How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression

by Eric Zuesse / January 23rd, 2024

The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

How It Does Domestic Oppression

On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, sys the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

How It Does Foreign Oppression

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

On 17 June 2015, I headlined “The Who’s Who at the Top of the Coup” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia,”he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

Conclusion

The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.

 

Does the U.S. Really Need Mideast Oil—or the Mideast—Anymore?

Since 2014 the U.S. has become the world’s “top oil and natural gas liquids” producer (2022: 19.1 million barrels per day). It even leads Saudi Arabia and Russia so it’s no longer dependent on Mideast oil.

by Barbara G. Ellis / January 23rd, 2024

When my husband and I were flying to Beirut, Lebanon to co-edit the English-language Daily Star, we noticed our tickets were paid by ARAMCO (since 1988, “Saudi Aramco,” then one of the world’s largest American oil companies. That was a factor the publisher somehow neglected to explain, along with the pro-West bias of this influential and major Arabic newspaper chain. Not long after, we took a bomb in the lobby that shook the building, but no one was killed.

Having then just departed from two years in Tulsa—he on the World, me, as a journalism professor—we were well aware of oil’s power and domination over Oklahoma, let alone the world. Because neither industries nor the military could last without oil—even before WWII—Allies and Axis nations then fought to seize and/or control the flow from Iran (650 billion barrels ) and pander for the rest from oil-rich Arab countries.

Today’s Department of Defense (DOD) requires at least an estimated annual 4.6 billion gallons of fuel  to cover its global military reach. Small wonder decades of Administrations and lawmakers have been unwilling, or downright frightened, to end the U.S. military’s dependence on the availability and prices of Mideast oil.

So from 2001 to at least 2019, wars in the Mideast and Asia have cost American taxpayers an estimated $6.4 trillion , not to mention millions of dead and wounded, environmental destruction, and millions from the Mideast seeking refuge in Europe. Not to count millions spent by the ferocious joint response of American oil producers and military contractors and their legendary use of election donations to influence both Congress and presidents. Add advertising “buys” to the mainstream-media—all vested interests as usual defending American (business) interests abroad.

Wars to Seize, Control Oil Supplies

The Pentagon’s insatiable fuel demands explain why the Bush Administration almost too quickly used 9/11 as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq. The real motive was more to “secure” its oil fields and production than to overthrow Saddam Hussain and destroy his nonexistent weapons-of-mass-destruction. It also explains why Iran—with its vast oil reserves—has been sanctioned as a U.S. enemy and is constantly under presidential and Pentagon threats ultimately to seize them as well.

As for Syria, the Pentagon has supported the Kurds’ separation of northern Syria to “help” protect its oil fields supposedly against possible reappearance of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). That rationale has meant taxpayers unknowingly have spent millions to support 10 U.S. bases  (900 troops in Syria, 2,500 in Iraq ). They’ve only become aware of that factor because of recent rocket and drone attacks: 32 times in Iraq, 34 in Syria (70 casualties ) from anti-US militants allegedly supported by Iran.

The response seemingly has been a shocked “Why are our kids still there?”—and sitting ducks for local target practice. The official reason for U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria was the “enduring defeat” of ISIS . But that occurred five years ago. Those recent attacks resulted in three U.S. retaliatory air strikes  killing eight Iraqis, and an outraged Iraqi government (“…a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat [ISIS] on Iraqi soil”).

The bigger question now being raised, however, is whether the Administration and Pentagon even have a need for Mideast oil. This despite President Biden’s recent decision to permit $582 millions in weapon sales  to ingratiate this country once again to Saudi Arabia despite unneeded oil.

Or teaming earlier this month with Britain to use a blunderbuss against the Houthi “mosquito” guerillas attacking Red Sea shipping: Two massive retaliatory bombings by air and submarine of more than 28 mostly “militant” targets  along Yemen’s mountainous coast —and warnings of more to come  if the Houthis don’t stop. Never did the Biden Administration consider demanding shippers equip vessels with weapons and hiring “shot-gun” crews for protection. Nor are taxpayers likely to learn the raids’ cost from the Pentagon.

