>From tavis@cs.bu.edu Thu Sep 9 16:40:09 1993 Date: Thu, 9 Sep 93 16:31:41 -0400 From: Tavis Barr To: pauls@umich.edu Subject: Left Turn Spring 1993 Bombs Away! by David Finkel A "smooth transition," the media called it, as the Bush administration launched a new bombing campaign against Iraq in its last week and the incoming Clinton administration enthusiastically approved it. The bombing was complete with "collateral damage," too: an apartment complex outside Baghdad and a hotel in the center of the capital were hit, with several dozen civilian deaths. Notice that there was no protest about this crime from liberal quarters, either over Clintons approval of Bushs new war crime or even Clintons tightening of the blockade of Haiti, contrary to his election promise. There is, of course, a difference between the Blockade of Iraq and that of Haiti. In the first case, desperately- needed goods are kept out; in the other, people desperate to leave are kept in. Yet from the liberal leadership in Congress and the major media, virtual silence. They are so anxious to feel good about Clinton that they have embraced his crimes against humanity as their own. What is perhaps most revealing about Bushs intentions is that none of the excuses used to conduct the "Gulf War" two years ago were applicable to this most recent undertaking. Iraq was bombed not because it poses any new threat to Kuwait; nor because anyone still believes that it is on the verge of nuclear weapons capacity; nor because the so-called "allied coalition" requested it; nor because it might bring down Saddam Hussein. Bush and Clinton bombed Iraq simply because Iraq refused to comply quickly enough with every detail of United States orders. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to ignore the worlds real human rights violations; for example, over 400 Palestinians brutally and illegally expelled by the government of Israel continue to freeze on a hillside in Lebanon. In that case of "defiance of the United Nations" by Israel, the United States cooked up a "compromise" to veto any UN sanctions in exchange for Israel taking back 100 of the Palestinians now and the other 300 a year from now! At least we know Clintons real slogans: to the worlds peoples its "bombs away;" when it comes to human rights its "lets make a deal." ---30--- Bosnia, Yes; Military Intervention, No! A Solidarity Statement "ETHNIC CLEANSING." Towns reduced to starvation. Rape camps. Atrocities reminiscent of Nazi occupation are now everyday news items from the Balkans. The center of the war in 1991 was Croatia, in 1992 it became Bosnia-Herzegovina, and it may soon spread as well to Kosovo and Macedonia. Many complex factors underlie the present catastrophe engulfing Bosnia-Herzegovina: the disintegration of the former Yugoslav bureaucratic party-state; the cynical neglect by the imperialist powers of a region that, with the end of the Cold War, is no longer "strategic;" the weight of historical intercommunal conflicts. The advent of a unified and stable capitalist Europe has been revealed as a hollow myth. Yet the basic immediate issue could not be clearer. As socialists, as defenders of democratic and human rights, we have a clear side to take. We must be supporters of the defense of Bosnia. This republic is being torn to pieces, not by the will of its people but by military forces unleashed and armed from outside. In particular the people of Bosnia - Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs - are being killed, tortured, displaced and destroyed, primarily by militias supported by the government of Serbia. That government is essentially a partnership of a former Communist party bureaucrat named Milosevic, and a nazilike monarchist, Sesselji, who enjoys the loyalty of many of the Serb militias operating in Bosnia.The catastrophe is also the result of a deal reached between the regimes of Serbia and Croatia, who agreed nearly two years ago to the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of a "settlement" of the conflict between them. The forces seeking to carve out "Greater Serbia" and "Greater Croatia" by genocidal ethnic cleansing stand for the principle that states must be made up of one and only one community, regardless of the irrelevant wishes of the actual people in them. In fighting to remain in their homes and to defend their republic, the people of Bosnia - Muslim, Croat and Serb - are waging a struggle not only for themselves, but for all those who believe that people of varying religious, ethnic or national communities can live together within a common state. It was surely among the most dramatic gestures in any modern war when the government of Bosnia and the Sarajevo city council temporarily blockaded their own desperately needed relief aid to force the United Nations to get food and medical convoys to starving villages in the countryside! The Bosnian defensive war is a progressive and democratic struggle, not because its government is socialist or revolutionary (it isn t) but because of the principles at stake - and because of the horrible slaughter that is already occurring as the Serbia-backed militias overrun eastern Bosnia. The Bosnian struggle has been not merely ignored, but stabbed in the back by Washington and European powers which, in the name of "stability," imposed an arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia. This left the militias backed by the Serbian regime with unlimited weaponry from the former Yugoslav National Army (JNA), while the Bosnians had little for self-defense. In fact the JNA confiscated the weapons of Bosnia s Territorial Defense forces prior to the war! To have any chance of success against desperate odds, the Bosnians have the right, first, to weapons and ammunition from any possible source. Second, they have the right to massive humanitarian aid to enable them to avoid death by starvation and freezing. Socialists must demand that the Western governments, through the United Nations, supply Bosnia with the humanitarian material aid its people need to remain in their homeland and continue their struggle. In no way does this imply ascribing any progressive qualities to the United Nations itself, which remains a rich powers club; in fact, the U.N. s interest in stopping the war has to do not with preserving Bosnia, but only with halting a flow of refugees that now alarms European states. At the same time we oppose all forms of intervention that harm the Bosnian struggle, or would subvert its independent character. First and foremost, of course, this means that the arms embargo, a particularly cynical form of intervention inasmuch as it masquerades as "neutrality and nonintervention," must be lifted. Second, it means we have no illusions that introducing tens of thousands of foreign troops to seize and hold conflicted territory would protect the people of Bosnia. We would oppose such military action, not only because of what military strategists call a "hopeless quagmire." More important, military intervention would not in fact preserve the integrity of Bosnia, nor even attempt to do so, but rather complete and ratify the act of destroying it. The imperial powers of the United States and western Europe have no stake in saving Bosnia-Herzegovina, but only in restoring "stability" through the path of least resistance, which is to force Bosnia to stop defending itself! In fact, the imperialist powers right now are using political means and blackmail to impose what the Greater Serb military onslaught couldn t: the practical dismemberment of the small Bosnian republic into communally- dominated provinces. This program, called the "Vance-Owen plan," is being implemented in "peace negotiations," where the legitimate, elected government of Bosnia is cynically regarded as just one "party," along with the forces that are trying to destroy Bosnia! While the great world powers, led by the United States, massacred 100,000 Iraqis in the name of stopping Saddam Hussein s seizure of Kuwait, in the case of ex-Yugoslavia the policy will reward