The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would allow unions to win recognition once a majority of workers at a given workplace signs a union card, rather than allowing managers to force their workers to suffer through a drawn-out union election by secret ballot. Employers typically prefer to force a union election because it allows them to delay the decision by months while they fire union supporters and force their workers to endure “captive audience” meetings with managers who threaten to close down the company or move elsewhere in the case of a union victory.

EFCA would also compel recalcitrant employers to bargain with unions, by imposing binding arbitration if there is no agreement reached 120 days after a union wins recognition. This is necessary because roughly half of all new unions never get a contract due to their managements’ refusal to bargain in good faith.

The Chamber of Commerce has called EFCA a “firestorm bordering on Armageddon.” In an October 28th interview on CNBC, John McCain pledged to veto EFCA if elected president, calling it “dangerous for America, [and] it’s dangerous to small business. And I think it’s a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.”

The Chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and other anti-union corporate crusaders have raised $200 million to combat EFCA. And they have only just begun to fight, framing their defense of workers’ “right” to a vote by secret ballot in a union election as if this were a struggle to preserve a sacred cornerstone of democracy — by preventing unions from simply asking workers to sign union cards if they would like to join the union.

In reality, EFCA would maintain the option of voting by secret ballot but transfers the decision to workers instead of employers, where it currently resides. Nevertheless, on the March 14 edition of Fox News’ “The Journal Editorial Report,” Wall St. Journal editor Paul Gigot accused “Big Labor” of using “brass knuckles” and their “toughest tactics” to get their way. It turns out that the behavior to which Gigot referred was nothing more thuggish than a group of unions having “written a letter … to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner suggesting that any banks or companies that receive funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program shouldn’t be able to lobby [against EFCA].”

This would seem a perfectly reasonable request, given that both Bank of America and Citigroup organized conference calls to launch their own campaigns against EFCA after receiving $25 billion and $50 billion in bailout funds, respectively. These clueless executives still seem not to realize that union busting is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money — especially in the midst of the apparently limitless taxpayer bailout of the Wall St. banks who provoked the current economic crisis. These are undoubtedly the same sort of managers who believe that referring to underpaid and overworked retail employees as “associates” actually prevents working-class resentment from appearing in their workplaces.

EFCA was last introduced in Congress in 2007, when it fell victim to a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Employers are aiming for the same outcome this time around. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who was a sponsor of the original EFCA bill in 2003, voted for it in 2005 and voted against the Republican filibuster in 2007 was undecided on the new bill until March 24th, when he made a firm about-face. As he explained his newfound anti-union stand, “The problems of the recession make this a particularly bad time to enact Employees Free Choice legislation. Employers understandably complain that adding a burden would result in further job losses.”

Some news outlets, including U.S. News and World Report, have credited Specter with dealing a “death blow” to EFCA because his lone vote will provide Republicans with the 60 Senate votes necessary to successfully vote against cloture — i.e., to achieve a filibuster. Alas, Specter must share the “death blow” distinction with a handful of Senate Democrats who have also belatedly turned against EFCA. Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor from Wal-Mart’s home state of Arkansas, for example, have similarly been peeled away from their previous support for an easier path to unionization. Even Barak Obama, who made his support for EFCA a campaign promise, indicated in a January 15th interview with the Washington Post that he would be open to making some compromise with business interests.

Starbucks, Costco and Whole Foods chief executives came forward with just such a compromise in March. Although these three companies all promote a “progressive” image, they have managed to remain largely union-free — with the exception of Costco, where the Teamsters union has organized about one-fifth of the workforce.

Moreover, their proposed compromise removes the most important aspects of the legislation: the right to unionization by majority card check and binding arbitration after 120 days of management stalling. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey bluntly explained their anti-union reasoning for removing these elements from the bill to the Washington Post, “Armed with those weapons, you will see unionization sweep across the United States and set workplaces at war with each other. I do not think it would be a good thing.”

Even this proposed toothless version of EFCA is too much for the Chamber of Commerce, however. Glenn Spencer, a senior executive at the Chamber argued, “I would say probably from the whole business community’s perspective, there are really no amendments you could make to this bill that would make it acceptable.”

From unions’ viewpoint, removing those key provisions from EFCA would make it worthless, based on the widespread intimidation tactics used by employers. According to the AFL-CIO, when companies are faced with a union drive,

• 92 percent of managers force their employees to attend closed-door meetings against the union — and 78 percent require their workers to attend one-on-one meetings with their supervisors;
• 75 percent of companies hire professional union-busters;
• 52 percent threatens to call U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services against immigrant workers;
• 25 percent illegally fire at least one worker during a union campaign.

It is no wonder that, as the AFL-CIO notes, 78 percent of the public supports workers’ right to bargain for better wages and benefits — and expresses precious little sympathy for the plight of corporate executives as this economic crisis worsens. Management, not labor, intimidates workers when it comes to union organizing.

But this new phase of the class struggle cannot be won via dueling television ads, however much popular sentiment tilts toward unions. Anti-union corporations spent $50 million on ads skewering Democratic Party candidates during last fall’s Congressional campaigns, while unions mustered only about $10 million for the same purpose against Republicans. Tellingly, Specter told reporters about his Republican peers, “I’m being lobbied on it very, very heavily” before he shifted his vote on EFCA.

Neither Senate Democrats nor labor leaders have thus far waged a principled fight approaching the level of determination exhibited by Republicans and the business lobby over EFCA. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on March 10th that Democrats’ push for a vote on EFCA might “have to wait until after the August recess” unless Democrats are assured the bill can survive a Republican attempt to filibuster. Each month that passes without a vote on this crucial piece of pro-union legislation significantly reduces its chances of success, as Democrats conveniently “forget” the promises they made during their 2008 election campaigns that inspired their supporters to get out the vote.

Unions need to mobilize the millions of workers who are enthusiastic union supporters to gain the upper hand in this struggle.

AIG’s stunning lack of gratitude toward its rescuers demonstrates the degree to which greed still pays on Wall Street. AIG executives, of course, emerged as the unwitting personification of unbridled corporate opulence after the company’s first two federal bailouts in September and October, when AIG hosted a $440,000 luxury spa vacation in California and then flew another group of executives to England for an $86,000 partridge hunt. AIG’s chief executive officer, Edward Liddy, finally agreed to cancel more than 160 subsequent executive entertainment events with a price tag of more than $8 million — leaving observers to wonder when these corporate parasites bothered to even show up at the office.

The Federal Reserve has engaged in much hand wringing over AIG’s responsibility for its own demise. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke minced no words, arguing, “AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system… This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company.” AIG particularly favored providing guarantees for collateral debt obligations (CDOs), or bonds backed by debts — including subprime mortgages. But when Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on March 5th, he refused to disclose the names of AIG’s top corporate trading partners, who have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the AIG federal bailout, arguing, “I would be very concerned that if we started giving out the names of counterparties here, people would not want to do business with AIG.”

The Wall Street Journal has discovered the names of some of the recipients of AIG bailout money. The cast of characters is familiar, mainly large U.S. and European banks that were AIG’s top traders, which have together received roughly $50 billion in taxpayer money since September. The U.S. firms include investment giants Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, with each receiving 100 cents on the dollar for their CDOs, although market value was only 47 cents on the dollar, according to the Financial Times. For these Wall Street insiders, AIG’s bailout proved to be a cash cow.

Merrill Lynch has meanwhile been embroiled in yet another unfolding scandal — along with its new owner, Bank of America (BofA), which received $35 billion from the Treasury’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and another $20 billion in loans last fall. Just weeks before Merrill passed into BofA’s hands on January 1st, it paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses — four top executives alone shared $121 million in cash and stocks — while the company posted a fourth quarter loss of $15.84 billion. The bonuses were given about a month ahead of Merrill’s normal schedule, without explanation.

BofA CEO Ken Lewis initially told Congress he had “no authority” over Merrill’s decisions until January and even feigned disapproval of the bonus payments. He told the House Committee on Financial Services in February, “We urged Merrill Lynch execs involved in this compensation issue to reduce the bonuses substantially particularly at the top.” Evidence soon emerged, however, that the merger agreement that Lewis signed on September 15th explicitly authorized bonuses of up to $5.8 billion to Merrill employees. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced in March that his office is investigating whether the early bonus payments motivated Merrill’s traders to mark down their positions in order to exaggerate their success once under BofA control in January. BofA has refused to turn over a list of Merrill’s 2008 individual bonus payments to prosecutors, arguing it would be an invasion of employee privacy.

Interestingly, the federal government helped to arrange the acquisition of Merrill by Bank of America on the same September weekend that it refused to rescue the equally troubled investment bank, Lehman Brothers.

The Federal Reserve and Treasury Departments have not merely rewarded the system of reckless betting with other people’s money that caused the banking crisis; they have also resuscitated the careers of some of the same executives who lost the biggest bets. A dozen former executives from mortgage lender Countrywide (which is also now owned by BofA), whose predatory lending practices played a key role in precipitating the subprime mortgage crisis, have launched a new corporate entity, the Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company — with a strategy to make exorbitant profits from individuals unable to keep up with their monthly mortgage payments.

Known as PennyMac, the company buys overdue mortgages at steep discounts from the federal government, which took them over from distressed banks. PennyMac then contacts the homeowners to negotiate new terms — and either pushes them into foreclosure or negotiates lower interest rates. It’s a win-win equation for PennyMac.

One of PennyMac’s leaders, Stanley L. Kurland is a former president at Countrywide and an architect of the classic sub-prime mortgage formula — mortgages with low “teaser” interest rates that later rose sharply. During the six years before Kurland left Countrywide in late 2006, Countrywide’s portfolio increased from $62 billion to $463 billion. Kurland sold $200 million in stocks shortly before leaving Countrywide. Now he stands to make many millions more reaping profits from the same category of people whose lives he helped to destroy. Federal banking officials nevertheless defend recruiting executives like Kurland to rebuild the financial system. As the New York Times explained: “[Federal officials] said that it was important to do business with experienced mortgage operators like Mr. Kurland, who know how to creatively renegotiate delinquent loans.”

Now the Federal Reserve and Treasury Departments are seeking to forge “an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms,” as the Washington Post reported on March 6th. The government’s new program, Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) states as its primary aim to resurrect the “shadow banking system” — the entirely unregulated investment-banking sector that proved responsible for much of the banking crisis.

Nevertheless, the government hopes to lure these same wealthy investors to start lending money again by offering the promise of easy profits without the risk of major losses. In what it is calling a “public-private partnership,” hedge funds would keep all profits, but the government would use taxpayer dollars to pick up the entire tab except for the investors’ initial down payments, in the case of a loss.

The credibility of the financial system was already on the skids when the most recent phase of the AIG and Merrill Lynch scandals began to break. Yet Wall Street powerbrokers thus far remain remarkably insulated from the class anger they have provoked on a scale not witnessed in many decades. Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s own failure to pay $34,000 in taxes while a self-employed staffer at the International Monetary Fund surely added to the sense of irony on March 3, when Geithner informed the House Ways and Means Committee that the Obama administration plans to crack down on tax evaders. Within days after Obama announced plans to slightly reduce tax rates on deductions for the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers (from $35 to $28 for every $100 of deductions), Geithner quickly suggested that the Obama administration would be willing to drop or reduce the tax hike.

The federal government’s ability to bail out the nation’s most corrupt capitalists appears inexhaustible, yet only crumbs have been made available for those who have produced all their profits. Wall Street insiders are still feeding at a bottomless trough funded by the millions of workers now facing mass layoffs, losing health insurance and confronting home values that are lower than their mortgages. But it is only a matter of time before the dam begins to break.

At a time when one in every nine U.S. homeowners with a mortgage is either in arrears on monthly payments or in some stage of foreclosure, as was the case by the end of 2008, not a single financial expert has considered the one measure that might bring relief on par with the scale of the mortgage crisis: a national moratorium on foreclosures. With official unemployment in a tailspin at 8.1 percent (and the actual combination of unemployment and underemployment at least double that figure), the government should, at minimum, offer unemployment benefits to anyone who is unable to find work for the duration of this financial crisis. Such measures would only begin to rectify the vast discrepancy between federal government support to Wall Street and Main Street. But we should expect no substantial change in policy with massive pressure from below.