In today’s global uproar for a Gaza cease-fire, at least it’s now unlikely the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs or Biden will put American boots on the ground for Israel. They appear to be keeping their powder dry for the “pivot” to Asia, particularly China which will require massive shifts of personnel and war materiel from the Mideast. But quick exits from Vietnam and Afghanistan have demonstrated the Pentagon’s prowess in rapid-transfer logistics on short notice.

U.S. Is Now Top Global Producer of Oil and Natural Gas

The point is that the U.S. really is no longer dependent on Mideast oil. New drilling techniques such as fracking have made it possible to produce enough oil and gas domestically, as well as importing it abroad.

Millions of Americans probably are unaware that since 2014 the U.S. has become the world’s “top oil and natural gas liquids” producer  (2022: 19.1 million barrels per day).  It even leads Saudi Arabia and Russia.

To arrive at this point took Biden’s betrayal of millions of environmentally conscious voters of his March 2020 campaign promise  (“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends.”). What followed has been his steady approval of 6,430 new permits  for oil/gas drilling on public lands. He also revealed that 9,000 permits  previously issued to companies have yet to be used.

Four key signals have been afoot for months that U.S. decision-makers are planning a Mideast exit after Israel has “cleared” Gaza of Palestinians. The Yemen bombings may be the last hurrah of U.S. meddling in the Mideast. Such an historic, earthshaking shift of policy and subsequent monumental move could be immediately ahead—possibly before the presidential election.

Another telling exit signal is new resistance by American taxpayers to the Armed Services budget (FY24: $841.1 billion ) and endless wars, just demonstrated by Congressional Republicans  opposed to Ukraine spending in FY2024 and/or the Pentagon’s never-ending budgetary increases. Or hiding expenses by its sixth audit failure . Among the expenses revealed by the Pentagon’s inspector-general’s report to Congress was failure to track more than $1 billion  of “highly sensitive and sophisticated equipment and weaponry” to Ukraine.

Too, the Yemen attack without the Constitutional requirement of notifying Congress first brought dozens of lawmakers to the Capitol steps to object, echoing Rep. Cori Bush’s online protest of: “The people do not want more of our taxpayer dollars going to endless wars and the killing of civilians. Stop the bombing and do better by us.”

The Pentagon seems impervious even to possible budget cuts from Congress, illustrated by its latest cliffhanging decision over its allocation and future supplemental appropriations. And with good reason. The House did pass the initial FY 2024 bill by a whisker (218-210 ), then, a reassured temporary resolution (395-95 ). The Senate soon followed (87-11 ). Even in the Yemen attack, Pentagon officials’ influence over Biden  is such that his knowing the nation’s overwhelming mood opposes any more Mideast wars, he failed to go immediately on TV to explain this massive action.

A third signal of a U.S. departure is Saudi Arabia’s replacement effort  by seeking new oil customers in Africa and Asia. No fools about the loss of a major customer, its visionary decision makers have been have been working on an Oil Demand Sustainability Program  to:

“…promote oil-based power generation, deploy petrol and diesel vehicles… work with a global auto manufacturer to make a cheap car, lobby against government subsidies for electric vehicles, and fast-track commercial supersonic air travel.”

Influential Media Calls for a Mideast Departure

A fourth indication of a U.S. pullout is that increasing recommendation by influential publications seemingly based on clues perceived from the Biden Administration and Pentagon.

For example, a November op-ed in Foreign Affairs  strongly suggests the Administration needs a course correction in the Mideast, a rapid withdrawal of the Armed Forces to let the locals handle their affairs.

Jason Brownlee , in the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft newsletter, claims the Administration’s “prolonged… deployment” in the Mideast has been “driven by policy inertia more than strategic necessity.” The White House: “should scrap, not reinforce, America’s outdated and unnecessarily provocative troop presence in Syria and Iraq.” His firsthand observations of Taliban rule since the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, he wrote, showed the country finally had “internal stability” because political violence “plummeted by 80%” in the first year.

Military expert William D. Hartung  added that fears of other great powers filling a withdrawal vacuum were “overblown.” That:

 A more restrained strategy would provide better defense per dollar spent while reducing the risk of being drawn into devastating and unnecessary wars. The outlines of such an approach should include taking a more realistic view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China; relying on allies to do more in defense of their own regions; [and]… paring back the U.S. overseas military presence, starting with a reduction in basing and troop levels in the Middle East.