Serbia s (and to a secondary but real degree, Croatia s) aggression against Bosnia. As this statement is written, the Clinton administration is attempting airdrops of food and medicine into the besieged towns of eastern Bosnia. We are for supplying these starving towns; but, as in the case of Somalia, we have no confidence whatsoever in the policies or actions of the United States. On the one hand, airdrops are only a symbolic action, are unlikely to be sufficiently accurate or large enough to meet the desperate needs of rural Bosnians, and may be intended more for symbolic than for real effect. (The first airlifted supplies missed their target completely!) On the other, the starving villagers searching out food parcels on mountain slopes became targets for the militias carrying out the genocidal ethnic-cleansing war. So what should be done? The fact is that the U.S. and European imperialist powers have no way of doing what is necessary to save Bosnia, except by allowing Bosnia access to the means of self-defense; and this they will not do. Partly, they are sacrificing Bosnia to avoid weakening the political position of Boris Yeltsin in Russia, where many nationalists and former Communists are outspoken in support of the Serbian government s assault on Bosnia. The reality is that the great powers have no great concern about Bosnia, beyond a fear of neighboring states in Europe being swamped by refugees (particularly Slavic Muslims), for which they have no room - just as there was no room for Jewish survivors of the Nazis ethnic cleansing program, of an earlier generation. Far from being the cockpit for imperialist rivals, the former Yugoslavia s slide into the present horror aroused scant initial interest in foreign capitals, for reasons which are instructive. During the Cold War, the Balkans were "strategic" and so Yugoslavia mattered to the West. So, for that matter, did the Horn of Africa, where the United States and Soviet Union respectively backed the regimes of Ethiopia and Somalia, before switching sides in the late 1970s. When the Cold War ended and the Horn of Africa no longer mattered, starvation in Somalia could be quietly ignored - until it became too late. Similarly, the catastrophic war in the former Yugoslavia could have been stopped by a decisive European response (even a threat to bomb Serbian warships) during last year s Serbian/JNA shelling of Dubrovnik and other cities in Croatia.The failure to stop Great-Serb aggression then gave the green light for the current horror in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and the carveup of Bosnia is the prelude for the next round of massacres in Kosovo and Macedonia, as the downward spiral continues. And continue it will, not only in the wreckage of Yugoslavia, but also in many parts of the former Soviet Union - until a democratic and socialist working-class alternative arises in the collapsing post-Stalinist East and the decaying capitalist West. A victory for Bosnia could begin to reverse the tide of chauvinist slaughter. Today, the desperate defenders of Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities are the front line of defense of basic democratic and human values. The cost of their defeat will be paid, immediately, in hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives in Bosnia, but in the longer run by all of us. ---EOF--- Actions are taking place in a number of cities to demand that the mass rapes committed in ethnic-cleansing operations in Bosnia be treated as war crimes. We urge that these actions be supported. Contact the National Organization for Women (NOW) or Women s Action Coalition (WAC) in your city to find out if local actions are taking place, or could be organized. Burge Purge: Chicago Activists Get a Brutal Cop off the Force by Rachel Quinn On February 10, 1993, Police Commander Jon Burge was fired by the Chicago Police board for his role in what Amnesty International and an internal police investigation both call systematic torture and abuse. Initial inquiry into Burge s abuse began in 1982 when Andrew Wilson, a convicted cop killer, claimed he had been forced to sign a confession to the murder of two Chicago policemen. The physical evidence of abuse was so overwhelming that the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. At a second trial, without the confession, Wilson was found guilty. Wilson brought a civil rights damage case to federal courts in 1989. His lawyers offered photographs of Wilson after his encounter with Burge and medical testimony that confirmed he had been beaten, burned, and most disturbingly, electroshocked. In his testimony, Wilson described being tortured by Burge and his men by being beaten, suffocated with a typewriter bag (a process called dry-submarino), handcuffed to a radiator so that he received 2nd degree burns, and electroshocked on the ears, nose, fingers, and genitals. A week before the case was to go to trial, Wilson s lawyers received a letter from an anonymous police source who had worked with Burge in the past. The letter stated that Burge was repeatedly involved in torture and gave the name and location of another victim. This source led Wilson s lawyers to at least ten other men, all black or Latino, who had been tortured by Burge. The judge barred any testimony from these men. He also barred testimony from an internationally renowned expert on torture who confirmed the use of electroshock on Wilson by citing details such as minute horseshoe-shaped scars on his ears from the clamps and Wilson s bleeding gums-it is extremely common for victims of torture to clamp their teeth so hard during the shock that their gums bleed. Not surprisingly, the all-white jury failed to find Burge responsible for the torture and abuse of Andrew Wilson. The jury did find, however, that the City of Chicago had a policy and practice of police abuse and torture and that Wilson s constitutional rights had been violated. After the discovery of Jon Burge s systematic use of torture and abuse among people of color, the Task Force to Confront Police Brutality, a grass roots activist group, was created. Its main goal was to educate the Chicago community about police brutality, especially in terms of the blatant racism involved in police control of communities of color. As well as education, the main project of Task Force has been to get Jon Burge and his cohorts fired from the police force. Using militant actions, public forums, and legal challenges, the Task Force has managed to garner media attention and more men have come forward to accuse Burge of torture. One of the most effective moves by the Task force was to involve Amnesty International, a group known for its intervention in human rights cases in so-called third-world countries. Amnesty International asked members in several countries to write letters to Mayor Daley and other members of the City Council to express concern about the allegations of torture in the Chicago Police Department and to call for a significant inquiry. The Amnesty International Report was part of an overall strategy to link issues of racism and human rights abuses internationally that included demonstrations outside the Mayor s home, police headquarters, area 2 headquarters (Burge s area), and at City Hall. The persistent vocal, militant, and organized actions of Task Force and ally groups, such as Citizen s Alert and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, forced the city government to deal with the issue of police brutality. Ten years after the first public allegations of torture were made against Burge and the officers working under him, the allegations were sustained by the Office of Professional Standards, the police force s internal investigative body. Jon Burge and two other officers, John Yucaitis and Patrick O Hara, were suspended until the findings of an internal hearing. The hearings took place throughout February and March of 1992. Meanwhile, more and more survivors of Burge s electroshock torture came forward, including three teenage