Category Archives: Democracy

Unions, democracy and the US in Haiti

The following is an edited version of a post to the Working Class Studies listserv by Kim Scipes:

January 29, 2006–

…In today’s [New York Times], there is a quite interesting article on the US operations in Haiti. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PIECE–PLEASE READ. …

The article is titled “Democracy Undone: Mixed US Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos” and is written by Walt Bogdanitch and Jenny Nordberg. (As I mention below, I don’t think the “US signals” were “mixed,” but this is a case where the two different “wings” of US foreign policy came into conflict, and now has been exposed, with some very interesting information included.)

Despite straight journalism’s approaches to something, what you get here in an incredibly detailed look at US policy in Haiti. But, crucially, what these journalists show is not only official policy, but also the activities of the International Republican Institute (IRI). I cannot remember such a detailed accounting in the straight press about IRI operations. (And while minor, there are references to Venezuela included.) US Senator John McCain, the darling of many for being a “maverick,” is the head of the IRI, and refused to comment on this article.

The important thing about the IRI is that it is one of the four core “institutes” of the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. The others are the International Democratic Institute, the International Wing of the US Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. (Go to www.ned.org for information.)This article ties in the IRI, NED and the Bush Administration, including those like Otto Reich, who I believe, and Elliot Abrams who I know, were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Reich has played a key role re US policy in Venezuela.

Now, there is no mention of the Solidarity Center or the AFL-CIO in this article. (FYI, the formal name of the Solidarity Center is the American Center on International Labor Solidarity or ACILS.)

However, Jeb Sprague has been doing research on the Solidarity Center’s activities in Haiti, and just reported that the Solidarity Center had channeled $100,000 from the NED to the Batay Ouvriye Labor Federation. And I just included that information in a piece that I wrote that ran on January 25, 2006 on MRZine, the Web Zine of Monthly Review, titlted “Worker Rights ARE Human Rights–Not Just in USA, but around World” (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/scipes250106.html –links to Sprague’s work as well as many other things is included in this article. (And I also reported the amounts to the Solidarity Center from the NED in FY 2005 for the Solidarity Center’s work across Latin America, information that was provided by Anthony Fenton, who has also done some fine writing on Haiti.)

Further, at the end of my article, there are links to three recent articles that I have written on the AFL-CIO foreign policy program. The most important, in connection with this, is “An Unholy Alliance: The AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela” that ran on ZNet on July 10, 2005 at www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionID=19&itemID=8268. What I did in this piece is detail the connection of the AFL-CIO and the NED. If you don’t know this material, I suggest you read this piece.

What I’m trying to bring together is this excellent report on IRI and the NED, and draw attention to those of you interested in Labor that at least some of the work of the Solidarity Center is very similar to what the IRI has been doing in Haiti, although in the local labor movements. And, apparently, even in the labor movement in Haiti.

This is just another example why we in the labor movement must break the link between the Solidarity Center and the NED–it is a toxic relationship.

This information needs the widest dissemination, so please spread widely in your networks in North America and around the world. If we do this, and build on this information, we can have an even greater impact on breaking the link between the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center and the NED. And have a major impact on US foreign policy.

In international solidarity–

Kim Scipes

“Capitalism no longer needs democracy” and democracy doesn’t need capitalism

Writing for The American Prospect, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, makes an important distinction between capitalism and democracy.

In “The China Path”, Reich argues that:

China shows that when it comes to economics, the dividing line among the world’s nations is no longer between communism and capitalism. Capitalism has won hands down. The real dividing line is no longer economic. It’s political. And that divide is between democracy and authoritarianism. China is a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government.

But he certainly errs by clinging to a the one-sided idea that democracy needs capitalism. Reich says that “for democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government.” Certainly this is true, but despite the evidence he points to in China (as well as the huge wealth gap in the USA), Reich continues to hold on to the fiction that “capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root.”

How exactly is that working in the USA right now?

Take for example a study released last week by Stalling the Dream—People of color less likely to own cars, less able to escape hurricanes & poverty

The report finds that people of color are considerably more likely to be left behind in a natural disaster, since fewer of them own cars compared to whites. In addition, lower rates of car ownership put them at an economic disadvantage.

