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International Socialist Review Issue 37, September–October 2004

NEWS AND REPORTS

2004 OLYMPICS
Paid for in Blood

By DAVE ZIRIN

YOU KNOW it’s Olympic season in the USA because Playboy has unleashed its "Women of the Summer Games" issue, where world-class female athletes are seen performing pole vaults, long jumps, and backstrokes, completely in the air-brushed buff. Swimmer and photo subject Holly Cope accompanied her display with this inspiring message to young girls across America: "I vote Republican, I worship Martha Stewart and I don’t mind being naked."

Lovely.

We are also getting bombarded with stories about how Athens is "a city transformed" by the Olympic Midas touch. As International Olympic Committee Chairman Jacques Rogge put it, "At Athens the legacy will be a new airport, new metro, new suburban train. This is a legacy the Greeks will be proud of."

But don’t let the gold, silver, or soft-core sexism fool you: These Greek Olympics arrive bathed from head to toe in blood and dust.

You won’t hear about it in NBC’s gauzy coverage, but estimates range that as many as 150 construction workers died in workplace accidents building Olympic facilities. The new center-right government of Costas Karamanlis, terrified of international embarrassment for not having a modernized infrastructure, turned the screws to finish facilities by any means necessary. In the last week of round-the-clock preparation alone, thirteen laborers were killed at the service of making Athens, in the words of one Olympic official, "habitable for a global audience."

As Andreas Zazopoulos, head of the Greek Construction Workers Union said, "We have paid for the Olympic games in blood."

Their deaths aren’t the only cause of local anger. The Karamanlis government has scuttled Greek law forbidding foreign personnel from carrying weapons in the country by allowing hundreds–perhaps thousands–of American, British, and Israeli Special Forces soldiers to be armed to the teeth throughout Athens.

City authorities are also, according to Democracy Now, "rounding up homeless people, drug addicts, and the mentally ill requiring that psychiatric hospitals lock them up. Also affected by Athens Olympic clean-up are refugees and asylum seekers, some of whom are being targeted for detention and deportation in the days leading up to the games."

But none of this is going unchallenged. There is a growing movement of those sickened by Olympic fever. On Tuesday, five hundred people, amid an atmosphere of tremendous repression, rallied on behalf of the dead, and olive wreaths were placed on thirteen crosses planted in the earth outside Greece’s parliament.

Inmates of Korydallos Prison and five other prisons have protested against the government’s security decision to stop authorizing parole during the games.

There is also a Greece-based organization with the name, "Revolutionary Struggle" that has been setting bombs in uninhabited buildings. They released the following statement after blowing up an empty police station: "With regard to the Olympic games we say that Greece’s transformation into a fortress, NATO’s involvement, the presence and activities of foreign intelligence units show clearly that (the Olympics) are not a festival like Games organizers say, but it’s a war."

They are absolutely right. We know it is a war because there are casualties. One hundred and fifty hard-working people are dead. They died so world dignitaries and CEOs could bask in the light of athletic achievement not unlike the rulers of the Greek and Roman Empires of old. The only difference between Bill Gates and Caligula is that Caligula threw better parties.

Just like the dissidents slaughtered before Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Berlin, or the protesting students massacred before the 1968 games in Mexico City, or those who died in Daryl Gates’ police custody in the lead up to the 1984 Los Angeles games, they have joined the ranks of the Olympic martyrs.

May their blood forever stain every flag that’s unfurled in Athens.

Dave Zirin is the author of Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket Books, 2007), The Muhammad Ali Handbook (MQ Publications, 2007), and What’s My Name, Fool? (Haymarket Books, 2005). He is Press Action’s 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, and has been called “an icon in the world of progressive sports.” You can receive his column Edge of Sports every week by e-mailing [email protected]

AIDS CRISIS
Some Profit, Others Lose
ALICE KIM and ERIC RUDER attended the tenth International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand held July 11—16, 2004

DURING THE six days of the July International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, an estimated 48,000 people died of AIDS worldwide. Last year, three million people died of AIDS-related causes, and to date, at least twenty million people have died of AIDS. These figures are staggering. The AIDS epidemic has reached unprecedented proportions, ravaging poor countries across the globe. Today, about thirty-eight million people are living with HIV. But the statistics can only begin to convey the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic.

"The most painful experience I can think of, after living with HIV for 13 years, is being poor and HIV-positive," Paisan Suwannawong of the Thai Drug Users Network told the audience at the opening ceremony of the Bangkok conference. "Again and again, I watched many friends die in front of me, from terrible opportunistic infections, simply because they were poor and could not afford treatment…What kills us is not AIDS, but greed."