African Americans last summer. The Police Board stalled on making its final decision in order to gain distance from the rebellion in Los Angeles last May. Finally, the board met and handed down its decision: Jon Burge (who had at some point in this decade-long struggle been promoted from lieutenant in charge of the Violent Crimes Unit in the South Side of Chicago to Commander of Area 2) was fired. The other officers involved were given retroactive suspensions and are now back on active duty, but there is more evidence of further cases against them. The Task Force says it wants criminal charges pressed against Burge and the other officers and continues to fight against police brutality. The strategy and analysis of the Task Force to Confront Police Brutality show how struggles can be linked to international issues and how racism in our culture in intimately connected to the state. The victory of the "Burge Purge" shows all activists how consistent action and organization can empower people to change society. ---30--- Impressions from a Trip to Chile by Veronica Werckmeister Nineteen years after the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected social-democrat Salvador Allende, the struggle of the people of Chile continues. I visited a Chile that was fighting to recover all that was lost in the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The referendum of 1988 unanimously denied Pinochet another "term" in office with an ardent "NO!", and in 1989 the "redemocratization" process was begun. However, fresh in the minds of the people are the thousands of graves, widows, single mothers, orphans, exiles, imprisoned and tortured he left after seventeen years of despotism. The problems of Chile have not been solved by the token removal of the general from power. The injustices that were committed in the authoritarian era remain; the majority are unpunished and even unrecognized. A government that legislates a law of amnesty and impunity for many of those involved in murder and torture cannot be expected to follow up on demands for justice without consistent public pressure. The Committee for the Disappeared and Detained and the Committee for Human Rights, along with other groups, are still active. Clearly Gen. Augusto Pinochet stepped down from the presidency with certain unspoken conditions: first, to remain as head of the armed forces, and second, to secure the safety and the liberty of himself and his cohorts. Many, however, have faith in "democracy," and the majority are grateful for the end of Pinochet s rule. Chile faces many of the same problems that other Latin American countries face today: economic development is hard to come by, and "progress" is the cry to arms of most conservative political entities. The new democratic party system constitutes a step forward, although most of the previous power structures remain in tact. The politics of Chile are complex and the right wing factions, the extremists and those that wish the "Golden Era" of Pinochet to return, continue to wield much of the economic and political power regardless of the formal political changes. The popular political movements, although still somewhat weak, seem to have maintained some cohesiveness. In Santiago the students of various universities comprise much of the public political activity. Demonstrations are held regularly and often end in violent clashes (comprised generally of one-sided attacks by the police armed with water trucks and tear gas bombs). On the days prior to the nineteenth anniversary of the coup student activists of the Universidad de Chile organized a strike and held rallies and demonstrations inside the campus and on the streets. The confrontation with the police resulted in injuries and arrests. The Chilean youth, however, know the perils of struggling against oppressive forces. It is very common on these days of political significance to find students loaded with salt and lemons, which they put under their eyes and noses in order to counteract the effects of the tear gas. The police and security forces still perceive popular movements as a threat and therefore have not toned down their repression. Instead they seem to want all dissent to disappear so as to project an image of stability. Though the distance between rich and poor widens with "democracy" and free enterprise, some are hesitant to resist. Most savour the improvements so much that they don t want to risk sabotaging the few but important changes. Others, however point out that the only difference between now and then is that now they are allowed to complain, but the same economic and social problems are still pervasive. Poverty is growing; more and more people live in the unhabitable poblaciones outside of Santiago, which provides an indication as to the economic divisions of the country. >From the center to the east where one finds comforts imported from Europe and the U.S., most government officials, businessmen, and military leaders (including Pinochet) live. The West side is home to the working class. Besieged by beggars and racked by crime, it creates a stark juxtaposition with the barrios to the east. If one travels even further west, leaving the urban landscape behind, one finds what is known as the poblaciones (populations). Poblaciones are a mix between urban and rural slums. Housing is makeshift and modern amenities such as toilets or electricity are rare. Racial divisions are also clear. The East side dwellers are of fair skin and European features and the West side residents have many indigenous characteristics and darker skin. Amid this landscape of social injustice and economic inequality, Chile is a country full of political struggle and ideological debate. The freedom of speech that exists now has led many Chileans to cautiously speak their minds. Debates are ever-present and analysis ongoing. What I saw in Chile was people struggling to incorporate these new liberties with their inherent sense of economic and human injustices. The change in political systems and electoral structures offers some hope for real and tangible change, while at the same time threatening to dampen popular struggle with illusion and appeasement. Like many other Latin American countries, Chile has lived a difficult history and must in many ways fight to recover from it. The Chileans, in general, have maintained a very distinct and admirable resistance to the injustices that rack their nation. The exiles that have recently returned, and the people that remained when Pinochet took over, are strong in their ideals, whether they be expressed politically, artistically or intellectually. There is rarely a day when, walking through the streets of Santiago, I didn t come upon some sort of remnant of the resistance that took place during the dictatorship or a more current symbol of the struggle that goes on now. Women s groups, labor groups, indigenous people s groups, human rights groups and other marginalized political groups are active throughout the capital and in other cities and rural areas. Most of these movements have some roots in the coalitions that were formed to resist the military dictatorship. On the anniversary of the coup they marched by the thousands; side by side, on their way to the national cemetery where the Allende mausoleum stands. A progressive social-democrat in his time, twenty years later Allende remains a symbol of resistance for activists of all ideologies. Red carnations, red flags, theatre groups, banners, mourners, old and young, all colors and classes invaded the cemetery on the 11th of September to place carnations on Allende s tomb and to show their allegiance to the spirit of social justice. >From the Editors: On Clinton and "Change"... How many of us woke up on the morning after Clinton s inauguration in a better mood than normal? Reading the accounts of the gala events of the night before, how many of us gave in to a sense of optimism? Clinton even went to the MTV Inaugural Ball! But before we get positively giddy, let s take a look at what s in