WW News Service Digest #240
1) Critical Resistance East to take up prison crisis
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2) Walking for welfare rights
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3) Japanese protest U.S. military abuses
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4) Citibank & drug money, again
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5) Workers around the world: 3/8/2001
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 8, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
CRITICAL RESISTANCE EAST
TO TAKE UP PRISON CRISIS
By Sarah Sloan
New York
Hundreds are expected to attend "Critical Resistance East,"
a conference examining many aspects of the U.S. prison-
industrial complex, in New York March 9-11.
Conference organizers define the prison-industrial complex
as "encompass[ing] human-rights violations, the death
penalty, exploitative industry and labor, policing, courts,
media, community disenfranchisement, the imprisonment of
political prisoners and prisoners of war and the elimination
of dissent. Additionally, the PIC intersects with and
depends upon the oppressive systems of racism, classism,
sexism and homophobia."
The conference is expected to feature dozens of workshops on
a wide range of topics, including racism and the phony "war
on drugs," youths and the prison-industrial complex, women
in prison, lesbian/gay/bi/trans people in prison, the
corporate connection to prison profits and the cases of
famed political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard
Peltier.
The New York conference follows a 1998 gathering in
Berkeley, Calif., that drew 2,000 people from the region.
Its objective: "to raise consciousness [about] the prison
industry and, in turn, to galvanize action to resist the
Prison-Industrial Complex." Among its goals is "to tear down
the Prison-Industrial Complex!"
There are now over 2 million people, disproportionately
people of color, imprisoned in the United States. This
represents 25 percent of the world's prison population,
drawn from the U.S. population that is 5 percent of the
world's total.
Those expected to attend the conference include students,
youths and other activists from the Northeast who were
involved in organizing for the Jan. 20 protest at George W.
Bush's inauguration, the campaign to free Abu-Jamal, and the
demonstrations coinciding with the meeting of the Free Trade
Area of the Americas set for April in Quebec City.
For more information about Critical Resistance East, readers
can visit the Web site www.criticalresistance.org/creast.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 8, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
WALKING FOR WELFARE RIGHTS
Over 100 people attended a send-off rally and march for
welfare-rights activists Kim Denmark and Rose Patton in New
York Feb. 24. Denmark and Patton have been walking across
the eastern United States to draw attention to the plight of
poor people afflicted by the 1996 "welfare reform" law.
The duo spent a month in New York speaking to unions,
students, community groups and the media. After a rousing
meeting at the Holyrood Church in Manhattan's Washington
Heights community, Denmark and Patton led a march across the
George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, the next stop on
their journey for justice.
Marchers carried signs reading "Stop the war against the
poor" and "Real jobs, not workfare slavery." As they chanted
"Walk, Kim, walk," the protesters received a warm reception
from residents of the predominately Latino neighborhood and
from motorists on the bridge.
To find out when Denmark and Patton are coming to your town,
or to make a financial contribution, visit the Web site
www.kimwalks.org or call the International Action Center at
(212) 633-6646.
--Greg Butterfield
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 8, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
After Navy sub sinks fishing boat
JAPANESE PROTEST U.S. MILITARY ABUSES
By G. Dunkel
The U.S. nuclear submarine Greenville smashed into the
Japanese fishing boat Ehime Maru Feb. 11, sinking the vessel
and killing nine Japanese sailors. Four of them were high-
school students being trained for a career in fishing.
The reaction in Japan was one of shock and dismay over an
obviously avoidable accident. At least, an accident is what
the U.S. Navy claims it was.
Protests have taken place almost daily in Japan, led by
women's organizations in Tokyo, Okinawa and elsewhere. So
far the demonstrations have not reached the fever pitch of
1996, when thousands protested as three U.S. Marines went on
trial for raping a 12-year-old girl. But anger is growing.
The people of Japan say they want answers as to how this
accident happened. They are also demanding a full and formal
apology from the U.S. government.
They want the Ehime Maru raised and the bodies that may be
inside it recovered. The town council of Uwajima--the Ehime
Maru's home port--has demanded financial support for the
victims and their families as well as an apology.
What particularly outraged people in Japan was that 16
civilians were present on the Greenville's bridge during the
accident. Two of them were even sitting at the controls.
MACKE: A NOTORIOUS RACIST
These weren't just any civilians.
Retired Adm. Richard C. Macke had selected them from the
major contributors to the USS Missouri Battleship Memorial
fund, according to the Feb. 18 Boston Globe. The Missouri is
the ship where Gen. Douglas McArthur accepted Japan's
surrender in 1945.
As commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific in 1996, Macke
dismissed the issue of the Okinawa rape, dismissing the
popular outcry as "absolutely stupid." He added: "I've said
several times, for the price [the soldiers] paid to rent the
car, they could have had a girl." (Chicago Sun-Times, Nov.
18, 1995)
The civilians aboard the Greenville also have monetary
connections to the current administration. Several are oil
millionaires. President George W. Bush is the honorary chair
of the memorial fund's board of directors.
Besides contributing to the Missouri Memorial, 14 of the 16
civilians were also major contributors to the 2000
Republican election campaign, according to the London Daily
Telegraph of Feb. 21.
Two other recent incidents on Okinawa, the island where most
of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan are based, contributed to
the anger felt throughout the country.
On Jan. 9, before Bush was inaugurated, a marine from Camp
Hansen on Okinawa was arrested after he forcibly lifted the
skirt of a Japanese teenager in Kin and tried to take
pictures of her underwear.
A week later, on Jan. 15, another marine from Camp Hansen
set two fires in Chatan, a nearby town. The Marines refused
to turn him over to Okinawan authorities, claiming that he
had not committed a "heinous" crime and so could be tried by
the U.S. military.
Reacting to these incidents, the Chatan Municipal Assembly
passed a unanimous resolution demanding that the Marines
leave Okinawa. National political leaders indicated that
they wanted to revise the agreement allowing the United
States to try its soldiers for crimes they commit in Japan.
Then a former commander of Camp Hansen told the Washington
Post Jan. 11 that the Marines did not have a high crime rate
and that anything they did was used to inflame the anger of
the people to force U.S. troops to leave.
The next day, the Kin Municipal Assembly resolved: "Although
we have protested and called for tighter discipline and
thorough measures every time criminal cases occur involving
U.S. military personnel, no improvements have been made. We
cannot forgive the halfhearted steps taken by the U.S.
military so far."
The Tokyo Daily Yomiuri, an English-language edition of the
conservative Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, covered the events
in Okinawa in a long article on Feb. 18.
ASSEMBLY DEMANDS U.S. WITHDRAWAL
The prefectural assembly--a body corresponding to a state
legislature in the United States--passed a resolution
calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from Okinawa,
the first time the body has taken such a step. The
resolution was sent to the U.S. ambassador, Prime Minister
Yoshiro Mori and Lt. Gen. Earl Hailston, commander of U.S.
forces on Okinawa.
Hailston lost his cool and sent out an incendiary email
message to his staff. He said Okinawa Gov. Keiichi Inamine,
Kin Mayor Katsuhiro Yoshida and others "falsely claim to be
our friends" and were simply "standing idly by" as the
assembly "passed an inflammatory and damaging resolution."
"Nuts" and "a bunch of wimps" is what Hailston called them,
according to The Daily Yomiuri.
A local Okinawan newspaper, Ryukyu Shimpo, broke the story
just a few days before the Greenville sank the Ehime Maru.
Even though Japan has become a mighty imperialist power and
rival of the United States, Washington still acts with a
deadly and callous arrogance. The sinking of the Ehime Maru
and the attitudes of Macke and Hailston are just two
components of the same racist military occupation.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 8, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
Editorial
CITIBANK & DRUG MONEY, AGAIN
Citibank is quietly back in the news again as the subject of a government
investigation
into money laundering. An article in the Feb. 27 New York Times based on
interviews with federal investigators and staff members of a Senate
subcommittee studying the matter reveals that the giant bank continued to
accept hundreds of millions of dollars in suspect money for a year and a
half
after federal agents had already seized millions from criminal accounts.
The money was reported to have come from drug dealers in Mexico. It is
clear,
however, that the really big kingpins of the drug trade are the respectable
U.S. bankers. Last Oct. 30, the General Accounting Office reported that
Citigroup and Commercial Bank of San Francisco had violated control rules
and
allowed some $1 billion in possibly illicit Eastern European money to move
through their accounts. A year earlier, it was revealed that the Bank of New
York, one of the nation's largest, had served as a conduit for $7 billion in
Russian money, some of it believed to be from criminal activities.
Foreign Policy magazine reported in June 1998 that U.S. financial
institutions launder
an estimated $100 billion in drug profits every year.
Citibank and other large institutions like BankAmerica have been given small
fines over
the years after investigations turned up repeated handling of large cash
accounts. Three years ago, a General Accounting Office investigation showed
that Citibank officials had set up a special offshore account for Raul
Salinas,
brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, while he was in jail on
a
murder charge. The bank eagerly accepted a double-endorsed check for nearly
$100 million from his fiancée to open the account.
Bank officials in New York, London and Mexico City were involved in what was
identified as drug money laundering, but no action was taken against them.