Like those that have come before, the International AIDS Conference brings together an amalgam of scientists, researchers, doctors, and health care providers seeking to learn from one another as well as government officials and representatives of pharmaceutical companies who use the conference as a platform to justify their paltry contributions to fighting AIDS. For activists, the conference is an opportunity to expose governments and pharmaceutical companies that are today the main obstacles to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

It’s no secret that poverty is the leading risk factor associated with HIV infection. Of the thirty-eight million people in the world with HIV/AIDS, twenty-five million are in sub-Saharan Africa–the poorest region on the planet. And the next explosion may take place in South and Southeast Asia, where 6.5 million people already suffer from HIV/AIDS. Sexism places women at greater risk than men–and in contrast to the early phase of the epidemic, women now account for at least half of all infections. Women–with less power in controlling their sexuality and vulnerable to infection from husbands who engage in extramarital affairs–have moved from the margins to the center of the epidemic.

While there’s no vaccine or cure for HIV today, there is an array of life-sustaining HIV medications that allow people with HIV to live longer and healthier lives. Access to these medicines–known as antiretroviral drugs–could end the epidemic as we know it. But the astronomical cost of these drugs has made them inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of people living with HIV and AIDS. Pharmaceutical companies continue to charge $10,000 to $15,000 per person for a year’s supply of these drugs.

In truth, these drugs can be produced for as low as $300 per person for a year’s supply. But for years, pharmaceutical companies have been fighting a battle–not against AIDS–but to stop governments from purchasing and manufacturing low-cost generic drugs. The pharmaceutical companies insist that generic reproductions are a violation of their "intellectual property rights"–a fancy term for maintaining their monopolies and charging exorbitant prices while condemning millions of people to death simply because they cannot afford the drugs. At the same time, the profits of the ten drug companies on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. corporations were equal to more than half the $69.6 billion in profits netted by the entire roster of Fortune 500 companies, according to Physicians for a National Health Program. If pharmaceutical companies gave away all AIDS drugs, it would make only a small dent in their overall profits.

As a consequence, of the six million people who need HIV medications in low- and middle-income countries, only about four hundred thousand–less than 7 percent of those who need them–have access to antiretrovirals. This is a tragedy and a crime.

Over two years ago, a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria was established as the world’s only independent, multilateral mechanism for financing locally driven HIV treatment, prevention, and care programs. According to UNAIDS, $12 billion is currently needed to fund the fight against AIDS annually, and by 2007, funding needs will increase to $20 billion annually. The World Health Organization set a goal of treating three million people by 2005, known as the "three-by-five plan," as a way to measure the progress of the Global Fund. With the current trickle of funding, however, even the modest goal of three-by-five will be missed by a wide margin.

Combined spending among all countries–rich and poor–is only $4.7 billion per year on AIDS. Donor countries–chief among them the U.S.–have repeatedly broken funding promises and failed to make substantial investments to fight AIDS.

For good reason, activists at the conference singled out George W. Bush and his five-year President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for special condemnation. Bush’s plan, which was widely praised when he first announced it in January 2003, promises $15 billion to global anti-AIDS efforts. But it comes with numerous strings attached.

Instead of contributing $15 billion to the Global Fund, Bush created his own plan that would benefit his administration’s interests. PEPFAR funds cannot be used to buy generic antiretroviral drugs that are much cheaper than brand name drugs produced by major Western drug companies. At least one-third of the money earmarked for prevention programs must be spent on programs that focus on sexual abstinence. And finally, Bush’s plan espouses the "ABC approach" (Abstinence, Be faithful, and use Condoms as a last resort). PEPFAR prohibits the use of its funds for harm reduction programs for injection drug users (e.g., needle exchange programs).

These restrictions show that Bush’s plan not only puts the interests of the pharmaceutical companies ahead of people living with HIV, but that he’s using his plan to satisfy the right-wing agenda of his Christian fundamentalist base.

In recent trade negotiations with poor countries, the Bush administration has also demanded anti-generic provisions that would keep governments from producing or importing generic version of new drugs developed by U.S. drug manufacturers for at least five years from the date when they first come to market.

Ironically, the United States’ own Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently released a report raising the same criticisms as the protesters. GAO interviews with twenty-eight U.S. Agency for International Development officials confirmed that PEPFAR’s program constraints–especially the limitations on the purchase of generic antiretroviral drugs–present obstacles to successful implementation of its programs.

U.S. Ambassador and Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias curtailed his appearances at the conference because of the dogged presence of activists, but he appeared long enough to reject UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s request for the U.S. to increase its contribution to the Global Fund from $200 million to $1 billion–a pittance considering that the U.S. has already spent more than $150 billion to fight the war on Iraq.

If the past holds any lessons for us today, it’s that these protests have been critical to forcing governments to take up the crisis–and more will be needed to shame politicians and corporate executives into putting their money where their mouths are.

Alice Kim is an organizer for the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and Eric Ruder is a reporter for Socialist Worker newspaper.

PALESTINE
Turmoil and Transition

By TOUFIC HADDAD

THE PAST two months in the Occupied Territories have witnessed an accumulation and acceleration of developments on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Palestinian Intifada–dynamics which are sure to have significant influence on the future of the Palestinian national movement. Israel is attempting not only to suppress the Intifada, but to impose a new reality on the ground. This new reality is characterized by the complete dismemberment of the Occupied Territories; the removal of any political role for the Palestinian Authority (PA), and its reduction to (at best) a provider of basic civil services and salaries; the erecting of the 435 miles of Israel’s "Separation wall"; and a plan to unilaterally disengage from Gaza.