store in the next four years. There is a real contradiction between Clinton s real priorities, which are to stabilize the Reagan-Bush agenda in the face of an economic crisis, and the expectations for progressive change that have been raised by his election. It is critical for us to understand that the extent to which Clinton does initiate reforms, however mild, will be because of sustained pressure from progressive movements. Without that constant pressure Clinton will take the path of least resistance, i.e. the path dictated to him by the nasty reality of a crisis-ridden economy and a powerful corporate lobby. We should be clear that Clinton is not so much better as less bad than Bush; a questionably lesser of two evils. Even before his inauguration he backed off on most of his (rather modest) progressive campaign promises, including a middle-class tax cut, a fast start on solving the health- care crisis, fiscal stimulus via government spending and his pledge not to turn back the Haitians fleeing their murderous dictatorship. He endorsed Bush s last-gasp intervention in Somalia and his final air strikes against Iraq. The stark realities of power, it seems, began to dawn on him even before he moved into the oval office. Clinton s furious backpedaling, combined with the quality of many of his appointments (especially Bentsen at Treasury, Brown at Commerce, Aspin at Defense and Christopher at State) not only do not indicate a commitment to a strong program of reform (which many progressives somewhat whimsically attribute to him), but indicate instead a strong commitment to maintaining the status quo. So much for change . More like the same old capitalism with a pretty face and a Jerry Garcia tie. An enormous number of people voted for Clinton on the basis of his rhetoric of change ; but his model for change is based on the ideology of unbridled capital mobility and a benevolent market. His top priority is to fix the economy without questioning its logic. Consequently, his priorities are no different from those of elite groups, especially the multinationals, and not much different in substance from those of the Reagan-Bush era. The difference is that he seems to be a more sensitive politician in that he recognizes the potential social costs of his priorities and is willing to modify them in the name of change and in the interests of overall social stability. But the fact remains that his priorities, regardless of rhetorical camouflage, are diametrically opposed to the needs of oppressed and exploited people of the entire hemisphere. It will likely take some time for progressives and working people in general to realize that Clinton s priorities and theirs are pulling in opposite directions. But in the face of continuing economic crisis this realization is likely to come sooner rather than later. What is likely to happen when people realize that Clinton cannot come through? Well, history seems to indicate that mobilizations demanding meaningful reform will begin to break out. This has happened in the past regardless of the strength or weakness of the left, and in both strong and weak economies. People have only stood for so much abuse, especially when faced with empty promises and hypocrisy, which are the Democrats historic specialty. It seems a pretty safe bet that the 90s will be a decade of progressive social upsurge. But it s not a sure bet. Even if there is a wide-spread upsurge, the question remains as to what kind of upsurge. It could be an upsurge of support for right-wing populists like H. Ross Perot. Or an upsurge of racism and gay bashing. Or an upsurge against women s control of their own bodies. We suggest that the left has something to do with the type of reaction people have to continued austerity and empty promises. As activists our responsibility is to reach as many people as possible with the idea and the incipient reality that an organized, mass fight-back against corporate America is both possible and in their best interests. Our hard work will not guarantee success; we don t have any magic formulas. But even though a strong and unified left won t guarantee a progressive fight-back, if the left continues to act in its old sectarian, in-fighting manner, we will just be making it all the easier for the likes of Perot, Buchanan and Duke to take control of the frustration with the status-quo that millions of people are already feeling. It s important to note here that unlike most of what s said in the progressive/liberal press, an upsurge will not take place because of any opening created by the election of Clinton; in fact we are already fighting hard in the movements not to give in to pressure to lower our expectations in order to give Clinton a chance . It will take place because the realities of the world economy, the national debt and Clinton s allegiances give the lie to his watered-down progressive rhetoric. It will take place as people realize that Clinton and his new Democrats aren t all they re cracked up to be and as they realize that only by struggling together will their needs even begin to be met. There are no great humanitarians in the corridors of power - not even little ones; if our needs are to be met we must organize ourselves and struggle together against those who would keep us down in the name of freedom, starve us in the name of opportunity and dictate to us in the name of democracy. Our job is to constantly push the Clinton administration to give us as much as possible from this system while at the same time encouraging people to think about just what the limits of this system are, and what s necessary in order to move beyond those limits. Our job is not to give Clinton a chance . Our job is to make him sweat! ---30--- Why Clinton Couldn't Help Working People (Even if He Wanted to...) by Tavis Barr Change. Jobs. These are the only two words that Clinton needed to use to get elected, and they may be the two words that actually did get him elected. But neither Clinton, nor any of the Democrats who ran against him in the primaries, had any substantive economic vision that was very different from the Republicans . We heard a few zany ideas, like Jerry Brown s flat-rate tax, but they seemed to serve more to show that the public is open to drastically different ideas than to show that the candidates were offering any that would actually work. The end result is that the only liberalish measures that Clinton has passed so far are those that didn t cost him any money, while his economic proposals, such as a cut in the capital gains tax, are really no different from Bush s. Perhaps one bit of honesty has crept in: instead of ignoring the attack on our income because "we re in a recovery," we are asked to patriotically accept it under the rallying cry of "sacrifice." But how much could Clinton actually change? We in Solidarity have maintained that he won t change anything out of his own will, since he knows where the money came from that got him elected. Clinton s primary objective seems to be stabilizing the Reagan-Bush agenda: while Reagan s budget measures, such as slashing the effective tax rate for the wealthiest Americans from about 70% to about 30%, have created an enormous deficit and misdirected investment, Clinton s plan, such as raising that rate to about 40% and creating better investment incentives, may bring the Reaganomics system under control while leaving the rich largely untouched. He will also echo the business community s call for economic growth, since by definition, the low growth of the economy (which has, in fact, been negative in per capita numbers) is what makes our government refer to this economic period as a recession. This is all fine and dandy for business, since economic growth means expanded markets and, probably, higher profits. The rest of us, on the other hand, may not benefit from an economic expansion, particularly if it comes at our expense. If the economy can generate new business at a lower wage rate, how many of us can truly say we are better off? The current economic