In the face-off against the monumental challenge of an uninhabitable planet, TIME magazine’s Alejandro de la Garza  noted even two years ago that:

 …the military cannot maintain its globe spanning presence and become carbon neutral at the same time. A sustainable military will have to be smaller, with fewer bases, fewer troops to feed and clothe, and fewer ships and airplanes ferrying supplies to personnel from Guam to Germany.

Leaving the Mideast carries the benefit of loosening the rigid thinking Pentagon leaders fixed on plotting wars to secure Arab and Iranian oil. Shifting plans for the Pacific Rim—North Korea and China—just might transform the Armed Forces into being smaller, fewer, and better. Especially removing our troops as moving targets in Iraq and Syria when we no longer need its oil, nor Iran’s. Trading and diplomatic policies could then lead the way instead of expending any more blood and taxpayers’ treasure on that region of the world.

Barbara G. Ellis, Ph.D, is the principal of a Portland (OR) writing/pr firm, a long-time writer and journalism professor, a Pulitzer nominee, and now an online free-lancer. Read other articles by Barbara.

 

A Special Strike: The 2019 Special Metals Strike in New Hartford, New York

by J.N. Cheney / January 24th, 2024

The struggle of organized labor in Upstate New York and more specifically Central New York is one that has typically gone unnoticed on both a national and historical scale. This of course can be said about numerous regions throughout the United States among other sections of the global socialist movement for the enfranchisement of the working class and the fight against backwards reactionary culture. Lessons can be drawn from organized struggle regardless of where in the world they take place. This lack of attention paid to the struggles in this region of New York State is depriving socialists, communists, and the general working class of the stories and lessons of the multifaceted battle in defense of those who feel the harshness of capitalism in small town areas. The 3-week struggle carried out in 2019 by Special Metals workers in New Hartford, New York, is one of those that deserves more attention as something that can be learned from with lessons carrying over to other struggles including the fights against homophobia and transphobia, racism, and colonialist apartheid against Palestine.

The Impetus

Workers from Special Metals, a company known for producing nickel and cobalt alloys for various purposes and owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, officially voted to establish a strike on August 17, 2019, making this the first strike to hit this company since 1992. 211 production workers as well as 25 company technicians, giving a total of 236 workers, walked away from their posts in response to a falling out with the company after they had been unable to negotiate a new contract the day before. The main catalyst for the workers deciding to embark on this struggle being the history of the company’s enforcement of an insane working schedule. The Special Metals facility operates on a 24-hour, 7-day cycle, and at the time of this strike, the company had been calling for their employees to work 60 hours a week, 6 days a week, also requiring that they work numerous holidays. It was reported that the company utilized very little in terms of hiring temporary employees or hiring new full-time employees to help soften the burden of constant mandatory overtime.

Ron Zegarelli, at the time chief steward for the workers’ union, the International Association of Machinists Local 2310, put it bluntly. “They know what we want, we want time off.” Having actual time off is the core element to this situation that drove the workers to engage in the struggle of the picket. The grueling schedule and the lack of adherence to the previous union contract posed numerous problems for the workers in their daily lives, leaving many alienated not only from their work but from their families as well. Special Metals’ desired 60-hour structure would only exacerbate such problems, with workers being overworked to the point, again according to Zegarelli, that workers in the past wound up getting divorces due to how much they were forced to be at work instead of home. Lives and marriages have been ruined in the past by this company, and they were going to double down on the schedule structure that would only bring about further detriment to the health and well-being of their employees. One worker spoke on the issues that such a harsh and unstable schedule poses, noting however that due to his lack of seniority in the company, speaking on such an issue without the power that the union had begun to exert could mean the loss of his job.