Israel’s relentless attacks have resulted in the death of at least 3,088 Palestinians (780 of whom were children under the age of eighteen), upwards of 55,000 injured, and with damage or destruction to more than 45,700 households. All these factors are deepening pre-existing contradictions within the national movement, forcing new ways to approach these contradictions, if not so much as a result of will, then perhaps as a result of necessity.

In one manifestation of this, activists erected a hunger strike tent on July 3 at the site of where Israel’s apartheid wall is in the process of being built around Jerusalem. The initiative came from Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, held in high esteem as a progressive writer and thinker both in the Occupied Territories and in the Arab world at large. Bishara was immediately joined by social and political activists from inside the 1967 Occupied Territories eager to join forces in struggle and focus attention on the racist nature of the wall and its employment as a weapon to destroy Palestinian communities, livelihoods, and national aspirations. The wall’s annexing of wide swaths of West Bank land unilaterally pre-determines in Israel’s favor what were supposed to be the topics of "final status negotiations" under the Oslo process: the fate of Israeli settlements, borders, Palestinian refugees, water, and Jerusalem.

The hunger strike by twenty-six people ended on July 9, the same day the International Court of Justice [ICJ] in the Hague issued its ruling regarding the legality of the wall. The ICJ ruled unequivocally that the wall was illegal (together with all Israeli settlements), and demanded its demolition, completely debunking Israel’s "security" pretexts for its construction. Though an important legal and diplomatic victory for the Palestinian cause, the court’s ruling faces the potential fate of other international resolutions passed in the Palestinians’ favor, which have simply been ignored by Israel.

The premature ending of the strike came about as a result of interference from Palestinian Authority elites (which were never happy with it to begin with), and the lack of consensus among strikers (who came from different political factions) as to its achievable political goals. These drawbacks exposed endemic weaknesses of the national movement, including conflicting and contending perspectives on political tactics and strategies of resistance, and a lack of communicative mechanisms for addressing these differences. Nevertheless, the strike was an important experience for grassroots political activists, showing the potential for what a progressive mass-based, anti-apartheid campaign that straddles both sides of Israel’s green line might look like if given the opportunity to gather momentum.

At the same time, events of the past month also showed what will happen if these problems are not addressed. On July 16, Gaza Police Superintendent Ghazi Jabali was abducted by a local resistance militia that demanded he be fired for corruption. The Jabali abduction immediately prompted a wave of similar acts of vigilantism, including other abductions against PA elites, attacks upon PA security headquarters, mass demonstrations demanding political and administrative reforms, and acts that attempted to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe taking place on the ground, especially in the Gaza Strip.

The spontaneous nature of these events gave evidence of the deep sense of desperation among Palestinians and their feeling of alienation from the PA leadership, after the enormous sacrifices of the past four years. The harshness of material conditions for Palestinian communities and resistance forces alike has drawn critical internal focus upon the question of the effectiveness of the national movement’s trajectory and the "efficiency" of its expenditure of political and resistance resources. The question of corruption (both political and financial) together with questions related to the capacity of Palestinian communities to remain steadfast (samid) in the face of relentless economic and military strangulation are quickly becoming central to national movement activists in the face of the sustained Israeli assaults.

These developments are further complicated by the presence of a disgruntled Palestinian elite that wants to pose itself as an alternative to Arafat, an elite fostered by the privileges of the Oslo era and which has been emboldened by Washington’s call for "reform" of the PA. These forces muddy the waters, riding the wave of popular discontent into power by making opportunist appeals that mingle with genuine calls for reform from the grassroots, and further complicate the challenges faced by the grassroots to consolidate resources and forge a political, social, and resistance program. We are thus witness to a dangerous cocktail of sharp class divisions, differing and contradictory political and resistance strategies, political opportunism, and communities under intense and constant siege.

Toufic Haddad is co-editor of Between the Lines and is a frequent contributor to the ISR. He submitted this article on August 11, 2004 from Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine.

BOSTON SOCIAL FORUM
Declaration of Dependence

By Annie Levin

THE BOSTON Social Forum (BSF) drew an audience of more than two thousand people to the University of Massachusetts in Boston July 23—25. Modeled on the much larger annual World Social Forum meetings, like the most recent one in Mumbai, India, the Boston conference was the biggest social forum to take place in the U.S. so far.

The event was the culmination of more than a year of organizing by dozens of Boston-based groups. The goal was to help "our popular movements to push forward to a new stage where we can challenge the masters of capital and the military that hold our country and the whole world hostage to their unending greed and insane desire for power," as BSF coordinator Jason Pramas put it. But the issue underlying many discussions during the weekend–election 2004 and the argument that progressives should hold their noses and vote for the prowar Democrat John Kerry–wasn’t in keeping with the non-party tradition of the social forum movement.

