Harry Targ
The Modern University
At my home university, only Coca-Cola products can be distributed on campus as a result of contractual agreements. Agriculture specialists train military personnel to teach agribusiness to farmers in Afghanistan. Students struggle against university contractors who have purchase agreements with companies such as Nike, which produce t-shirts and hats with university logos made with sweatshop labor. Research and teaching programs are established to highlight the significance of unregulated markets, electoral democracy, religions, and other ideas celebrated in the United States.
The president of the university, the director of athletic programs, and some athletic coaches earn ten times more than experienced clerical staff and 7 or 8 times more than new assistant professors. In addition to corporate style salary differentials, members of the administrative staff, like those in corporations, work on logos, “branding,” and lobbying state and national legislators. Human relations bureaucracies, again like those in corporations, make personnel decisions that bear on substantive policy; in this case relating to education.
Shifting Finances, Academic Workers, and Access to Higher Education
The enduring economic crisis has begun to open up debate on the direction of modern higher education. For example, The Delta Project supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education has recently issued a report, “Trends in College Spending: 1998-2008: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?” that deserves study and reflection. Inside Higher Education (July 9, 2010) summarized some of the project’s major findings:
Between 1998 and 2008 public research universities (such as Big Ten institutions) increased rates of expenditure on top administrators, lawyers, and accountants twice that of spending on faculty and instructional materials.
Students at what the Project calls, “Public Research Universities” are now subsidized over three times as much per student as those attending community colleges.
Resources channeled to instructional purposes have modestly declined while slight increases in moneys find their way to computers, libraries, and administrative expenses.
The 51 page Delta Project report concluded that if the trends identified between 1998 and 2008 (with data that does not include the 2008-2010 recession) continue significant aspects of higher education in the United States will decline, particularly in comparison with other developed countries. The trends increasingly affect access to higher education, job security among educators, and the quality of education. In the project’s words:
“Revenue shortfalls in both public and private institutions have become the occasion, once again, for steep increases in student tuition, cutbacks in enrollments, and reductions in course offerings. Employee furloughs are becoming common, along with layoffs and program closures.”
Higher education administrators and government officials, the Report asserts, have adopted “the dominant model to manage revenue shortfalls,” including tuition increases, expanding class size, and reducing staff and faculty wages and benefits.
And changes in institutions of higher education, as in virtually all institutions, involve questions of class and inequality. “Turning this trajectory around will require huge attention to the deep issues of educational inequality, and the leaky pipeline that persistently disadvantages first-generation and low-income students.”
Some Proposals for Change
In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus make a series of proposals to address some of the crises of higher education today. They begin by noting that tuition for public and private colleges has doubled compared with a generation ago. Rising educational costs require parents to commit large financial outlays, second only to house mortgages, to their children’s education. Alternatively students have to take out loans that will burden them for their entire lives.
Among the proposals these authors make are the following:
-Institute free higher education for all who seek it.
-Maintain course requirements that lead to knowledge in history, the arts, sciences, and reasoned discourse.
-Provide secure full-time teaching jobs for every classroom. Eliminate the system of staffing classrooms with graduate students and temporary adjuncts who receive one-sixth the pay of the regular faculty.
-Pay presidents and other administrators salaries commensurate with public employees, not CEOs of Wall Street banks and corporations.
I would add that the connections between systems of higher education and sports, the military, and the corporate sector must be examined as well.
While our wealthiest and most powerful institutions-- corporations and banks, the military, and the health care system-- have come under some scrutiny in the new century, until recently higher education has remained hidden behind a wall of mystery even though everyone pays lip service to it as the hope for the future.
With enduring economic stagnation coupled with rising gaps in the distribution of income and wealth, education is offered as an escape route from poverty. We need to broaden public discussion about our assumptions concerning higher education, assessing its costs, accessibility, educational quality, and workplace security.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
THE KOREAN WAR NEVER ENDS: A 60 YEAR COVERUP
Harry Targ
"We continue to send a message to the North. There is another way. There is a way that can benefit the people of the North," Mrs. Clinton said alongside Mr. Gates on Wednesday, as they stood just feet away from leering North Korean soldiers stationed across the North-South border. "But until they change direction, the United States stands firmly on behalf of the people and government of the Republic of Korea." (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2010).
In a political about-face, a South Korean commission investigating a century of human rights abuses has ruled that the U.S. military's large-scale killing of refugees during the Korean War, in case after case, arose out of military necessity.
Shutting down the inquiry into South Korea's hidden history, the commission also will leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their own government early in the 1950-53 war, sometimes as U.S. officers watched.
The four-year-old Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea probed more deeply than any previous inquiry into the country's bloody past. But a shift to conservative national leadership changed the panel's political makeup this year and dampened its investigative zeal.
The families of 1950's victims wanted the work continued. (Charles J. Hanley and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press, July 11, 2010).
Back to Korea
I keep coming back to the Korean War. Maybe it is an occupational hazard of those who teach foreign policy. Perhaps it is because virtually every administration since World War II has made their narrative of the events on the Korean peninsula a centerpiece for justifying United States foreign policy. And, from the standpoint of those of us who view United States foreign policy from a critical perspective, the Korean War represents a model of what that policy continued to be ever since the 1940s.
I wrote recently about “our forgotten war,” the Korean war, arguing that the U.S. commitment to “defend” the Korean regime south of the 38th parallel militarily opened the door to massive increases in military spending, the unquestioned commitment of the United States to a global anti-Communist agenda, defense of the reactionary Chinese on the Formosa Islands, the total funding of the French effort to crush Vietnamese anti-colonial forces, and the rapid expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also, with the Korean War, domestic repression of dissent was broadened and deepened, unleashing the FBI, Congressional and state legislative investigative committees, and moves to standardize American popular culture.
I thought I had written enough on Korea for a while until I read a July 11 wire service story announcing that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established five years ago in South Korea was terminated. The Commission was created to investigate charges that the U.S. puppet government in South Korea before and during the war was responsible for the rounding up and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of anti-government dissidents in the South (with U.S. military support). Also the Commission was to examine claims by historians that South Korean president Syngman Rhee may have slaughtered 100,000 or more of his own citizens in the early stages of the Korean War because they were deemed unsympathetic to the anti-Communist regime in Seoul.
Then on July 21, Secretaries of State and Defense Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates visited the 38th parallel which has divided the Korean peninsula for over 60 years. Photo images of Clinton peering North with binoculars underscored the definition of North Korea as mysterious and demonic. To support the imagery she announced that sanctions against the “Stalinist dictatorship” would be escalated. The North, she claimed, was responsible for the destruction of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, on March 26, killing 46 sailors. She accepted this interpretation from official South Korean government sources.
The Hidden History
I had read many books over the years on the Korea War but just recently took I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War off my shelf. As one of the first definitive studies of the onset of the Korean War, published by Monthly Review, in 1952, it tells a story of how that war started that is radically different from the official story: “the evil communists in the North invaded the democratic South on orders from the Soviet Union and China.” Even for me, the I.F. Stone narrative was shocking about Korea then (and now). Most troubling were the suggestions about how lies, deceit, messianic ideology, and personality disorders along with imperial structures and processes may have affected United States foreign policy in general. Reflecting on these foreign policies led me to realize that their impacts have included the deaths of millions of people, mostly people outside the Anglo-Saxon world.
Stone’s narrative highlights the interests, behavior, ideologies, and personalities of a handful of players who had most to do with creating and prosecuting the Korean War. Most central was General Douglas MacArthur, commanding officer of the U.S. occupation of Japan, headquartered in Tokyo. MacArthur saw himself as the future leader of all of Asia, bringing Christianity, capitalism, authoritarian democracy and his own historic destiny to the region.
His partners including John Foster Dulles, key Republican spokesperson on foreign policy, former representative to the United Nations and U.S. negotiator of the Japanese Peace Treaty which welcomed back that country into the “family of democratic nations.” Dulles had a long legal career, working with corporations and banks that did business with Nazi Germany. He regarded the rise of Communism as a manifestation of the anti-Christ.
Other partners in the Korean War drama were Syngman Rhee, dictatorial president of the South Korean regime who was on the verge of being ousted from power after his party lost parliamentary elections and Chiang Kai Shek, leader of the anti-Communist forces who were defeated by the Chinese Communists in a thirty-year civil war. Chiang’s Koumintang was forced to retreat from the mainland of China to the Formosan islands and he was desperately seeking a commitment from the United States to defend his beleaguered armies on the islands.
The narrative, of course, includes defense department officials and military contractors who remained, even in 1950, under the yoke of fiscally conservative legislators. They wanted a justification for massive increases in military spending such as those recommended in the secret document National Security Council Document 68.