The issue of holidays is an example of Special Metals blatantly breaching the prior contract they held with the union before the strike blossomed from the material conditions. As laid out by Jason Berdanier, vice president of the union at the time, workers were sick of “scheduling the holidays around Special Metals instead of having Special Metals schedule around us.” Berdanier also revealed that despite the fact that their contract explicitly stated that there were 13 holidays listed as days off, however only a fraction of these would actually be guaranteed paid holidays. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, and Good Friday were the only holidays that workers were guaranteed to have off. No Easter, no Martin Luther King Day, no New Years, several other federal holidays that were supposed to be in their contract were denied. All in all, the people who actually kept Special Metals running even to their own detriment simply wanted an end to, or even just a reduction of mandatory overtime and to have the full extent of their holidays be guaranteed.

The production workers were not in this struggle alone though. In a display of solidarity with their fellow proletarians, 25 technicians from Special Metals joined the picket line and worked to counter the divisive efforts of the company. Though the union’s national body was acting in ways that would concede to the demands of management, something that would ultimately go against the very foundation of labor unions and in blunt terms, screw over the workers, the technicians would not bow to these demands. A separate agreement was presented to the technicians holding greater pay options than production workers were offered, and the technicians rejected this offer, seeing it as an attempt to pit workers against each other and distract from the problems that the capitalists create for the proletariat. When asked about the IAM’s reactionary decision to take the divisive agreement, a worker only referred to as William said; “I don’t know, but it was some kind of bullshit deal that was allowed that worked to keep workers against each other.”

An additional statement from William draws several parallels to the situation that workers at the Redco Foods plant in Little Falls, New York dealt with in 2007. In both conditions, we see workers calling for solidarity with one another as they fight the common enemy of the working-class that is the bourgeoisie, as well as worrying about the future prospects for their children and other young people as they enter the workforce and wanting to ensure that their working conditions are at the best that they can be in contradiction to the reactionary choices of the bourgeois apparatus. William continues, explaining why exactly the separate agreement was rejected;

“We voted it down because we wanted to stand in solidarity with our fellow brothers and sisters and not stab them in the back, and we’re also considering the next generation and know that we have to draw a line and fight it out now.”

In addition, though the strike did not go on long enough to allow for the creation of such, the idea of creating committees of rank-and-file workers designed to work in collaboration with international workers, particularly those who worked at the one Special Metals plant in England, would float around until a settlement had been reached.

Local Responses

Once again in parallel to the Redco struggle from 12 years prior, the fight waged by over 200 Special Metals workers was met with an overwhelming support from the local community in numerous forms. As the strikers carried signs with phrases such as “No Mandated OT” and set up a small makeshift rest area with shade and a grill to keep them fed, locals would show up throughout the day in support of their efforts and bring them food and water to fuel their fight, with one person even bringing an entire truck bed’s worth of water to keep the picketers hydrated in the August heat. Material support for the working-class battle against unfair contracts and endeavors to diminish the strength and solidarity of the workers is something that should always be appreciated as well as considered for other struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and other reactionary profit-driven isms.

Students from Hamilton College in nearby Clinton forged an outlet for support for the strikers, exemplifying the carryover of struggle in that people from different fields and different conditions must be able to act in solidarity together if there is to be any real chance at fighting the injustices thrust upon the proletariat and all oppressed people by the bourgeois political, economic, and social structures. Students Libby Militello and Brook Kessler, both of the Hamilton College Democrats, saw the Special Metals workers’ cause being of great significance, with Militello relating the struggle to her own family’s union ties. The Hamilton College Democrats, according to Militello and Kessler, supports fair working conditions, and thus felt it was part of their duty to provide moral support and engage with the picket line. Kessler specifically addressed the emotional and physical issues that can derive from excessive overtime, an indirect admission that the very structure of capitalism is designed to keep workers beaten down and ill, and in addition she referenced the various decisions made by the Supreme Court before and during the strike that sought to further weaken the power of unions in line with the anti-worker endeavors of the past.

Drawing parallels this time to the struggle waged by Remington Arms workers in late 2020 in nearby Ilion, the strikers at Special Metals even received lip-service support from both members of the New York State Assembly and the United States House of Representatives. State Assemblywoman Marriane Buttenschon sent a letter to both the company CEO located in Portland, Oregon, as well as the manager of the New Hartford plant where the strike was taking place. Playing both sides as is often the case with Democrats in their adherence to the bourgeois political structure, Buttenschon would both thank the company for doing business in New York and for the role that it has played in the state’s economy, and emphasize the necessity of upholding the collective bargaining process and calling for the demands of the workers to be properly listened to and addressed. Then-Congressman Anthony Brindisi, also a toothless Democrat, sent a letter to the New Hartford management as well as Ron Zegarelli. Brindisi essentially reiterated what was said by Buttenschon, highlighting the overtime concerns of the workers and encouraging the two parties to go back into negotiations.