crisis, in fact, has not been just a development of the last three or four years. Its roots go back to the time of the 1973 oil crisis, although that crisis was more of a trigger than a cause. Real wages peaked in 1973, and they have been on the decline ever since. They stabilized for a brief period during the mid- 1980 s, but have continued on down since. They are now at the same levels they were at in 1959, and will probably continue to decline. The boom that gave capitalism new life after World War II has all been taken away from us. The wealth is still there, to be sure, and the productive capacity of the United States has continued to expand, as the economic growth figures indicate. In fact, the United States economy is more productive than any time in its history. But the prosperity that working people in our parents generation could expect has all been handed over to the very wealthiest people. Why has this happened, and what can we do about it? Capitalism is, by its very foundation, a system that leads itself into crisis. The prosperity that it has brought in increased productivity has been mostly in the form of continually increased production technology. New technology requires capital to create; capitalism started in the eighteenth century as a viable system, because a capitalist could invest in machinery, pay a worker the going wage, and produce so much more than a worker without the machinery that the capitalist recovers the cost of the machinery over the machine s lifetime, and receives a yearly profit to boot. The ratio of the profit to the amount of money spent on the machinery is called the profit rate. Competition will bring the profit rate down. Eventually it will stabilize, in an economic boom: most firms can find ways to behave at least a bit monopolistically, keeping their profits high, and in doing so, those firms will keep up the profit rate that investors are willing to accept on a new investment. However, given competition, there is another factor that will drive the profit rate down over a long period of time. When capitalists or companies get profits, they reinvest them. This means that every year, the country s capital stock grows at a rate about equal to that of the profit rate - a bit lower, in fact, since perhaps 10-20% of profits are consumed. Each additional dollar of profit becomes a legitimate part of the capital stock. Where can it be invested? In its youth, capitalism used new investments to reproduce itself until nearly all production was industrialized. Today, the only real option is to increase the capital intensity of production. But the income resulting from each additional unit invested in the economy (known as the marginal return to capital) will be lower than that of any previous unit. In other words, the more machinery you offer workers to use, the less productive each unit will become, even though the total productivity may go up. This is what mainstream economists call "diminishing marginal returns." The lower the marginal return, the lower the average return. The lower the average return, the lower the profit rate. If productivity grows at a certain rate, however, the problem of diminishing marginal returns can be set back. An investment in new and better technology will generate more wealth than an investment in the technology of the previous period. If the productivity enhancement is high enough, it may offset any problem of decreasing marginal returns. Everybody then gains (even though the very wealthiest gain far more than the rest of us), since increasing wages and lowering prices do basically the same thing for the purchasing power of the average worker. However, any decrease in productivity growth will lead us back to the situation of declining profits. Notice that productivity growth does not have to be zero - it just has to be lower than the marginal return. At that point, capitalism has to cut wages to save the profit rate. Put simply, if the rich have to get richer, at a rate faster than the economy grows, then the rest of us have to get poorer. This is why there has been a massive shift of wealth to the richest 5% of the country, and especially to the richest 1%. What does capitalism have in store for us? There is a further contradiction in the system that may lead the economy to outright collapse. If production continues to increase but the wage continues to decrease, who is left to buy all of the goods? The ruling class certainly won t go around buying gratuitous refrigerators and color TVs. The main economic interest of the ruling class is in its profits. If the capitalists knew just what they were doing to those profits, they might change their minds, but they don t. Besides, it would be individually rational for a capitalist to insist on investing for further profits, even though the result of all capitalists doing this at the same time will only leave them worse off than if they all just accepted a lower profit rate. In the end, the capitalists end up fighting with each other in the hope that they will come out on top. The last time the system collapsed, in the 1920 s and 1930 s, the ruling class used myriad brutal methods to maintain themselves: in the U.S., wages went through the floor and there was massive unemployment; in much of Europe, the upper crust of the bourgeoisie crushed the rest by latching on to a state capitalist command economy that they molded into a shape of their pleasing; finally, it took a world war for the capitalists to divert working class frustration and loot other people s capital for themselves. By the end of the war, enough capital had been destroyed and technology had progressed enough that the system was ready for another boom. Is this likely to happen again? It s anybody s guess just how deep the crisis is, and what the economy has to do to get out of it. It may be that a technological revolution in medicine and robotics will soon bring enough growth possibilities that the wage may start to rise again. It may also be that the U.S. will use its military might to go backward from neo-colonialism to outright colonialism, thereby capturing the capital of other countries for itself, or simply engage in destroying the capital of economically competing nations (if you liked Iraq...). But the economy has a lot of baggage at this point. The flood of money that the United States has poured into the world economy over the last twenty years (in the form of eurodollars and, later, treasury bonds) is still ballooning around earning interest without really representing any hard assets; at least in our country, government spending on research and development was slashed in the 1980 s; and, given that wages are now only about 80% of what they were in 1973, even though economic output is some 30% higher, who will pay for all of the products? All of these facts suggest that some structural change will have to be imposed on the economy before it can run smoothly again. If and when that happens, it is not clear how much capitalism has left to offer in terms of increasing economic output. Robotics may increase the productivity of manufacturing labor drastically, but manufacturing is a shrinking part of the economy. It is true that the continuously expanding service sector of the 1980 s was accelerated further by low wages. But the manufacturing economy is coming closer and closer to satiating most people s needs. Just because the average person has had to work longer and longer hours to afford such goods does not mean they weren t produced. The end result is that the service sector, with jobs such as teaching and counselling, will become an increasing part of a healthy economy, and there is very little that capital can do to increase the productivity of these jobs. One might say that capitalism will have run its course. At that point, the only thing left for it to do, if it is still around, will be either to lower the standard of living of the average person to the point of barbarism, or for a section of the ruling class to transform it into some sort