In addition, Republican politicians were looking for an issue to finally end the twenty year domination of the Democratic Party in national political life. Issues such as the “fall of China,” “the spread of Communism,” the “lack of attention to Asia,” and “subversion inside the State Department” became part of their public agenda. And President Truman, his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and other key advisers saw the need to expand U.S. military reach to Asia as well. With “the fall of China” Japan and the Korean peninsula were central to the geo-political expansion of US empire and the institutionalization of vibrant capitalist systems in Asia to challenge Communism.
Everybody Has an Interest in War
After describing the central characters in the Korean War drama, it becomes clear that they all would benefit from a massive and irrevocable U. S. military commitment to the anti-Communist regime in South Korea. Such a war would cap the distinguished military career of MacArthur, bring Christianity to Asia, shift foreign policy influence to missionary Republicans such as Dulles and others who wanted to expand U.S. domination to all of Asia, and would save the faltering political fortunes of the dictators in South Korea and Formosa who lacked support among their own people. Last, and not least, a Korean War would institutionalize, militarize, and globalize a United States foreign policy that would bring capitalism and democracy to the world.
The story Stone then tells is of lies and deceit designed to threaten and entice the North Koreans into making war on the South, changing the United States/United Nations response from defending the territory below the 38th parallel to expanding the war to the North, and doing whatever could be done to scare the Chinese into entering the war in full combat. Stone’s narrative shows how desperately the Chinese resisted all-out military response and how MacArthur’s headquarters at every turn resisted peace overtures.
The Stone narrative is long and complicated. Of course many have written about the Korean War since. But what so impacted me reading the book almost 60 years after its publication was the plausibility of the descriptions about how broad economic and political forces shaped and encouraged key decision-makers to act in despicable ways to serve their own interests, as well as United States empire. I am afraid that the United States approach to the Korean peninsula and foreign policy in general has not changed much since.
Any Way Out?
The best alternative to current U.S. foreign policy toward Korea and the world was recently expressed by the Veterans for Peace President Mike Ferner in a press release remembering the 60 year anniversary of the Korean War:
The recent unfortunate sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, should not be used as an excuse by any parties to renew the armed conflict that the armistice was supposed to address on July 27, 1953. Rivers of blood, mountains of pain and a permanent war economy in the U.S. are the true costs of this conflict. This sad anniversary renews VFP's commitment to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
The press release concluded:
As we observe the 60th anniversary of the Korean War of 1950-1953 today, it is time to end this tragic war, not re-ignite it. We urge all concerned parties in the Korean War--both Koreas, the United States, and China--to begin negotiations for a peace treaty and an official end to the war.
"We continue to send a message to the North. There is another way. There is a way that can benefit the people of the North," Mrs. Clinton said alongside Mr. Gates on Wednesday, as they stood just feet away from leering North Korean soldiers stationed across the North-South border. "But until they change direction, the United States stands firmly on behalf of the people and government of the Republic of Korea." (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2010).
In a political about-face, a South Korean commission investigating a century of human rights abuses has ruled that the U.S. military's large-scale killing of refugees during the Korean War, in case after case, arose out of military necessity.
Shutting down the inquiry into South Korea's hidden history, the commission also will leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their own government early in the 1950-53 war, sometimes as U.S. officers watched.
The four-year-old Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea probed more deeply than any previous inquiry into the country's bloody past. But a shift to conservative national leadership changed the panel's political makeup this year and dampened its investigative zeal.
The families of 1950's victims wanted the work continued. (Charles J. Hanley and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press, July 11, 2010).
Back to Korea
I keep coming back to the Korean War. Maybe it is an occupational hazard of those who teach foreign policy. Perhaps it is because virtually every administration since World War II has made their narrative of the events on the Korean peninsula a centerpiece for justifying United States foreign policy. And, from the standpoint of those of us who view United States foreign policy from a critical perspective, the Korean War represents a model of what that policy continued to be ever since the 1940s.
I wrote recently about “our forgotten war,” the Korean war, arguing that the U.S. commitment to “defend” the Korean regime south of the 38th parallel militarily opened the door to massive increases in military spending, the unquestioned commitment of the United States to a global anti-Communist agenda, defense of the reactionary Chinese on the Formosa Islands, the total funding of the French effort to crush Vietnamese anti-colonial forces, and the rapid expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also, with the Korean War, domestic repression of dissent was broadened and deepened, unleashing the FBI, Congressional and state legislative investigative committees, and moves to standardize American popular culture.
I thought I had written enough on Korea for a while until I read a July 11 wire service story announcing that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established five years ago in South Korea was terminated. The Commission was created to investigate charges that the U.S. puppet government in South Korea before and during the war was responsible for the rounding up and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of anti-government dissidents in the South (with U.S. military support). Also the Commission was to examine claims by historians that South Korean president Syngman Rhee may have slaughtered 100,000 or more of his own citizens in the early stages of the Korean War because they were deemed unsympathetic to the anti-Communist regime in Seoul.
Then on July 21, Secretaries of State and Defense Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates visited the 38th parallel which has divided the Korean peninsula for over 60 years. Photo images of Clinton peering North with binoculars underscored the definition of North Korea as mysterious and demonic. To support the imagery she announced that sanctions against the “Stalinist dictatorship” would be escalated. The North, she claimed, was responsible for the destruction of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, on March 26, killing 46 sailors. She accepted this interpretation from official South Korean government sources.
The Hidden History
I had read many books over the years on the Korea War but just recently took I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War off my shelf. As one of the first definitive studies of the onset of the Korean War, published by Monthly Review, in 1952, it tells a story of how that war started that is radically different from the official story: “the evil communists in the North invaded the democratic South on orders from the Soviet Union and China.” Even for me, the I.F. Stone narrative was shocking about Korea then (and now). Most troubling were the suggestions about how lies, deceit, messianic ideology, and personality disorders along with imperial structures and processes may have affected United States foreign policy in general. Reflecting on these foreign policies led me to realize that their impacts have included the deaths of millions of people, mostly people outside the Anglo-Saxon world.
Stone’s narrative highlights the interests, behavior, ideologies, and personalities of a handful of players who had most to do with creating and prosecuting the Korean War. Most central was General Douglas MacArthur, commanding officer of the U.S. occupation of Japan, headquartered in Tokyo. MacArthur saw himself as the future leader of all of Asia, bringing Christianity, capitalism, authoritarian democracy and his own historic destiny to the region.
His partners including John Foster Dulles, key Republican spokesperson on foreign policy, former representative to the United Nations and U.S. negotiator of the Japanese Peace Treaty which welcomed back that country into the “family of democratic nations.” Dulles had a long legal career, working with corporations and banks that did business with Nazi Germany. He regarded the rise of Communism as a manifestation of the anti-Christ.
Other partners in the Korean War drama were Syngman Rhee, dictatorial president of the South Korean regime who was on the verge of being ousted from power after his party lost parliamentary elections and Chiang Kai Shek, leader of the anti-Communist forces who were defeated by the Chinese Communists in a thirty-year civil war. Chiang’s Koumintang was forced to retreat from the mainland of China to the Formosan islands and he was desperately seeking a commitment from the United States to defend his beleaguered armies on the islands.
The narrative, of course, includes defense department officials and military contractors who remained, even in 1950, under the yoke of fiscally conservative legislators. They wanted a justification for massive increases in military spending such as those recommended in the secret document National Security Council Document 68.
In addition, Republican politicians were looking for an issue to finally end the twenty year domination of the Democratic Party in national political life. Issues such as the “fall of China,” “the spread of Communism,” the “lack of attention to Asia,” and “subversion inside the State Department” became part of their public agenda. And President Truman, his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and other key advisers saw the need to expand U.S. military reach to Asia as well. With “the fall of China” Japan and the Korean peninsula were central to the geo-political expansion of US empire and the institutionalization of vibrant capitalist systems in Asia to challenge Communism.
Everybody Has an Interest in War
After describing the central characters in the Korean War drama, it becomes clear that they all would benefit from a massive and irrevocable U. S. military commitment to the anti-Communist regime in South Korea. Such a war would cap the distinguished military career of MacArthur, bring Christianity to Asia, shift foreign policy influence to missionary Republicans such as Dulles and others who wanted to expand U.S. domination to all of Asia, and would save the faltering political fortunes of the dictators in South Korea and Formosa who lacked support among their own people. Last, and not least, a Korean War would institutionalize, militarize, and globalize a United States foreign policy that would bring capitalism and democracy to the world.
The story Stone then tells is of lies and deceit designed to threaten and entice the North Koreans into making war on the South, changing the United States/United Nations response from defending the territory below the 38th parallel to expanding the war to the North, and doing whatever could be done to scare the Chinese into entering the war in full combat. Stone’s narrative shows how desperately the Chinese resisted all-out military response and how MacArthur’s headquarters at every turn resisted peace overtures.
The Stone narrative is long and complicated. Of course many have written about the Korean War since. But what so impacted me reading the book almost 60 years after its publication was the plausibility of the descriptions about how broad economic and political forces shaped and encouraged key decision-makers to act in despicable ways to serve their own interests, as well as United States empire. I am afraid that the United States approach to the Korean peninsula and foreign policy in general has not changed much since.