The general response to the strike encompasses the varied ways in which a local community can rally behind those fighting against the unjust actions carried out by capitalists trying to exert their power over the workers. However, there is one instance of outside dissatisfaction with the strikers that raises several eyebrows. In an act of extralegal violence, Zegarelli recalled that at one point a driver tried to drive their vehicle through the protest! That people actually willing to attempt to do bodily harm and even kill their fellow worker in defense of the capitalists who would cast them aside at the drop of a hat is a testament to the effect that anti-worker propaganda pushed to enforce the hegemonic power that capitalists hold can have on the working masses. For some reason no charges were pressed on the man, perhaps showing that this was just some freak accident and not a deliberate act of terror against workers trying to get their just dues, but the common thread of seeing people call for running over protesters on social media and the various legislative measures introduced to protect people who do such a thing over the last half decade makes it hard to believe that this was simply a matter of someone looking at their phone or something else of the sort.

The Company Response

All while the strikers, legislature, and student supporters stressed that Special Metals was enacting policy that was in blatant terms screwing over their workers on numerous levels, the company asserted that the offer they presented before the initial fallout was “fair and equitable” according to the company’s director of communications David Dugan. In an act of “fair and equitable” negotiation, the company decided to utilize tactics that are in essence active attacks on the strikers by indirectly threatening their jobs. Dugan explained:

“As a result of the vote, we are executing our contingency plans, including having our salaried employees operate our equipment. Through these and other actions, such as leveraging other production facilities, we are well positioned to meet our customers’ needs as negotiations continue.”

In essence, Dugan admitted that the company would be putting other less-experienced workers to task in operating dangerous equipment and utilizing scab labor. Zegarelli, even as a representative of the union, showed worry for the salaried employees being thrown into the lion’s den, citing that the work conducted by the production workers is very dangerous and that the salaried workers were being put in danger for the sake of maintaining productivity and profit for Special Metals. That the company would try to force their production workers into a 60-hour work week with barely time off, and would throw their less experienced salaried employees into an environment that they don’t have nearly as much knowledge of in order to keep up the arbitrary notion of productivity under capitalism, exhibits a complete lack of humanity or respect for the working class on the part of Special Metals.

Special Metals incorporated certain elements of the Mohawk Valley Formula into their campaign against the strikers. In addition to utilizing scab labor and forcing workers from other departments onto the production line, the strikers were also being closely observed by a combination of local police forces as well as private security hired by the company. The police would ultimately be of no help when someone drove their vehicle into the picket line, and the strikers at no point threatened the use of violence, sabotage, or any other tactic that would physically disrupt the company’s proceedings. Using the factor of intimidation by having a police presence alongside a privately hired security seems like it’s overkill when the workers have picketed in an orderly fashion.

In what is perhaps the strangest and most unexplained act of retaliation carried out by the company in this situation, Special Metals delayed contract negotiations because of a meeting with the Department of Labor, because the company filed an unfair labor practice report against those on strike. No context is given as to why this was done. No claims of inflammatory language, no claims of intimidating other workers into joining them on the picket line, nothing that points out any concrete reason for such a report to be filed other than as an act of intimidation against the strikers by Special Metals themselves.

A Settlement Is Reached

In early September, 3 weeks after the strike had been initiated, the strikers and representatives from Special Metals were formally negotiating once more. After further deliberation with the help of a federal mediator, an agreement was reached and the strike was officially over. Though their demands were not fully met, the outcome of the strike is still ultimately considered a success. According to a statement from the IAM, the negotiations had resulted in a 4-year contract that created “a new process that will minimize how often members are scheduled for 12 hours,” as well as establishing wage increases and increases to certain aspects of the employees’ health care coverage. No word is given on the status of the guaranteed holidays, though it is presumed that this is addressed in the process of negating 12-hour shifts.