But surely this group of veteran Washington insiders already had an inkling that all was not well on Wall Street. Schumer arrived in Washington in 1980 to serve in the House and was elected to the Senate in 1999. He sits on the Senate Banking Committee and its subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment. Also in attendance at the meeting was Christopher Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut, who first entered Washington politics in 1975 in the House of Representatives and joined the Senate in 1981. He currently chairs the Senate Banking Committee. Another present Democrat was Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who has served in the House since 1981 and is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

These Democratic Party powerbrokers have certainly been privy to the inner workings of the financial feeding frenzy that has unfolded on Wall Street over the last two decades and are as complicit as any Republican in enabling the same firms now being bailed out with taxpayer dollars. It could also be argued that their liberal rhetoric is a key component of the selling job now needed to contain a popular revolt against the unbridled greed that has brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of collapse.

Indeed, their campaign coffers are overflowing with Wall St. dollars. Frank’s top contributors in the current election cycle include Brown Brothers Harriman & Life, Manulife Financial, the American Bankers Association and the American Society of Appraisers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Back in 2003, Frank opposed the Bush administration plan to increase regulation of Fannie and Freddie. At the time, Frank argued, “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

As recently as July 11th, Dodd concurred. “This is not a time to be panicking about [Fannie May and Freddie Mac],” Dodd argued in a press conference. “These are viable, strong institutions.” Dodd’s main contributors from 2003-2008 included Citigroup, SAC Capital Partners, United Technologies and the American International Group (the now infamous AIG).

Schumer’s top five campaign contributors from 2001 to 2006 were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Citigroup. Earlier this year, he went on record supporting a federal bailout for mortgage lenders modeled on the federal government’s savings and loan bailout of the early 1990s—which offloaded the debts incurred by insolvent S & Ls onto the backs of taxpayers while the investors (among them Neil Bush, son of George H. W.) who recklessly created the savings and loan crisis walked away with their profits.

These same congressional foxes have once again been guarding the chicken coop, with a predictable outcome. Much like addicted gamblers on a winning streak in a Vegas casino, they ignored the crippling losses that inevitably follow as long as the good times rolled. Now they must reconcile the excesses of their Wall Street patrons with as little retribution as possible.

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly,” Dodd told ABC’s Good Morning America the morning after the closed-door meeting—as if Democrats and Republicans have been involved in an intractable war in recent decades. In reality, the two parties have been equal partners in enforcing punishing neoliberal policies on the world working class. And after three decades of neoliberal rule, U.S. workers are no strangers to federal intervention.

Federally orchestrated bailouts, always justified by the slogan “They’re too big to fail” over the last 30 years have typically signaled a steep drop deeper down the economic ladder for those who actually work for their income. Congress has played an active role in forcing down working-class living standards since the Carter administration intervened to rescue Chrysler from bankruptcy in 1979. At the time, Congress refused to give Chrysler its $1.2 billion loan guarantee unless workers gave concessions totaling $462 million. This included a wage freeze and giving up seventeen vacation days. By the next contract, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca demanded more concessions, including a pay cut of $1.15 per hour. In 1985, Chrysler had been restored to profitability, and Iacocca was the second-highest paid U.S. corporate executive—but Chrysler had already cut 50,000 jobs and successfully demanded yet more wage concessions from its workers.

The Chrysler bailout set the wheels in motion for the downward spiral in working-class wages, coupled with skyrocketing corporate profits, now reaching the breaking point. The neoliberal agenda forced the U.S. working class into competition with the world’s poorest workers, and as a result, U.S. workers went from the highest paid in the world in the 1960s to among the lowest of advanced industrial societies today.

In 1982, Congress deregulated the savings and loan industry, removing all limits on interest rates, having already raised the level of federal insurance for all S&L deposits to $100,000 in 1980. This allowed wealthy corporations and individuals to divide up their fortunes into $100,000 deposits at exorbitantly high interest rates, all of it completely insured with taxpayers’ money. Generous campaign contributions—estimated at between $11 and $22 million—kept both houses of congress from blowing the whistle, even as one after another S&L became insolvent. Sen. John McCain was one of five senators accused of fronting for the notorious Charles Keating, head of American Continental and Lincoln Savings before it went under, losing $200 million for its 17,000 bondholders, most of them elderly depositors thrown into poverty. The final cost of the S&L bailout to taxpayers was an estimated $300 billion.

The next government-orchestrated bailout offered a clear view of the risks engendered by the high-powered gamblers on Wall Street, beginning in the mid-1990s and culminating in the current financial crisis. The executives at the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund claimed to have discovered a fool proof computer based model for betting on bond prices. Wealthy investors, including the government of China and the Bank of Italy, lined up to invest the $10 million minimum demanded by Long-Term Capital, while Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs loaned freely to the hedge fund. Investors doubled their money between 1994 and 1996. But the computer model was flawed. Between August 1 and September 21, 1998, 90 percent of Long Term Capital’s equity was wiped out. Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan stepped in, explaining that if Long-Term Capital went bankrupt, it would lead to a “fire sale” of its portfolio, devastating the world economy. The New York Federal Reserve orchestrated a $3.5 billion bailout, involving an array of international lenders—along with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

Ironically, in a December 1996 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Greenspan warned against the market’s lust for easy money, arguing, “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” He nevertheless proceeded to flood the market with liquidity while lowering interest rates, spurring the borrowing phenomenon that characterized the recovery after the 2000 recession. Homeowners facing falling incomes took out second and third mortgages to make ends meet, while Wall Street players raked in astronomical profits using borrowed money.

At the behest of credit companies, Congress meanwhile passed the punitive personal bankruptcy law in 2005 that remains in place today. Although the vast majority of personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills, job loss and divorce, Congress refused to make exceptions for active duty soldiers or Hurricane Katrina survivors. And no one in Congress is now proposing to rescind this draconian legislation.

In a note of bitter irony, during this week’s congressional hearings, Bernanke refuted proposals to cap the proposed payout to failed executives taking advantage of the federal bailout as unnecessarily “punitive”.

Congressional leaders Dodd, Schumer and Frank all embraced the $700 billion federal bailout from the beginning and remain its biggest champions. Alas, the only principled opposition to the federal bailout has come from the most crackpot wing of the Republican Party. As Jim Bunning, one of that wing’s spokesmen, protested, “This massive bailout is not the solution, it is financial socialism. It is un-American.” (These knee-jerk conservatives seem not to understand that the basic tenet of socialism requires the redistribution of wealth downward, not upward, as this bailout will accomplish.)

As such, Democratic Party powerbrokers have rallied to pass the bailout. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid exhorted Republicans to “start producing some votes for us” on September 23rd. To be sure, there has been much huffing and puffing from the Democratic side of the aisle, including from Dodd, who exclaimed that the Treasury proposal is “not acceptable” during the September 23rd Senate hearings. But should the bailout pass in some form, as is likely, it should be remembered that Dodd was one of its first champions, and is protests have been orchestrated to make it palatable to ordinary taxpayers.

The proposals being floated by Democrats to soften the blow of the bailout will provide no relief from rising gas, food, housing and healthcare costs crippling those who rely on their own labor to earn tangible income—nor will it protect the thousands of workers who lose their jobs in the coming months. The notion that homeowners should expect relief if, as Dodd suggests, bankruptcy judges are empowered to refinance their mortgages, assumes that those behind in their mortgages will end up in bankruptcy court and depend on (typically not sympathetic) judges to right the wrong they face. How about proposing a moratorium on foreclosures? Health care costs are expected to rise more than 10 percent next year, according to a survey of insurers by Aon Consulting Worldwide released in August. Perhaps a cap on healthcare costs is in order, since Congress can find the hundreds of billions to finance a corporate bailout without spending a penny to alleviate ordinary Americans’ skyrocketing healthcare costs.

Whatever the final form the bailout takes (and there is no viable counter-proposal on offer coming from Washington), its goal will be salvaging the extraordinary fortunes of those who have used fictional capital to bet on fleeting schemes, few of which represent anything of material value. Obama and McCain are both awash in Wall Street donations, and neither should be expected to halt the federal rescue of these morally bankrupt firms now receiving a lifeline from the federal government. As the likely next president, Obama has already thrown promises for “change” overboard, blaming the bailout. “I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it’s there,” Obama, stated, borrowing from Bill Clinton’s playbook, at a Green Bay rally on September 22nd. “We will fire government managers who aren’t getting results, we will cut funding for programs that are wasting your money and we will use technology and lessons from the private sector to improve efficiency across every level of government.” Clinton’s neoliberal agenda survived the 1990s boom, but it cannot begin to address the problems of ordinary Americans in the severe recession now on the horizon.

Last weekend, the Federal Reserve rushed through emergency requests by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to suddenly change their status from investment banks to bank holding companies—bypassing the legal five-day antitrust waiting period (after all, what’s a few days difference among golfing partners?) And two days later Warren Buffet of insurance conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group. Happy days are here again, signaling the continuity of Wall Street greed for the foreseeable future, unless the victims of this obscene bailout demand it, with pressure.

A Zogby Interactive poll released on September 21st showed that 84 percent of voters believe that more investment banks and corporations will fail in the coming months; nearly two-thirds said they blame government entities, led by the White House, for causing the crisis. Meanwhile, 58 percent of respondents said they have little or no confidence in government leaders to resolve the crisis, while 83 percent of likely voters want those responsible for the crisis to be held criminally responsible.

Don’t expect any significant re-ordering of the balance of class forces without a fight against the insatiable greed of financial institutions and the entrenched politicians who front for them, whichever party wins the White House on November 4th.

Despite protests from the UN, human rights organizations and the villagers themselves, Pentagon officials insisted for weeks that only seven civilians had been killed, along with 35 Taliban fighters, during a legitimate military operation aimed at capturing Taliban commander Mullah Sadiq. Indeed, they claimed that the attack, which included bombardment with a C130 Specter gunship, was a necessary response to heavy fire emanating from a meeting of Taliban leaders in the village.

In its defense, the Pentagon cited evidence from an embedded Fox News correspondent who had substantiated its claims. Unfortunately, that correspondent turned out to be Veteran Marine Corps Lieutenant Oliver North, who has been known to bend the truth in the past. North’s military career was cut short after his role was revealed in the Iran-contra scandal in the 1980s. At the time, North admitted to having illegally channeled guns to Iran while funneling the profits to the CIA-backed contra mercenary force fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s democratically elected Sandinista government–and then lying to congress about it. In recent years, North has nevertheless cultivated a lucrative broadcasting career at Fox.

Although North assured Fox viewers, “Coalition forces have not been able to find any evidence that non-combatants were killed in this engagement,” video footage taken on the scene by a local doctor showed scores of dead bodies and destroyed homes, documenting a civilian death toll at Nawabad that is the largest since the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan nearly seven years ago. Thus, the U.S. military was forced to reopen its own investigation on September 8th, only days after it had exonerated itself. A red-faced official told reporters that “emerging evidence” had convinced the Pentagon to investigate the matter further.

On that same day, Human Rights Watch issued a report that U.S. and NATO forces dropped 362 tons of bombs over Afghanistan during the first seven months of this year; bombings during June and July alone equaled the total during all of 2006. The rising civilian death toll in Afghanistan rattled even the normally placid New York Times, which argued, “America is fast losing the battle for hearts and minds, and unless the Pentagon comes up with a better strategy, the United States and its allies may well lose the war.”

As news of the Nawabad massacre unfolded, another atrocity was also gaining media attention, further exposing the gangster state installed and maintained by U.S. forces to run Afghanistan since 2001. President Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-hand picked puppet, reportedly pardoned two men convicted of brutally raping a woman in the northern province of Samangan in September 2005.

At the time, Mawlawi Islam, the commander of a local militia, was running for a seat in Afghanistan’s first parliamentary elections. “The commander and three of his fighters came and took my wife out of our home and took her to their house about 200 meters away and, in front of these witnesses, raped her,” the woman’s husband told the Independent. The couple has a doctor’s report that the rapists cut her private parts with a bayonet during the rape, and then forced her to stagger home without clothes from the waist down.

