Patrick Martin

Laid-Off Factory Workers Occupy Chicago
Factory (Credit: Luis Moreno Photostream)

Once the election is safely over, the two parties can drop their populist phrases and their pretense of intransigent hostility and get down to business.

According to a report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Friday, millions of American workers who lost their jobs after the Wall Street crash of 2008 have failed to find work, while millions more have gone back to work only after taking substantial wage cuts.

According to the BLS, some 12.9 million workers were displaced from their jobs between January 2009 and December 2011. The BLS study focused on those who had lost jobs they had held for at least three years, who comprised just under half the total, some 6.1 million workers.

Of these 6.1 million workers, 27 percent were still unemployed but looking for work, while 17 percent have stopped looking for work, effectively dropping out of the labor force. Of the 56 percent who had found new jobs, slightly more than half took jobs that paid less than their old jobs. For those who took new jobs with pay cuts, the majority lost 20 percent or more compared to their previous wages, on top of the loss of earnings due to part-time work or reduced overtime.

All told, only 1.1 million out of the 6.1 million workers had been rehired at full-time jobs paying as much or more as they earned before the crash. In other words, of the workers hit hardest by the slump, barely 15 percent have been able to regain a position comparable to what they lost.

There is the starkest contrast between these figures, which give a glimpse of the mass suffering and hardship in the working class, and the conditions facing corporate America, where most large companies are enjoying bumper profits, stock prices are back to the levels before the crash, and CEO salaries and perks have broken all records.

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Patrick Martin

American imperialism is planing atrocities in Syria that would put the events in Libya in the shade, and dwarf the killings that have already taken place.

US-backed forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are stepping up their offensive in Aleppo, the country’s largest city, amid with reports Wednesday that the rebels had engaged in summary execution of dozens of captured loyalist police and soldiers. A gruesome video of one such slaughter was widely distributed on the Internet.

The scale of the fighting was shown in the reported storming of a police station at al-Marju in the Salhein district of Aleppo by a force of more than 700 "rebel" fighters. The 45-man security detachment inside resisted the attack fiercely until a large bomb was thrown into the building, killing at least 15 of the defenders. Most of the rest then surrendered.

One video showed four men, accused of being members of the pro-Assad Shabbiha militia force, lined up against a wall and forced to kneel, then mowed down with automatic weapons as their killers chanted “Allahu Akbar.” The victims were said to be members of the Barri family, a clan linked to Assad through adherence to the Alawite religion, a branch of Shiite Islam. In another video, from the al-Marju police station, showed a rebel desecrating the corpse of the station commander, blowing his head off.

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Patrick Martin

The display of militarism in London serves the political purposes of Washington.

According to the International Olympic Committee, “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”

This high-sounding boilerplate has long been at odds with the actual function of the Olympic Games, which have increasingly become a quadrennial celebration of nationalism, celebrity and corporate money-making. And never more so than the 2012 Olympics in London, which seem to have been deliberately staged by the host government to trample on notions of peace, human dignity and democratic rights.

The British government announced Thursday that it would mobilize an additional 3,500 troops for security duty at the Olympics, bringing the total number of soldiers, airmen and military police deployed for the event to a staggering 17,000, far more than are currently deployed in the imperialist war in Afghanistan.

The combined total of 49,000 uniformed personnel—17,000 troops, 12,000 police and 20,000 or more security guards—exceeds the size of the expeditionary force Britain contributed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is the largest single mobilization of British security forces since the Suez Crisis of 1956.

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Patrick Martin

US and Afghan officials announced Sunday that they had reached a draft agreement committing the United States to continuing military and financial support to the puppet regime in Kabul long after the scheduled withdrawal of the bulk of US ground troops at the end of 2014.

The pledge of long-term involvement in Afghanistan flies in the face of popular sentiment in the United States, the European countries and Australia, where there is overwhelming opposition to continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and a war that has dragged on for eleven years.

Neither of the envoys who negotiated the agreement, US ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Afghan national security adviser Rangin Spanta, would release its text, or even outline its main features, ostensibly to give time for their respective governments to review and approve the drafts.

The deal will become final when signed by US President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It will not be submitted for Senate ratification, making the agreement’s longterm effect contingent on Obama’s reelection in November. In effect, it is a promissory note from Obama to Karzai to keep funding the regime in Kabul, assuming Obama remains in the White House and Karzai survives the pullout of most US and NATO ground troops.

