4. AMERICAN SWEATSHOPS SEW U.S. MILITARY UNIFORMS The women who work at the Lion Apparel factory in Beattyville, Ky., work long, grueling days for minimum wage. All day they breathe fumes from formaldehyde, a suspected carcinogen. In the winter, they freeze; in the southern summers, they swelter for want of air conditioning. In the past 12 years, their employer has been cited 32 times for health and safety violations. But keeping workers in sweatshop conditions helps Lion keep prices low for its biggest customer: the U.S. Department of Defense. According to accounts from workers, the Lion plant and others that make uniforms for the U.S. military fall squarely within the legal definition of sweatshops: wages that don't meet workers' basic needs, uncomfortable and dangerous working conditions, and intimidation when workers try to unionize. (Lion denies all these charges.) But you won't hear the Pentagon complaining. unlike some other high-profile retailers, led by Kathie Lee Gifford, the Defense Department has never signed onto the Clinton administration's Workplace Code of Conduct. In fact, it aggressively works to keep costs as low as possible, and workers end up paying the price. The Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees tried to organize Lion workers in 1997. The drive failed, the union says, because of management's unyielding opposition -- including, some workers say, dark threats of plant closures. Uniforms for America's military are made in some of the country's poorest communities: rural Appalachia, small towns in the Deep South. The economic boom has had little impact here, and workers are still dependent on a precious few employers. And instead of trying to help them out of poverty, the government saves money by exploiting their labor. Note: Lion Apparel challenged Mother Jones and demanded a retraction of this story. Mother Jones refused, but it did make two changes in its report. Mark Boal, http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ99/boal.html "An American Sweatshop," Mother Jones, May/June 1999. For more information go to http://www.nlcnet.org http://www.sweatshopwatch.org http://www.uniteunion.org 5. TURKEY DESTROYS KURDISH VILLAGES WITH U.S. WEAPONS The Turkish government's campaign of repression against ethnic Kurds has lasted since the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923. Fifteen years ago, though, the civil war escalated -- thanks to generous donations of weaponry from the United States. Since 1980 the United States has sold or given Turkey weapons to the tune of $15 billion -- including Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and F-16 fighter bombers. American soldiers have been sent to Turkey to train commando forces there. An estimated 75 percent of the Turkish army's arsenal is marked "Made in the U.S.A." This weaponry has gone to quell the nationalist movement among the Kurds -- at 25 million, the largest ethnic group in the world without its own state. The Turkish civil war represents the single largest use of U.S. weapons by non-U.S. forces anywhere in the world. In the past 15 years nearly 40,000 lives have been lost -- more than in the West Bank and in Northern Ireland combined. More than 3,000 villages have been leveled, burned, or evacuated since 1990; some were simply destroyed from above by American-made bombers. Two million Kurds have lost their homes. All this in an effort by Turkey's military government to crack down on the Marxist-led Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. In a tactic borrowed from the U.S. army in Vietnam, Turkish soldiers habitually force Kurdish civilians into serving as "village guards." Villagers who won't participate in the anti-PKK struggle have been beaten, forced off their land, or worse. Readers of the U.S. press have seen stories about the plight of the Iraqi Kurds -- perhaps because their oppressor, Saddam Hussein, is an enemy of the United States. But there are four times as many Kurds in Turkey, also suffering state repression, and about them we hear nothing. Is that because their tormentors are our allies, using our weapons? Kevin McKeirnan, "Turkey's War on the Kurds," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April 1999. For more information go to http://www.kurdistan.org http://www.fas.org/asmp http://www.clark.net/kurd 6. NATO DEFENDS PRIVATE ECONOMIC INTERESTS IN THE BALKANS The Kosovo conflict was repeatedly cited as the first victory for the new world order. Liberals abandoned their usual suspiciousness of military intervention, enchanted by the idea of the United States as a crusader for human rights worldwide. Republicans played along, abandoning their typical hawkishness to argue that U.S. troops should only be used to defend U.S. interests. Here's what neither side said aloud: the United States had some very traditional economic interests in the Balkans, and Kosovo was about mineral resources every bit as much as the Gulf War. Among the United States' primary foreign policy campaigns is the struggle over oil fields in the Caspian region, which includes Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan and contains trillions of dollars worth of oil. The question on the table: how to pipe it to U.S. consumers? The most direct route goes through Iran. The United States doesn't like that option, because of its embargo against that country. But the best alternative would ship the oil across the Black Sea and through the narrow Bosporus straits, which could present U.S. ally Turkey with an environmental nightmare and billions of dollars in lost revenues. The obvious solution is a pipeline through the Balkans. And the best way to ensure that the Balkan states will play ball with Western energy interests is to bring the whole region under a NATO protectorate. And that's not the only reason Kosovo could be important to the U.S. economy. Most Americans think of