Mawlawi won a seat in parliament in September 2005, as the U.S. media celebrated the elections as proof that democracy was flourishing in Afghanistan thanks to U.S. occupation. But Mawlawi was assassinated, mafia-style in January of this year. His past had caught up with him. Mawlawi had first fought as a mujahedeen commander in the 1980s but switched sides to become a Taliban governor in the 1990s. He switched sides yet again when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and re-joined the former mujahedeen, which had morphed into the “Northern Alliance”–the group of warlords installed by the U.S. to run Afghanistan as a collection of private gangster fiefdoms.

Karzai issued a press statement expressing his “deep regret” in response to Mawlawi’s death in January. Bypassing the rape charge, he expressed nothing but praise: “Mawlawi Islam Muhammadi was a prominent Jihadi figure who has made great sacrifices during the years of Jihad against the Soviet invasion.” Mawlawi’s three subordinates were finally convicted for the rape this year, and one died in prison. But although they were sentenced to 11 years, Karzai reportedly issued a pardon for the other two in May, claiming the men “had been forced to confess their crimes.”

The drug-running warlords who have controlled Afghanistan with the U.S.’ blessing since 2001 have no interest in either democracy or women’s rights. Indeed, it is not uncommon for poor poppy farmers who cannot repay loans to local warlords to offer up their daughters for marriage instead. Gang rapes and violence against women are on the rise, according to human rights organizations. As a member of parliament, Mir Ahmad Joyenda, told the Independent, “The commanders, the war criminals, still have armed groups. They’re in the government. Karzai, the Americans, the British sit down with them. They have impunity. They’ve become very courageous and can do whatever crimes they like.” In this situation, Afghan warlords again produce 90 percent of the world’s opium, without legal repercussion.

Women’s prisons, in contrast, are teeming once again. As Sonali Kolhatkar, the author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence, argued on Democracy Now! “Women are being imprisoned in greater numbers than ever before, for the crime of escaping from home or having, quote-unquote, ’sexual relations’–’illegal sexual relations.’ Most of these women are simply victims of rape.”

Despite the appalling conditions that seven years of U.S. occupation have produced for ordinary Afghans, the two U.S. ruling parties came together in August to plan the escalation of that sordid war with the goal of adding 10,000 more U.S. troops in the coming year. Barack Obama chided his Republican rival during his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention on August 28, using a page from Bush’s playbook: “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell–but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.”

Obama did not utter a word of criticism about rising civilian casualties, rampant corruption, the flourishing drug trade or women’s oppression in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan during that historic speech. On the contrary, he continued, “I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Ending the war in Iraq “responsibly” will allow a long-term U.S. military presence there–and the redeployment of 10,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to “finish” the job started by George W. Bush.

In one fell swoop, the candidate who slogan is “change” laid out a strategy bearing striking similarity to that of the neocons who invaded Afghanistan in 2001. This hawkish turn was not a surprise. Obama first expressed his willingness to bomb Iran and Pakistan in 2004, when he told the Chicago Tribune, “surgical missile strikes” on Iran may become necessary. “On the other hand,” he continued, “having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse.” Obama went on to argue that military strikes on Pakistan should not be ruled out if “violent Islamic extremists” were to “take over.”

Obama represents the dissenting ruling class view since 2003, which regarded the Iraq war as a “distraction” from the real war the U.S should pursue. That war has little to do with al-Qaeda, but much more to do with Afghanistan’s strategic location in Central Asia, and its borders with Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China. The Russia-Georgia conflict this summer surely reminded U.S. rulers that they cannot afford to ignore their long-standing aim to establish U.S. military bases in this key region, a goal which long pre-dated 9-11. As the BBC News reported on Sept. 18, 2001, “Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by mid-October.”

The antiwar movement in the U.S. can no longer afford to ignore the war in Afghanistan without fading into irrelevance. The original aims of the war on terror have been resuscitated, and as Obama has repeatedly emphasized in recent months, its “central front” is shifting back to Afghanistan. The Afghan people have endured seven long years of misery thanks to U.S. occupation, and it is high time to take a principled stand against U.S. imperial aims in Central Asia. The war on Afghanistan is no more justified than the war on Iraq.

Once securely anointed in June, Obama immediately lost interest in ordinary people and began panting for corporate support. Perhaps for this reason, he felt no need to criticize the Court for its June 25th ruling on behalf of Exxon-Mobil that reduced to a mere pittance the amount in punitive damages the most profitable corporation in history owes to the nearly 33,000 Alaskan fishermen, cannery workers and Natives whose livelihoods were destroyed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in corporate history.

Souter himself penned the decision, which pronounced, “The punitive damages award against Exxon was excessive as a matter of maritime common law.” Souter did not mention that maritime common law was virtually nonexistent but was being invented on the fly by the current Supreme Court. Exxon-Mobil had based its maritime appeal solely on an obscure 1818 decision known as “the Amiable Nancy,” in which the Court ruled that a privateer ship’s owners were not liable for punitive damages stemming from a robbery by a sailor in its employ. During questioning, Ginsburg—who dissented on the current ruling—noted that it was “an exaggeration to call it a long line of settled decisions in maritime law” as Exxon claimed, apparently to no avail.

Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from the case because he owns Exxon Mobil stocks worth between $100,000 and $250,000 according to 2006 financial statements. But the court remained stacked with Exxon sympathizers. “So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive damages awards such as this?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked in exasperation during questioning. When the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jeffrey L. Fisher, noted that Exxon should not benefit from an argument its legal team had not made, Justice Antonin Scalia retorted, “They don’t have to make every tiny little argument.”

It has been nineteen long years since the Exxon Valdez, under the authority of drunken captain Joseph Hazelwood (who reportedly downed five double vodkas before boarding the ship), gushed at least 11 million gallons of crude oil over 1,300 miles of unspoiled Alaskan coastline. In a scenario worthy of the Titanic, Hazelwood abandoned his post shortly before the ship hurtled toward Bligh Reef on that fateful night in March 1989. Eleven hours after the accident, the captain’s blood-alcohol content measured at .241.

But Hazelwood’s alcohol problem was already well known within the extensive Exxon hierarchy. Lloyd Miller, a lawyer representing Native villages in the lawsuit, noted a pervasive alcoholic culture in Exxon-Mobil’s shipping arm. Indeed, witnesses testifying before the Supreme Court explained that Hazelwood was a well-known alcoholic who had dropped out of an alcoholism treatment follow-up program. The Supreme Court decision acknowledged, “Although Exxon had a clear policy prohibiting employees from serving onboard within four hours of consuming alcohol … Exxon presented no evidence that it monitored Hazelwood after his return to duty or considered giving him a shoreside assignment.”

Yet the Court’s majority concluded that Exxon had acted without “intentional or malicious conduct” to justify rejecting Exxon’s responsibility to pay significant punitive damages to the tens of thousands of human victims whose lives were upended by the disaster.

In 1994, a jury awarded $287 million to the Alaskan plaintiffs to compensate for immediate economic losses, averaging roughly $15,000 per claimant. But the jury added an additional $5 billion in punitive damages for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Exxon-Mobil paid the compensatory damages, but CEO Lee Raymond said privately at the time that he would fight tooth and nail to prevent paying a dime in punitive damages. Since then, the corporation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting this court case, delaying the outcome for fourteen years, with tremendous success.

In 2006, an appeals court halved the punitive claim to $2.5 billion. And last week, the Supreme Court reduced that amount by 80 percent, to roughly $500 million—an average of $15,000 per plaintiff. When Raymond retired from Exxon years ago, he received a $400 million retirement package all to himself. Now the Exxon Valdez’s nearly 33,000 victim are left to scramble for a tiny share of a settlement amounting to roughly the same real value—at $15,000 per claimant—or 10 percent of the original 1994 award.

Between 1994 and 2008, Exxon’s profits have soared, further reducing the punitive impact of the current ruling. While the 1994 jury required Exxon to pay roughly one year of its profits to the victims of the 1989 oil spill, the Court’s new ruling amounts to just four days’ profits for the oil giant, which raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits last year.

The immediate wildlife death toll of the Exxon Valdez oil spill included at least 250,000 birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles and billions of salmon and herring larvae. Nearly two decades later many species, including herring—a source of food for many other species of wildlife, along other herring—have yet to return. As salmon fisherman Buck Meloy commented earlier this year in the Cordova Times, “Even now, 19 years later, one still finds gooey, sticky, stinking, toxic crude oil only a few inches below the surface of some gravel beaches on the heavily oiled western side of the Sound.”

From the beginning, the company’s team of spin-doctors spared no expense in preparing for the inevitable legal battle to follow, focusing on its contrived public image rather than effective cleanup. As marine ecologist Thomas Okey, who arrived shortly after the spill, recounted, “I heard that political and legal pressures had influenced the science and muzzled some of the reporting of information during the months immediately following the spill. In retrospect, I realize that, even then, the involved parties had already started building their legal cases. The rhetorical showdowns of ‘experts’ would soon ensue, a parade deemed not amusing to native Aleut communities, which had gathered their food from Prince William Sound for millennia.”

Exxon inexplicably waited three days after the spill before launching a recovery effort, by which time the oil had spread too far for containment. As Alaskan Native Kellie Kvasnikoff described, “Apparently, Exxon was more interested in cleaning up its image than in cleaning the oil. On tape, we have Don Cornett, Exxon’s chief public relations officer, yelling frantically to Exxon’s cleaners: ‘I want something people can see.’”

In the end, the company chose a dramatic public relations success that worsened the ecological nightmare: hosing scorching hot water at high pressure on the shoreline. As Kvasnikoff recalled, many scientists judged that this strategy “did as much harm as good. The hallmark of Exxon’s post-spill cleanup — 140-degree water applied at high pressure — was, according to these scientists, poison to the beach and area’s many animals.”

The company’s public relations campaign since then has relied primarily on a horde of “earth scientists” on Exxon’s payroll who are regularly rolled out to discredit environmentalists’ claims of ecological devastation in Prince William Sound. Exxon admirer L.D. Sociack commented, “[I]n Exxon’s case, public approval has been very much dependent upon what the corporation’s earth sciences people have been able to say and do to convince the public that the environmental damage to the Alaskan coastline is nowhere near as damaging as other earth scientists have claimed… in order to defend themselves against charges that they are liable for billions of dollars in environmental damage to the ecosystem of Prince William Sound.”

By 1995, Sociak reported, “Exxon followed up on these efforts with the release of an Exxon-funded study by Christopher Wooley which concluded that Prince William Sound was better off after the spill than it had been before.”

The aftermath continues to devastate the region’s ecosystem and the tens of thousands of human lives intertwined with it.

As Kvasnikoff described, “The Valdez spill severely hurt the towns’ economies and centuries-old reliance on providing themselves food and clothing from the sea. The result: Increases in clinical depression. Domestic violence. Attempted suicide. Broken families. Researchers have shown that the more exposed an Alaskan area to Valdez oil, the more social and psychological problems have resulted.”

While ordinary Alaskans mourn, corporate America is celebrating. The American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce submitted friends of the court briefings on behalf of Exxon and are relishing the Supreme Court’s gift to businesses shielding themselves from their victims’ lawsuits. As Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, responded to the ruling, “This is good news for companies concerned about reining in excessive punitive damages.”

It is very possible, however, that these corporate brethren have won this battle while losing the war of public opinion. As ordinary Americans reel from spiraling gasoline and food prices alongside lower wages, perhaps they are less inclined to empathize with the very corporations that are bilking them at the pump. More likely, they realize that, in a parallel scenario to Exxon Valdez, the lawyer for a drunk driver who killed someone could not reasonably argue in criminal court that the only compensation they owe is for funeral expenses for the deceased. Punitive damages would be in order.

But this seismic shift in mass consciousness was nowhere to be seen in the Democratic primaries in recent months. On the contrary, as Hillary Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination succumbed to the momentum of Senator Barack Obama’s, the multi-millionaire Clinton ludicrously posed as a populist spokesperson for that minority of stereotypical rural, racist whites who steadfastly refuse to vote for any Black candidate — complete with photo-ops swilling shots of whiskey and posing on the back of pickup truck. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted, “There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.”