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Patrick Martin

In a cynical and duplicitous editorial Saturday, the New York Times stepped up its campaign for US political subversion and military action against Syria, while demanding Washington adopt a more aggressive posture against Russia and China. The editorial, headlined “Assad’s Lies,” is itself a compendium of lies, as the newspaper reprises its role in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, when it peddled the Bush administration’s lies about supposed Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in order to neutralize the widespread popular opposition to the war.

The Times indicts Assad for “cruelty and blindness,” which would hardly make him unique in the region. Virtually all the US allies and client states in the Middle East—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the military dictatorship in Egypt, the Netanyahu government in Israel—display those characteristics. This week, for example, has seen violent repression of anti-government protests in Bahrain and Tunisia, both right-wing regimes closely tied to the United States, along with saber-rattling threats by Israeli officials of a unilateral attack on Iran, an action that would represent a war crime of monstrous proportions.

The Times editorial is written in its typically hand-wringing tone, bemoaning the “bloodbath” in Syria and the danger of a “wider war,” although the policy advocated by the newspaper—and carried out by the Obama administration—leads inexorably to both outcomes. The Times would like its readers to forget the fact that the US government is directly or indirectly arming the opposition in Syria, using both American Special Forces and US proxies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, where does the danger of “wider war” come from—the beleaguered Assad is hardly likely to invade any of his neighbors—if not from the intervention of a US-led coalition along the lines of the NATO operation against Libya last year.

Most sinister is the editorial’s indictment of Moscow and Beijing, as it presents US motives in the Syrian crisis as humanitarian, even altruistic, while vilifying Russia and China for “playing a pointless geopolitical game.”

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Patrick Martin

This will be presented to the American people, either by President Obama or his Republican successor, as a measure providing “equal sacrifice” or “shared responsibility” for the fiscal crisis of the federal government.

The US House of Representatives has adopted a budget resolution that calls for privatization of Medicare and the elimination of Medicaid, food stamps and many other federal entitlement benefits. The resolution is part of a bipartisan campaign to slash spending on social programs.

All but ten of the Republican majority in the House backed the resolution—and those ten wanted even bigger cuts. All Democrats voted against the resolution, while offering their own proposals that called for somewhat less drastic cuts in spending and token tax increases on the wealthy.

Not a single resolution was offered that called for increasing spending to meet social needs as the American economy staggers through a fifth year of economic slump and mass unemployment.

The budget was drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who last year offered the first-ever proposal for the complete abolition of Medicare. It passed the House but not the Senate.

This year’s resolution was even more sweeping and reactionary. It calls for $5.3 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. Part of the savings would be used to reduce the federal deficit, but the bulk of them would go to reward the wealthy with new tax breaks, including abolition of the estate tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and lowering the top income tax rate from the present 35 percent to 25 percent.

The major spending cuts in the budget resolution are focused on programs for the poor and the lower-paid sections of the working class. According to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 62 percent of the $5.3 trillion in spending cuts come from “programs that serve people of limited means.” If implemented, the cuts would drastically increase income inequality and poverty.

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Patrick Martin

Unverified atrocity reports by US-backed opposition groups are being used to pave the way for imperialist military intervention, on the model of Libya—where the allegedly impending “bloodbath” in Benghazi became the pretext for the US-NATO bombing.

The United States and other imperialist powers are pushing ahead with plans for military intervention and the overthrow of the Syrian government, convening a meeting Friday in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, of so-called “Friends of Syria.”

Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem, speaking Monday after a meeting of Mediterranean region foreign ministers in Rome, said his government had decided that “The Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest Syrian opposition group and other opposition groups will be represented at the Tunis meeting.”

The SNC is an amalgam of CIA hirelings, Islamic fundamentalists and disaffected former officials of the Assad regime in Syria, sponsored by Turkey and the United States in a maneuver similar to the creation of the National Transitional Council in Libya, which provided a pretext for the US-NATO war against that country.

An SNC spokesman said the group would go to Tunis to seek military aid to the Free Syrian Army (SFA), the armed wing of the “rebels.” The SFA was formed on Turkish territory but engages in attacks on government installations inside Syria—including the assassination Monday of a high-ranking judge and prosecutor.

The two countries that have the closest relations with Syria, Iran and Russia, are excluded from the meeting of the “Friends,” along with China, which joined with Russia to veto a UN Security Council resolution that would have opened the door to a Libyan-style military intervention in Syria.