The report finds that:

Only 7% of white households, but 24% of black households and 17% of Latino (Hispanic) households owned no vehicle in 2000.
In all 11 major cities that have had five or more hurricanes in the last 100 years (Houston, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Tampa, New York City, Providence, Boston, and New Orleans), people without cars are disproportionately people of color.
In the case of a mandatory evacuation order during a disaster, of those who say they would not evacuate immediately, 33% of Latinos, 27% of African Americans, and 23% of whites say that lack of transportation would be an obstacle preventing them from evacuating.
Evacuation planning tends to focus on traffic management for those with cars and on institutionalized people, not on non-institutionalized people without vehicles. New Orleans had only one-quarter the number of buses that would have been needed to evacuate all carless residents.
In the counties affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, only 7% of white households have no car, compared with 24% of black, 12% of Native American and 14% of Latino households.
The stereotype that black people own expensive cars is inaccurate. In fact, their median car value is half (or less) of whites, according to the Federal Reserve.
Eleven percent of African-American families and 21 percent of Latino families have missed out on medical care because of transportation issues, compared to only 2 percent of white families, according to the Children’s Health Fund.
The median net worth of white families increased about 6% after inflation from 2001 to 2004, to $136,000, while the black median stayed unchanged at $20,000, according to the Federal Reserve.
Transportation is the second biggest expense for American households, after housing, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project.

Overall, there is a correlation between vehicle ownership and economic prosperity. Cars give access to wider choices of jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities and healthcare. Many small businesses require a vehicle, such as gardening and catering.

The report concludes that car ownership is a vital part of the American Dream. However, the solution is not simply to provide all residents with their own cars. The report suggests improvements in public transportation and disaster planning, as well as narrowing the racial wealth divide to enable more car purchases.

One of the report’s co-authors, Emma Dixon, went without electricity in her Louisiana home for a week after Hurricane Katrina. The others, Meizhu Lui and Betsy Leondar-Wright, are also co-authors of the forthcoming book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide (New Press, 2006). All work for United for a Fair Economy.

Stalling the Dream is the third annual Martin Luther King Day report from United for a Fair Economy, following State of the Dream 2004 and 2005.

United for a Fair Economy is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization that raises awareness of the dangers of growing economic inequality.

END THE WAR! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

Here are photos from the anti-war demo this past Saturday (Sept 24) in San Diego, which was part of a US-wide anti-war protest, that drew a somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people in Washington, DC.

Polls continue to show that the majority of the U.S public is against the war in Iraq and want an immediate withdrawal of U.S troops. After Hurricane Katrina hit, support for Bush’s policies in Iraq dropped even more.

A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that two-thirds of Americans believe Bush is spending too much money in Iraq and 42 percent favor cutting spending on the war to pay for relief efforts in the devastated Gulf Coast region. Nearly 70% of Americans disapprove of how George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq; 60% now say it was a mistake to send US troops to Iraq; and over 60% support troop withdrawals.

The San Diego demo was held in Balboa Park and included some spirited singing, representatives/speeches from folks from a wide variety of political, religious, educational, community activist, and human rights organizations.

Over 2000 people (including babies and puppets, but not the cops)—and not a few sign toting dogs—came out for a vigorous protest against the oil war in Iraq and US foreign policies that continue to criminalize poor people along the southern US border who come to the US looking for work. The Rouge Forum had a small delegation there leafleting the crowd.

Photos from the September 24th demo in Washington, DC.

The Mysteries of NOLA: 25 Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy

From Tom Dispatch
The Mysteries of New Orleans

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy

By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple “incompetence” or “failure of leadership,” locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect — the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward — the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an “Incident of National Significance” until August 31 — thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?

6. Why wasn’t the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort.

7. Similarly, why wasn’t the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?

8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his “severe weather execution order” that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments?

9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority — eventually flooded where they were parked — not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents?

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the “forty thieves” — white business leaders led by Reiss — reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

12. Everyone knows about a famous train called “the City of New Orleans.” Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?

14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision — as many believe — to force poorer residents to leave the city?

15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn’t officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)

16. City Hall’s emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood?

17. Why didn’t the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn’t such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

18. Why weren’t evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge — an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?

20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?

21. Where were FEMA’s several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn’t FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about “disaster czars” and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed “new urbanism” in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future?

25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?

Maher to W: “Take a Hint”

One of Maher’s New Rules: America must recall the president.