More than five hundred meetings throughout the weekend featured leading figures of the global justice and antiwar movements–as well as many lesser-known voices, from people organizing resistance to corporate domination and the U.S. government’s war on the world. The topics of the meetings showed the range of concerns–the dual occupations of Iraq and Palestine; Bush’s "war on terror"; attacks on the civil liberties of Arabs and Muslims; segregation and the end of busing in the historically racist Boston Public Schools; the barbarism of the U.S. prison system; the corporate destruction of the environment; the need for the labor movement to organize for immigrant rights; and much more.

Nevertheless, many BSF organizers and speakers were committed to the idea that activists should vote for Kerry as a "lesser evil" in November–and this sentiment worked its way into many discussions. For example, Filipino activist and global justice movement leader Walden Bello presented a strong case for why antiwar activists should support the resistance in Iraq against U.S. occupation forces–but ended his speech by calling for a vote for Kerry, who is committed to extending the U.S. occupation.

Global Exchange co-founder Medea Benjamin argued that Kerry himself isn’t the issue, but that the re-election of George W. Bush would be viewed by Iraqis as sanctioning the war.

Speaking at one of the larger meetings, Eric Mann, a veteran activist and director of the Los Angeles-based Strategy Center, called for a "united front with Kerry against imperialism"–then devoted much of his speech to attacking the independent presidential campaign of Ralph Nader.

No declaration of principles

In the end, the prevailing desire to help Kerry get elected was a main reason why organizers of the BSF chose not to conclude with any declaration of shared principles–as the World Social Forums all have–or with a demonstration to raise opposition to militarism and neoliberalism. The pro-Kerry sentiment goes against the spirit of the social forum movement of promoting grassroots organizing and the development of social movements, rather than election campaigns. The World Social Forum, for example, maintains its independence by specifically rejecting any association with political parties.

But what is even more of a contradiction is the fact that Kerry is opposed to everything the social forum movement stands for. The BSF brought together many activists who helped to lead the movement against George Bush’s war on Iraq. Kerry voted for the war and wants to extend and expand the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Several powerful sessions at the BSF focused on the attacks on the civil liberties of Arabs and Muslims–with the director of the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union, Nancy Murray, warning that "the last time the U.S. government profiled the ‘enemy within’ the way it is profiling Muslims and Middle Easterners today, it ended up forcing more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans and non-citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps."

Yet Kerry voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, and his running mate John Edwards often repeats that Democrats in the White House will strengthen "homeland security."

Despite this record, the BSF gave a platform to the Democrats to promote Kerry’s candidacy, while preventing other voices from being heard. Reportedly, various figures who support Kerry worked behind the scenes to prevent Ralph Nader from speaking at the forum. Meanwhile, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) spoke several times.

Kucinich was among the most liberal of the Democrats who sought the party’s presidential nomination, and he made his proposal for the creation of a "Department of Peace" a centerpiece of his campaign.

But in the run-up to the convention, he abandoned his effort to get the Democrats to adopt an antiwar platform. His mission at the BSF was obvious–push John Kerry.

"I ran for president as a Democrat to bring these principles into the party," Kucinich said at one session. "John Kerry represents a chance for a new direction….We can’t predict what John Kerry will bring us. I’m in this with my eyes wide open but John Kerry did tell me, ‘I want to make the White House a Department of Peace.’"

Dedrick Muhammad, an activist with United for a Fair Economy, was one among a minority of speakers who challenged the predominance of "lesser evilism" at the BSF.

"Kerry is Clinton, and under Bill Clinton, there were five hundred thousand dead children in Iraq," Muhammad said. "The two parties both have all-white, all-male, all-millionaire tickets," he said. "There’s nothing to vote for."

Though Nader didn’t speak at the BSF, Peter Camejo, his running mate and a leading member of the Green Party in California, addressed a meeting of 125 people during the last session of the BSF. He argued that activists should reject the logic of voting for the lesser evil–and that social movements won’t move forward until they break with the Democratic Party.

"We do not have a party of the people," Camejo said. "We have a political party that is one of the most effective instruments for the rule of money over people. The Democrats…guarantee that there will be no opposition to the Republicans in the U.S. That is the role they play. They will co-opt, absorb, derail, and demobilize every protest movement that comes along–and they have succeeded so far."

The kind of struggles that can represent an alternative to the Washington status quo were on display at other meetings of the BSF. One discussion sponsored by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty drew a hundred people to hear a panel of speakers that included activist Shujaa Graham, a former California death row prisoner.

"When the pictures of the torture from Abu Ghraib came out, I knew it was true because they did the same kind of things to us when I was in prison," Graham said. "As long as people continue their suffering in the prisons and on death row, I will always be a condemned man."