Kosovo as a poor mountain region with few resources. For the most part, the media didn't tell them any different. In fact, Kosovo is home to the Stari Trg mining complex -- a fully developed $5 billion deposit of lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver. The region is also home to 17 billion tons of coal reserves. Kosovo's mineral reserves are perhaps the most valuable resources not yet in the hands of Western capitalists. The collapse of the Soviet empire put their ownership in doubt. It will now likely be determined by NATO. According to top government sources, U.S. officials at the Rambouillet peace talks deliberately presented the Serbs with an ultimatum they couldn't accept: ensuring that NATO would have an opportunity to begin a bombing campaign. The mainstream media uncritically accepted the government's spin -- that NATO intervened in Kosovo to protect the Albanian population's right to self-determination. To do so, they rarely mentioned the region's enormous mineral wealth or strategic importance -- an omission, as Sara Flounders puts it, "comparable to describing Kuwait and the oil-rich Gulf states as barren deserts." Diana Johnstone, http://www.worldwidewamm.org/caspian.html "The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan Conflict," Women Against Military Madness, November 1998, and Sonoma County Peace Press, April/May 1999; Sara Flounders, http://www.eroj.org/urbiorbi/Yugoslavia/mines.htm "Kosovo: It's about the Mines," Because People Matter, May/June 1999 (reprinted from Workers World, 7/30/98); Pratap Chatterjee, "Caspian Pipe Dreams," San Francisco Bay Guardian, 12/16/99. For more on the war in Kosovo go to http://www.iacenter.org" For more information on the mineral industries go to http://www.moles.org 7. U.S. MEDIA REDUCES FOREIGN COVERAGE International news coverage has almost vanished from America's mainstream daily newspapers. Well-respected regional papers that once prided themselves on their foreign coverage are closing bureaus. The Associated Press continues to send out stories from around the world, but editors seldom find space to run them. Newspaper readers are unlikely to learn much about foreign news unless there's a bombing, a natural disaster, or a financial crisis. And without newspapers most Americans have little access to foreign news. Broadcast news shows have largely given up. News magazines have found that foreign news covers stifle newsstand sales. Americans are growing increasingly ignorant of events in foreign countries -- at a time when the global economy is making those events ever more relevant to their lives. It was not always this way. In the 1960s --with the cold war at its height and the Vietnam War, the high-water mark of foreign correspondence, beginning-- international coverage dominated the front pages. But foreign news fell out of favor in the 1970s, as editors turned to local news and service-oriented features. Today stories with exotic datelines typically appear as one-paragraph "briefs" in a slim "world roundup" section. There are exceptions. The top handful of mainstream American newspapers --the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times-- continue to operate a raft of foreign bureaus. And when it comes to international business news, there is more information available than ever before: the Wall Street Journal has 100 foreign correspondents; Reuters has some 1,700. But the readers of average and even better-than-average regional daily newspapers won't learn much about the world beyond the borders of the United States. When it comes to allocating news space, for most papers, the hierarchy is clear: local news comes first, with reports from Washington, D.C., and Hollywood second. The rest of the world is a distant third. Peter Arnett, "Goodbye World," American Journalism Review, November 1998. 8. Planned weapons in space violate international law "Absolutely we're going to fight wars in space," says Gen. Joseph Ashy, commander in chief of the U.S. Space Command. "It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen." "Politically sensitive" may be understating the case. Deploying weapons of mass destruction in space is specifically barred by a 1967 United Nations treaty. But that treaty hasn't stopped the Pentagon from working feverishly to install antisatellite weapons, as well as the recently approved Star Wars ballistic missile defense system. The possibility of high-powered weapons in space poses a problem: how to equip them with a long-lasting and compact source of power. The obvious answer: nuclear reactors in space. Already, increasing demand by NASA and the Pentagon for space-based nuclear power has led the Department of Energy to step up its nuclear programs and consider reopening shuttered facilities. Taking radioactive material on space flights, of course, endangers pretty much the entire population of the earth. (The recent nuclear-powered Cassini space probe, for instance, risked exposing five billion people to radiation from 72.3 pounds of plutonium.) Fortunately for the U.S. taxpayers, however, a 1991 U.S. law limits the government's liability for nuclear accidents: $8.9 billion for damage within the United States and a mere $100 million for damage anywhere else in the world. In the process of staking its claim to the universe, the United States runs the risk of antagonizing other countries. Russia and China have both expressed concern about U.S. plans to colonize space. Both have called for the U.N. Conference on Disarmament to form a committee on the "prevention of an arms race in outer space." That proposal is being blocked by the United States. Karl Grossman, http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/winter99/wr_winter99space.ht ml "U.S. Violates World Law to Militarize Space," Earth Island Journal, Winter/Spring, 1999; Bruce K. Gagnon, http://www.towardfreedom.com/sep99/spacewar.htm "Pyramids to the Heavens," Toward Freedom, Sept/Oct, 1999. For more information go to http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk 9. LOUISIANA PROMOTES TOXIC RACISM The skyline along the 100-mile strip between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is dominated by immense petrochemical plants. Such giants as Dow, Texaco, Dupont, and Chevron were lured to southeast Louisiana with generous tax breaks. In return they've brought very few jobs for local residents -- but that hasn't stopped them from making their presence felt. The plants release more than 23 million pounds of toxins into the air each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Residents of the area surrounding the strip, most of them poor and black, blame that pollution for unusually high rates of cancer, reproductive problems, and other ailments. They say they're victims of environmental racism -- the targeting of minority communities for toxic industries. Nationwide, studies confirm that blacks are four times more likely to live near toxic and hazardous waste sites than whites and that government fines are much higher when companies pollute white communities than when they pollute black ones. One hundred thirty-eight petrochemical companies already have facilities along the southeast Louisiana strip, known to residents as Cancer Alley. Another may be on its way. Japanese company Shintech hopes to build the nation's largest polyvinyl chloride plant on the border of Convent, a tiny town on the Mississippi River. The plant would add another 600,000 pounds of air pollution to the community -- already home to an IMC-Agrico plant. If the company gets the go-ahead, it will likely create 165 jobs -- and receive tax breaks to the tune of $130 million in return. And the experience of Convent and neighboring towns suggests it will do little to improve the local economy. Faced with the threat of yet more toxins, residents of Convent are saying "enough!" Locals have already collected 1,000 signatures on a petition aimed at stopping the plant, and hundreds have turned out to demonstrations. But they face confirmed industry supporters in local and state government -- as well as the company, which has plied elected officials with campaign contributions. Resident Jerome Ringo, who is fighting the plant, points out that many of the plant's potential neighbors are descended from slaves who worked on sugarcane plantations on the proposed site. "Much like their ancestors," he says, "these people have nowhere else to go." Ron Nixon, "Toxic Gumbo," Southern Exposure, Summer/Fall 1998. For more information call Greenpeace's Damu Smith at (202) 462-1177. 10. U.S. AND NATO DELIBERATELY STARTED THE WAR WITH YUGOSLAVIA The conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo has lasted more than three centuries -- longer by far than the sectarian disputes in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. But NATO, led by the United States, insisted that the dispute be settled forever in a single "peace negotiation" at Rambouillet. The U.S. media condemned Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic for refusing to sign the agreement presented to him there, and never interrogated NATO's assertion that Milosevic's intransigence left no alternative to war. But how many reporters covering Rambouillet actually read the agreement proposed there? If they had, say scholars of international relations, they might have wondered: does NATO really expect Serbia to accept this? The Rambouillet agreement, which NATO claimed was aimed at protecting the ethnic Albanians' self-determination, would in fact have turned over Kosovo to NATO. Overseers would have had the power to set law and overrule election results; military leaders would have had authority to run Kosovo as a dictatorship. It's particularly hard to imagine Milosevic -- or the leader of any other sovereign state -- willingly agreeing to some of the terms in Appendix B of the Rambouillet document: the assertion that "NATO personnel shall be immune from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]" and "shall enjoy ... free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY, including associated airspace and territorial waters." NATO troops were also to be given the power to arrest and detain anyone they pleased. Bear in mind, this wasn't just in Kosovo -- this was in the whole of the former Yugoslavia, including Serbia. As Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, put it, the accords would have allowed for "the military occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia." Were the Rambouillet accords intended to set the stage for a full-scale occupation of Yugoslavia? Were they designed to be unacceptable to Serbian negotiators, thereby providing a pretext for a bombing campaign? Was NATO's seeming insistence on total control --by treaty or by air war-- connected to Kosovo's rich mineral resources (see number six)? The answers to those questions aren't clear -- but the mainstream media, gulled by NATO posturing and appeals to "humanitarianism," never even asked them. Jason Vest, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9919/vest.shtml "The Real Rambouillet," Village Voice, May 18, 1999; Seth Ackerman, http://www.fair.org/extra/9907/kosovo-diplomacy.html, "Redefining Diplomacy," Extra, July/August 1999; Seth Ackerman, "What Was the War For?" In These Times, August 8, 1999; Diana Johnstone, http://www.covertaction.org/yugo1.htm, "Hawks and Eagles: 'Greater NATO' flies to the Aid of 'Greater Albania,' Covert Action Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1999; Amy Goodman, http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/demnow/dn990422.html, "Democracy Now," Pacifica Radio Network, April 22, 1999. For more information go to http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/kosovo.htm http://www.transnational.org