Any Way Out?
The best alternative to current U.S. foreign policy toward Korea and the world was recently expressed by the Veterans for Peace President Mike Ferner in a press release remembering the 60 year anniversary of the Korean War:
The recent unfortunate sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, should not be used as an excuse by any parties to renew the armed conflict that the armistice was supposed to address on July 27, 1953. Rivers of blood, mountains of pain and a permanent war economy in the U.S. are the true costs of this conflict. This sad anniversary renews VFP's commitment to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
The press release concluded:
As we observe the 60th anniversary of the Korean War of 1950-1953 today, it is time to end this tragic war, not re-ignite it. We urge all concerned parties in the Korean War--both Koreas, the United States, and China--to begin negotiations for a peace treaty and an official end to the war.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
DISSIDENTS, POLITICAL PRISONERS, CONTRACTORS, SPIES, AND CRIMINALS: DIFFERENT LABELS FOR DIFFERENT NATIONS
Harry Targ
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on the Jewish community in the United States to raise its voice in support of Agency for International Development “contractor,” “human rights activist,” supporter of the “isolated Jewish community in Cuba,” Alan Gross who is currently in jail for bringing unauthorized communications equipment to distribute to Cuban citizens.
The Clinton speech resembles the Cold War efforts of various administrations to get the support of ethnic groups to advocate for United States imperial policies: Poles, Hungarians, Koreans, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and counter-revolutionary Cubans. The Reagan administration launched a phony campaign in the 1980s to convince the American people that the Sandinista-led government in Nicaragua was anti-Semitic. Despite the efforts of a few holocaust survivors, a delegation of Jewish leaders, including rabbis, visited Nicaragua and reported that after careful investigation, the charges were false.
In addition, several dozen convicted violators of Cuban law, who probably had ties to U.S. efforts to undermine the Cuban government, have been referred to in the media as “dissidents,” or activists for “democratization” on the island. Curiously, the five Cubans who have been in U.S. prisons for working to uncover Cuban-American terrorist plots against the island are called “spies.”
Eleven Russians who have been living in the United States for years and all of a sudden have been identified as “spies” are being returned to Russia in exchange for spies funded by the United States who were serving prison terms in Russia.
Finally, a story just broke that an Iranian scientist who left his country and via Saudi Arabia came to the United States, presumably as a defector, is returning to Iran. Was he a defector? Is he an Iranian spy? Was his family in Iran threatened by the regime?
There are several morals from these stories. First, the United States continues to work to undermine, destabilize, and destroy the Cuban revolution. Gross is claimed to have been a conduit for humanitarian assistance to marginalized Cubans at the same time that Walter Lippman, CubaNews@yahoogroups.com, reports that the State Department is increasing the dispersal of funds to anti-government dissidents in Cuba: more money for “contractors” like Gross.
Second, the mainstream media never tells the story of the Cuban Five, who with the full knowledge of the FBI, were working to uncover violent plots against their country hatched in Miami.
Third, the spy story, Cubans, Russians, Iranians, or others captures the imagination and interest of the mainstream media. What makes stories like the capture of the Russian spies so silly is that most information any operatives from one or another government might want is available on the internet. But the spy story reminds us of the good old days of James Bond and Matt Helm and the Cold War.
Fourth, as to the old Cold War adversaries, bureaucratic institutions were established, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and KGB, to stimulate fear, justify bizarre militaristic policies, and stifle dissent. The FBI and the successor to the KGB need spies. In fact these two bloated and irresponsible bureaucracies, parallel to the military establishments of the former Cold War adversaries, need each other and so-called “spies” to justify their existence.
Finally, as to Cuba, Karen Wald has pointed out that Alan Gross, the humanitarian USAID “contractor” had not contacted Cuban Jews to distribute the communications technology that was supposed to improve their lives. Several years ago I visited the synagogue and community center, Patronato, in Vedado in Central Havana. The then Jewish community leader, Dr. Jose Miller, welcomed me and asked where I was from. I told him Indiana. He responded: “Ah Congressman Burton.” He knew that the Helms/Burton Act of 1996 tightened the economic blockade of Cuba. I took from his response the idea that the primary kind of humanitarian assistance the Jewish community of Cuba wanted from the United States was an end to the economic blockade.
But United States policy remains buried in the Cold War days: trying to undermine regimes, calling people who agree with us “dissidents,” “contractors,” humanitarians” and “political prisoners” and those we still oppose “spies,” and the regimes they serve dictatorships.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on the Jewish community in the United States to raise its voice in support of Agency for International Development “contractor,” “human rights activist,” supporter of the “isolated Jewish community in Cuba,” Alan Gross who is currently in jail for bringing unauthorized communications equipment to distribute to Cuban citizens.
The Clinton speech resembles the Cold War efforts of various administrations to get the support of ethnic groups to advocate for United States imperial policies: Poles, Hungarians, Koreans, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and counter-revolutionary Cubans. The Reagan administration launched a phony campaign in the 1980s to convince the American people that the Sandinista-led government in Nicaragua was anti-Semitic. Despite the efforts of a few holocaust survivors, a delegation of Jewish leaders, including rabbis, visited Nicaragua and reported that after careful investigation, the charges were false.
In addition, several dozen convicted violators of Cuban law, who probably had ties to U.S. efforts to undermine the Cuban government, have been referred to in the media as “dissidents,” or activists for “democratization” on the island. Curiously, the five Cubans who have been in U.S. prisons for working to uncover Cuban-American terrorist plots against the island are called “spies.”
Eleven Russians who have been living in the United States for years and all of a sudden have been identified as “spies” are being returned to Russia in exchange for spies funded by the United States who were serving prison terms in Russia.
Finally, a story just broke that an Iranian scientist who left his country and via Saudi Arabia came to the United States, presumably as a defector, is returning to Iran. Was he a defector? Is he an Iranian spy? Was his family in Iran threatened by the regime?
There are several morals from these stories. First, the United States continues to work to undermine, destabilize, and destroy the Cuban revolution. Gross is claimed to have been a conduit for humanitarian assistance to marginalized Cubans at the same time that Walter Lippman, CubaNews@yahoogroups.com, reports that the State Department is increasing the dispersal of funds to anti-government dissidents in Cuba: more money for “contractors” like Gross.
Second, the mainstream media never tells the story of the Cuban Five, who with the full knowledge of the FBI, were working to uncover violent plots against their country hatched in Miami.
Third, the spy story, Cubans, Russians, Iranians, or others captures the imagination and interest of the mainstream media. What makes stories like the capture of the Russian spies so silly is that most information any operatives from one or another government might want is available on the internet. But the spy story reminds us of the good old days of James Bond and Matt Helm and the Cold War.
Fourth, as to the old Cold War adversaries, bureaucratic institutions were established, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and KGB, to stimulate fear, justify bizarre militaristic policies, and stifle dissent. The FBI and the successor to the KGB need spies. In fact these two bloated and irresponsible bureaucracies, parallel to the military establishments of the former Cold War adversaries, need each other and so-called “spies” to justify their existence.
Finally, as to Cuba, Karen Wald has pointed out that Alan Gross, the humanitarian USAID “contractor” had not contacted Cuban Jews to distribute the communications technology that was supposed to improve their lives. Several years ago I visited the synagogue and community center, Patronato, in Vedado in Central Havana. The then Jewish community leader, Dr. Jose Miller, welcomed me and asked where I was from. I told him Indiana. He responded: “Ah Congressman Burton.” He knew that the Helms/Burton Act of 1996 tightened the economic blockade of Cuba. I took from his response the idea that the primary kind of humanitarian assistance the Jewish community of Cuba wanted from the United States was an end to the economic blockade.
But United States policy remains buried in the Cold War days: trying to undermine regimes, calling people who agree with us “dissidents,” “contractors,” humanitarians” and “political prisoners” and those we still oppose “spies,” and the regimes they serve dictatorships.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
CAPITALISM IS ABOUT PROFIT, NOT SAVING FINGERS
Harry Targ
I have been thinking a whole lot about the virtual destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, the rich animal life that once lived there, and the lost jobs of perhaps millions of those who fish, work in the tourist sector, or somehow depend on the resources of the Gulf Coast for their livelihood. Almost everybody, with the possible exception of libertarians and some Republicans, are condemning British Petroleum for the disaster that they and their corporate sisters such as Haliburton, Deep Water Horizon, and Transocean have wrought. Virtually everybody who comments on the disaster sanctimoniously attacks BP, granted an easy target. Somehow this seems to me to be mistaking the trees for the forest.
I reflected on this general impression when I was listening to a radio report on National Public Radio on Sunday, July 4 about table saw accidents.It seems that some 3,000 people per year cut off fingers with table saws and ten times that number have accidents that require emergency room visits. Carpenters work with these saws. Backyard hobbyists work with them. And lots of students still take high school shop courses in which they learn to fashion wood products using these dangerous devices.