The Clintons’ last-ditch effort was in full display at the Democratic National Committee showdown on Saturday, May 31st at a Washington, D.C. hotel. Hundreds of bitter Clinton supporters protested inside and outside while the DNC’s rules committee attempted to forge a compromise on the contested delegations of Florida and Michigan, which violated party rules by holding early primaries. As the rules committee met, tensions ran high. Jeering and cheering filled the hotel ballroom, while “one woman, wearing a blue ‘Team Hillary’ shirt, shoved a man in a suit and tie wearing a small Obama button on his lapel,” according to the New York Times.

Clinton’s supporters, whipped into a frenzied and desperate attempt to rescue her long-doomed campaign, couched their complaints as an attempt to restore “democracy” to the primary contests. But the racial overtones were hard to ignore. Harriet Christian, one of Clinton’s more unruly supporters, was captured on YouTube calling Obama an “inadequate black male” exploiting the “white woman running for president,” as she vowed to vote for McCain in November rather than cast a vote for Obama.

Former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro had primed the pump for the angry Clinton mob just one day earlier, in a racist tirade that appeared as a Boston Globe op-ed piece. There, Ferraro clumsily fused the interests of feminists and white racists in an anti-Obama rant. “Perhaps it’s because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom sexism isn’t an issue, but reverse racism is,” she wrote.

Ferraro made headlines in March when she told the Torrence, California newspaper, the Daily Breeze, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” She later defended her comments by stating angrily, “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white.” She resigned from Clinton’s finance committee afterward but clearly reserves her right to articulate the clarion call of white racists—all in the name of feminism. “If you’re white you can’t open your mouth without being accused of being racist,” she argued in the Globe. “They [racist whites] see Obama’s playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening… [W]hen he said in South Carolina after his victory ‘Our Time Has Come’ they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.”

One of Hillary Clinton’s scandal-ridden younger brothers, Tony Rodham, briefly escaped the DNC melee at a nearby Irish bar, where he seethed over a beer, as his pregnant wife and small children waited for him to finish. There, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “I’m just here to make sure Americans are represented by one vote for every person.” (Rodham apparently does not appreciate that most democracies require more than one candidate to appear on the ballot, in contrast to Michigan’s, where only Clinton’s name was on offer.)

Rodham described himself as a “yellow dog Democrat, all my life” while threatening, “If my sister doesn’t end up with the nomination, I gotta take a look at who I’m gonna vote for.” Lest there be any confusion about Rodham’s political motives, his commitment to women’s rights is highly suspect. His first wife, Nicole Boxer (daughter of California Senator Barbara Boxer) was forced to sue him in court last year to retrieve $158,000 in back alimony and child support payments he had failed to deliver since they parted ways. Nevertheless, he played a prominent role in Clinton’s fracas at the DNC, which consciously pitted the interests of ‘60s generation white feminists against the African-American candidate.

—–

Hillary Clinton’s entourage appeared to be above the fray on May 31st, hundreds of miles away, relishing victory in the Puerto Rican primary. But the Clintons were the key architects of the thinly veiled race-based campaign strategy that escalated when Hillary Clinton’s own presidential aspirations disintegrated after Iowa’s caucuses delivered victory to Obama in January. The Clintons appeared unable to gracefully relinquish control over the party apparatus that they have so ruthlessly abused over the last twenty-odd years. Indeed, they were barely able to conceal their outrage that the First Lady of the so-called “first black president” could be so easily upstaged by an actual Black presidential candidate.

Before embracing a classic “Southern strategy,” the Clintons seem to have paid close attention to polls such as one conducted by the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that reported only 34 percent of respondents said they could vote for a Muslim for president. Even prior to the January Iowa caucuses, at least two Clinton staffers forwarded an email reading, “Let us all remain alert concerning Obama’s expected presidential Candidacy. Please forward to everyone you know. The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level.” Clinton summarily fired the two staffers, yet the campaign theme remained, even as right-wing bloggers circulated rumors, as the Washington Post reported, claiming that Obama is “a ‘Muslim plant’ in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible.”

Indeed, when Clinton was asked on March 2nd in an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes whether she believes Obama is a Muslim, she replied, “No, no why would I — there’s nothing to base that on,” while adding suggestively, “as far as I know.” In contrast, John McCain chastised a radio host for repeatedly referring to “Barack Hussein Obama” during an interview. Clinton’s campaign denied leaking a widely circulated photo of Obama wearing a turban and also denied leaking a rumor that the young Obama had “spent at least four years in a so-called madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia” to Insight, an online conservative magazine. Insight editors insist their source was the Clinton campaign.

Opinion polls have reported in recent months that roughly one in ten U.S. voters erroneously believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim. Moreover, a Pew Research Center survey released on March 27th showed that, while Obama has a highly favorable image among Democratic voters of all races, the breakdown shows his clear areas of demographic weakness. The report noted, “white Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating, and are more concerned about the threat that immigrants may pose to American values. In addition, nearly a quarter of white Democrats (23%) who hold a negative view of Obama believe he is a Muslim.”

In early May, Hillary Clinton ventured into territory once limited to the likes of white supremacist George Wallace, telling USA Today that Obama’s support has been weak among “hard-working Americans, white Americans”—invoking the racist stereotype of “lazy” African-Americans embraced by the most reactionary section of the voting population. “There’s a pattern emerging here,” Clinton added, reinventing her waning campaign as a crusade for whites unable to stomach the prospect of voting for a Black presidential candidate.

In this process, Clinton has shifted the parameters of election year politics backwards by several decades–away from the most urgent issues facing voters, which include falling living standards, lack of healthcare and the Iraq war—to a debate over whether a Black person has a democratic right to become president over the persistent opposition of a minority of white racists who happen to be “swing voters.” She has deliberately stoked the mistaken and racist fear that Muslims threaten the principles of democracy.

Those pockets of racism are undeniable, and they continue to flourish in both so-called “Blue” and Red” states. And the Clintons have courted all of them, from Boston to West Virginia. While Hillary Clinton has undoubtedly been subjected to virulent sexism as she seeks to become president, the Obama campaign has played no role in contributing to it. In contrast, the Clintons must bear tremendous responsibility for embracing society’s most backward elements in their cold-blooded quest to move back into the White House.

*****

In a rare report on the uglier encounters faced by Obama campaigners, the Washington Post described on May 13th, “For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.”

Tunkhannock Borough, Indiana Mayor Norm Ball wrote a letter to a local newspaper explaining his opposition to Obama with anti-Muslim racial stereotypes. “Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country,” he wrote. “There is so much that people don’t know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can’t convince me that some of that didn’t rub off on him. No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office.”

Obama supporters in Kokomo, Indiana (an historic bulwark for the KKK) have been chased by dogs and treated to a steady stream of racist invective. Obama’s Vincennes office was vandalized on the ever of the Indiana primary, spray painted with slogans such as, “Hamas votes BHO” and “We don’t cling to guns or religion– Goddamn Wright” as they proved otherwise.

Obama supporter Ray McCormick, who is white, arrived at the crime scene and took photos. “I thought, this is a big deal,” he told the Washington Post. But when he notified the Obama campaign, he was told that the incident was not newsworthy. All told, Obama’s Indiana campaign offices received three bomb threats from disgruntled locals, but the campaign chose not to raise these as a campaign issue. Likewise, Obama’s response to claims that he is a practicing Muslim has been reduced to repeated denial, rather than a defense of one of the world’s largest religions, which is currently so disparaged in mainstream Western discourse. “Barack has never been a Muslim or practiced any other faith besides Christianity,” states one of his fact sheets.

Obama is innocent of Ferraro’s charge that he has played the “race card” during the primary season, but this is unfortunate. Obama’s reluctance to forcefully challenge racism on the campaign trail has allowed the Clinton campaign to make the “Southern strategy” respectable once again, emboldening the racist white minority—in stark contrast to majority opinion in this changing political climate. To be sure, there has been an anti-racist backlash against Clinton’s white supremacist supporters. Even in Indiana, Clinton barely scored a victory, with an unimpressive 51 to 49 percent, while Obama attracted a strong percentage of white voters.

Now, as Clinton faces the inevitability of failure in her quest for the presidency, she is floating the possibility of vice president on Obama’s ticket. He should give her a middle finger, after surveying the wreckage the Clinton campaign has left behind.

U.S. politics are at a potential turning point, in which a nation founded upon slavery, with racism ingrained in its very foundation, could finally begin to correct its hideous past. This process is long overdue. But realizing it requires a candidate willing to wage a frontal assault on the minority of white Americans from all social classes who still cling to racism—who the Clintons have consciously emboldened—while championing the civil rights of African-Americans, Muslims, Latinos and Asians victimized by the system.

Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population. While Israel’s proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa’s racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, “We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us.” If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, “the state of Israel is finished.”

Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both the Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.

Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa’s white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine’s majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority. In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.

Armed Zionist gangs, including the Irgun, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin, and the Stern Gang initially massacred 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin. The terror spread to 40 other Palestinian villages as tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland in desperation, with only their clothes on their backs. By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They have never been allowed to return.

Times have changed. The majority of Palestine’s Arab population is now hermetically sealed and relegated to sub-human status within Israel’s occupied post-1967 borders. But what Israel fears most is the imposition of one person/one vote — destroying any claim to the “democratic” model so carefully engineered to give Jews a majority — should those borders ever reopen. If Israel were to return to a democratic, secular state, Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.

The parallels of these two racially segregated regimes remain stunning. When South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the occupied territories in 2003, he described Palestinians’ existence “much like what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations were designed as a public relations exercise, intended to reinstate Israel’s victim status. But they failed miserably in this regard, starting with their keynote speakers. As George W. Bush’s approval ratings plummeted lower than any president since Gallup began polling 70 years ago — including those of Richard Nixon before his forced resignation — the idiot president traveled to the Israel to join in the pomp and circumstance. Bush knew that in Israel, if nowhere else, his presence would be greeted enthusiastically, for Israel’s colonial fate so closely overlaps with that of U.S. imperialism. On May 15th, Bush shared a Jerusalem stage with his scandal ridden Israeli counterpart, Olmert, in a bumbled effort to resurrect the moral authority of the increasingly discredited apartheid state of Israel.

The Israeli celebrations were marred by the tenacity of its occupied Palestinian population, who insisted on calling attention to their desperate existence at the receiving end of the Zionist project. Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in their largest numbers since the start of the second Intifada in 2000, inside and outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As Bush spoke, he miraculously managed to ignore the plight of the Palestinian protesters assembled on the other side of the nearby separation wall, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Indeed, as Israel celebrated, the Gaza Strip lay in darkness on Saturday, May 10th, with no fuel for its only power plant. Before Israel bombed this power plant two years ago, it was able to provide 100mW of electricity; today, it provides less than half that amount. Israel has exacerbated the shortage of electricity by withholding fuel allowed into Gaza.

Israel’s sweeping blockade of basic necessities has reduced Gaza’s population to a “subhuman existence,” according to a senior UN official. The World Bank estimated that poverty rates in Gaza stood at 67 percent in April, with the UN suspending food aid for four days due to a lack of fuel for its delivery vehicles. By these means, Israel has reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a UN report, to just 61 percent of the average daily requirement. Lack of electricity has also drastically reduced drinkable water for the 70,000 Gazans who rely on wells using fuel pumps, while “60m liters of raw and partially treated sewage are being pumped straight into the sea every day,” according to the Guardian newspaper.

In the West Bank, where Palestinians are caged in by 8-meter high separation walls, pass laws, curfews and 600 separate military checkpoints prohibiting their ability to travel even within the Israeli-occupied territories, Jewish-only settlements and roads have expanded to control coveted water resources and dominate roughly 40 percent of the land within. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the OPT stated recently, “the restrictions of movement that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories over the past five years are unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation in their scope, durations and in the severity of damage that they have caused to the three and half million Palestinians who reside there.”

Between February 27th and March 3rd, Israeli troops murdered 106 Palestinians, including 54 civilian bystanders and 25 children. This year’s death toll on May 12th numbered at least 312 Palestinians — 197 who were unarmed civilians and least 44 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Israel has justified its ongoing blockade and daily assassinations of Gazans as a legitimate response to the “violent takeover” of Gaza by Hamas. But Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006, verified by international observers. The violence ensued only after both Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize the results of this democratic election. This uncomfortable fact negates Bush’s claim to be bringing “democracy” to the recalcitrant Arab populations of the Middle East, so he did not mention it in his extensive speeches to Israeli revelers during his visit.