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Patrick Martin

The budget for fiscal year 2013 proposed by the Obama White House Monday is a thoroughly cynical exercise. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending cuts, further devastating public services and the living standards of working people.

This is combined with populist demagogy about taxing the rich, although the administration knows full well that no such measures will pass either the Republican-controlled House of Representatives or the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The budget incorporates $1 trillion over ten years in cuts to domestic social spending already agreed on with congressional Republicans in last year’s negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling. To these cuts will be added a total of $638 billion in social spending cuts.

Relatively few details leaked out over the weekend, and a preview document issued by the White House Friday listed only the programs that would receive spending increases, not those being slashed, for which only vague generalities were available.

The largest cutback will be $360 billion over ten years from Medicare and Medicaid, mainly through reducing payments to health care providers, which will have the effect of further reducing the number of hospitals and doctors willing to treat patients on either government program. This cut is particularly pernicious because the Obama healthcare reform program calls for extending Medicaid to tens of millions of additional people in 2014, which will require more and not less funding to cover the cost.

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Patrick Martin

The atrocities being committed in the drone missile strikes are not an aberration, but rather demonstrate the essence of the US intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, now in its eleventh year.

A report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency deliberately attacked rescue workers and funeral processions in follow-up strikes after drone missile attacks on insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The findings were made public on the group’s web site and published by the Sunday Times of London.

According to the organization, which includes British and Pakistani journalists, at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes while they were attempting to help victims of an initial CIA drone attack. Dozens more were killed by missile strikes against the funerals of victims of drone attacks.

Overall, the group found that “since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed, including more than 60 children.” Pakistani officials and humanitarian aid workers have reported much higher figures for the death toll in Pakistan’s tribal areas, as many as several thousand.

Among the cases of mass murder detailed in the report:

● May 16, 2009: A US drone missile hit a group of Taliban militants in the village of Khaisor, killing as many as a dozen. As villagers were digging bodies out of the rubble, two more missiles hit, bringing the death toll to at least 29.
● June 23, 2009: A CIA missile strike killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a Pakistan Taliban commander, and five companions. Some 5,000 people attended his funeral later that day. US drones stuck again, killing as many as 83 people, ten of them children.
● March 17, 2011: The day after Pakistan released CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had been jailed for two months for murdering two Pakistani men in Lahore, a CIA drone missile attack killed 42 people in North Waziristan, striking what a Pakistani military officer said was a tribal meeting to discuss a land ownership dispute, not a Taliban gathering.

Experts on international law have characterized these follow-up drone missile strikes as war crimes. Clive Stafford Smith, who has fought for the release of many innocent men held in Guantanamo Bay, told BIJ the drone strikes “are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.”

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Patrick Martin

A comic strip [sic!] depicting the Abottabad compound in
Pakistan where Osama bin Laden allegedly was killed. To
date, no proof of his murder has been offered by Obama
and, incredibly, none has been demanded by the MSM.

In his conclusion, Obama returned to his vision of a society run along military lines when he again invoked the raid that killed bin Laden. For Barack Obama, the cohesion of a team of trained assassins is the highest form of human solidarity.

The State of the Union Speech delivered by Barack Obama Tuesday night was memorable only as a further milestone in the decay of American democracy.

While billed in advance by the White House and media pundits as a “populist appeal” by the Democratic president, effectively kicking off his reelection campaign, there was virtually nothing in the speech that even acknowledged the acute social crisis in America, let alone offering any solution.

The annual presidential addresses to a joint session of Congress have taken on an increasingly empty and ritualistic character—the same empty phrases, the same perfunctory ovations, the same gimmick of individuals placed in the First Lady’s box to serve as cameos, the laundry list of proposals, either insignificant or overtly reactionary, the sickening appeals to national unity and militarism.

Four years after the official onset of recession, three years after the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, the US economy remains mired in slump and the world economy is rapidly approaching a new cataclysm. Yet neither Obama nor his Republican opponents can acknowledge the overriding fact being experienced by hundreds of millions of working people: the desperate crisis of the capitalist system.

The Wall Street crash of 2008 plunged the country into a social crisis: mass unemployment, increasing poverty, the collapse of local and state government budgets, the shutdown of public services, the spread of hunger and homelessness. Yet for both Obama and the Republicans, the only solution proposed is to increase the profits of American corporations at the expense of the working class. Every so-called “job-creation” measure proposed by Obama was, in reality, a tax break or government subsidy for corporate America.

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