of Stalinist-like system with no direct profits. Because such a system would require a state apparatus to manage the economy, we could expect that the ruling class would take away any democratic control of the state so that it could keep the lid on its wealth and power. We in Solidarity believe that the eventual collapse of capitalism makes overthrowing it all the more important. This is why we say: "Socialism or barbarism." As long as the control of wealth is in the hands of a few, we are, at the end of the road, left with the choice of being robbed of a decent living or being robbed of our freedom. The only way to avoid either outcome is for the people who create the wealth - working people - to take control of it. Any society in which the control of production is democratic is one we would fight for; however, there are a couple of reasons why we believe that only the working class can do so effectively. First, those who create the products or service of a particular industry are the ones most fit to manage that industry. Not only do they gain the expertise of spending their entire workday minding the production process, but controlling the workplace itself is the only way workers can guarantee that their job will not exploit them. Secondly, the working class determination of production is the only majority control powerful enough to uproot the ruling class. While mass mobilizations are capable of creating political revolution, where one ruling class is replaced with another, it is necessary to uproot the production system in order to create a social revolution, where everyone is empowered. Corporations are always capable of re-organizing and squirming their way back into power; they can only be stopped if they are democratically controlled. "The people united will never be defeated!" is an evocative slogan, but unfortunately, it isn t always true. The people united have been defeated many, many times. Only by stopping production directly can the great majority of people deprive the ruling class of its means of power. Clinton may be able to pull the same trick as Reagan, and create a temporary economic boom right around the time of the next election. However, with the economic crisis getting deeper and deeper, that possibility of a boom looks shallower and a lot less likely. It is more probable that the public will become disillusioned with Clinton. Wages have finally dropped far enough and for long enough that people are getting quite suspicious of why they can t earn more. Now that the system has gone far enough that even the generous government definition says the economy is weak, many people believe that their suspicions are legitimate. What remains to be seen is how people will react to their disillusionment. There are groups among the New Right, such as the Oregon Citizens alliance, that are using the rhetoric and organizing tactics of the Left to rebuild an active proto-fascist movement. It is clearly not time for fascism yet in this country, but the OCA is much stronger in one state than any of the socialist movement throughout the entire country. This doesn t mean that the left won t grow in the wake of disillusionment with the system, but we may be defeated unless we organize well. Our job is to be as vocal and as straight-forward about what s really going on as we can be. Capitalism may be shedding its sheep s clothing, and a truly democratic and equitable ideology may be accepted by many who have, until the last couple of years, at least been accepting of the status quo. People voted last November for change. When they realize that the Democrats are just more of same, many people may be looking for an explanation. As weak as we are, socialists do address the declining living standard of the average working person in a way that "family values" does not. People won t believe that their wage has gone down because of absent fathers, even if some may be (erroneously) convinced that they would be better off if the government slashed social spending. If we can genuinely help build the foundations for a movement that brings the working class into power, then we may be living in a very exciting time. ---30--- Organizing from Below: Ten Years at a Los Angeles High School by Joshua Pechthalt On September 9, 1992, more than 1,200 students, teachers and parents from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles staged a one-hour strike to protest cuts in education and to demand full funding of social services by raising taxes on corporations and the rich. The strike was called by the Manual Arts School Community Coalition, a small committee of teachers, parents and students that emerged following the April 92 uprising. Over the past two and a half years, Californias once booming economy has been racked by a crippling recession, resulting in almost a million jobs lost and dramatically reducing tax revenues. The governor and state legislature have used the recession to justify billions of dollars in permanent program cuts to all state programs except the state prison system. The Los Angeles Unified School District, during this economic crisis, has eliminated more than 4,000 teaching jobs through cuts and attrition. Teachers have suffered combined pay cuts of 16%, cuts in health benefits, and an increase in class size to 40 students in secondary schools and 30 students in elementary. The leadership of the 28,000-member Los Angeles teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), in the face of these unprecedented attacks, has pursued a narrow, go-it-alone strategy that has relied on state Democratic politicians to protect educations share of dwindling state tax revenues. Throughout this period, UTLA organized no job actions, made little effort to build links with other public sector workers or with parents, and has encouraged discord between the district employee unions by issuing proposals that would cut classi- fied employees to maintain teacher wages. In the midst of state budget cuts, the Rodney King verdict ignited the largest urban rebellion in United States history. Following the upheaval, a group of teachers, parents and students from Manual Arts High School, located in the middle of the citys most devastated area, organized a school community committee to discuss the causes of the uprising and what could be done to change the direction of the community. We settled on a proposal for a one-hour strike during the Fall semester that we hoped could pressure the teachers union to be more militant and give some direction to the struggle in Los Angeles. The key to our success would be the participation of teachers. We wanted our action to include members of the entire school community and feared that without a sizeable number of teachers out on the strike our action would be dismissed as only a student effort. We also wanted to make clear that as teachers and parents we were taking some responsibility for the demonstration. When students in several other senior and junior high schools did initiate actions prior to our strike, their lack of organization and planning and the absence of teachers and parents led to several incidents of petty vandalism and student arrests. Members of the school community committee met with teachers, students and the administration to get support for the one-hour job action. The parents on the committee were particularly concerned that we advise the principal of our plan because we had received his support from the beginning and this action was not directed against the school site administration. While we knew the administration would not formally support the action, the school principal privately encouraged us. Later he permitted student leaders to print a thousand flyers, lent us a bullhorn the morning of the strike, and most importantly, did not try to stop students from participating. When the union president learned of the plans, she contacted a district superintendent to "inform" him. A union representative warned us that we could be dismissed from the district. In the past, such