On the contrary, Bush called Israel a homeland for God’s “chosen people,” while claiming that European Jews arrived “here in the desert” in 1948, as if it had been an empty, unoccupied land. That same day, addressing the Israeli Knesset, Bush praised former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “one of Israel’s greatest leaders” and “a man of peace.”

By referencing Sharon (one of Israel’s most blood-thirsty ethnic cleansers, lying blissfully in a persistent vegetative state since 2006), Bush unwittingly forced attention on Israel’s conscious identification with South African apartheid since the 1970s. Following South Africa’s example of moving its African population into segregated cantons without citizenship rights, Sharon infamously argued that “the Bantustan plan was the most suitable solution to [Israel’s] conflict,” as reported in Haaretz on June 18, 2007.

The Zionist regime was not deterred by the fact that apartheid leaders, including South African’s violent Prime Minister John Vorster, were open Nazi enablers during the Second World War — because a similar system of racial segregation also suited the Israeli state. Like South Africa’s apartheid regime, Israel sought to relegate its majority indigenous population to the status of non-citizen in their own homeland, through a combination of armed terror and racist segregation laws.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed Vorster at a state banquet in 1976, noting the two countries’ common fight against “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” South Africa was more blatant in its government yearbook published a few months later, noting, “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

As The Guardian reported in 2006, Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa described the relations between Israel and South Africa in 1976 as “a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” He continued, “We created the South African arms industry. They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money.”

U.S taxpayer dollars have funded Israel’s war on Palestine since its inception 60 years ago. Since 1948, Israel has remained the largest recipient of foreign aid, with more than $108 billion from the U.S. government. Over the last ten years, U.S. military aid reached $17 billion — including $2.4 billion this year alone — while Congress endorsed Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza by a vote of 404-1.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude as many do, that the “Israeli lobby” guides U.S. Middle East policy. On the contrary, Israel’s most powerful lobby resides inside the Pentagon. The U.S. funds Israel for its own reasons in the Middle East, because it needs this well-armed and hostile combatant state, however unpredictable, that shares a similar interest in quelling Arab rebellions wherever they occur.

Indeed, Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S foreign aid, receiving roughly $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. Egypt will receive 1.3 billion in military aid and $415 million in civilian aid this year. This is money well spent, as witnessed in January, when Palestinians swarmed the Rafah border into Egypt to buy basic necessities — and Egyptian riot police turned water cannons on the starving Palestinians. Despite the desperation of Gazans fleeing occupation, Egypt closed its border as soon as possible.

Yet the populations of neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan identify with the Palestinian struggle, even if their despotic leaders do not. Regional solidarity provides the eventual solution to the struggle for Palestine.

Israel’s greatest fear, that Palestinians will outnumber Jews despite their careful engineering, will soon become a demographic reality. As former Knesset member Yossi Sarid, noted recently, comparing Israel to South African apartheid, “One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon… “[T]he Zionist project will come to an end if we don’t choose to leave the slave house before being visited by a fatal demographic plague.”

As in South Africa, Israeli apartheid can only survive for so long before it is overthrown from below. Indeed, if Israel’s current starvation tactic toward Palestinians, currently locked down in their future “Palestinian state,” is any indication the Camp David solution is dead. Only a genuine democracy encompassed by one–person/one-vote, that Israel so fears, points the way for the future — in a single, secular state in which all citizens are equal, without regard to race or religion.

Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil,” she argued. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”

But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellers — who inherited their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent corporation — is aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s population. As Peter O’Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, commented at the press conference, “I have a world of respect for what the company has done well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy business were just going to be about oil and gas, we probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists. The New York Times ran the headline, “Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon Greener?” News outlets quoted freely from the Rockefellers’ press release, which described John D. Rockefeller as “one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S. and the World” and the family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as “promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”

The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable. Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’ current reliance on oil — and automobiles. Moreover, the family’s “philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of the world’s black and brown populations throughout the twentieth century—highlighting the absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the family history but instead report the Rockefellers’ self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.

Indeed, the family’s selective memory of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his role as a nineteenth-century robber baron. “God gave me my money,” he said. “Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

Rockefeller’s conscience apparently did not dictate paying his employees more than a starvation wage. His admirers praise him for making gasoline affordable to average Americans, and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of “cheap and good” gasoline for mass consumption, successfully lowering the price of gas from 58 cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his own private militias to crush workers who dared to go on strike to demand higher wages.

The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company carried out the infamous Ludlow Massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes in U.S. labor history. On the morning of April 20, 1914, Rockefeller’s armies joined forces with state militias, opening fire on thousands of striking miners and their families as they slept in their makeshift tents — where they had been forced to live since they were expelled from company housing at the start of the strike. The militias later drenched the tents with oil and set them on fire. Thirteen women and children were burned to death, and three strikers were executed on the spot. Other charred bodies were discovered in the following days.

Rockefeller was a cutthroat capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the decades after the Civil War using methods more in keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back stabbing of a mafia family than an honest entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, “I would rather earn 1 percent off a [sic] 100 people’s efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This credo made him the richest man in the world.

As he quietly bought up his smaller oil competitors with these methods, Rockefeller entered into secret—and illegal—agreements with railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily driving smaller refiners out of business. By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the oil refining business in the U.S. When the Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil (now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller spent his remaining decades playing golf.

John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have happily carried on in the robber baron’s tradition, alongside a public relations machine that routinely airbrushes the family history. These heirs have never needed to work a day in their lives to afford the best of everything money could buy. The Rockefeller name ensures each generation a ten-figure trust fund and a guaranteed spot at an elite university, enabled by the Rockefeller family’s generous donations. The many chapels, libraries, museums and other buildings bearing the Rockefeller name on private campuses across the U.S. bear testament to the family’s self-serving approach to gift giving. Most recently, David M. Rockefeller, Sr., former chairman, president and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, and former chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Group, donated a record $100 million to Harvard University, citing his fond memories as part of the class of ’36.

By design, the Rockefellers have received no blame for their pivotal role in destroying the vast trolley car system that dominated U.S. cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city dwellers’ dependency on automobiles and gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California joined General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum to form the National City Lines holding company, which bought out and dismantled more than 100 trolley systems in 45 cities (including New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Los Angeles) between 1936 and 1950.

In 1949, these corporate defendants were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize transportation services. Indeed, the corporations behind National City Lines were each fined just $5,000—while each of their directors paid a mere $1 fine—a small price to pay for the windfall in profits they all enjoyed in the decades that followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to build the enormous highway infrastructure that encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while federal investment in mass transit and train systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, “By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.”

No Rockefeller family history would be complete without highlighting their central role in shaping twentieth century population control policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910, Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, which spearheaded the eugenics movement — the “science” of “improving heredity.” These organizations, also funded by the upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg families, sponsored academics claiming that those at the top of the social ladder had proven their racial superiority, while those at the bottom were biologically incapable of success. The eugenics movement encouraged the “superior” races to marry each other and have lots of children, while promoting forced sterilization, racial segregation and deportation of immigrants of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.

The “superior” races so admired by the eugenics movement were “Nordic,” with blond hair and blue eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in Adolph Hitler. In 1924’s Mein Kampf, Hitler noted, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was already providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in 1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, according to Edwin Black, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German research by the onset of the Second World War in 1939, Black argued, “[B]y that time, the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.”

By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective.” In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as historian Dorothy E. Roberts described, “planned a ‘Negro Project’ designed to limit reproduction by blacks ‘who still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.’” In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.

After World War Two, population control agencies set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive sterilization programs targeting Third World populations. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico — still a U.S. colony — had been permanently sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000 women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965, according to feminist author Bonnie Mass. These are just two examples among many.

The self-righteous claims of the current generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this context. They have kept silent since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Nor have they uttered a word of protest following news that growing numbers of employed workers across the U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, told CNN, “People are giving up buying groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car.”

Today’s Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its current status as the most profitable corporation in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits in 2007. They are merely watching out for their own parasitical futures.

For the three billion people who survive on less than two dollars a day, the upward spiral in global food prices has meant a struggle for the most basic of human rights—the right to eat. Rice, bread and tortillas are the staple food for this half of the world’s population. In 2007, the price of grain rose by 42 per cent, and dairy products by 80 per cent, according to UN figures, and food inflation has accelerated further in recent months.

As the Observer noted on April 6, “A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world’s most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis.” In recent weeks, mass hunger has spawned violent rioting in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Haiti.

Six straight days of rioting rocked Haiti this past week. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day and the typical adult diet consists of just 1,640 calories—640 calories less than the average adult requirement—according to the World Food Program. Haitians have grown tired of subsisting on what has become the common diet: clay, salt and vegetable shortening. “Protesters compared the burning hunger in their stomachs to bleach or battery acid,” noted the Guardian on April 9.

On April 4, thousands of angry Haitians protested in the southern city of Les Cayes, attempting to set the UN police base on fire while stealing rice from trucks. The rioting soon spread to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands stormed the presidential palace demanding the resignation of the U.S.’ hand picked president, Rene Preval. Fortunately for Preval, UN “peacekeepers” eventually managed to disburse the starving masses with tear gas and rubber bullets. Their brutal suppression perhaps prevented Preval from meeting the same fate as Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the U.S.-backed dictator overthrown by a popular rebellion in 1986.

Preval has done nothing to stabilize skyrocketing food prices or to assist those on the brink of starvation—and he made clear in a televised speech on April 9 that he has no intention of doing so now. In a Marie Antoinette moment, Preval scolded Haitian citizens, “The demonstrations and destruction won’t make the prices go down or resolve the country’s problems. On the contrary, this can make the misery grow and prevent investment in the country.”

***

In Egypt, where protests and strikes are illegal, thousands of textile workers and supporters in Mahalla el-Kobra rioted against high food prices and low wages on April 6 and 7. Police occupied the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving plant overnight to prevent workers from going on strike as they had planned, but protesters responded by setting buildings on fire and throwing bricks at police tear-gassing them. Police repression did not succeed in frightening these protesters but rather only further fueled their anger.

Roughly forty percent of Egyptians survive on less than $2 per day, while the price of unsubsidized bread rose by 10 times in recent months and the cost of rice doubled in a single week. The national minimum wage has remained unchanged since 1984, at 115 Egyptian pounds per month. The Mahallah workers have called for a national minimum wage of 1,200 pounds per month—which would still leave a family of four living under the poverty level of $2 per day.

This week’s rioting in Mahalla is the latest episode in the rising class struggle now reaching deep inside Egypt’s working class. Middle East Report editor Joel Beinin argued of the growing strike movement, “This is potentially the broadest-based gathering of dissent the Mubarak regime has ever faced. The combination of repression, apathy and political demobilization that has sustained autocracy in Egypt for over half a century is being forcefully challenged, making it increasingly difficult for the Mubarak regime, if not its capitalist cronies, to conduct business as usual.” Indeed, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif rushed to Mahallah on April 8 to announce he is granting the workers a 30-day salary bonus and will address their demands on healthcare and wages.

***

Hunger is also rising in the U.S. The unregulated greed unleashed over thirty years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world’s poorest countries is now exposing the class divide in the world’s richest. It can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the global South.

To be sure, growing hunger in America has only earned passing reference from U.S. media outlets, which still largely take their cue from Wall St. and the White House. On April 7, for example, Tribune Newspapers preposterously featured an article on the plight of that tiny slice of Americans now curbing their exorbitant spending habits. The article feature a down-on-her-luck mortgage broker forced to forego the Botox treatments for which she once regularly dropped $1,800. “I would rather have Botox than go out to dinner,” the woman told reporters—who reported it without irony.

Food inflation in the U.S. has reached a level not seen in decades, with food staples like milk rising 17 percent over the last year, rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 percent and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are expected to receive food stamps to survive this year. One in six people in West Virginia, and one in ten in Ohio and New York, are now relying on food stamps to survive. And one in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps at some time in the last year.

Food stamp “entitlements” are far from generous in the world’s most affluent society, and it safe to say that most people suffering from rising food prices do not qualify for help. According to guidelines posted on the USDA’s website, a family of four is eligible to receive food stamps only if their net monthly income is at or below $1,721. This same family of four is then entitled to a maximum monthly food stamp allotment of $542—the same amount as in 1996. The average subsidy amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly and disabled food stamp recipients currently receive the minimum benefit of a mere $10 per month, according to the New York Times.