About a decade ago Steve Gass invented the “SawStop.” The SawStop does everything an old table saw does with one difference. The sharp rotating saw senses when the blade is making contact with a finger. The SawStop sensor shuts down the saw before it can endanger the finger of the wood worker. “When the safety brake is triggered, the blade slams down into the table and away from the person’s hand.”
A logical idea concerning human safety would suggest that all table saws produced subsequent to the invention of this new safety feature would include the new SawStop technology. However, the story indicated, the machine tool industry has resisted adding the safety feature to its product. A spokesperson for the trade association of tool makers, the Power Tool Institute, indicated why the new safety feature has not been adopted. First, tool makers have always been studying new ways to make their products safer and they think they have found additions to the product that can protect consumers more cheaply. Second, adding the SawStop feature would add cost to the product, cost that they said would have to be transferred to the consumer. Third, adding the SawStop feature to the product, instead of some other, albeit less productive devices, “…could increase the consumer’s cost of table saws and reduce the ability of consumers to choose from among safe alternative designs,” said Susan Young, Power Tool Institute spokesperson.
Finally, the new chairperson of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Inez Tenenbaum, warned that if the industry does not embrace voluntary standards for product safety, then the government just might have to set product safety standards, presumably at some time in the distant future.
After listening to this NPR report, I reflected on the Gulf Coast disaster.
I went back to read a long and technical article about why the Gulf Coast disaster happened, by a research team including David Barstow, Laura Dodd, James Glanz, Stephanie Saul and Ian Urbina called “Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Save Device (The New York Times, June 20, 2010). The article examined why appropriate deep water drilling technology was not installed to prevent oil “spills” such as the BP disaster.
Their article lists a multiplicity of problems from lack of adequate government regulation and oversight; the failure of the Obama administration to deal with “the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations;” or the false sense of security of all “stakeholders” including corporations, the Congress, and the regulators. Most prominently mentioned in the story was the decision of the relevant corporations, Deepwater Horizon, acquired by Transocean, and contracted by British Petroleum, not to install appropriate technology to stifle accidental failures of drilling equipment. “…neither Transocean nor BP took steps to outfit the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer with two blind shear rams.” Why?
The reporters noted that all participating corporations realized the necessity from a safety point of view to have “blind shear rams” on all oil wells. But they suggest that the technology was not made available because of cost constraints. Oil industry studies estimated that pulling up blowout preventers for repairs would cost $700 per minute. “Those costs could be enough to draw the attention of Wall Street.” Industry sources also indicated that drilling corporations “cut corners on federally mandated tests of blowout preventers.”
The authors added that “BP and other oil companies helped finance a study early this year arguing that blowout preventer pressure tests conducted every 14 days should be stretched out to every 35 days. The industry estimated the change could save $193 million a year in lost productivity.”
Reflecting on the table saw industry and the 80-day reporting of the tragedy of the Gulf Coast, I began to think of some parallels between severed fingers and environmental spoilation. First, corporations engaged in very different productive activities are, by definition, driven by the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of more and more capital. Second, whatever the product, the producing corporations must maximize their profits, meaning minimizing their costs. Third, the ways to minimize costs include cutting wages, increasing worker productivity, minimizing costly health and safety provisions at the work place, and more generally circumventing expensive rules and regulations that are designed to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.
Therefore, while we are appropriately outraged at British Petroleum or Black and Decker and should demand that they meet federally determined and enforced health and safety standards, we need to be aware of the fact that the economic system of capitalism shapes and conditions the behavior of all corporations and banks. Some behave better than others and they should be applauded. But, in the end, only a system of humane, democratic socialism can create the conditions for the protection of fingers, hands, wildlife, rivers, streams, and oceans.
I have been thinking a whole lot about the virtual destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, the rich animal life that once lived there, and the lost jobs of perhaps millions of those who fish, work in the tourist sector, or somehow depend on the resources of the Gulf Coast for their livelihood. Almost everybody, with the possible exception of libertarians and some Republicans, are condemning British Petroleum for the disaster that they and their corporate sisters such as Haliburton, Deep Water Horizon, and Transocean have wrought. Virtually everybody who comments on the disaster sanctimoniously attacks BP, granted an easy target. Somehow this seems to me to be mistaking the trees for the forest.
I reflected on this general impression when I was listening to a radio report on National Public Radio on Sunday, July 4 about table saw accidents.It seems that some 3,000 people per year cut off fingers with table saws and ten times that number have accidents that require emergency room visits. Carpenters work with these saws. Backyard hobbyists work with them. And lots of students still take high school shop courses in which they learn to fashion wood products using these dangerous devices.
About a decade ago Steve Gass invented the “SawStop.” The SawStop does everything an old table saw does with one difference. The sharp rotating saw senses when the blade is making contact with a finger. The SawStop sensor shuts down the saw before it can endanger the finger of the wood worker. “When the safety brake is triggered, the blade slams down into the table and away from the person’s hand.”
A logical idea concerning human safety would suggest that all table saws produced subsequent to the invention of this new safety feature would include the new SawStop technology. However, the story indicated, the machine tool industry has resisted adding the safety feature to its product. A spokesperson for the trade association of tool makers, the Power Tool Institute, indicated why the new safety feature has not been adopted. First, tool makers have always been studying new ways to make their products safer and they think they have found additions to the product that can protect consumers more cheaply. Second, adding the SawStop feature would add cost to the product, cost that they said would have to be transferred to the consumer. Third, adding the SawStop feature to the product, instead of some other, albeit less productive devices, “…could increase the consumer’s cost of table saws and reduce the ability of consumers to choose from among safe alternative designs,” said Susan Young, Power Tool Institute spokesperson.
Finally, the new chairperson of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Inez Tenenbaum, warned that if the industry does not embrace voluntary standards for product safety, then the government just might have to set product safety standards, presumably at some time in the distant future.
After listening to this NPR report, I reflected on the Gulf Coast disaster.
I went back to read a long and technical article about why the Gulf Coast disaster happened, by a research team including David Barstow, Laura Dodd, James Glanz, Stephanie Saul and Ian Urbina called “Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Save Device (The New York Times, June 20, 2010). The article examined why appropriate deep water drilling technology was not installed to prevent oil “spills” such as the BP disaster.
Their article lists a multiplicity of problems from lack of adequate government regulation and oversight; the failure of the Obama administration to deal with “the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations;” or the false sense of security of all “stakeholders” including corporations, the Congress, and the regulators. Most prominently mentioned in the story was the decision of the relevant corporations, Deepwater Horizon, acquired by Transocean, and contracted by British Petroleum, not to install appropriate technology to stifle accidental failures of drilling equipment. “…neither Transocean nor BP took steps to outfit the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer with two blind shear rams.” Why?
The reporters noted that all participating corporations realized the necessity from a safety point of view to have “blind shear rams” on all oil wells. But they suggest that the technology was not made available because of cost constraints. Oil industry studies estimated that pulling up blowout preventers for repairs would cost $700 per minute. “Those costs could be enough to draw the attention of Wall Street.” Industry sources also indicated that drilling corporations “cut corners on federally mandated tests of blowout preventers.”
The authors added that “BP and other oil companies helped finance a study early this year arguing that blowout preventer pressure tests conducted every 14 days should be stretched out to every 35 days. The industry estimated the change could save $193 million a year in lost productivity.”
Reflecting on the table saw industry and the 80-day reporting of the tragedy of the Gulf Coast, I began to think of some parallels between severed fingers and environmental spoilation. First, corporations engaged in very different productive activities are, by definition, driven by the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of more and more capital. Second, whatever the product, the producing corporations must maximize their profits, meaning minimizing their costs. Third, the ways to minimize costs include cutting wages, increasing worker productivity, minimizing costly health and safety provisions at the work place, and more generally circumventing expensive rules and regulations that are designed to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.
Therefore, while we are appropriately outraged at British Petroleum or Black and Decker and should demand that they meet federally determined and enforced health and safety standards, we need to be aware of the fact that the economic system of capitalism shapes and conditions the behavior of all corporations and banks. Some behave better than others and they should be applauded. But, in the end, only a system of humane, democratic socialism can create the conditions for the protection of fingers, hands, wildlife, rivers, streams, and oceans.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
LET THE POETS SPEAK
Harry Targ
-Oil Spills as the Gulf of Mexico is Destroyed
-Judge with BP Stock Rules Against Government Regulation
-Several States Contemplate Arizona-Like Laws to Install Police Repression Against People of Color
-Millionaire Politicians Vote to Cut Off Benefits to the Jobless
-Media Ignores Massive Detroit Mobilization Against Poverty and War
-Media Continues to Advertise “Tea-Party” and Sarah Palin Without Ever Addressing Capitalism(fantasy headlines by the author, morning June 26)
Some of our finest poets described so well the nature of the empire in which we live and the need for resistance against it. Meridel Le Sueur, the socialist/feminist poet, novelist, and chronicler of the Great Depression and beyond wrote with power about twentieth century America in a way that could have been written this week.