At a meeting called "Why We Can’t Wait: The Fight for Gay Marriage," speakers argued against putting the fight for gay marriage on hold in order to elect Kerry. Rebecca Rotzler, the deputy mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., described how she and New Paltz Mayor Jason West–both Green Party members–defied state law in an act of civil disobedience to perform more than 230 "illegal" marriages of gay couples in the past several months–including a mass wedding of a thousand people.

Rotzler pointed out that if the Democrats had beaten the Greens in New Paltz, these marriages would not be taking place.

The BSF was an important step along the road toward future social forums in the United States. But its significance was undermined by its emphasis on support for a party that is opposed to everything the social forum movement stands for. These issues will have to be debated if we are going to carve a political space for the global justice movement in the U.S. that is truly independent of both pro-neoliberal parties.

Actor Danny Glover spoke for many when he stressed the importance of struggle.

"Neither party represents the needs of the people–for economic development, for job development, for education, for health care," Glover told a crowd of four hundred at one meeting. "Demand that both parties bring our troops home and stop this war of aggression."

Annie Levin was a member of the planning committee for the Boston Social Forum (as a representative of CERSC) and is a frequent contributor to the ISR.

Meredith Kolodner, Jason Yanowitz, and Tom Arabia also contributed to this article.

HOLLYWOOD
The Fahrenheit Phenomenon

By NICOLE COLSON

SINCE IT premiered in late June, Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has grossed more than $110 million domestically. It is the first documentary ever to debut at number one in the U.S., and broke the record for the biggest box office opening weekend for any film (non-documentaries included) opening in fewer than one thousand theaters.

According to a Gallup survey conducted two weeks after the film’s opening, 8 percent of American adults had seen the film–and 18 percent said they planned to see it at a theater. Another 30 percent planned to see it on video. And for those who argued that the film was playing only to the already converted, more than one-third of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of independents told Gallup they had seen or expected to see the film at theaters or on video.

This has happened in the midst of a right-wing campaign calculated to discredit Moore and his film. First, the Disney Corporation refused to distribute the film because, according to CEO Michael Eisner, Disney shareholders and customers did not want to be associated with a "partisan" company. The Federal Election Commission, at the prompting of the conservative group Citizens United, contemplated censoring ads for the film on the grounds that they were election propaganda for the Democratic Party.

The White House jumped onto the Moore-bashing bandwagon as well. "I can speak for myself and I can speak for the President, and I can assure you that neither of us have seen [the film]," sniffed White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett in June. "We don’t have a lot of free time these days and when we do have free time to see a good fiction movie, we’ll pick ‘Shrek’ or some other enjoy[able] feature like that…. [Moore’s] outside of the mainstream…. This is a film that doesn’t require us to actually view it to know that it’s filled with factual inaccuracies."
"That is not staged"

It’s not hard to understand why Fahrenheit 9/11 would have such an impact. In addition to Moore’s own skills as a humorist and muckraking filmmaker taking on the powerful, Fahrenheit 9/11 debuted at a time when the faltering U.S. occupation of Iraq and continued revelations of administration lies about "weapons of mass destruction" and Iraqi prisoner abuse were bringing more and more people to question the case for war.

Moore shows just how arrogant, absurd, and worthy of ridicule our so-called leaders really are. More than humor, however, the film provides a much-needed outlet for the anger and confusion felt by the millions who opposed the war from the beginning. But it also has played to people who may have supported the war at its beginning, but have come to question it as the U.S. death toll has risen and the brutality of the occupation and prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib have been revealed.

Moore makes the story of Lila Lipscomb, the Flint, Michigan mother who encouraged her four children to see the military as a stable job and a way to pay for an education, a centerpiece of the film. Initially, Lipscomb supported the war, on the assumption that the government was only doing what was necessary in the fight against terrorism. Just two weeks into the war, however, her twenty-six-year-old son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was shot down while serving as a door gunner in a Black Hawk helicopter. Michael, it turns out, joined the military because his job at a Long John Silver’s fast food chain didn’t pay enough to buy formula and diapers for his newborn daughter.

In gut-wrenching detail, Lila reads Michael’s last letter home–received a week after his death. "[Bush] got us out here for nothing whatsoever," he wrote. "I am so furious right now, Mama." We rage with her as she travels to Washington and is confronted by an arrogant passerby who accuses her of "staging" her grief. "My son is dead," Lila Lipscomb replies, "That is not staged."

Moore shows the horror taking place inside Iraq, as well. The footage of an Iraqi woman, shattered in her grief, wailing to God following the U.S. bombing of her uncle’s house; the footage of young U.S. soldiers in Iraq, describing, in some cases casually, how they can plug into the sound systems in their armored vehicles in order to listen to hard rock music while killing; the broken young soldier who tells the camera that "You cannot kill someone without killing a part of yourself."

Altogether, Moore paints a picture of war in class terms–as something that poor people fight and rich people profit from–that is almost entirely absent from the mainstream media. When Moore tags along with U.S. Marine recruiters who target poor and working-class (mostly Black and Latino) young men at a Flint-area mall, it’s clear who pays the price for war.