***

Mainstream economists have usually described the global food crisis as a food “shortage”, but the shortage has been greatly exacerbated by the merciless laws of the free market. In many cases, the problem is not an immediate shortage of food but merely a shortage of the money to pay for it. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran recently remarked about Sub-Saharan Africa, “We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed the automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the world, has become one of the world’s largest beef processors, demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the agribusiness sector. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2008 heaped approval on the role of agribusiness, commenting, “The private agri-business sector has become more vibrant. New, powerful actors have entered agricultural value chains and have an economic interest in a dynamic and prosperous agricultural sector and a voice in political affairs.”

But just as agribusiness wiped out small U.S. farmers in the 1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India “without market regulation agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly seeds, buying cheap farm produce, and locking farmers in debt. This has been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in U.S.A, Argentina, Europe.”

Now the law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S.–triggering a manmade shortage and a rise in corn prices. Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the world’s poorest people.

The neoliberal agenda long ago lost its shine for the vast majority of the world’s population, although its most earnest proponents have been the last to recognize this stubborn reality. The most recent World Economic Outlook, published by the IMF last fall, did note rising inequality in the richest countries: “Among the largest advanced countries, inequality appears to have declined only in France… The recent experience (of increasing inequality) seems to be clear change in the course from the general decline in inequality in the first half of the 20th century.”

Yet the IMF remained optimistic about the future of neoliberalism: “from 2002 to the present, the world economy has enjoyed its strongest period of sustained growth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, while inflation has remained at low levels. Not only has recent global growth been high but expansion has also been broadly shared across countries. The volatility of growth has fallen.”

In recent weeks, neoliberal policymakers appear to have finally realized that widespread hunger could ignite a level of protest that threatens the ruling order worldwide. World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently worried on the organization’s website, “33 countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices.”

Perhaps these out-of-touch policy wonks should suggest that the world’s poor start eating ethanol, in keeping with their long-standing bourgeois tradition. And U.S. workers now teetering into the neoliberal abyss should consider following their brothers and sisters around the world in fighting back.

Bear approached complete collapse before the U.S. Federal Reserve stepped in to rescue it by engineering the emergency funding that allowed commercial giant JPMorgan to take over Bear, the first time the Fed has engineered such a rescue since the 1930s.

Dimon and Schwartz somberly explained to the assembled executives, “We here are a collective victim of violence”–as if the investment firm had been beaten and robbed by a gang of creditors instead of aiding and abetting its own rapid demise.

It is impossible to feel sympathy for the situation now facing Bear’s high-flying management team. Schwartz continued to issue public assurances of Bear’s solvency until the day the firm collapsed.

Current non-executive Chairman and former CEO Jimmy Cayne, who achieved billionaire status a year ago, has spent the better part of the last year attending to his hobby of card playing, and was indeed at a bridge tournament in Detroit while the value of Bear stocks was evaporating last week.

Even now, Cayne will walk away with more than $16 million while JPMorgan has already reportedly made lucrative offers to hire top Bear bankers and brokers. Under pressure from Bear’s board of directors, Morgan sweetened the pot, raising its initial offer of $2 per share to $10 on March 24–again winning praise from Schwartz.

Bear’s 14,000 employees, in contrast, have fared poorly. They own an estimated one-third of its total shares, which only last year peaked at $171.50 per share. As Bear sheds half of its workforce, many will face financial ruin. The cost to workers whose pension funds have been invested in Bear Stearns is unknown.

The Bear Stearns debacle is just the latest phase of the financial distress triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis last July, and it is unlikely to be the last. In a moment of candor, former Bear board member Stephen Raphael summarized the unfolding crisis facing the U.S. financial system, telling the Wall Street Journal, “Wall Street is really predicated on greed. This could happen to any firm.”

The current financial panic is based on the knowledge that since the 1990s, Wall Street investment firms have orchestrated get-rich-quick schemes predicated on a model of betting, using the odds of Russian Roulette, in which managers offer investors opportunities to make fast money in high-risk transactions–through hedge funds, Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) and other “innovative” derivative instruments such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs).

These investment schemes, which operate free of government regulation or oversight, have been described as a “shadow banking system,” which operates in virtual secrecy, accountable to no one, based on mathematical models investors could not possibly understand and leveraged by borrowed money many times the actual money invested–at terms always skewed in favor of the short-term gains for managers.

The wheels for the current financial perfect storm were set in motion many years before the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit, and the Bush administration deserves no credit.

As one of his last acts as president in December 2000, Bill Clinton signed into law the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which formally deregulated companies sponsoring derivatives schemes. The legislation was sponsored by Texas Republican Phil Gramm, now the vice chairman of the Swiss investment firm UBS.

As Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf noted, “With the ‘right’ fee structure, mediocre investment managers may become rich as they ensure that their investors cease to remain so.”

On March 13, the Carlyle Capital Corporation hedge fund collapsed with debts amounting to 32 times its capital. The significance of Carlyle’s demise was overshadowed by the Bear Stearns debacle. Yet, as Wolf argued, such vehicles are “bound to attract the unscrupulous and unskilled, just as such people are attracted to dealing in used cars…

“It is in the interests of insiders to game the system by exploiting the returns from high probability events. This means that businesses will suddenly blow up when the low probability disaster occurs, as happened spectacularly at [the U.K. bank] Northern Rock and Bear Stearns.”

Two of Bear Stearns’ hedge funds went under in the last six months due to disintegrating sub-prime mortgage holdings. But as the recent string of Wall Street crises exposed, the shadow banking system has increasingly intersected with commercial banks. It is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins, since banks have been allowed to keep such investment vehicles off their balance sheets–legally.

As the New York Times reported on March 23, “[D]erivatives are buried in the accounts of just about every Wall Street firm, as well as major commercial banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.”

In recent years, mortgages have been carved up and bundled into investments that changed hands before the ink was dry, as investment banks and other vehicles bundled the debt and passed it on in a global game of “hot potato” that passed on risks to the entire international banking system.

Using up to $30 billion of taxpayer money–and without congressional approval–the Federal Reserve instantly mustered a bailout plan for Bear Stearns. But no relief is in sight for the more than 20 million homeowners whose mortgages are expected to exceed the value of their houses by the end of the year–roughly one-quarter of U.S. homes, according to economist Paul Krugman–or the more than 2 million facing foreclosure within the next two years.

While house prices have already have dropped 5 to 10 percent, most economists predict they will drop by another 20 percent or more over the next two years. But as Krugman notes, regional disparities will be devastating: “In places like Miami or Los Angeles, you could be looking at 40 percent or 50 percent declines.”

Yet, as the Financial Times recently observed, working-class homeowners are the most vulnerable to market trepidations: “[R]emarkably, bankruptcy laws currently provide that almost every form of property (including business property, vacation homes and those owned for rental) except an individual’s principal residence cannot be repossessed if an individual has a suitable court-approved bankruptcy plan.”

Thus far, the Bush administration’s response has promoted a “tough love” approach toward delinquent homeowners lured into obtaining mortgages by predatory lenders during the heyday of the housing boom. Preventing housing prices from falling will prolong the agony, according to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: “We need the correction.”

Even the Wall Street Journal observed this glaring discrepancy, commenting, “Why a ‘bailout’ for Wall Street, and none for homeowners? Treasury Secretary Paulson is trying…[to defend] what the government just did: ‘Given the turbulence, we’ve had in our markets and the way that sentiment has swung so hard toward ‘risk adversity,’ our top priority is the stability of our financial system, because orderly, stable financial markets are essential to the overall health of our economy.’”

Those expecting a Democratic Party victory in November to reverse Wall Street forces must reconsider.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who are running for president as economic populists, are benefiting handsomely from Wall Street donations, easily surpassing Republican John McCain in campaign contributions from the troubled financial services sector,” noted the Los Angeles Times.

By the end of 2007, 36 percent of the U.S. population’s disposable income went to food, energy and medical care, more than at any time since 1960, when records began. And that doesn’t count, crucially, housing costs. The other shoe has yet to drop.

Back in 2000, Bill Clinton still occupied the White House and his neoliberal agenda remained alive in the left’s collective consciousness. In that context, Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign easily filled stadiums across the country, as activists and left-wing celebrities alike embraced Nader’s third party candidacy in a blow against both corporate parties. Those were also the heady days of the global justice movement, when optimism prevailed and solidarity grew, christened by the “Teamster-Turtle” alliance during the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999.

Then along came George W. Bush. The attacks of 9-11 catapulted the idiot president to the role of revered statesman virtually overnight, while his reckless band of neocon advisers moved from the margins to the center of imperial policy. That dismal period demoralized the broad left, and the mood of pessimism that ensued led many to sheepishly return to the folds of the Democratic Party. “Anybody But Bush” was the clarion call for this surrender to the logic of lesser-evilism, which has kept the corporate duopoly in power historically.

Nader’s 2004 election bid witnessed the mass defection of liberals and antiwar activists, who flocked to Democrat John Kerry’s campaign while heaping invective on Nader as a “spoiler” who would aid Bush’s victory. Alas, Kerry needed no help in spoiling his own chances for soundly defeating Bush: his pro-war, neoliberal campaign failed to sufficiently inspire the Democrats’ traditional voting base on Election Day. Once again, the chosen candidate of the well-organized Christian Right carried the day.

The 2004 election, therefore, marked the disintegration of the broad left that had risen so spectacularly in the final years of the twentieth century. Now, as the 2008 election approaches, the left is fracturing yet further amid a spurious debate over the merits of voting for Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul that has surfaced on numerous left and antiwar websites, including CounterPunch. With breathtaking speed, self-avowed anti-imperialists and even former Nader supporters have embraced the logic of single-issue voting to justify support for this right-wing libertarian–based solely on his opposition to the Iraq war.

To be sure, Paul’s vigorous opposition to the war has provided a breath of fresh air during the otherwise stultifying presidential debates of both parties. Paul famously ruffled fellow Republicans’ feathers when he remarked last May at a Fox News-sponsored debate, “So, right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.”

But Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson have likewise offered a refreshing departure from the antiwar posturing of this election’s crop of pro-war Democrats. During a September debate sponsored by MSNBC, Kucinich declared that he would remove troops from Iraq within “three months after I take office.” Kucinich went a step further, arguing for reparations to the Iraqi people: “The U.S. and Great Britain have a high moral obligation to enable a peace process by beginning a program of significant reparations to the people of Iraq for the loss of lives, physical and emotional injuries, and damage to property.”

But welcoming such departures from what currently passes for debate among the chosen candidates from the two corporate parties does not require endorsing the candidates who advance them. Rhetorical flourishes not withstanding, an alternative worldview is in order, and no candidate from either party is offering one in this election year.

Kucinich has attracted a significant left following since 2004. In addition to his forthright opposition to the Iraq war, he supports immigrants’ rights, single-payer healthcare, the legalization of gay marriage and abortion rights. But Kucinich embittered many of his most ardent supporters by backing Kerry and abandoning any fight for an antiwar platform at the Democratic Party’s 2004 convention. In so doing, he betrayed himself as unwilling to build a coherent alternative to the party establishment.

Ron Paul’s right-wing worldview

In contrast to Kucinich, Ron Paul’s lone appeal to the left is his vocal opposition to the Iraq war. Paul is a long-standing Republican who brandishes his right-wing libertarian worldview, consisting of standard reactionary fare—much of it coinciding with that of traditional states’ rights segregationists and the Christian right. For years, Paul has dodged accusations about his past murky association with an assortment of noxious right-wing newsletters. The January 8 edition of The New Republic contains an exposé by assistant editor James Kirchick that documents the bigotry contained in newsletters dating back to the 1970s–all “published under a banner containing Paul’s name.” Paul unconvincingly denies that he was aware of the vile content of these newsletters bearing his stamp of approval—over a period of decades.