threats had squelched our actions, but at this point the twenty teachers who wanted to participate were no longer intimidated. The strike was a huge success with live media coverage for more than two hours and every major television station covering the event. No disciplinary action was taken against students, while teachers were docked an hours pay and received notices of reprimand. Two teachers received stronger disciplinary notices which both are currently grieving. Neither teacher is in jeopardy of losing his job. The ability of Manual teachers to take action without union sanction did not occur spontaneously but developed over time with the encouragement of a core of union activists. Teacher leaders at the school have helped create a workplace environment inspiring rank and file teachers with the confidence to challenge the school site administration as well as their own bureaucratic union leadership. The September strike was only the most visible of a series of actions in which teachers, over the years, have flexed their muscles and altered their working conditions. The Los Angeles teachers union was forged out of a 4 1/2 week strike in 1971, but had been relatively unsuccessful in maintaining teacher wages until the mid-1980s. In 1984 teachers elected a more militant union president on a platform that challenged the concessionary approach of the previous leadership. The change in leadership meant very little that first year for the more than 100 teachers at Manual Arts. While a couple of lefty teachers had been active in organizing students, their sectarian politics threatened most teachers and did nothing to organize the UTLA chapter (shop). No regular union meetings were held and teachers regularly transferred out of the school. Near the end of the school year, a small group of teachers met and pressured the chapter chair (shop steward) to call a meeting to discuss conditions in the school. At the beginning of the next school year, this group continued to meet and encouraged a progressive African American woman to challenge the incumbent chapter chair, whom she beat in a close vote. The core of teacher activists pushed to hold regular lunch time meetings in which "regular" teachers felt comfortable to discuss school site issues and broader union concerns. Over time, we went from monthly meetings to weekly and even twice weekly meetings. The regular meetings transformed the chapter from a passive, fatalistic group of individuals to one in which teachers increasingly felt a sense of collective power. In particular, the meetings helped overcome the isolation felt by teachers who work in separate rooms and often are too tired to walk across campus to the school cafeteria for mid-morning break or lunch. Over the years, 15-25 teachers have come regularly to union meetings, but when a critical issue arises, 50 or more attend, sometimes for several days in a row. The chapter began to assert its strength in 1985/86 when a new principal imposed a once-a-week ten-minute lesson plan for homeroom. Teachers, already overburdened with large classrooms, public address announcements and endless paper work, filed a successful collective grievance and stopped the principals plan. When the same principal went on a semester long sabbatical, teachers circulated a petition with more than one hundred signatures demanding that the temporary principal be retained. The petition was presented to a district superintendent and the old principal never came back. Through the mid-1980s Los Angeles teachers were relatively successful in raising salaries. The growth in Californias economy coupled with a national concern over the quality of education meant a growing budget for the district. With a more aggressive union leadership attacking the districts bureaucracy and even organizing a one-day strike, the first job action since the 1971 strike, we were able to win significant wage increases. The climax of our efforts to improve wages came in 1989 when more than 25,000 teachers staged a nine day strike. While the strike was victorious, several teachers at Manual were critical of the leaderships "in-plant" strategy designed to anger parents and students, and their divisive jibes at classified district employees, including bus and truck drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, educational aides and others. Four months prior to the strike, more than 50 teachers voted to stage a one-day strike to show our opposition to the leadership's strategy and our willingness to fight. When the union president learned of the planned wildcat, he came to school and discouraged the idea. While few union members, at that point, were willing to openly defy their president, many teachers saw, for the first time, how the union bureaucracy stifles rank and file initiative. Several months later, when the in-plant strategy failed to win us a contract, the leadership called for a strike. In 1991, Manual teachers nearly wildcatted again when the teaching assistants (TAs) staged roving strikes throughout the school district. The ten thousand TAs were being organized by SEIU Local 99, which represented the 25,000+ classified district employees. Neither the teachers union nor the other bargaining units within Local 99 would officially respect the TAs picket lines. Distressed by the lack of solidarity with the TAs, Manual teachers discussed staying out a day to support them. When the union leadership learned of our plan, the union supervisor of grievances came to the school to set us straight. Again, the leaderships intervention frightened teachers with the threat of dismissal and the idea was killed. One result of the 1989 UTLA strike was greater teacher participation in school-site decision making. While this education version of the Team Concept (blurring the lines between labor and management to increase production) has been a relative failure at most schools in the district, at Manual the formal recognition of teacher power coupled with strong union activism has broadened and deepened the overall level of teacher involvement. We are currently permitted eight pupil free days during the school year with teachers usually meeting all together or in smaller groups. The faculty-wide discussions are almost always animated, as teachers feel increasingly empowered. With each one of these debates, the administrator-teacher paternalism of the past becomes a dim memory. In the fall of 1991, Manual teachers again stopped the administration from imposing a policy that compelled teachers to make calls to absent students. Although several teachers were already making calls as part of their tutoring commitment, the overwhelming majority resented the calls being imposed. Following a series of meetings, teachers were able to overturn the policy. Since the one-hour action in September, Manual teachers have continued to meet regularly at the school site, while actively reaching out to other teachers and parents. In an effort to encourage the kind of grass roots organizing we have done at Manual, we have sent members of our school community coalition to nearby schools to talk about our experience. At a recent union area meeting, with union representatives from different schools in attendance, Manual teachers openly challenged union officers on their support of proposals eliminating substitute teachers, cuts in benefits and a strategy that alienated the community. What will happen in the next few weeks is uncertain. With a strike deadline of Feb. 23 looming, the union leadership seems intent on having the membership ratify a concessionary contract before the strike. Whether the rank and file will accept or reject this contract is not clear. What is certain is that without pressure from below, the public sector union bureaucracies will continue to surrender in the face of the states budget deficits. Only when public school teachers, like those at Manual Arts, reject their unions bureaucratic, concessionary approach, and fight for a perspective that unites rank and file district employees along