Beyond statistics, stories of audience reactions from around the country also suggest that it is having an effect beyond "preaching to the choir." The theater in Fayetteville, North Carolina–home of Fort Bragg–had to add extra showings of the film to satisfy demand. According to the theater owner, as many as 75 percent of moviegoers were soldiers or military families. Many were like Natalie Sorton, the twenty-five-year-old wife of an infantryman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before entering the theater, she expressed fear that the movie would present soldiers in a negative light, but told a reporter that "I want to see what my husband is fighting for."

Afterwards, she came out of the theater saying she plans to buy the film on DVD and give it to everyone she knows. "I’m disgusted," she said. "Disgusted." She said the film changed her opinions on the war in Iraq by convincing her that oil and corporate interests were behind the decision-making. "All this movie did was open my eyes a little more to what’s really going on," she said. "I think this is definitely going to have an impact on the election. I’m glad I’m a voter."
Right movie, wrong conclusion

None of this is to suggest that there are not criticisms that can be made of Moore’s film. He spends far too much time, for example, focusing on the Bush family’s connection with Saudi Arabia (to the point of implying that the war in Iraq was a diversion away from the "real" enemy–the Saudi ruling family). Scratch the surface, and it becomes apparent that many politicians from both parties have connections to oil wealth and corrupt regimes across the globe (though perhaps none quite so successfully as the Bush family.) Moore also fails to mention the hundreds of Arabs and Muslins rounded up following the September 11 attacks, despite his criticisms of the USA PARTIOT Act.

A Ralph Nader supporter in 2000, Moore today has jumped firmly on the "Anybody But Bush" bandwagon, and made the film with that in mind. For that reason, it is less critical of the Democrats that his previous film, Bowling for Columbine, which took aim at Clinton’s war in the Balkans. Nor is it critical of the fact that Kerry voted for the invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act. "If this movie can inspire a few of that 50 percent that did not vote in this country to get back involved, to re-engage, then the movie will have accomplished something important," Moore has said. How much more inspiring it would have been if Moore had skewered both parties as the war parties they really are.

Even so, an early scene in Fahrenheit, shows Al Gore giving the gavel to Black congressional Democrats who try to speak out against Black disenfranchisement in Florida in the 2000 election. Though this scene is secondary to the main thrust of the film–skewering Bush–it is a powerful indictment of a party that preferred to lose rather than throw open the prospect of a new fight for Black voting rights.

Nicole Colson is a writer for Socialist Worker newspaper.

SOCIAL FORUM OF THE AMERICAS, QUITO
Globalizing Resistance
By TOM LEWIS and LANCE SELFA

Approximately ten thousand participants attended the Social Forum of the Americas (SFA) in Quito, Ecuador, July 25—30 to discuss the effects of neoliberalism and imperialism throughout the hemisphere, as well as the struggle for democratic control over natural resources such as water and gas. The rights of indigenous people and of gays and lesbians provided a special focus for the forum, as did the U.S. militarization of Central and South America.

Ecuador was a perfect site for the first SFA, where everyday reality sharply illustrates the forum’s main themes of economic equality and social justice. The SFA opened on July 25, six weeks into a hunger strike of hundreds of retirees demanding an increase in their meager pensions. Two days later, the strikers won a commitment from neoliberal President Lucio Gutierrez to raise taxes on liquor, beer, and cigarettes to fund their pensions. The human cost of the forty-three-day strike was high, witheighteen deaths among the retirees. The strike, whose encampment in Quito stood only blocks from the main SFA sites, never strayed far from the minds of participants.

Neither did the ever-present reality of the huge U.S. military presence in Ecuador. The U.S. Southern Command is headquartered in Manta, approximately two hundred miles from Quito on Ecuador’s northern coast. An ad appearing during the SFA in Quito’s main newspaper, El Comercio, invited bids on the construction of a new dock and support facilities for a U.S. Marine battalion in San Lorenzo. The contractor is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose project, from the point of view of many Ecuadorians, will only further erode their nation’s sovereignty.

On July 28, more than ten thousand demonstrators from forty-four countries took to the streets of Quito in a planned protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and other national and regional trade agreements the U.S. is pursuing throughout Latin America. Among the most prominent slogans were "If they globalize misery, we will globalize resistance" and "We do not want to be a U.S. colony, we want a free and sovereign Latin America."

Several confrontations with police, including a skirmish in front of the U.S. embassy, broke out at the end of the march. A half-dozen injured protesters were injured–one seriously. Other buildings targeted for protest were Repsol, the Spanish-based oil transnational, and the Ecuadorian Foreign Trade Ministry.

The march confirmed an assessment of the current state of affairs in Latin America offered by Atilio Boron, head of the prestigious Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO), at one of the FSA’s sessions. "Neoliberalism has attained almost all of its goals," Boron said, "but it has failed. It hasn’t been able to contain protests from below." "Instead," he continued, "neoliberalism has created new forces of resistance."