But one need look no further than Paul’s own policy statements to determine the overarching political character of his campaign. His opposition to immigration is linked to his opposition to basic welfare provisions for U.S. born workers. In an article entitled “Immigration and the Welfare State,” Paul argued, “Our current welfare system also encourages illegal immigration by discouraging American citizens from taking low-wage jobs.” He voices admiration for Senator Robert Taft, the virulent opponent of 1930s New Deal reforms who went on to co-sponsor the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, strangling the rights of union workers to this day.

Opponents of U.S. imperialism should also take note that Paul’s anti-immigration policy specifically targets Mexicans crossing the U.S.’s Southern border and immigrants hailing from so-called “terrorist” [Arab and Muslim] countries. U.S. imperialism has historically regarded Latin America as its low-wage backyard, while rising racism against Arabs and Muslims has accompanied more recent imperialist forays in the Middle East. “With our virtually unguarded borders, almost any determined individual – including a potential terrorist – can enter the United States,” Paul has argued. His television ad aired prior to the New Hampshire primary advocates a draconian clampdown on immigration that rivals that of Tom Tancredo: “No amnesty. No welfare to illegal aliens. End birthright citizenship. No more student visas from terrorist nations. Standing up for the rule of law… Ron Paul for President.”

Ron Paul is not an open racist, but he opposes every federally mandated historical advance for African-Americans, from Reconstruction to affirmative action. In a December 23 appearance on “Meet the Press,” Paul described the U.S. Civil War as “senseless” and criticized Abraham Lincoln for getting “rid of the original intent of the republic.” Paul also stands in proud opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was the only member of Congress to vote against its fortieth anniversary commemoration. He justified his no vote in an article entitled “The Trouble With Forced Integration,” in which he argued, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country… [T]he only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business’s workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge’s defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota.”

Paul’s opposition to abortion rights is not a “side issue” as some have suggested, but a centerpiece of his campaign. Twice in the last year, (in February and again in June) Paul introduced the Sanctity of Life Act, proclaiming, “human life shall be deemed to exist from conception.” In February of last year, Paul also sponsored the Taxpayers’ Freedom of Conscience Act, banning the use of federal funds for “family planning activity” whether “foreign or domestic.” Paul thus hopes to accomplish what the abstinence-obsessed Bush has failed to do thus far.

Who’s holding back the left?

Yet Paul’s anti-imperialist supporters—who arguably should know better–have responded with vitriol to those unwilling to surrender once cherished left principles merely to advance Paul’s presidential campaign. In a Counterpunch article dated January 4, for example, Stan Goff lashed out at the “program-intoxicated, ‘I won’t endorse this-n-that position’ liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on.”

This begs the following question: Is Goff suggesting that immigrants who are horrified at the notion of voting for someone with Paul’s anti-immigrant policies guilty of enabling imperialist conquest? Are African-Americans who are unwilling to surrender the merits of the 1964 Civil Rights Act standing in the way of ending the war in Iraq? Are women who shudder at the thought of supporting Ron Paul, an anti-abortion zealot, holding back progress? I think not. And no amount of huffing and puffing can hide the fact that Goff himself is abandoning central left-wing principles.

On the contrary, by advocating single-issue voting, Paul’s left-wing supporters are endangering the survival of anything resembling a coherent U.S. left. Single-issue voting requires choosing one overriding issue and ranking its importance above all others in a given election year—pitting constituencies against each other as if their interests are counter-posed. Those now stumping for Ron Paul have effectively accepted the notion prevalent in bourgeois politics that “interest groups” are in competition with each other.

In reality, the rights of women, African-Americans, immigrants and gays are not counterposed to, but aligned with, those oppressed by imperialist war. This was demonstrated vividly with the rise of the Gay Liberation Front in the late 1960s—which, inspired by the armed struggle of the North Vietnamese against the forces of U.S. imperialism, chose its name as a formal identification with the National Liberation Front (NLF), the Vietnamese resistance.

Single-issue voting was once the bastion of Democratic Party liberals. Pro-choice organizations supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s because he favored abortion rights and then sat silently as he dismantled the New Deal welfare state, impoverishing poor women and children across the country. This silence also enabled Clinton to bomb Iraq with impunity while starving its citizens through sanctions and to claim that the U.S. invasions of Haiti, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were “humanitarian missions”—not the result of imperialist ambition.

This faulty logic proved the death knell of liberalism in the U.S. by the end of the 1990s. The same logic now leaves Ron Paul’s left-wing supporters teetering atop a slippery slope, and perhaps headed into oblivion. Paul’s enthusiastic grassroots support shows the potential to energize the antiwar electorate. But the left should do more than applaud, for Paul’s libertarian worldview lands his supporters in the same political cul-de-sac as any other bourgeois politician. Indeed, the left has a responsibility to itself—to rebuild, however difficult the circumstances.

Hayden acknowledges that, even as a Congressional majority over the last year, Democrats have provided little more than an “echo” for the Bush administration. He also admits that leading Democratic presidential contenders refuse to guarantee troop withdrawal before 2013, arguing, “The platform of ‘out by 2013′ may be a sufficient difference from the Republicans for some, but it won’t satisfy the most committed antiwar voters.” He notes that all the leading candidates vaguely assert the need, as Hillary Clinton does, for “a smaller American force left behind dedicated to training Iraqis and counter-terrorism.”

Nevertheless, Hayden’s “Field Guide” exhorts antiwar activists to get out the vote for 2008-for whichever candidate becomes the anointed Democratic nominee. “Only in this way,” Hayden argues without evidence, “will the peace movement succeed in expanding and intensifying antiwar feeling to a degree that will compel the politicians to abandon their six-year timetable for a far shorter one.”

This leap of logic begs the question: Why would politicians feel pressured to change their pro-war policies when legions of antiwar activists are already working for grassroots votes on their behalf? Far from empowering the antiwar majority, this strategy appears doomed to enabling the pro-war and bi-partisan status quo.

Tom Hayden can be dismissed as a relic of a bygone era. His radical credentials date back to the 1960s-as a founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and one of the “Chicago Seven,” the arrested leaders of the mass antiwar protests against the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Hayden long ago traded in his love beads for a suit and tie, in an unremarkable political career that ended in 2000 when he left the California State Senate. Now he serves on the advisory board of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), an organization aimed at expanding the influence of the left wing of the Democratic Party-from inside its bureaucratic framework.

Perhaps more alarming than Hayden’s election year strategy is one from the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis that appeared in the November issue of Peaceworkmagazine.org: “Deepening the Majority: Anti-War Organizing in an Election Year.” Bennis, a long-standing champion of Palestinian rights, might appear an unlikely bedfellow for the has-been Hayden. Yet she likewise argues, “It is very hard, at an emotional level, for people to understand that none of the Presidential candidates likely to win in 2008 is committed to ending the war Still, it matters very much who gets elected in 2008.”

“Even those of us whose work is focused almost exclusively on ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan don’t have the luxury to say that all candidates, for Congress or for the presidency, are the same,” Bennis continues. Here Bennis strikes down a straw figure, since virtually no one opposed to supporting Democrats in this election year has argued that all Democrats and all Republicans hold identical political positions.

Both main parties do, however, share certain overriding aims that dwarf their differences. One of those aims is their shared desire to preserve the credibility of U.S. imperialism, and that requires salvaging a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq, in the form of permanent military bases. This is the reason why Clinton et al refuse to commit to removing all U.S. troops by the end of their first term in 2013. Indeed, according to White House adviser General Douglas Lute speaking to the Financial Times, the Bush administration is already negotiating a bilateral agreement with the Iraqi government authorizing a “continued presence for US and other coalition troops outside of the UN Security Council mandate.”

So what do Hayden and Bennis share in common? Bennis is a close collaborator of the leadership to United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest national antiwar coalition in the U.S. Hayden was the only Democratic Party politician who attended UFPJ’s third national assembly on June 22nd-24th, which declared as a priority “engaging in the 2008 electoral season to project a peace and justice agenda.” Presumably, Hayden’s and Bennis’ appeals for election-year voter registration together represent the uninspiring consensus of the assembly.

To follow this misguided advice will repeat the very mistakes that sidelined the antiwar majority during pro-war John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. All claims to the contrary, an electoral strategy effectively denigrates the importance of antiwar activism during election years-especially when such activism might embarrass pro-war candidates. Look no further back than 2004 to recall the demoralizing consequences for the antiwar movement. All movements must aim to influence government policy. There is no evidence to support the claim that supporting pro-war politicians furthers the aims of the antiwar movement, while there is plenty to discredit it.

This time, the White House carefully choreographed every detail of Bush’s visit to Southern California. Fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger joined him in a back-slapping press conference, praising Bush for “quick action–quicker than I expected, I can tell you that.”

Bush, in turn, praised Schwarzenegger. “It makes a significant difference when you have someone in the statehouse who’s willing to lead,” Bush said, in an obvious jab at Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, as if she obstructed federal evacuation efforts during Katrina.

The mainstream media has dutifully lapped up Bush’s every orchestrated photo op and sound bite. There was Bush, abandoning the luxury of Air Force One that once whisked him over the wreckage of New Orleans, slumming it in a helicopter as he viewed the charred California landscape.

When the presidential motorcade arrived at San Diego’s devastated community of Rancho Bernardo, Bush emerged with sleeves rolled up as if eager to help with recovery efforts. While cameras rolled, Bush embraced distraught resident Kendra Jeffcoat, while telling reporters, “Those of us who are here in government, our hearts are right here with the Jeffcoats.”

Soon thereafter, Bush climbed back into Air Force One to return to Washington. Mission accomplished.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials, however, took their stage management of media coverage one step too far in a potentially embarrassing incident.

On October 26, FEMA’s deputy administrator Harvey Johnson called a news briefing–giving journalists just 15 minutes notice beforehand. Not surprisingly, no reporters were able to make their way to attend, but several television networks broadcast a live feed nonetheless.

The “reporters” asking questions turned out to be handpicked FEMA administrators feeding Johnson a prepared repertoire. One “reporter” asked, for example, “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”–to which Johnson responded, “I’m very happy with FEMA’s response so far.”

Ultimately, a few diligent reporters exposed the phony press conference, but the scandal quickly disappeared from news headlines.

Indeed, most news outlets focused on the contrast between the squalor and neglect experienced by Katrina survivors at New Orleans’ Superdome and the seemingly idyllic conditions at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium.

“There was a banh mi picnic in the parking lot, beef empanadas on the chow line, Caesar salads, cartons of fresh Starbucks House Blend, free magazines, toys for the kids, cots for grandma, pizza by the slice or, if you wished, the box. There was a man playing jazz guitar, a blues band, massages and acupuncture,” gushed the Los Angeles Times on October 24.

The mainstream media conveniently overlooked the real story of the California wildfires. Just as in New Orleans, race and class loomed large–even inside Qualcomm Stadium. Suburban whites exited the stadium en masse in midweek, leaving poorer and nonwhite survivors behind. And the atmosphere inside the stadium changed decisively when Border Patrol officers arrived to harass and deport immigrants.

As the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium described, “Yesterday [Wednesday, October 24], the police initiated an immigration enforcement action that was contrary to their policy of not calling in Border Patrol/ICE unless and until they file a formal criminal charge against a person.

“Police detained approximately 12 evacuees (at least four were children) who they alleged were ‘looting’ donated blankets, food and toys for the children.” Six family members were deported within hours.

Although both San Diego Police Department officials and Border Patrol agents initially claimed the detained immigrants had confessed to “looting” (reminiscent of accusations against New Orleans’ desperate African Americans in the aftermath of Katrina), the ACLU noted that none of those deported was actually charged with robbery by San Diego police.

The San Diego Union-Tribune initially repeated the looting charge, while defending racial profiling: “[B]ecause some members of the group spoke Spanish, officers called Border Patrol agents who were at the stadium for relief efforts. They determined the people were in the country illegally and arrested them.”

Without retracting its initial claims, the Union-Tribune later admitted that none of the deportees had admitted to stealing anything–nor were charges filed.

But the deportations, however unjust, offered the excuse for authorities to patrol the stadium, demanding evacuees to show “proper identification.” ACLU immigrant rights attorney Andrea Guerrero estimated that up to 1,000 people were forced out of the stadium because they lacked proper identification, according to immigrants’ rights activist José Fusté in an October 27 post to the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center.