Lessons Of the Strike

The lessons of the 2019 Special Metals strike are similar to that of the 2007 Redco Foods strike. Ultimately, both exhibit the significance of solidarity and community building, especially when confronting issues as pressing as the mistreatment of workers under the profit-motive. Regardless of whether the cause is a workers strike, a pro-Palestine movement, a movement against transphobia or police brutality, or even a general rally in support of the socialist system and the communist goal, providing material and vocal support for such causes should be the goal for all socialists in our collective, global fight against the capitalist apparatus and for the improvement of society for all oppressed peoples. Only through collective action and solidarity do we stand any chance at defeating those who endanger the planet, endanger marginalized groups, and endanger workers of all kinds.

J.N. Cheney is an aspiring Marxist historian. His research primarily focuses on New York State labor history, branching into other facets of the history of socialism in the United States as well as the global socialist movement. He’s written for Midwestern Marx and has been published in their Journal of American Socialist Studies under both a penname and his given name. He is currently writing a book on the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912. Read other articles by J.N..

 

Six Years On, Hassan Diab Recounts His Release from a French Prison in January 2018

by Hassan Diab Support Committee / January 25th, 2024

Dr. Hassan Diab was wrongfully extradited from Canada to France in 2014, for alleged involvement in a bombing outside a Paris synagogue in 1980. He spent more than three years in a French prison before investigative judges determined that there was no evidence linking him to the crime, and ordered his immediate and unconditional release.

Hassan’s release was a moment of pure joy which we share with you in the videos below. Sadly, the joy did not last long. The French prosecutor appealed the release decision for political reasons and Hassan remains under the threat of being extradited once again to France for a crime he did not commit.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must honour his words on June 20, 2018, when he acknowledged that “this is something that obviously was an extremely difficult situation to go through for himself [Hassan], for his family” and promised to “make sure that it never happens again”.

Hassan Diab Support Committee seeks to end relentless persecution and reform Canada's Extradition Act. Read other articles by Hassan Diab Support Committee, or visit Hassan Diab Support Committee's website.

 

We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess

by Vijay Prashad / January 25th, 2024

Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.

‘The West is in danger’, warned Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In his dangerously appealing style, Milei blamed ‘collectivism’ – that is, social welfare, taxes, and the state – as the ‘root cause’ of the world’s problems, leading to widespread impoverishment. The only way forward, Milei declared, is through ‘free enterprise, capitalism, and economic freedom’. Milei’s speech marked a return to the orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who pushed forward an ideology of social cannibalism as the basis for their neoliberal agenda. Since the 1970s, this scorched earth policy has devasted much of the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund, but also created factory deserts in the West (what Donald Trump, in his inauguration address in 2017, called the ‘American carnage’). Therein lies the confounding logic of the far right: on the one side, calling for the billionaire class to dominate society in their interest (which produces the social carnage) and then, on the other side, inflaming the victims of said carnage to fight against policies that would benefit them.

Milei is right in his overall judgment: the West is in danger, but not because of social democratic policies; it is in danger because of its inability to come to terms with its slow demise as the dominating bloc in the world.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights (GSI) come two important texts on the changing global landscape: a landmark study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage, and our seventy-second dossier, The Churning of the World Order (the dossier is an ‘executive summary’ of the study, so I will be referring to them as if they were one text). We believe that this is the most significant theoretical statement that our institute has made in its eight-year history.

In both Hyper-Imperialism and The Churning of the World Order we make four important points:

First, through a deep analysis of the concepts of the Global North and the Global South, we show that the former acts as a bloc, while the latter is merely a loose grouping. The Global North is led by the United States, which has created several instruments to extend its authority over the other countries in the bloc (many of which are historic colonial powers and settler-colonial societies). These platforms include the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (initially set up in 1941 between the US and UK, the network has now expanded to Fourteen Eyes), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949), and the Group of Seven (G7, set up in 1974). Through these and other formations, the United States and its political allies within the Global North are able to exercise authority over their own countries and the countries of the Global South.

In contrast, the countries of the Global South have historically been much more disorganised, with some, looser alliances and linkages around regional and political affiliations. The Global South has neither a political centre nor an ideologically driven project.