[Check out the streaming video and get all the “new rules” and see the new line of greeting cards from the Bush administration:

Streaming Video in Real media format

Video in Windows media format]

“That’s what this country needs. A good, old-fashioned, California-style recall election! Complete with Gary Coleman, porno actresses and action film stars. And just like Schwarzenegger’s predecessor here in California, George Bush is now so unpopular, he must defend his jog against…Russell Crowe. Because at this point, I want a leader who will throw a phone at somebody. In fact, let’s have only phone throwers. Naomi Campbell can be the vice-president!

Now, I kid, but seriously, Mr. President, this job can’t be fun for you anymore. There’s no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can’t start another war because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people.

Yeah, listen to your mom. The cupboard’s bare, the credit card’s maxed out, and no one is speaking to you: mission accomplished! Now it’s time to do what you’ve always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service. And the oil company. And the baseball team. It’s time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or spaceman?!

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that there’s so many other things that you, as president, could involve yourself in…Please don’t. I know, I know, there’s a lot left to do. There’s a war with Venezuela, and eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote. But, sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You’ve performed so poorly I’m surprised you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man.

Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two Trade Centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans…Maybe you’re just not lucky!

I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So, yes, God does speak to you, and what he’s saying is, “Take a hint.”

Will Katrina wash away the neo-cons?

In an essay for truthout.org William Rivers Pitt, author of The War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know, argues that Katrina will be the downfall of the neo-conservative agenda. I hope he’s right.

…” Somewhere, at this moment, a neoconservative is seething because his entire belief structure regarding government has been laid waste by a storm of singular ferocity. Hurricane Katrina has destroyed lives, ravaged a city, damaged our all-important petroleum infrastructure, and left every American with scenes of chaos and horror seared forever into their minds. Simultaneously, Hurricane Katrina has annihilated the fundamental underpinnings of conservative governmental philosophy.

What we are seeing in New Orleans is the end result of what can be best described as extended Reaganomics. Small government, budget cuts across the board, tax cuts meant to financially strangle the ability of federal agencies to function, the diversion of billions of what is left in the budget into military spending: This has been the aim and desire of the conservative movement for decades now, and they have been largely successful in their efforts.

Combine this with a wildly expensive and unnecessary war, rampant cronyism that replaces professionals with unqualified hacks at nearly every level of government, and the basic neoconservative/Straussian premise that the truth is not important and that the so-called elite know best, and you have this catastrophe laid out on a platter. The conservative and neoconservative plan for the way this country should be run has been blasted to matchsticks, their choice of priorities exposed as lacking, to say the very least.

The Katrina disaster in a nutshell: A storm that had been listed for years as #3 on America’s list of “Worst Possible Things That Could Happen” arrives in New Orleans to find levees unprepared because massive budget cuts stripped away any ability to repair and augment them. The storm finds FEMA, the national agency tasked to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters, run by Bush friend Michael Brown, a guy who got fired from his last job representing the rights of Arabian horse owners. The storm finds a goodly chunk of the Louisiana National Guard sitting in a desert 7,000 miles away with their high-water Humvees parked beside them. The storm finds that our institutional decades-old unwillingness to address poverty issues left tens of thousands of people unable to get out of the way of the ram.

Watching the Gazan Fiasco

Jennifer Lowenstein’s “Shame of It All” piece in Counterpunch, provides a literal (though minor) counterpunch to the MSM coverage of the Israel’s removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.

I do not remember ever seeing the MSM doing such in-depth “pain and anguish” stories about Palestinians. Nor, as Lowenstein points out, does MSM report that:

Sharon’s unilateral “Disengagement” plan is not ending the occupation of Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to patrol under Israel’s watchful eye and according to Israel’s strictest terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim. Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.

PS: One of the most powerful representations of the Palestinian experience under Israeli occupation is graphic journalist Joe Sacco’s Palestine, which won the American Book Award in 1996. The single-volume collection of this “cartoon journalism” includes an introduction by Edward Said.

Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. His other journalism in the form of comics include: Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95 (with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens) and Notes From A Defeatist.

Robert Fisk: “How Can the US Ever Win, When Iraqi Children Die like This?”

Robert Fisk is one of a few truly independent journalist covering the war in Iraq. His column in today’s edition of The Independent is a powerful illustration of the obsentity that is the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

Of course the answer to Fisk’s rhetorical question is, “they cannot and they will not.”