[More details are available online at the GAO Web site, report GAO/OSI-99-1,
"Private Banking: Raul Salinas, Citibank, and Alleged Money
Laundering."]
The drug laws of the United States have made it so easy to incarcerate
people for
possession of small amounts of controlled substances that the rate of
imprisonment here is the highest in the world and the jails are bursting.
You
would have to look hard to find any bankers behind walls, however. No
Special
Forces teams are defoliating the dracaena plants in bank offices to better
observe illegal transactions. Drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey has made no
television appearances announcing a war on bankers' drug-money profits.
That kind of treatment is reserved for petty dealers and users, or better
yet, for
revolutionary movements like the FARC-EP and the ELN in Colombia that make
easier targets for the Pentagon's wars of counter-revolution once they have
been branded "narco-guerrillas" by Washington and the media.
What are banks? Why do they yield so consistently to temptation? And why are
they so
untouchable by the state?
The first thing to understand is that these are capitalist banks. If the
workers
controlled the state, banks would merely be socially-owned repositories for
the
money-wealth created through labor whose use is being deferred for future
projects. But when owned by the capitalist class, they are controlling
institutions at the very pinnacle of the process of capitalist exploitation
and
accumulation of wealth.
Every day the moneyed class draws into its coffers the surplus wealth
created by the
working class. They plow most of it back into production in order to gather
in
even more next year, more the year after that, and so on.
There is a constant struggle among the capitalists to survive by growing
larger and
larger, thus beating out the competition. They are not born greedy. The
system
makes them greedy by consigning the less greedy to failure.
Karl Marx, quoting an economist of his day, wrote that there is nothing
capitalists
would not do to get a higher return on their investments than their rivals.
The
slave trade in the Western Hemisphere, after all, was to feed labor to
capitalist enterprises producing cotton and sugar for a growing market. If
human slavery is acceptable to the capitalist--and it was until
technological
advances in agriculture made it counter-productive--then why not drug-money
laundering?
Driving the capitalists to take ever more risks these days is their fear
that the
system stands on the edge of a precipice. When a boom period shows signs of
going bust, everyone wants cash. A bank's assets dwindle as many of those
who
have borrowed its money go bankrupt. Credit collapses. Only cash will do.
So what's better than all those accounts funneling large amounts of cash
into the
bank? And so what if it comes in brown paper bags? To paraphrase the words
of
one Nixon administration crook, the bankers will walk over their own
grandmothers to get their hands on the loot.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the March 8, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
WORKERS AROUND THE WORLD
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Strikes hit gov't austerity
National police attacked striking workers, arresting
hundreds and wounding dozens on Feb. 20. The workers were
protesting government austerity and cutbacks. The protests
were concentrated in the regions of Licey, Tenares, Nagua,
San Francisco de Macoris and Salcedo.
The Broad Front for People's Struggle (FALPO) had called the
protests against President Hipolito Mejia's attempts to
privatize the country's social-security system, eliminate
subsidies to various public-sector industries and deny
raises for public-sector workers. All these measures are a
continuation of policies dictated by the International
Monetary Fund to Mejia's predecessor, Leonel Fernandez.
According to the Pulsar news agency, Licey community leaders
accused the National Police of mounting a military-style
operation against the protests. Gunshots wounded at least 27
people.
Afterward, organizers called for continued struggle. The
Coordinating Committee for People's, Trade Unionists and
Drivers staged a 48-hour strike. It also set up encampments
to build support for the mass protests.
In response, the government announced a partial concession
under which the Social Security system would not be
completely privatized. Even this moderate concession, which
allowed a "mixed" public-private system, came under
immediate attack by boss groups like the Foundation in
Defense of Private Property and business and finance groups.
The Coordinating Committee--which has led a number of
important struggles in defense of living conditions--also
announced plans for a National People's Assembly on March
18, "at the same time that we maintain ourselves mobilized
and disposed to take to the trenches if the business leaders
and the financial sector block the agreements reached."
BOTSWANA
Unions threaten strike wave
Botswana is often praised in the big-business press as a
"stable democracy" and model for Africa. Translated from
boss-speak that means corporations from the United States
and other imperialist countries can exploit the workers with
little resistance.
That may be changing. On Feb. 19, the Manual Workers' Union
announced it would launch a mass campaign of rolling strikes
to press its demands for wage increases and against the
"premature implementation of privatization.
"Information reaching us suggests that the government may be
bracing itself to reduce the size of the public service,"
read an MWU statement quoted by the South Africa-based
Business Day. The statement announced that "the executive
committee has resolved to embark on rolling mass action" to
confront the government's anti-labor moves.
The announcement came on the eve of an evaluation by the
financial credit-rating agencies Standard & Poors and
Moodys.