The analysis in the texts is detailed, relying upon public databases and databases built by GSI. The bottom line is that there is one world system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc. There are no multiple imperialisms, no inter-imperialist conflict.

Mahmud al-Obaidi (Iraq), Untitled, 2008.

Second, the platforms of the Global North exercise power over the world system through a number of vectors (military, financial, economic, social, cultural) and through a range of instruments (NATO, the International Monetary Fund, information systems). With the gradual decline of the Global North’s control over the international financial system, raw materials, technology, and science, this bloc mainly exercises its power through military force and through the management of information. In these texts, we do not go over the question of information, although we have previously written about it and will take it up again in a study on digital sovereignty. The focus of these texts is largely on military spending, where we show that the US-led bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending and that the US spends 12.6 times more than the world average on a per capita basis (Israel, second to the US, spends 7.2 times above the per capita world average). To put this into perspective, China accounts for 10% of world military spending and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.

Such enormous spending on the military is not innocent. Not only does it come at the cost of social spending, the Global North’s military power is used to threaten and intimidate countries, and – if they are disobedient – to punish them with hellfire and brimstone. In 2022 alone, these imperialist nations made 317 deployments of their military forces to countries in the Global South. The highest number of these deployments (31) were made to Mali, a nation strongly seeking sovereignty, and which was the first of the Sahel states to stage popular-backed coups (2020 and 2021) and eject the French military from its territory (2022).

Between 1776 and 2019, the United States carried out at least 392 interventions worldwide, half of them between 1950 and 2019. This includes the terrible, illegal war against Iraq in 2003 (at this year’s WEF meeting, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani asked for Global North troops to leave Iraq). This vast military spending by the Global North, led by the United States, reflects the militarisation of its foreign policy. One of the little remarked aspects of this militarisation is the development of a theory in both the United States and United Kingdom of ‘defence diplomacy’ (as it was noted in the UK Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998). In the United States, strategic thinkers use the acronym DIME to reflect on the sources of national power (diplomacy, informational, military, and economic).

Last year, the European Union and NATO – the institutions at the heart of the Global North – jointly pledged to ‘mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’. In case you did not catch it, that power – mostly military power and military diplomacy – is not to serve humanity, but to serve only their ‘citizens’.

António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.

Third, Part IV of our Hyper-Imperialism study is called ‘The West in Decline’, and looks at the evidence for this trend from a perspective that rejects Milei’s ‘the West is in danger’ fearmongering. The facts show that since the start of the Third Great Depression, the Global North has struggled to maintain its control over the world economy; its instruments – monopolies over technology and raw materials, as well as dominion over foreign direct investment – have fundamentally eroded. When China surpassed the United States’ share of global industrial output in 2004, the United States lost hegemony in production (by 2022, the former held a 25.7% share versus the 9.7% held by the latter). Given that the United States is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which reached $1 trillion in 2022, the US has little internal capability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies. Owners of capital in the United States have siphoned off their profits from the country’s exchequer creating the economic conditions for the social carnage that afflicts the country. The old political coalitions rooted around the two parties in the United States are in flux, with no space within US political system to develop a political project to exercise hegemony over the world economy through legitimacy and consent. That is why the US-led Global North resorts to force and intimidation, building its massive military apparatus by increasing its own public debt (since there is little domestic consensus to use that borrowing to build the infrastructure and productive base of the country).

The root of the New Cold War imposed by the United States on China is that China has outpaced the United States in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Every year since 1992, China has been a net exporter of capital, this surplus of capital creation has made it possible to finance international projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old.

El Meya (Algeria), Les Moudjahidates, 2021.

Fourth, we analyse the emergence of new organisations rooted in the Global South, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), the BRICS10 (2009), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021). These interregional platforms are in an embryonic stage, but they provide evidence for the growth of a new regionalism and multilateralism. Although these formations do not seek to operate as a bloc to counter the Global North’s bloc, they reflect what we have previously called a ‘new mood’ in the Global South. The new mood is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-capitalist, but is shaped by four main vectors:

• Multilateralism and regionalism centred on the creation of Global South-anchored platforms for cooperation.
• New modernisation centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.
• Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.
• Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.