Political debate at the SFA often focused on whether capturing state power should be an objective of Latin America’s social movements. The view that the nation-state can be circumvented, or that it has become irrelevant to social transformation, was prevalent.

Against this view, Belgian agrarian activist Francois Houtart argued,

If changing the world without taking power means disdaining the importance of the political struggle, then it is purely a utopian formulation, an illusion. In fact, it reflects the way neoliberal ideology tries to eliminate politics by relegating everything to the market. We cannot underestimate the political field.

Nevertheless, the dominant view among participants was that the nation-state should recover its former role as guarantor of social welfare by reversing neoliberal privatizations and funding jobs, pensions, and basic services. This nostalgia for state-run capitalism received a challenge from a minority who proposed a revolutionary socialist alternative to the hemispheric crisis. The minority pointed to the failures of politicians such as President Lula of Brazil and presidential hopeful Evo Morales of Bolivia, as examples of how electoral strategies for bringing change from above are checked by U.S. imperialism. Nationalist leaders like Lula and Evo must play by the rules of the U.S. if they are to win and hold on to power.

In contrast, Peruvian labor leader Simón Lazara emphasized that

only a mass movement from below can achieve a society in which equality and solidarity replace hunger and oppression. The only viable way out of the crisis is a revolutionary fight for a world in which the majority of workers and peasants run their societies in their own interests.
Toward hemispheric solidarity

Filipino activist Walden Bello also presented his alternative of "de-globalization."

We have no option but to dismantle, disempower, or reduce the power of the key institutions–the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. And we don’t have to rebuild new centralized institutions. While we reduce the power of the institutions of global capitalism we can increase the power of regional institutions and regional trading blocks.

Bello’s message of reducing the power of the IMF and World Bank struck a chord with participants. But reaction was lukewarm to his idea of de-linking Latin America from the rest of the world economy. Mercosur, South America’s regional trading bloc, serves Latin American bosses, not Latin America’s impoverished populations. So far Mercosur has proven willing to subordinate itself to U.S. and European interests.

Forty percent of Latin Americans live on less than one dollar per day. The solution to Latin America’s crisis lies not in isolation, nor in a disadvantaged position competing on the world market. Rather, it lies in solidarity between the urban and rural workers of both South and North Americas. Together they can wrest the wealth they produce from the bosses throughout the hemisphere who rob them on a daily basis.

Tom Lewis and Lance Selfa are members of the ISR editorial board who attended the forum in Quito, Ecuador. Rafael Greenblatt, Peter Lamphere, and Ashley Smith were part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change’s (CERSC) delegation in Quito and contributed material to this report. CERSC, publisher of ISR, sponsored five metings at the SFA.

HAITI
Labor After the Coup
ON FEBRUARY 29, 2004, the U.S. government, with approval from the United Nations, removed the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and replaced him with a puppet government headed by Gerard Latortue. The U.S. and France considered Aristide an unreliable partner in implementing neoliberal, free market policies in Haiti. Although he had faithfully followed U.S. dictates since being restored to power by President Clinton’s 1994 invasion and occupation, Aristide still had ties to the popular movement and used populist rhetoric to condemn the U.S., France, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

Multilateral "peace-keeping" forces, comprised of U.S., Canadian, French, and Chilean troops have turned a blind eye, and in some cases aided, right-wing repression of Aristide supporters and other leaders of the popular movement. The U.S. has since handed over leadership of the occupation to Brazil, which now heads up forces from several Latin American countries.

Batay Ouvriye is an organization that has played a prominent role in organizing sweatshop workers in Haiti. It also organizes around peasant and women’s issues. Ashley Smith and Raphael Greenblatt spoke with Paul Philome from Batay Ouvriye at the Social Forum of the Americas in Quito, Ecuador.
COULD YOU say a little bit about the situation under Aristide and what led to the coup?

THE SITUATION under Aristide was very complicated. At first, in the 1990s, he came to the presidency at the head of a broad popular movement. Aristide summarized the demands in three words: transparency, participation, and justice. So it was a very broad, very important movement. But it was spontaneous and not very structured, and little by little it was taken over by the capitalists. Everything went into legal, "democratic" methods, even repudiating the struggles on the street, the fight against the Macoutes [paramilitary death squads], and the capitalists. Nevertheless, Aristide was leading a popular movement against the existing order. That’s why the Haitian elite overthrew him in 1990. In 1994 Aristide came back changed. But, during the coup years, the main leaders of the popular movements inside Haiti were being killed, and drugs, contraband, and major corruption started coming into the country. Aristide accepted this, consolidated this, and was reconciled with the capitalists. He became one of them and carried out their politics, neoliberalism in general. He ended up the opposite of what he had started as. Aristide worked against the people. In all the conflicts that we in Batay Ouvriye had, for example, with big landlords, with factory owners, Aristide’s government always sided with them against the workers and peasants.
HOW HAS the coup affected the situation of ordinary Haitians and the possibilities for political activity?