Go to original

How Can the US Ever Win, When Iraqi Children Die like This?
By Robert Fisk
The Independent UK

Saturday 13 August 2005

There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans – if you are lucky.

Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and – this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year – they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead – or what the Americans told him afterwards.

“It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: “There is a boy under this vehicle.” According to Selim al-Sammerai, the Americans’ first reaction was to put handcuffs on the two other boys. But a Lebanese Arabic interpreter working for the Americans arrived to explain that it was all a mistake. “We don’t have anything against you,” she said. The Americans produced a laminated paper in English and Arabic entitled “Iraqi Claims Pocket Card” which tells them how to claim compensation.

The unit whose Bradley drove over Yassin is listed as “256 BCT A/156 AR, Mortars”. Under “Type of Incident”, an American had written: “Raid destroyed gate and doors.” No one told the family there had been a raid. And nowhere – but nowhere – on the form does it suggest that the “raid” destroyed the life of the football-loving Yassin al-Sammerai.

Inside Yassin’s father’s home yesterday, Selim shakes with anger and then weeps softly, wiping his eyes. “He is surely in heaven,” one of his surviving seven sons replies. And the old man looks at me and says: “He liked swimming too. ”

A former technical manager at the Baghdad University college of arts, Selim is now just a shadow. He is half bent over on his seat, his face sallow and his cheeks drawn in. This is a Sunni household in a Sunni area. This is “insurgent country” for the Americans, which is why they crash into these narrow streets at night. Several days ago, a collaborator gave away the location of a group of Sunni guerrillas and US troops surrounded the house. A two-hour gun-battle followed until an Apache helicopter came barrelling out of the darkness and dropped a bomb on the building, killing all inside.

There is much muttering around the room about the Americans and the West and I pick up on this quickly and say how grateful I am that they have let a Westerner come to their home after what has happened. Selim turns and shakes me by the hand. “You are welcome here,” he says. “Please tell people what happened to us.” Outside, my driver is watching the road; it’s the usual story. Any car with three men inside or a man with a mobile phone means “get out”. The sun bakes down. It is a Friday. “These guys take Fridays off,” the driver offers by way of confidence.

“The Americans came back with an officer two days later,” Selim al-Sammerai continues. “They offered us compensation. I refused. I lost my son, I told the officer. ‘I don’t want the money – I don’t think the money will bring back my son.’ That’s what I told the American.” There is a long silence in the room. But Selim, who is still crying, insists on speaking again.

“I told the American officer: ‘You have killed the innocent and such things will lead the people to destroy you and the people will make a revolution against you. You said you had come to liberate us from the previous regime. But you are destroying our walls and doors.'”

I suddenly realise that Selim al-Sammerai has straightened up on his seat and his voice is rising in strength. “Do you know what the American said to me? He said, ‘This is fate.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘I am very faithful in the fate of God – but not in the fate of which you speak.'”

Then one of Yassin’s brothers says that he took a photograph of the dead boy as he lay on the ground, a picture taken on his mobile phone, and he printed a picture of it and when the Americans returned on the second day they asked to see it. “They asked me why I had taken the picture and I said it was so people here could see what the Americans had done to my brother. They asked if they could borrow it and bring it back. I gave it to them but they didn’t bring it back. But I still kept the image on my mobile and I was able to print another.” And suddenly it is in my hands, an obscene and terrible snapshot of Yassin’s head crushed flat as if an elephant had stood upon it, blood pouring from what had been the back of his brains. “So now, you see,” the brother explains, “the people can still see what the Americans have done.”

In the heat, we slunk out of al-Jamia yesterday, the place of insurgents and Americans and grief and revenge. “When the car bomb blew up over there,” my driver says, “the US Humvees went on burning for three hours and the bodies were still there. The Americans took three hours to reach them. Al the people gathered round and watched.” And I look at the carbonised car that still lies on the road and realise it has now become a little icon of resistance. How, I ask myself again, can the Americans ever win?

Class? In America?!

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published series on
issues of class and mobility.

From Class Action: Class in America: Two Elite Newspapers Tackle the Big Taboo

From The New York Times: Class Matters

From theWall Street Journal: As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls

See other Class Action news, upcoming workshops and resources at Class Action