’s health care task force put on a show of meeting with activists like Dr. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and others in early 1993, but the administration had no intention of considering proposals for a Canadian-style single-payer plan covering all Americans.

Dr. David Himmelstein, a colleague of Young in PNHP and supporter of a single-payer system, gave an account of a meeting with Hillary Clinton that appeared in a September 1993 Washington Monthly article.

“Himmelstein’s studies, published in The New England Journal of Medicine since 1986, show that the U.S. could save as much as $67 billion in administrative costs alone by cutting out the 1,500 private insurers and going to a single government insurer in each state–easily enough to pay to cover every uninsured American,” read the article.

“Hillary Clinton had heard it all before. How, she asked Himmelstein, do you defeat the multibillion-dollar insurance industry? ‘With presidential leadership and polls showing that 70 percent of Americans favor [the features of] a single-payer system,’ Himmelstein recalls telling Mrs. Clinton.

“The First Lady replied: ‘Tell me something interesting, David.’”

Single-payer didn’t stand a chance. Instead, the Clinton administration focused on a corporate-friendly “universal” health care plan.

This nevertheless raised the hopes of millions of uninsured workers. “With this card, if you lose your job or you switch jobs, you’re covered,” said Bill Clinton, speaking before Congress in September 1993. “If you’re an early retiree, you’re covered. If someone in your family has, unfortunately, had an illness that qualifies as a pre-existing condition, you’re still covered…And if an insurance company tries to drop you for any reason, you will still be covered, because that will be illegal.”

He promised that preventative care would be covered as well as substance abuse and mental health treatment. The plan, he said, would rival Social Security in its groundbreaking improvements in workers’ lives.

But running through the administration’s argument for health care reform was the concept of “shared responsibility” between employers and employees–that no one was getting a “free ride.” Clinton’s speeches on the subject stressed the importance of bipartisanship and compromise.

By the time the administration’s proposed “Health Security Act” reached Congress on November 20, 1993, it was a watered-down proposal centered on private health maintenance organizations (HMOs)–based in part on input from the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA).

The HIAA would later run its infamous “Harry and Louise” TV ads decrying the Clinton plan as “big government.” “This plan forces us to buy our insurance through new mandatory government health alliances,” complained Louise. “Run by tens of thousands of bureaucrats,” said Harry. “Having choices we don’t like is no choice at all,” replied Louise. “They choose, we lose,” they said.

Ultimately, insurance companies, large and small, decided that the series of concessions made by the Clintons in formulating their plan weren’t enough.

During 1993 and 1994, 660 lobbyist groups spent more than $100 million to stop health care reform. According to a report from the Center for Public Integrity, organizations with health care interests funneled $25 million to members of Congress. About a third of that went to members sitting on one of five committees overseeing health care.

It was money well spent. Several health care proposals made their way to Congress over the coming months, each more watered down than the one before it.

By the time a bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) came to the floor in August 1994, it was of little consequence–abandoning any requirement that employers provide health insurance for workers for at least another 10 years at least. Establishing universal coverage would be put off for nearly as long. Still, it failed.

Health care reform wasn’t killed by big business. It was allowed to waste away–and the Clintons sat by and let it happen. As a result, the ranks of the uninsured grew at least by 3 million people during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The Clinton health care reform disaster showed that furthering corporate interests and backroom deals aren’t flaws or exceptions–they’re part and parcel of the Washington political system.

So, for instance, members of Congress regularly move on to roles as corporate lobbyists, and visa versa. “William Gradison was member of Congress on Sunday, and a head of HIAA–producer of the infamous Harry and Louise ads–on Monday,” wrote Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein in their book Washington Babylon.

Corporate interests, not the “will of the people,” come first in Washington. For this reason, real health care reform didn’t stand a chance under Clinton without a movement to back it up.

A Gallup poll in late 1994 showed that 72 percent of the public considered major health care reform a high priority. But that sentiment was never expressed in any organized form. Unfortunately, instead of mobilizing pressure, labor unions and liberal organizations gave the Clinton administration the space it said it needed to negotiate.

Today, some liberal commentators blame the Clinton health care debacle–caused, they say, by “going too far, too fast”–for Newt Gingrich and the Republicans taking over both the House and Senate in the 1994 congressional election, dubbed the “Republican revolution.”