None of my sons or grandsons took up guns against you.
And all the time the predators were poisoning the humus, polluting
the water, the hooves of empire passing over us all. White
hunters were aiming down the gunsights; villages wrecked,
mine and yours. Defoliated trees, gnawed earth, blasted embryos.
We also live in a captive country, in the belly of the shark.
The horrible faces of our predators, gloating, leering,
the bloody Ford and Rockefeller and Kissinger presiding over
the violation of Asia (Meridel Le Sueur)
Langston Hughes, African American poet, captured United States history powerfully in the words of class and race
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
(Langston Hughes)
And balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote verses, often unsung, for the unofficial American anthem, “This Land is Your Land?”
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me? (Woody Guthrie)
Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer of Abraham Lincoln, and children’s author, reminded us of who has made history and ironically created the exploitation of the producing class.
I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Poets usually are driven by a vision of a better world. For Langston Hughes:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
And for Woody Guthrie:
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
And finally poets offer the hope of resistance and change:
How can we touch each other, my sisters?
How can we hear each other over the criminal space?
How can we touch each other over the agony of bloody roses?
I always feel you near, your sorrow like a wind in the
great legend of your resistance, your strong and delicate strength.
It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.
(Meridel Le Sueur)
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me. (Woody Guthrie)
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to
remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then. (Carl Sandburg)
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again! (Langston Hughes)
Selections from the following poems:
Meridel Le Sueur, “Doan Ket,” http://workingwomen.wikispaces.com/lesueur
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83
Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land?”
http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.
Carl Sandburg, “I Am the People, the Mob,”
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15264
-Oil Spills as the Gulf of Mexico is Destroyed
-Judge with BP Stock Rules Against Government Regulation
-Several States Contemplate Arizona-Like Laws to Install Police Repression Against People of Color
-Millionaire Politicians Vote to Cut Off Benefits to the Jobless
-Media Ignores Massive Detroit Mobilization Against Poverty and War
-Media Continues to Advertise “Tea-Party” and Sarah Palin Without Ever Addressing Capitalism(fantasy headlines by the author, morning June 26)
Some of our finest poets described so well the nature of the empire in which we live and the need for resistance against it. Meridel Le Sueur, the socialist/feminist poet, novelist, and chronicler of the Great Depression and beyond wrote with power about twentieth century America in a way that could have been written this week.
None of my sons or grandsons took up guns against you.
And all the time the predators were poisoning the humus, polluting
the water, the hooves of empire passing over us all. White
hunters were aiming down the gunsights; villages wrecked,
mine and yours. Defoliated trees, gnawed earth, blasted embryos.
We also live in a captive country, in the belly of the shark.
The horrible faces of our predators, gloating, leering,
the bloody Ford and Rockefeller and Kissinger presiding over
the violation of Asia (Meridel Le Sueur)
Langston Hughes, African American poet, captured United States history powerfully in the words of class and race
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
(Langston Hughes)
And balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote verses, often unsung, for the unofficial American anthem, “This Land is Your Land?”
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me? (Woody Guthrie)
Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer of Abraham Lincoln, and children’s author, reminded us of who has made history and ironically created the exploitation of the producing class.
I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Poets usually are driven by a vision of a better world. For Langston Hughes:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
And for Woody Guthrie:
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
And finally poets offer the hope of resistance and change:
How can we touch each other, my sisters?
How can we hear each other over the criminal space?
How can we touch each other over the agony of bloody roses?
I always feel you near, your sorrow like a wind in the
great legend of your resistance, your strong and delicate strength.
It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.
(Meridel Le Sueur)
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me. (Woody Guthrie)
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to
remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then. (Carl Sandburg)
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again! (Langston Hughes)
Selections from the following poems:
Meridel Le Sueur, “Doan Ket,” http://workingwomen.wikispaces.com/lesueur
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83
Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land?”
http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.
Carl Sandburg, “I Am the People, the Mob,”
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15264
Sunday, June 20, 2010
KOREA:"OUR FORGOTTEN WAR"
Harry Targ
"If we stand up to them [the communists] . . . they won't take any next steps. There's no telling what they'll do if we don't put up a fight now."
President Harry Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
On June 25, 1950, communist-backed troops from North Korea invaded a hopelessly overmatched South Korea. American-led U.N. forces quickly came to the aid of South Korea, but the war unexpectedly escalated five months later when China, in support of North Korea, launched a massive attack on U.N. forces near the Yalu River.
Three years of brutal fighting followed as both armies hurled each other up and down the Korean peninsula. More than 54,000 U.S. soldiers died during the war, which technically has never officially ended but has been in a prolonged cease-fire since 1953.
North Korea often states that it is still at war, but the reality is that tenacious fighting by U.S. and U.N. soldiers successfully repelled the invading communist forces and pushed them back across the 38th Parallel border. South Korea remains a free nation, one of the most prosperous in Asia, while North Korea is one of the most repressive.
Chris Gibbons, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
The Annual Fantasy
Americans relive and debate the Vietnam War. Analysts discuss “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the “albatross” that shackled every president, and/or claims about where every candidate for public office was during Vietnam. To the contrary, the Korean War, which in the words of the U.S. government was launched by the aggressive invasion of North Korean armies below the 38th parallel into South Korea 60 years ago on June 25, 1950, is beyond question.
As newspapers often title Korea, “Our Forgotten War,” the story is simple; Communist aggressors (inspired by Moscow) invaded a free nation (South Korea). The Americans mobilized United Nations support and boldly counter-attacked forcing the Communist aggressors back North. Then, the story goes, the US-led army of the free people went North of the 38th parallel to liberate North Korea from its dictatorship. This invasion was foiled by a massive Chinese Communist military response. While a ceasefire was established in 1953, conflict on the peninsula remains between the prosperous and free South Korea and the poor and totalitarian North Korea.
Key Facts
This fantasy, created in 1950, set the stage for a sixty year rationalization for trillions of dollars of military spending, hundreds of thousands of US soldiers killed and wounded, and the deaths of millions of people, largely from the Global South, who were unwilling hosts of wars, interventions, and domestic violence related to the Cold War.
Just a brief examination of the history of the Far East suggests that the fantasy is just that. The Korean Peninsula was colonized by the Japanese before World War I. At the end of World War II, with their defeat, Koreans all across the peninsula believed that they, at last, would be able to establish their own independent government. “Peoples Assemblies” began to meet to plan for a post-war Korean government. However, at the urging of the United States, it and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the peninsula at the 38th parallel until such time as an independent government, desirable to the victorious powers could be established.
The United States government over the next three years brought exiled Korean Syngman Rhee back to the country to establish a government in the US occupied zone. Rhee, an émigré with ties to large landowners, was not popular with South Korean farmers, many of whom rebelled against the new government imposed by Washington. In areas where rebellions were stifled, the United Nations held “elections” for a new government. Rhee and his party were victorious. And in the North, a regime allied with the Soviet Union was established led by Kim Il Sung, long-time Korean Communist party organizer.
In 1948 Soviet troops were withdrawn from the North and in 1949 US troops from the South. Both leaders, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, declared their commitments to liberate the other half to establish one Korean government. Some US congressmen began to balk at Truman requests to continue to fund the corrupt Rhee government in the South.
In May, 1950 Republican spokesman on foreign policy John Foster Dulles visited South Korea and spoke in support of Syngman Rhee, whose domestic support was faltering, and then Rhee and Dulles flew off to the Tokyo headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, overseer of post-war Japan. It is important to note that shots had been fired both ways across the 38th parallel for months before these events.
Finally, as the official story suggests, North Korean troops invaded the South on June 25, 1950. South Korean military forces, heavily subsidized and trained by the United States, fled South and within a month much of the country below the 38th parallel was occupied by Northern armies.
Then the US, with UN support, launched a counter-assault in September, 1950, led by General MacArthur, who already had declared his vision of creating a Christian and anti-Communist Asia. North Korean armies were forced back north of the 38th parallel and with the urging of MacArthur and other virulent Cold Warriors in the Truman administration an apocryphal decision was made to take the war to the North. The Chinese, fearful of an invasion of their own land, entered the war on the side of North Korean armies. The Korean War was extended until 1953 and a troubled ceasefire was established that still prevails today.
What the Real History Suggests
First, as historian Robert Simmons wrote: “There were constant and sizeable armed clashes and border incursions between the North and South for over a year before the final crisis…the Seoul regime enjoyed little popular support…it had announced its intention to invade the North and appeared to be preparing to do so…”
Second, the division of Korea in 1945 defied the wishes of the Korean people, Communist and non-Communist alike. In the South, Syngman Rhee was regarded as an outsider and representative of the small land-owning class of Koreans (a character similar to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam).