But most migrant workers never made it to Qualcomm Stadium. Indeed, even as others evacuated dangerous areas, many farmworkers continued to labor in fields as ash rained on them because their employers did not allow them to leave.

The New York Times reported on October 27: “‘There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,’ said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. ‘It’s outrageous.’”

Christian Ramirez from the American Friends Service Committee commented, “Some farmers are not following evacuation orders and have kept workers in the fields despite orders being given to evacuate.”

Many migrant workers without papers who turned to authorities for help found themselves deported on the spot. By Friday, October 27, Border Patrol agents claimed they had arrested 100 immigrants since the fires started.

Those now returning to their evacuated homes face military-style Border Patrol checkpoints when they try to return, aimed at “detaining and handing over people suspected of being undocumented to U.S. Border Patrol,” according to the San Diego ACLU.

As Fusté remarked, “People need to know that the same way that the government doesn’t care about Black people in New Orleans, it also doesn’t care about immigrant families in California.”

The two were apparently unaware that Fox News’ microphones were still turned on to overhear their mutual exasperation at sharing the stage with those on the losing end of opinion polls.

According to the Associated Press, Edwards whispered, “We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group.” Clinton agreed that the broad format had “trivialized” the debates, adding, “We’ve got to cut the number…They’re not serious.”

Dennis Kucinich, who would certainly be excluded if Edwards and Clinton succeed at this scheme, rapidly issued a press release stating his outrage: “Candidates, no matter how important or influential they perceive themselves to be, do not have and should not have the power to determine who is allowed to speak to the American public and who is not…Imperial candidates are as repugnant to the American people and to our Democracy as an imperial president.”

Indeed, Kucinich stands alone among the current crop of candidates in his consistently principled stand on issues ranging from opposition to the war in Iraq to support for single-payer health care, immigrant rights and the legalization of gay marriage.

During a nationally televised MSNBC debate on September 26, none of the three front-runners–who all claim to be “antiwar”–pledged to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of their first term in office in 2013. Clinton argued, “It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting.” Barack Obama stated, “I think it would be irresponsible.” Edwards admitted, “I cannot make that commitment.”

Kucinich answered with a refreshingly concrete antiwar resolve: “We can get out of there three months after I take office.” He added, “To me, it is fairly astonishing to have Democrats who took back the power of the House and Senate in 2006 to stand on this stage and tell the American people that the war will continue till 2013 and perhaps past that.”

And while current Democratic Party talking points blame Iraqis for the chaos enveloping Iraq, Kucinich supports reparations for the Iraqi people from the governments who have caused their suffering, arguing, “The U.S. and Great Britain have a high moral obligation to enable a peace process by beginning a program of significant reparations to the people of Iraq for the loss of lives, physical and emotional injuries, and damage to property.”

While Clinton has lurched rightward on support for abortion rights in recent years (stating in 2005 that abortion is “a sad, even tragic choice”), Kucinich is the only candidate who has shifted leftward on the issue of choice. He actively opposed abortion for many years but reversed his stand in 2003, stating, “[I]t finally came to the point where I understood that women will not be truly free unless they have the right to choose.”

Kucinich also stands firmly on the side of immigrants rights, however much his own party has compromised, arguing, “No fines should be paid [by immigrants], no one should be made to go back, and we should stop scapegoating immigrants.” He seeks to abolish NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) because it drives down Mexican wages and opposed the Security Fence Act to further enhance border control.

But Kucinich has no hope of winning the Democratic Party nomination, for his unwillingness to compromise on sound humanitarian principles dooms that outcome. This fact, combined with his steadfast refusal to accept corporate donations, relegates his candidacy in 2008, as it did in 2004, to the margins of the electoral arena, a project willingly enabled by a compliant mainstream media.

The Kucinich campaign complained, for example, that ABC News “deliberately cropped [Kucinich] out of a ‘Politics Page’ photo of the candidates after their August 19 debate” and removed an online “Who won the debate” survey after Kucinich came out the winner.

Nevertheless, like a scorned relative who always shows up to family functions, Kucinich refuses to disengage from the Democratic Party establishment that, as Clinton and Edwards attest, tolerates his presence only with gritted teeth.

But Kucinich’s loyalty to the party that holds him in such contempt will perform a useful service in delivering left-wing support for the party’s chosen, corporate-backed nominee in 2008.

This is a service that Kucinich will undoubtedly perform. Look back no further than 2004 for a preview of what lies ahead. After a principled antiwar campaign, Kucinich promised his supporters he would fight for a plank opposing the Iraq war at the Democratic Party Convention in July 2004. But no antiwar debate materialized, and Kucinich’s stunned supporters were left with no other choice than backing pro-war John Kerry as the anointed candidate.

Kucinich must therefore be faulted for compromising his principles in one crucial respect. He remains beholden to the Democrats–a ruling-class, imperialist party that coexists in a power-sharing arrangement with the Republicans–offering voters no genuine alternative to the status quo.

If Kucinich truly believed his own rhetoric, he would leave, creating the possibility for building a viable third party that could express popular opposition to corporate rule.

“When you’ve done your best, there isn’t a great deal to apologize for,” sniffed Jim Simons, manager of Renaissance Technologies, an enormous fund that lost nearly 9 percent the first week of August.

Now that the heady days of reckless betting using borrowed cash to obtain massive profits have predictably given way to more somber times on Wall Street, the arrogance displayed by the financial magnates responsible for the financial meltdown bears an uncanny resemblance to that of laissez-faire robber barons of a century ago.

Likewise, financier J.P. Morgan told the news media in 1901, “I owe the public nothing,” after a stock market war he waged against rival J.P. Harriman ended in a financial crash, impoverishing thousands of investors.

The unfolding sub-prime mortgage crisis has finally begun to unmask the real victims of Wall Street’s latest feeding frenzy, disguised as an economic recovery.

Mortgage brokers and predatory lenders long ago raked in their exorbitant fees and profits, while an estimated 2.2 million homeowners will face foreclosure in the coming two years. And while Goldman Sachs sunk $3 billion last month to bail out its ailing hedge funds, no such support will be forthcoming for the countless workers whose pensions and 401(k) plans were invested to the tune of billions in hedge funds now holding worthless sub-prime mortgages.

Even before the stock market crisis hit in August, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that more than two-thirds of Americans believe the country is either already in recession or headed for one over the coming year.

This is no wonder, since statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau in August showed real earnings for year-round, full-time workers declining by more than 1 percent in 2006, falling for the third straight year of the present recovery — while an additional 2.2 million people, including 700,000 children, lost health insurance last year. The working class maintained household income by working longer hours for lower wages.

Neoliberals who have single-mindedly derided government regulation since the 1970s while touting the wonders of the free market should be congratulated for their success in moving the nation’s social fabric backward by a century or so — heralding the return of the unrivaled supremacy of capital, whose quest for profit is unencumbered by the basic human needs of the vast majority.

To be sure, the “company store” no longer symbolizes the choke-hold of employers over their indebted workers as it did 100 years ago. But it has been replaced by an entire industry of predatory lenders.

The rise of sub-prime mortgages over the last few years represents just one wing of the profitable “high-risk” lending industry dangling the promise of easy financing for everything from homes and cars to computers and televisions to the working poor.

As Business Week reported on May 21, “In 1989, households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8 percent higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004, the discrepancy had soared to 56.1 percent. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4 percent gap to one of 25.5 percent…

“From 1989 through 2004, the total amount owed by households earning $30,000 or less a year has grown 247 percent, to $691 billion, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data available.”

The Byrider car franchise, with 130 dealerships in 30 states, enjoys the backing of the Bank of America, while offering loans to low-income car buyers at interest in the range of 25 percent. When those buyers default on payments, Byrider then repossesses the cars to resell, pocketing whatever payments got made in the meantime.

Although Byrider’s Albuquerque, N.M., dealership advertises “Good Cars for People Who Need Credit,” half of its buyers’ loans never get paid off, many of their cars repossessed.

Last year, Byrider reported net income of $828 per used car sold, compared with just $223 for used cars from new-car dealers. Byrider’s sales last year totaled $700 million nationwide. “It’s the finance business,” Milwaukee Byrider manager Russ Darrow Jr. told Newsweek. “Cars happen to be the commodity that we sell.”

Big banks such as Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp have joined in the success of payday loans to the poor, with terms that require $2 for every $20 borrowed — an annual interest rate of 120 percent based on a 30-day loan.

Indeed, today’s mainstream economists continue to extol the virtues of the free market, placing blame only on its working-class victims. “The only feasible way to run a capitalist society is to allow companies to maximize their profits,” George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen told Business Week. “That will sometimes include allowing them to sell things to people that will sometimes make them worse off.”

Carl Steidtmann, chief economist for Deloitte Research, chastised ordinary consumers recently: “We will have to learn to live within our means… We’re not going to be able to spend at levels well above our income levels.”

Yet no attempt has yet been made to discipline the massive borrowing of the real culprits in the sub-prime mortgage meltdown — including entirely unregulated hedge funds.

As a McClatchy Newspapers report noted on August 7, “Some 7,500 hedge funds controlled $1.6 trillion in assets as of the end of June. That’s equal to about 10 percent of the total value of the New York Stock Exchange. Much of what they own was bought with money they borrowed from big banks, sometimes up to 80 percent of their holdings.”

******

Bush’s much anticipated announcement of a plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure was in reality a bailout for sub-prime lenders. On August 31, Bush unveiled his plan to revive the role of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) — founded in 1934 as a means to assist low-income families to buy homes.

In recent years, the FHA found itself sidelined by private-sector sub-prime lenders offering seemingly “better deals” to low-income buyers. Now Bush has proposed that some homeowners facing foreclosure should be allowed to switch to lower-priced FHA loans — ensuring that their private-sector lenders are paid off, however predatory their lending policies.

“The government has got a role to play — but it is limited,” Bush warned as he announced that he will allow the FHA to assist homeowners with good credit caught in the sub-prime mess. But just an estimated 240,000 homeowners will be able to refinance in the coming year — with a maximum of roughly 600,000 over the next three years.

“This is only going to skim the surface of the problem,” commented Mike Van Zellingen of the Chicago-based not-for-profit Neighborhood Housing Services. “A million people are about to lose their homes, based on a conservative estimate. The typical homeowner in foreclosure is probably about five months behind on their mortgage, and their credit is going to be really bad. Very few are going to qualify for FHA.”

The quest for profits among today’s freewheeling capitalist class knows no bounds, with a range of government agencies watching their backs.

For example, when British Petroleum recently requested permission to break federal environmental guidelines in order to discharge 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of toxic sludge into Lake Michigan each day from its Whiting, Ind., oil refinery, regulators readily agreed, declaring that cutting its emissions would pose “an extreme hardship” on the oil conglomerate.

And the prison-industrial complex has begun to redefine the race to the bottom in U.S. wages, rivaling the role of convict chain gangs a century ago. Colorado began sending female inmates to harvest onions, corn, and melons this summer for private farmers.

For 20 years, the Arizona Department of Corrections — more recently assisted by its business development unit, Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI) — has been leasing its prisoners to labor for private agricultural firms. The ACI requires only that inmates be “paid a minimum of $2 per hour,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. “Thirty percent of their wages go to room and board in prison. The rest goes to court-ordered restitution for victims, any child support, and a mandatory savings account.”

The U.S. currently has the highest proportion of its population behind bars, including a prison rate of one in every eight Black men between the ages of 25 and 29.

As Daniel Lazare argued recently in The Nation, “The standard account of American economic development since the 1970s, told and retold in countless undergraduate classrooms, is that economic deregulation and growth have done much to narrow the once-yawning wage gap between white and black workers.

“To quote the New York Times: ‘Unemployment rates among blacks and Hispanic people…are at or near record lows. Joblessness among high school dropouts has fallen to about half the rate in 1992. And wages for the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation for the first time in decades.’”

But, Lazares continues, citing Bruce Western’s recent book, Punishment and Inequality in America, “if U.S. economic policies look good, it is only because the country’s enormous prison population is not factored into the equation. If workers behind bars are counted, then…the real Black unemployment rate is up to 20 percent greater than official statistics indicate.

“Rather than freeing up the markets, Western writes, the United States has ‘adopted policies that massively and coercively regulated the poor.’”

The robber barons would certainly approve.