But it was in large part the rightward shift of Clinton and his fellow Democrats that paved the way for the Gingrichites to triumph. The vote in favor of the GOP in 1994 was less an embrace of the Republican Right and its agenda than it was a rejection of the Democrats and their trail of broken promises.

From this point, the Clinton era ushered in unprecedented attacks on workers and poor–on issues of crime and immigration, as well as welfare spending. These attacks paved the way for further assaults down the road.

If the Clinton administration is mistakenly remembered today for confronting the health care bosses, the industry knows better. Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign war chests have brimmed with health care money. She was ranked the number-two recipient of donations from the industry, trailing only former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ analysis of 2005-6 campaign finance.

Today, while the U.S. spends more on health care than any other Western country, and 47 million people still live without health insurance, we should be drawing very different lessons from the Clinton years.

“Hillary Clinton did learn a lesson from her 1994 fiasco on health care reform,” Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, wrote this month. “Unfortunately for most of us who don’t have an Inc. after our name or a private jet to cart us around, it was the wrong lesson…

“She might have decided to cut them out of the business of profiting off pain, suffering and medical debt, and proposed a very different solution, such as expanding Medicare, Medicaid, or the State Children’s Health Program to cover everyone.

“Accommodating the insurance behemoths, and effectively offering them massive public subsidies–using the considerable power of government to force everyone to become paying customers of the private insurers–is not the kind of leadership on health care we need.”

“I want to go home,” Lewis told a reporter. “They don’t have places for old people in New Orleans yet. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to die in a little trailer in the middle of a field somewhere.”

When Katrina hit, 65-year-old Phyllis Taylor also had to evacuate. But for Taylor, that meant leaving behind her downtown penthouse apartment for her 40,000-acre ranch in Foxworth, Miss.

Taylor is the richest woman in the second-poorest state in the country. She became chair and CEO of Taylor Energy company — the largest privately held oil and gas company on the Gulf of Mexico — after her oilman husband died in 2004. In 2007, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth at $1.6 billion.

After the storm, a window was broken in Taylor’s penthouse, and the air-conditioning was out. Carrie Lewis lost everything.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed to the world the reality of two Americas, standing side by side — one rich and one poor. Two years later, that harsh reality remains — but Katrina’s victims are gone from the media’s attention.

Carrie Lewis is like tens of thousands of people still living in trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — 45,000 trailers in Louisiana, 20,000 in Mississippi, 17,000 in Texas and 400 in Alabama–because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Pamela Lomis lives in a FEMA trailer with her two children at the Sugar Hill trailer park, in the middle of the cane fields near Convent, La. Somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, she’s 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. There’s only one bus that goes there. It leaves at 9 a.m. and returns at 4 p.m.

“We just sit around here with life slipping by,” Lomis said. “We’re just on hold. Just waiting for something that never comes.”

With no homes to go back to — since no one put a priority on rebuilding the low-income housing that many of the poor and elderly once lived in — many are reaching the breaking point.

“I want out of this trailer, out of this place,” said Helen Felton, a resident of Renaissance Village trailer park. “But I get my little Social Security check. Do you know how far $660 goes?”

And the Katrina refugees can expect matters to get worse–people still living in trailers in 2008 will have to start paying rent to FEMA.

If the trailers don’t kill them, that is. As if their living situation wasn’t bad enough, more and more trailer residents are reporting health problems as a result of formaldehyde poisoning.
In early August, 500 people in New Orleans filed a class-action lawsuit against trailer manufacturers, making the case that the 14 companies providing some 120,000 trailers for FEMA ignored regulations on formaldehyde levels, which is resulting in illnesses.

Formaldehyde, a chemical usually associated with embalming dead bodies, is widely used in pressed wood products, particleboard and plywood — which are typically part of FEMA trailers. High levels of formaldehyde are dangerous, causing respiratory diseases, bloody noses, burning eyes, headaches and insomnia — even low levels can cause respiratory problems and exacerbate already existing conditions. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a human carcinogen.

Nancy and Michael Sonnier were glad to get their trailer just before Thanksgiving, after their home was destroyed in Hurricane Rita. When they told a FEMA representative about the fumes in their trailer, “One of them laughed out loud and said, ‘We hear that from all kinds of people. Just open your doors and windows,’” 63-year-old Nancy told Amanda Spake for her article “Running on Fumes,” in Louisiana’s Independent Weekly.

