The Time Has Come to Re-ignite a Vast Movement of Working People Against War and Occupations...

The Time Has Come to Re-ignite a Vast Movement of Working People Against War and Occupations and for Fundamental Social Change in America

By RALPH SCHOENMAN

Working people—the vast and overwhelming majority of the population—confront an unprecedented crisis. The government and the State itself have been captured by a tiny oligarchy of the corporate rich. They have hijacked our political process in a class war of the privileged few against the exploited many.

Business Week described this reality in a feature article (December 1, 2003) entitled "Waking Up From The American Dream": "There has been much talk of the Wal-Martization" of America. But for years, even during the 1990’s boom, much of Corporate America had already embraced stratagems to control labor costs—hiring temps and part-timers, fighting unions, dismantling career ladders and outsourcing to lower-paying contractors at home and abroad."

Under the cover of "free trade," the corporate and banking oligarchy pitted workers against each other in every part of the planet. In Haiti, K-Mart, J. C. Penny, Disney and corporate giants are paying slave-labor wages of 8 cents to 21 cents an hour. Workers in America are pitted against workers in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America in a mad race to the bottom.

Congressional Budget Office data cited by Paul Krugman in his article "The Death of Horatio Alger" (New York Times, December 18, 2003), established that between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers went into free fall as the income of the top one percent of the population rose by 123 percent and income of the top one-hundredth of 1 percent (0.01%) rose 600 percent. From 2000 to 2004 the disparity escalated.

War was declared on working families and children in America by a cabal in control of government. Full time jobs have been replaced by temporary work. Union jobs with a living wage have been outsourced to the sweatshops of the world. Health benefits have been stripped from workers. Schools and libraries are closed and public busing suspended.

Budget surpluses have been converted into deficits that will escalate to trillions of dollars as profits soar. Five hundred billion dollars ($500 billion) are allocated to the Pentagon for crony contracts that benefit a corrupt handful of corporate directors who switch hats and enter the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Agencies to hand out billions of profits to their former companies.

The U.S. publication, Insight On The News, reported on August 10, 2001: "Every year trillions of dollars go unaccounted by federal agencies." Robert Lieberman, the Deputy Inspector-General of the Department of Defense, admitted that 4.4 trillion dollars in the Pentagon’s books had to be cooked to compile financial statements.

"In one year, $1.1 trillion was simply gone and no one can be sure when, where and to whom the money went. Untold trillions of dollars are stolen every year and disappear into off-shore numbered accounts, holding companies and banks without records."

In the year 2000, $855 billion were "lost" by the Pentagon—more than the $855 billion in individual taxes collected by the IRS in 1999.

On September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, CBS News and its anchor Dan Rather reported that the Pentagon had ’lost" $2.3 trillion $mdash; fully one quarter of its budget for the decade.

One trillion dollars represents $1,000 a minute since the life of Jesus.

Government in America is in the hands of a kleptocracy that is cannibalizing the infrastructure of our society. Plunder on this scale is concealed by lies. Iraq, a small country of 26 million people, has one ten thousandth of the military capacity of the United States.

A vast lying propaganda campaign was launched in Washington to justify a war to seize the oil of the people of Iraq. In the process, what was once an industrial society has been devastated and workers are now earning as little as 25 cents a day. The anti-union edicts and banning of collective bargaining imposed by the old regime under U.S. pressure and now enforced by the occupation—expose the real agenda.

What is true in Iraq applies to every part of the world. The drive for permanent war benefits the Pentagon, the oil companies, the corporations and the banks at our expense.

Working people are the cannon fodder for these wars, sent to wage war against the working poor of other countries. The vast majority of Americans have no interest in invading and occupying other nations so the Pentagon can steal trillions of dollars and the corporate masters can seize the oil and natural resources of other nations.

Workers everywhere have the same interest—to control their own resources to improve their lives. While countless trillions of dollars have been vested with the military and the corporations to wage war and make profits, social services were slashed everywhere.

Martin Luther King, Jr. summoned a historic Poor Peoples’ March on Washington to declare that the vast arsenal of death unleashed by the Pentagon was in reality a war on working people at home and abroad. The time has come to re-ignite a vast movement of working people for fundamental social change in America. The time has come to build a genuinely independent Million Worker March in Washington, D.C., in October 2004.

(Ralph Schoenman is a member of the Million Worker March Committee.)

http://www.millionworkermarch.org/mwmantiwar.html