Third, the Korean War was in fact a civil war which the Truman administration chose to define as the first great conflagration in the global struggle against worldwide Communism. Many scholars suggest to the contrary that North Korean Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade the South was made by him without approval or support from the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet delegate at the United Nations was boycotting the Security Council at the time the Council voted to condemn the invasion of the South. If the Soviet delegate was aware of the planned invasion he probably would have attended the Security Council session to veto the US resolution condemning the North Korean invasion.
Consequences of “Our Forgotten War”
The decision by the Truman administration to enter the war to “save” the Rhee regime in the South signified a permanent commitment to an imperial policy that continues to this day. As political scientist Hans Morgenthau once wrote, after the Korean War started reversing US/Soviet conflicts and the militarization of the world was no longer possible.
The Korean War gave support to those Truman administration advocates for the full militarization of United States foreign policy and US society. National Security Council Document 68 had been circulating inside the administration at that time. It called for a dramatic increase in annual military spending based on the proposition that each president should give the military all it wanted before any other expenditures for government programs were adopted. Specifically it called for an immediate four-fold increase in military spending, a proposal that some fiscal conservatives had opposed. After Korea virtually all restrictions on military spending were lifted.
Additional byproducts of the new US commitment to a Korean War included the following: finalizing the construction of an anti-Communist Japanese economy to balance the new Chinese Communist regime; making permanent the US financial commitment to the French in Indochina (a prelude to the next big war, in Vietnam); circulating the idea of an Asian military alliance to be called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and stimulating anti-Communist repression domestically.
As we reflect on the limited economic development in the North and the dramatic growth in the South, both products of the Cold War, the impacts of “Our Forgotten War” on the Korean people should be recalled. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko wrote:
“The United States air force had completely destroyed all usual strategic bombing targets in North Korea within three months time, and by the end of the first year of combat it had dropped 97,000 tons of bombs and 7.8 million gallons of napalm, destroying 125,000 buildings that might ‘shelter’ the enemy. In mid-1952 it turned to the systematic destruction of mines and cement plants…” and the “…Suihu hydroelectric complex on the Yalu.”
They added that Syngman Rhee rounded up 400,000 South Koreans who were put in concentration camps. The authors wrote: “The Korean War, in effect, became a war against an entire nation, civilians and soldiers, Communists and anti-Communists alike. Everything-from villages to military targets-the United States considered a legitimate target for attack.” At least four million Koreans, North and South died, were wounded, or were made homeless (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-54).
So despite the fact that the Korean War has become “Our Forgotten War,” the decision to enter Korea globalized, militarized, and institutionalized a U.S. policy that rationalized wars on entire populations ever since.
"If we stand up to them [the communists] . . . they won't take any next steps. There's no telling what they'll do if we don't put up a fight now."
President Harry Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
On June 25, 1950, communist-backed troops from North Korea invaded a hopelessly overmatched South Korea. American-led U.N. forces quickly came to the aid of South Korea, but the war unexpectedly escalated five months later when China, in support of North Korea, launched a massive attack on U.N. forces near the Yalu River.
Three years of brutal fighting followed as both armies hurled each other up and down the Korean peninsula. More than 54,000 U.S. soldiers died during the war, which technically has never officially ended but has been in a prolonged cease-fire since 1953.
North Korea often states that it is still at war, but the reality is that tenacious fighting by U.S. and U.N. soldiers successfully repelled the invading communist forces and pushed them back across the 38th Parallel border. South Korea remains a free nation, one of the most prosperous in Asia, while North Korea is one of the most repressive.
Chris Gibbons, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010
The Annual Fantasy
Americans relive and debate the Vietnam War. Analysts discuss “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the “albatross” that shackled every president, and/or claims about where every candidate for public office was during Vietnam. To the contrary, the Korean War, which in the words of the U.S. government was launched by the aggressive invasion of North Korean armies below the 38th parallel into South Korea 60 years ago on June 25, 1950, is beyond question.
As newspapers often title Korea, “Our Forgotten War,” the story is simple; Communist aggressors (inspired by Moscow) invaded a free nation (South Korea). The Americans mobilized United Nations support and boldly counter-attacked forcing the Communist aggressors back North. Then, the story goes, the US-led army of the free people went North of the 38th parallel to liberate North Korea from its dictatorship. This invasion was foiled by a massive Chinese Communist military response. While a ceasefire was established in 1953, conflict on the peninsula remains between the prosperous and free South Korea and the poor and totalitarian North Korea.
Key Facts
This fantasy, created in 1950, set the stage for a sixty year rationalization for trillions of dollars of military spending, hundreds of thousands of US soldiers killed and wounded, and the deaths of millions of people, largely from the Global South, who were unwilling hosts of wars, interventions, and domestic violence related to the Cold War.
Just a brief examination of the history of the Far East suggests that the fantasy is just that. The Korean Peninsula was colonized by the Japanese before World War I. At the end of World War II, with their defeat, Koreans all across the peninsula believed that they, at last, would be able to establish their own independent government. “Peoples Assemblies” began to meet to plan for a post-war Korean government. However, at the urging of the United States, it and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the peninsula at the 38th parallel until such time as an independent government, desirable to the victorious powers could be established.
The United States government over the next three years brought exiled Korean Syngman Rhee back to the country to establish a government in the US occupied zone. Rhee, an émigré with ties to large landowners, was not popular with South Korean farmers, many of whom rebelled against the new government imposed by Washington. In areas where rebellions were stifled, the United Nations held “elections” for a new government. Rhee and his party were victorious. And in the North, a regime allied with the Soviet Union was established led by Kim Il Sung, long-time Korean Communist party organizer.
In 1948 Soviet troops were withdrawn from the North and in 1949 US troops from the South. Both leaders, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, declared their commitments to liberate the other half to establish one Korean government. Some US congressmen began to balk at Truman requests to continue to fund the corrupt Rhee government in the South.
In May, 1950 Republican spokesman on foreign policy John Foster Dulles visited South Korea and spoke in support of Syngman Rhee, whose domestic support was faltering, and then Rhee and Dulles flew off to the Tokyo headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, overseer of post-war Japan. It is important to note that shots had been fired both ways across the 38th parallel for months before these events.
Finally, as the official story suggests, North Korean troops invaded the South on June 25, 1950. South Korean military forces, heavily subsidized and trained by the United States, fled South and within a month much of the country below the 38th parallel was occupied by Northern armies.
Then the US, with UN support, launched a counter-assault in September, 1950, led by General MacArthur, who already had declared his vision of creating a Christian and anti-Communist Asia. North Korean armies were forced back north of the 38th parallel and with the urging of MacArthur and other virulent Cold Warriors in the Truman administration an apocryphal decision was made to take the war to the North. The Chinese, fearful of an invasion of their own land, entered the war on the side of North Korean armies. The Korean War was extended until 1953 and a troubled ceasefire was established that still prevails today.
What the Real History Suggests
First, as historian Robert Simmons wrote: “There were constant and sizeable armed clashes and border incursions between the North and South for over a year before the final crisis…the Seoul regime enjoyed little popular support…it had announced its intention to invade the North and appeared to be preparing to do so…”
Second, the division of Korea in 1945 defied the wishes of the Korean people, Communist and non-Communist alike. In the South, Syngman Rhee was regarded as an outsider and representative of the small land-owning class of Koreans (a character similar to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam).
Third, the Korean War was in fact a civil war which the Truman administration chose to define as the first great conflagration in the global struggle against worldwide Communism. Many scholars suggest to the contrary that North Korean Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade the South was made by him without approval or support from the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet delegate at the United Nations was boycotting the Security Council at the time the Council voted to condemn the invasion of the South. If the Soviet delegate was aware of the planned invasion he probably would have attended the Security Council session to veto the US resolution condemning the North Korean invasion.
Consequences of “Our Forgotten War”
The decision by the Truman administration to enter the war to “save” the Rhee regime in the South signified a permanent commitment to an imperial policy that continues to this day. As political scientist Hans Morgenthau once wrote, after the Korean War started reversing US/Soviet conflicts and the militarization of the world was no longer possible.
The Korean War gave support to those Truman administration advocates for the full militarization of United States foreign policy and US society. National Security Council Document 68 had been circulating inside the administration at that time. It called for a dramatic increase in annual military spending based on the proposition that each president should give the military all it wanted before any other expenditures for government programs were adopted. Specifically it called for an immediate four-fold increase in military spending, a proposal that some fiscal conservatives had opposed. After Korea virtually all restrictions on military spending were lifted.
Additional byproducts of the new US commitment to a Korean War included the following: finalizing the construction of an anti-Communist Japanese economy to balance the new Chinese Communist regime; making permanent the US financial commitment to the French in Indochina (a prelude to the next big war, in Vietnam); circulating the idea of an Asian military alliance to be called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and stimulating anti-Communist repression domestically.