According to evidence introduced at a congressional hearing in mid-July, when trailer residents reported health problems from formaldehyde fumes in their homes to FEMA field workers, top FEMA officials did their best to sweep their complaints under the rug. The House Committee on Oversight and Government made public some of the more than 5,000 internal e-mails that revealed a pattern of cover-ups and denials — what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) called “an official policy of premeditated ignorance.”

One man, dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was forced to move into a motel after he couldn’t breathe because the formaldehyde had caused his lungs to swell. FEMA agreed to pay his motel bill — but only after a FEMA staff member wrote to superiors, “He said he had nowhere to go, and he was dying with cancer. He would not go back to the travel trailer as he had a violent reaction to the formaldehyde.”

Later, a FEMA attorney cut off the motel payment before it was set to end, suggesting the man try a charity.

“One of the things that we’re seeing is that there are more and more children who are having allergy problems and respiratory problems,” Lourna Bourg, executive director of the New Iberia, La.-based Southern Mutual Help Association, told Spake. “Because of the closeness and smallness of the FEMA trailers, there’s a number of people who just can’t tolerate the fumes. We even had one lady who was living in a shed to get out of it.”

But while some former residents are desperate for a safe place to live, people like Phyllis Taylor see dollar signs when they imagine the new New Orleans.

Last year, she told the Dallas Morning News, “We have an opportunity of a lifetime to build an urban Eden.” Earlier this year, she added, “Our challenge is the rebuilding of New Orleans, especially taking advantage of the opportunity to rebuild in a better way.”

A better way — meaning one that doesn’t include poor people.

Some people are profiting big-time from the Katrina disaster. The Bush administration saw the opportunities right away — and assigned billion-dollar contracts for cleaning up the Gulf Coast to corporate friends like Bechtel and Halliburton.

When it came to retrieving dead bodies, FEMA hired Kenyon International Emergency Services, a subsidiary of Service Corporation International, a Texas-based funeral services company run by Robert Waltrip, a close friend of the Bushes and major campaign donor, according to CorpWatch.

The federal government claims to have earmarked millions to rebuild the area, but there’s little proof of that on the ground. The federal government has supposedly promised more than $116 billion for rebuilding the devastated region. But according to a report from the Institute for Southern Studies, less than 42 percent of that money has actually been spent.

The report found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore needed storm defenses. But as of July, less than 20 percent of the money had been spent.

“Included in the oft-cited $116 billion spending figure is $3.5 billion in tax credits to jump-start business in Gulf Opportunity or ‘GO’ Zones across 91 parishes and counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi,” noted the Institute for Southern Studies’ Blueprint for Gulf Renewal Report.

“But many of the breaks have been of questionable benefit to Katrina survivors. Take for instance the $1 million deal to build 10 luxury condos next to the University of Alabama football stadium — four hours from the Gulf Coast.”

Meanwhile in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, some homes still have the “X” painted on them by the National Guard to signal that there was a dead body inside.

The federal government is failing New Orleans — and that means the workers who are rebuilding the city, too. During the initial cleanup, dangerous work was subcontracted to companies who regularly abused workers, failing to provide them protective gear and underpaying them afterward.

That’s if they paid them at all. Undocumented workers reported companies that called in Immigration and Customs Enforcement when workers tried to demand the wages they were owed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which spoke with more than 1,000 Gulf Coast workers, the majority didn’t receive overtime pay, despite the fact that many worked 80 to 100 hours per week.

While all these abuses were happening, the federal government looked the other way. Two years after Katrina, we are still seeing the divide between rich and poor exposed by Katrina–and it’s growing worse all the time.

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What Else to Read

The Institute for Southern Studies’ report, “Blueprint for Gulf Renewal: The Katrina Crisis and a Community Agenda for Change,” identifies the failures in the federal government’s rebuilding effort, two years on. For a detailed article on allegations that FEMA trailers are contaminated with formaldehyde, read the “Running on Fumes” in the Independent Weekly.

One excellent source of articles on Katrina is the Justice for New Orleans Web site, run by the Loyola Law Clinic. Also, see the Web site of the Common Ground Collective, a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support for Katrina survivors.

One of the best books on New Orleans and Katrina is Michael Dyson’s Come Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster.

The International Socialist Review has had excellent coverage of the Katrina disaster and its aftermath. Read Mike Davis’ “Who killed New Orleans? Questions for an autopsy” and “Open letter to the residents of Gretna,” by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two EMTs from San Francisco who were trapped in New Orleans during Katrina.