The analysis in these texts goes deep beneath the surface, providing a historical materialist assessment of our present crises. Documents produced by the institutions of the Global North, such as the WEF’s Global Risks report for 2024, provide a list of the dangers that we face (climate catastrophe, social polarisation, economic downturns) but cannot explain them. Our approach, we believe, provides a theory to understand these perils as the outcome of the world system managed by the hyper-imperialist bloc.

In thinking about these texts, my mind wandered to the work of the Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996). When all seemed futile, al-Haydari wrote that ‘the sun will not rise’ and that ‘at the bottom of the house, already dead, are the steps of my children, reduced to silence’. But even then, when we ‘were without power’, there remains hope. His civilisation drowns, but then ‘you arrived with the paddle’, he sings. ‘Such is the history of our yesterday, and its taste is bitterness’, he concludes, ‘such is our slow walk, the procession of our dignity: our only good until the hour when will rise, finally, a free paddle’.

That anticipation defines a classic by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), ‘Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone’ (1966):

I’ve had a dream that someone is coming.
I’ve dreamt of a red star,
and my eyes lids keep twitching
and my shoes keep snapping to attention
and may I go blind
if I’m lying.
I’ve dreamt of that red star
when I wasn’t asleep.
Someone is coming,
someone is coming
someone better.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

War: The Malignant Creation of an Emotional Animal

What can be done? 

by Nayvin Gordon / January 23rd, 2024

There have always been some people who believe that they are entitled to rule over the rest of humanity.  This is because human behavior is driven by emotions. Decades of research has demonstrated this truth. Human nature is, for the vast majority, powered by empathy and concern for the common good. There are some whose nature can be described as aggressively assertive, dominating, and driven by selfishness, greed, and power.

The anthropologist, Douglas P. Fry comments, “ Social stratification and resulting positions of leadership open the door for a plethora of injustices and cruelties that come with warfare, slavery, and other types of exploitation by unchecked power wielders. In centralized polities, the power of some people to dominate and control others increases many times over what is possible at the level of bands and tribes.” (The Human Potential for Peace, 2006)

For thousands of years, on many continents, humans lived in egalitarian bands and tribes. They lived this way before and during slavery, feudalism, and corporate capitalism, systems dominated by a small elite that used warfare to expand their power, privilege, and profit.

History reveals that the vast majority of humanity, motivated by their desire for the common good, equality, and peace, has resisted, rebelled, and revolted against domination and exploitation: From the slave rebellions of Spartacus to revolutions against monarchy and colonialism to the socialist revolutions in Russia, and China.

How did egalitarian societies maintain equality and resist domination?  The anthropologist Christopher Boehm documented how members of egalitarian societies exert “intentional behavior that decisively suppressed hierarchical relations among adults as political actors.” “Differences between individuals are only permitted…, insofar as they work for the common good. Such equality can only persist as long as followers remain vigilantly egalitarian because they understand the nature of domination, the innate tendencies of individuals to dominate their peers”.  (“Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology, 1993)

“If an egalitarian ethos is present, abusive leadership is by definition, deviant…. it is a war of the great majority who are willing to settle for equality against the occasional dominator who is not… Upstarts who think they can get away with it.” After extensive study, Boehm concluded that humans consciously maintain egalitarianism by “constraining and controlling upstarts”. Such societies resist domination by ensuring that decisions are made by all, in the interest of all.

We must accept the need for eternal political vigilance and the need for force in the hands of the rank and file, to identify, expose, constrain, or punish those who wish to dominate, manipulate, or exploit us.

In the words of the famous anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould, humans have the capacity for war and destruction as well as peace and creativity. “Which ultimately shall we choose?  As for the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take a stand. It need not be.  We can do otherwise. (The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould, 2007)

We choose egalitarianism: economic, political, and social equality for all, to ensure a world without social status hierarchy, dominance, exploitation, and war.

Those, who control the war-mongering dominance hierarchies of today, are making active plans to foment nuclear war. The task before humanity is urgent.

Dr. Nayvin Gordon is a Family Physician in California who has written many articles on Health and Politics. He can be reached at gordonnayvin@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Nayvin.