As we reflect on the limited economic development in the North and the dramatic growth in the South, both products of the Cold War, the impacts of “Our Forgotten War” on the Korean people should be recalled. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko wrote:
“The United States air force had completely destroyed all usual strategic bombing targets in North Korea within three months time, and by the end of the first year of combat it had dropped 97,000 tons of bombs and 7.8 million gallons of napalm, destroying 125,000 buildings that might ‘shelter’ the enemy. In mid-1952 it turned to the systematic destruction of mines and cement plants…” and the “…Suihu hydroelectric complex on the Yalu.”
They added that Syngman Rhee rounded up 400,000 South Koreans who were put in concentration camps. The authors wrote: “The Korean War, in effect, became a war against an entire nation, civilians and soldiers, Communists and anti-Communists alike. Everything-from villages to military targets-the United States considered a legitimate target for attack.” At least four million Koreans, North and South died, were wounded, or were made homeless (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-54).
So despite the fact that the Korean War has become “Our Forgotten War,” the decision to enter Korea globalized, militarized, and institutionalized a U.S. policy that rationalized wars on entire populations ever since.
Friday, June 11, 2010
FOREIGN POLICY AND CLASS STRUGGLE: THE EXAMPLE OF THE PACKINGHOUSE WORKERS AFTER WORLD WAR II
Harry Targ
The Connection Between Class Struggle and Peace
Foreign policy has long been used to divide workers. During the Cold War “anti-Communism” linked an external enemy with so-called domestic enemies in the labor and civil rights movements. The external enemy and its domestic collaborators justified the construction of a permanent war economy, worker sacrifices through taxes, loss of shop floor rights, and the “need” to limit labor organizing. Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the labor movement today have their roots in the mobilization of the American people to respond to the “threat of international communism.” In the post-Cold War international system cheap labor overseas and the threat of international terrorism have been used to manipulate workers and limit their ability to organize. But even during the height of the Cold War, sectors of the labor movement resisted the simplistic claims such as that declared by one CEO that the threat to America came from “the Soviet Union abroad and the labor movement at home.”
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) successfully organized most of the large meat-packing plants in the United States by 1943 when it was fully chartered as a union in the new Congress of Industrial Organizations. Unfortunately after World War II ended, the CIO slowly but steadily embraced the anti-Communist policies of the day. In 1949 eleven unions were purged from the CIO for their alleged Communist sympathies and affiliations. Even though the UPWA was not one of the eleven it increasingly opposed the militarization of the Cold War, avoided some of the worst internal manifestations of “red-baiting” of union members, and, in 1953 took a stance against the U.S. Cold War record and the Korean War. It published in The Packinghouse Worker, the union newspaper, a condemnation of U.S. Korean War policy in a four-page essay entitled “The Road Ahead.”
McCarthyism, the Korean War, and “The Road Ahead”
The use of the “Communist threat” to generate support for an imperial U.S. foreign policy and repression of union militancy was well advanced by the time Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his February, 1950 speech that made him famous identifying 204 Communists in the State Department. Along with the anti-labor Taft–Hartley Act requiring union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, the Internal Security Act of 1950 required “Communist front” and “Communist action” groups to register with the government. Spy trials, such as those against Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Smith Act trials of members of the Communist Party, and investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), had thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere such that serious debate about United States foreign policy was stifled.
HUAC particularly called public hearings in communities where workers were on strike; ordering union leaders to appear to answer questions about their political affiliations. The issue of “Communism,” which was often defined as opposition to U.S. foreign policy, was divisive in the labor movement even after the eleven progressive unions were purged from the CIO in 1949.
Anti-Communist sentiment found its way into various district organizations of the UPWA. For example, in 1950, one of the ten UPWA districts passed a resolution barring Communists from office in the union. This prompted Vice President Frank Ellis, a former organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, to declare that “No labor union ever was destroyed by an employer. Unions break only when they quarrel among themselves “(Packinghouse Worker, April 21, 1950).
A more typical resolution was passed by the progressive Chicago-based District One convention. It said: “We reject red-baiting and witch-hunting. We reaffirm our belief that the sole judge and worth of any union member shall be his contribution to the advancement and the interest of the packinghouse workers.” The resolution also opposed those forces which favored “a shooting war,” and urged “active measures for peace,” including United States-Soviet negotiations on resolving the arms race. The connection between foreign policy and labor issues was proposed. “We packinghouse workers have felt the effects of the Cold War policy in terms of heavy layoffs, of speed-up and the piling up of grievances and of sharp attacks on the very existence of our union” (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1950).
At the 1950 UPWA national convention President Ralph Helstein spoke against barring Communists from office. However, guest speaker CIO President Philip Murray attacked the recently ousted eleven unions as “Communist-dominated” and spoke of the “Communist bloc” within the CIO “who continued to vote for Russia, for Communism-against their own unions and their own country. To hell with them” he declared (Packinghouse Worker, June 10, 1950).
Subsequently, after the onset of the Korean War in late June, 1950 Murray wired President Truman declaring: “The CIO stands solidly behind your effort to halt this act of Communist aggression and to restore peace in Asia (Packinghouse Worker, July 14, 1950). In his Labor Day speech in September, Murray warned that workers were being challenged by the threat of world war. “The threat comes from the masters of Communist world strategy. They have already shown their tactics and their objectives in Korea. We support our government’s efforts to halt the vicious aggression provoked by the Communists in Korea”(Packinghouse Worker, September, 1950).
Despite Murray and his supporters in the CIO, the UPWA left-center coalition of the 1940s held together. A theme running throughout statements of left-center forces in the union was that anti-Communism, anti-labor legislation, and a militaristic foreign policy were all connected. Lyle Cooper, UPWA economist, warned that war is being used to create prosperity for the rich. He said that the “biggest danger in all of this is that the powers that be become afraid of peace. Since war orders become the foundation for this phony prosperity, a war psychology must be maintained and spread as wide as possible among our people” (Packinghouse Worker, November, 1950).
Strong opposition to U.S. foreign policy was expressed by resolutions and statements from several UPWA district organizations. One district declared that the Korean War was being used as a “smokescreen” for reactionary attacks on workers’ living standards. District One, which included the Chicago meat packing plants proclaimed that “The Taft-Hartley and McCarran laws have been crammed down the throat of labor and the promises of civil rights and fair employment have been thrown into the waste basket.” They condemned the use of worldwide military forces that were protecting markets and profits overseas. “… it has become increasingly obvious that the war in Korea is being used by giant U.S. corporations as an excuse for piling up billions in profits at the expense of the farmers and working people of our country and their sons who are fighting.” (Packinghouse Worker, May 12, 1951 and July 13, 1951).
All of these expressions of opposition to U.S. foreign policy and domestic repression stimulated two analytical statements from the international union leadership. The first, a front page Packinghouse Worker commentary, was titled “We Shall Speak Up Now!” The article discussed the growing military power over civilian government and that government and military power increasingly served the interests of big business. All of these forces planned for more war and to divide and weaken the labor movement. Fear was used to attack schools, unions, churches, and other institutions. The commentary referred metaphorically to “germ warfare,” a spreading disease that induces massive subservience to the wishes of the military and war profiteers. In response to this milieu of fear and repression, the commentary claimed, unions must speak out (Packinghouse Worker, March, 1953).
The second document was a four-page statement entitled “The Road Ahead,” inserted in the April 1953 issue of the Packinghouse Worker. At the outset it asserted that the drift of the United States and the world toward war and oppression required discussion and a dedication to social change. Particularly “…unless there is a very quick and drastic change in the thinking and action of the labor movement, history will record that in the showdown, labor failed miserably in the performance of the historically progressive function which is properly assigned to organizations of working people.” The document lists such problems as the danger of nuclear war, the Korean War, high taxes for the war machine, and repression of dissent. Big business, it contended, had pursued profits at home and overseas unconcerned by these problems while labor remained silent.
The document discussed the “dictatorship of fear” which had resulted from repression and witch-hunting. Labor, it was argued, must speak out and act to defend liberty from the attacks of those who would stifle dissent. “The Road Ahead” therefore involved freedom, world peace, and prosperity, suggesting that the war-peace issues and the freedom and prosperity issues were interconnected in a fundamental way (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1953). Consequently, the UPWA leadership decided that the labor movement had to extend its horizons beyond collective bargaining; that successes on bread-and-butter issues, better working conditions, and economic security depended on a foreign policy of peace and anti-colonialism.
Class Struggle, Peace, and Justice
Sometimes stories such as that of the UPWA in the 1940s and 1950s capture our attention because they are interesting or inspiring. Also, sometimes these stories provide insights that still bear relevance to political struggles today.