THINGS ARE more difficult. Look at what they finally did with Aristide; they just took him away. There was nothing democratic about that; they held no elections. Now American experts supervise everything, organize the military occupation, and have imposed a technocratic government that accepts anything the Americans want–a project of extreme exploitation of the cheapest labor in the world. They’re like vultures that have come to devour this defenseless, impoverished, unemployed, disorganized people.
COULD YOU tell us about the struggle that Batay Ouvriye was involved in at Codeví free trade zone?

CODEVÍ IS owned by a Dominican, Fernando Capellan of Grupo M. They received a $20 million loan from the World Bank for development in the free trade zone to take advantage of cheap Haitian labor. It has been making clothes for Levi-Strauss. We launched an organizing campaign, together with American workers and workers from other countries, with the Global Sweatshop Coalition and United Students Against Sweatshops, and we pressured the World Bank to include as a condition of the loan that Codeví respect union rights and guarantee the personal safety of the workers. But that’s just a paper promise. We went in secretly and began to organize a union. After the coup against Aristide on February 29, the company fired all thirty-four workers who had joined the union. We had a fight and were able to get them rehired, and when that happened everyone came towards the union, and of the six hundred workers at the plant, four hundred joined the union. But the bosses fired all these union members again. With help from the AFL-CIO and the International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers Federation and organizations in Europe and Latin America, we are carrying out actions to get these people rehired, to put pressure on the World Bank, against Levi-Strauss. There have been protests at Levi’s stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles, involving Americans and also Haitians who are part of the Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network. I think we’re on the point of winning, but it’s a battle that’s still going on.
WHAT’S THE situation of the union movement in general? Are similar things happening in the rest of the country?

YES. THE Association of Haitian Industry (ADIH) completely supported Codeví–a multinational–even when they brought in the Dominican army to attack Haitian workers. They support their fellow capitalists because it’s in their interest not to have unions in the free trade zone, because they don’t want unions in their own assembly plants, in the industrial parks, and in the new free trade zones that are being established. Last year we had twenty-three unions in Port-au-Prince. Today we don’t have a single one. After the fall of Aristide the Haitian capitalists, with the cooperation of the government, kicked them all out of the industrial parks. We’re in one of the most reactionary moments of the last few years right now. Clearly, it’s the occupation that makes this all possible.
THE U.S. government is resuming aid for Haiti and lowering the barriers for Haitian exports to the US. What’s your opinion about that?

IT’S BECAUSE it’s their government that’s in power in Haiti right now. There are technocrats and capitalists and the capitalists are trying to establish capitalist hegemony in the country, and of course the multinationals and the U.S. government are going to support that. So they got over a billion dollars from the World Bank to build more free trade zones. They need a government that can administer this exploitation, and that’s something Aristide couldn’t do because of all of the contradictions he was carrying with him. There are a lot of conditions on these loans: The government has to pay its debts by September and it has to adopt a very neoliberal plan–nothing for agriculture, nothing for small businesses, nothing to repair what’s been destroyed like sugar and rice cultivation, and everything for free trade zones.
WHAT IS the significance of the participation of countries other than the U.S., particularly Latin American countries, in the occupation of Haiti?

FRANCE AND Canada basically want the same thing as the U.S., with a few differences. Then there’s Chile, Argentina, and above all Brazil. In Brazil, Lula, who’s from the Workers Party, is a former worker himself. He says that Brazil has come to help rebuild, but it seems to us that this is mistaken to say the least. If the Brazilian forces are there to help rebuild–I’m singling out Brazil because of Lula, but also because Brazil is leading the forces there–then what will be their position if there’s a confrontation and capitalists call on the occupying forces to suppress the workers? What will Lula’s position be? Will they attack the bosses? We don’t think so, because Lula isn’t fighting against the capitalists inside of Brazil. Lula has already taken his mask off in Brazil, we know what to expect in Haiti. We think that when the conflicts start things will become clear and there will be more opportunities to denounce these supposedly progressive leaders in Latin America, who are really supporting an imperialist project and the capitalist project of the Haitian bourgeoisie against the workers, who are being asphyxiated and are being exploited to the limit.
WHAT ROLE do you think activists in the U.S. can play?

I THINK that first they need to denounce the presence of the armed forces, and second they need to denounce the fact that these forces are there to support a project of extreme capitalist exploitation. Over the last two hundred years, especially the last twenty or thirty years, the American government and American businesses have destroyed, exploited, and robbed the entire country, leaving a multitude of unemployed, who they are now going to come in and further exploit. The U.S. armed forces are there, arms in hand, to carry this out. This has to be denounced in the newspapers, radio, and the universities, everywhere. Alongside this, there has to be a struggle against the multinationals. With the struggle at Codeví, as I already mentioned, American workers and students have mobilized against the World Bank and Levi-Strauss, and this is also very important. Mobilizing American workers is very important. Not just to support their brothers in Haiti, but because it’s their struggle too. American factories are being moved to cheaper locations, and to solidify their own situation the workers there have to strengthen the workers in Haiti.