In the case of the UPWA, its effectiveness as a workers’ organization was affected by its willingness to resist the power of big capital. This effectiveness was hindered by the Cold War foreign policy of the 1940s to the 1960s, competition between it and other unions, the mass mobilization of cultural and educational institutions to promote the fear of Communism, state repression, and efforts to incite racism among the membership of the union.
In the face of exploitation, repression, anti-Communism, and racism the union staked out an independent politics in the depths of the Cold War. Central to this politics were two principles: first, that the humanity of all workers is determined by their common struggles and solidarity; and second that the character of the foreign policy of the United States is intimately connected to the well-being of the working class.
(This essay was taken from Harry Targ, “Foreign Policy and Class Struggle in the United Packinghouse Workers of America: 1945-1953,” Nature, Society and Thought, Vol.4, no.1/2 1991).
The Connection Between Class Struggle and Peace
Foreign policy has long been used to divide workers. During the Cold War “anti-Communism” linked an external enemy with so-called domestic enemies in the labor and civil rights movements. The external enemy and its domestic collaborators justified the construction of a permanent war economy, worker sacrifices through taxes, loss of shop floor rights, and the “need” to limit labor organizing. Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the labor movement today have their roots in the mobilization of the American people to respond to the “threat of international communism.” In the post-Cold War international system cheap labor overseas and the threat of international terrorism have been used to manipulate workers and limit their ability to organize. But even during the height of the Cold War, sectors of the labor movement resisted the simplistic claims such as that declared by one CEO that the threat to America came from “the Soviet Union abroad and the labor movement at home.”
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) successfully organized most of the large meat-packing plants in the United States by 1943 when it was fully chartered as a union in the new Congress of Industrial Organizations. Unfortunately after World War II ended, the CIO slowly but steadily embraced the anti-Communist policies of the day. In 1949 eleven unions were purged from the CIO for their alleged Communist sympathies and affiliations. Even though the UPWA was not one of the eleven it increasingly opposed the militarization of the Cold War, avoided some of the worst internal manifestations of “red-baiting” of union members, and, in 1953 took a stance against the U.S. Cold War record and the Korean War. It published in The Packinghouse Worker, the union newspaper, a condemnation of U.S. Korean War policy in a four-page essay entitled “The Road Ahead.”
McCarthyism, the Korean War, and “The Road Ahead”
The use of the “Communist threat” to generate support for an imperial U.S. foreign policy and repression of union militancy was well advanced by the time Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his February, 1950 speech that made him famous identifying 204 Communists in the State Department. Along with the anti-labor Taft–Hartley Act requiring union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not Communists, the Internal Security Act of 1950 required “Communist front” and “Communist action” groups to register with the government. Spy trials, such as those against Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Smith Act trials of members of the Communist Party, and investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), had thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere such that serious debate about United States foreign policy was stifled.
HUAC particularly called public hearings in communities where workers were on strike; ordering union leaders to appear to answer questions about their political affiliations. The issue of “Communism,” which was often defined as opposition to U.S. foreign policy, was divisive in the labor movement even after the eleven progressive unions were purged from the CIO in 1949.
Anti-Communist sentiment found its way into various district organizations of the UPWA. For example, in 1950, one of the ten UPWA districts passed a resolution barring Communists from office in the union. This prompted Vice President Frank Ellis, a former organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, to declare that “No labor union ever was destroyed by an employer. Unions break only when they quarrel among themselves “(Packinghouse Worker, April 21, 1950).
A more typical resolution was passed by the progressive Chicago-based District One convention. It said: “We reject red-baiting and witch-hunting. We reaffirm our belief that the sole judge and worth of any union member shall be his contribution to the advancement and the interest of the packinghouse workers.” The resolution also opposed those forces which favored “a shooting war,” and urged “active measures for peace,” including United States-Soviet negotiations on resolving the arms race. The connection between foreign policy and labor issues was proposed. “We packinghouse workers have felt the effects of the Cold War policy in terms of heavy layoffs, of speed-up and the piling up of grievances and of sharp attacks on the very existence of our union” (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1950).
At the 1950 UPWA national convention President Ralph Helstein spoke against barring Communists from office. However, guest speaker CIO President Philip Murray attacked the recently ousted eleven unions as “Communist-dominated” and spoke of the “Communist bloc” within the CIO “who continued to vote for Russia, for Communism-against their own unions and their own country. To hell with them” he declared (Packinghouse Worker, June 10, 1950).
Subsequently, after the onset of the Korean War in late June, 1950 Murray wired President Truman declaring: “The CIO stands solidly behind your effort to halt this act of Communist aggression and to restore peace in Asia (Packinghouse Worker, July 14, 1950). In his Labor Day speech in September, Murray warned that workers were being challenged by the threat of world war. “The threat comes from the masters of Communist world strategy. They have already shown their tactics and their objectives in Korea. We support our government’s efforts to halt the vicious aggression provoked by the Communists in Korea”(Packinghouse Worker, September, 1950).
Despite Murray and his supporters in the CIO, the UPWA left-center coalition of the 1940s held together. A theme running throughout statements of left-center forces in the union was that anti-Communism, anti-labor legislation, and a militaristic foreign policy were all connected. Lyle Cooper, UPWA economist, warned that war is being used to create prosperity for the rich. He said that the “biggest danger in all of this is that the powers that be become afraid of peace. Since war orders become the foundation for this phony prosperity, a war psychology must be maintained and spread as wide as possible among our people” (Packinghouse Worker, November, 1950).
Strong opposition to U.S. foreign policy was expressed by resolutions and statements from several UPWA district organizations. One district declared that the Korean War was being used as a “smokescreen” for reactionary attacks on workers’ living standards. District One, which included the Chicago meat packing plants proclaimed that “The Taft-Hartley and McCarran laws have been crammed down the throat of labor and the promises of civil rights and fair employment have been thrown into the waste basket.” They condemned the use of worldwide military forces that were protecting markets and profits overseas. “… it has become increasingly obvious that the war in Korea is being used by giant U.S. corporations as an excuse for piling up billions in profits at the expense of the farmers and working people of our country and their sons who are fighting.” (Packinghouse Worker, May 12, 1951 and July 13, 1951).
All of these expressions of opposition to U.S. foreign policy and domestic repression stimulated two analytical statements from the international union leadership. The first, a front page Packinghouse Worker commentary, was titled “We Shall Speak Up Now!” The article discussed the growing military power over civilian government and that government and military power increasingly served the interests of big business. All of these forces planned for more war and to divide and weaken the labor movement. Fear was used to attack schools, unions, churches, and other institutions. The commentary referred metaphorically to “germ warfare,” a spreading disease that induces massive subservience to the wishes of the military and war profiteers. In response to this milieu of fear and repression, the commentary claimed, unions must speak out (Packinghouse Worker, March, 1953).
The second document was a four-page statement entitled “The Road Ahead,” inserted in the April 1953 issue of the Packinghouse Worker. At the outset it asserted that the drift of the United States and the world toward war and oppression required discussion and a dedication to social change. Particularly “…unless there is a very quick and drastic change in the thinking and action of the labor movement, history will record that in the showdown, labor failed miserably in the performance of the historically progressive function which is properly assigned to organizations of working people.” The document lists such problems as the danger of nuclear war, the Korean War, high taxes for the war machine, and repression of dissent. Big business, it contended, had pursued profits at home and overseas unconcerned by these problems while labor remained silent.
The document discussed the “dictatorship of fear” which had resulted from repression and witch-hunting. Labor, it was argued, must speak out and act to defend liberty from the attacks of those who would stifle dissent. “The Road Ahead” therefore involved freedom, world peace, and prosperity, suggesting that the war-peace issues and the freedom and prosperity issues were interconnected in a fundamental way (Packinghouse Worker, April, 1953). Consequently, the UPWA leadership decided that the labor movement had to extend its horizons beyond collective bargaining; that successes on bread-and-butter issues, better working conditions, and economic security depended on a foreign policy of peace and anti-colonialism.
Class Struggle, Peace, and Justice
Sometimes stories such as that of the UPWA in the 1940s and 1950s capture our attention because they are interesting or inspiring. Also, sometimes these stories provide insights that still bear relevance to political struggles today.
In the case of the UPWA, its effectiveness as a workers’ organization was affected by its willingness to resist the power of big capital. This effectiveness was hindered by the Cold War foreign policy of the 1940s to the 1960s, competition between it and other unions, the mass mobilization of cultural and educational institutions to promote the fear of Communism, state repression, and efforts to incite racism among the membership of the union.
In the face of exploitation, repression, anti-Communism, and racism the union staked out an independent politics in the depths of the Cold War. Central to this politics were two principles: first, that the humanity of all workers is determined by their common struggles and solidarity; and second that the character of the foreign policy of the United States is intimately connected to the well-being of the working class.
(This essay was taken from Harry Targ, “Foreign Policy and Class Struggle in the United Packinghouse Workers of America: 1945-1953,” Nature, Society and Thought, Vol.4, no.1/2 1991).
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