class lines with other public sector workers, parents and students, will we be able to challenge the politicians continued attacks on education and other critical community services. ---30--- The "X" Article (Everything has been said about Malcolm's ideas, but what is his importance to revolutionary socialists?) by Bill Almy The release of Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee, reflects the ongoing fascination African-Americans, and many white, Latino, and Asian Americans have with this brilliant Black leader. The film forced a whole new generation to confront his legacy by focussing America on its racist past without ignoring its racist present. The importance of Malcolm X, his ideas and their interpretation will continue precisely because so little has changed since his assassination in 1965. The renewed interest in Malcolm by the African American community reflects just how powerful his ideas were, especially since the white media has tried to portray him as a sideshow of `60s politics. It is not just the shallow resurfacing of a figurehead; rather, the resurgence reflects the cross-generational credibility he had as a Black revolutionary pitted against a racist system. His message was always sharper, clearer and more ruthless when speaking about the sickness of anti- black racism in the U.S. than that of his "integrationist" counterparts. His analysis, in all its permutations, still resonates throughout the African- American community. White liberals continue to debate whether Malcolm was a "reverse racist." White America has always been made suspicious of African-American male leaders by its racist media and its unshaken adherence to this countrys dominant racist ideas. However, the African-American community has considered Malcolm one of its best and brightest. For example, the African-American operated, private, non-profit agency I worked for in Malcolms old neighborhood, Roxbury, has celebrated Malcolm X day as well as Martin Luther King day since the late 1970s. Many Americans were first introduced to Malcolm by Mike Wallaces documentary, The Hate that Hate Produced. In it he shocked America by saying, "I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth...I charge the white man with being the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble- maker on earth." His message contradicted the general notion held by many in the civil rights movement that integration was attainable or positive. Malcolm X first became well known as a leader of the "Black Muslim" Nation of Islam. The ideas of Malcolm and the Nation were always controversial, and received widely different interpretations even from those who participated in the civil rights movement. The Communist Party called his ideas "racism-in-reverse." The liberal-left magazine The Nation first described him as a leader of "the lunatic fringe," and then later, in a review of Haleys Autobiography, they honored him as a revolutionary liberator of his people. The U.S. Socialist Workers Party was convinced he was moving closer to a revolutionary socialist position after he broke with Elijah Muhammad. Louis Farrakhan, months before Malcolms murder, in the publication Muhammad Speaks, clearly felt those following Malcolms ideas wished "to be led to hell or their doom" and declared that Malcolm was "worthy of death". The New York Times called him "ruthless.., fanatic.., violent.." and blamed him for creating his own assassins. At the same time they recognized him for being his communitys most "articulate and compelling spokesman." The different takes on Malcolm reflect his connection to a bona fide social movement. While Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam abstained from the civil rights movement, Malcolm found his way to it and was considered profoundly influential. His fourteen years in the NOI allowed him to develop into a confident, skilled orator and debator. He was able to capture the thoughts of the mass of African-Americans and speak them back in words and phrases which captured their essence and clarified the struggle. His break with the Nation allowed him to re-examine his views in the context of struggle. The Lefts theories identifying exactly when he took an ideological turn away from the Nations peculiar separatist, pro-Black-capitalist analysis and towards one more open to linking up with the white left and socialist ideas seem less important now. His by now well-documented synthesis was tragically cut short. He was a work in progress till his last days. What remains his most attractive feature was his intransigent, unrelenting, in-your-face, articulate smashing of the sick, pervasive racist ideology that is shoved down our throats every day. The movement which allowed a leader like Malcolm to surface does not exist today. That movements success resulted in the State, i.e., the FBI, CIA, Police, courts, etc., launching a massive campaign called Cointelpro to eradicate the "Black Messiah," and to disrupt civil rights and revolutionary organizations. Many African-American leaders were murdered or jailed. There is also very little remaining of the largely white left who wished to work with Malcolm and other revolutionaries of the period. For those revolutionary socialists in and around Solidarity, Malcolm Xs legacy represents the kind of continually-questioning social movement that needs to come about if the anti-racist struggle (or virtually any other struggle) is to finally pull the working class together to take power. Malcolm defines revolutionary: he fits no neat category. He comes with program in transition and baggage from his past. He was tailor-made to upset those on the Left with pure politics. In fact, he still does. There would probably be little difference in the way revolutionary socialists relate to this kind of leader today. Liberals, and those with a formulaic, set-in-stone view that society can be changed through laws would condemn such a leader as "violent" and "reckless," just as they did to Malcolm in the 1960s. This is apparent in the outrage over videos by artists such as Chuck D. and Sister Souljah who are reflecting their personal coming to grips with racism in their artistic work. Solidarity, on the other hand, would dedicate itself to building the movement. Only in the context of a movement is it possible to argue for socialist ideas in a way that will impact the thinking of people who are struggling to understand the obstacles they face in society. Such a struggle is bound to produce leaders like Malcolm who we can relate to. In reality, this is the most important mission we have, since revolutionary socialists have little besides their ideas to offer. The beating of Rodney King, the resulting rebellion in Los Angles and even Spike Lees film being nominated for only one Oscar (Denzel Washington for Best Actor), point to this countrys continuing inability to deal with racism. Racism remains the key obstacle to working class unity in this country and therefore a major obstacle to socialism. Solidarity offers historical continuity, a tradition of Marxist analysis and an overwhelming desire to contribute to the development of social movements in this country and internationally which will fight racism and smash capitalism. What Malcolm X represents is the legacy of resistance, rebellion and revolution which must inspire us to continue. ---30--- Back from the Continental Student Conference: November 27-30, 1992, Guadalajara, Mexico by Allison Rolls On November 27-30, 1992, about 200 young people from universities and student organizations in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. met in Guadalajara to voice their opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, and to discuss strategies for making that voice heard all over the continent. The Minneapolis-based International Student Trade, Environment and Development Program (INSTEAD) joined with the Mexican Federacion de Estudiantes Universi- tarios (FEU) and the Canadian Federation of Students in sponsoring the weekend conference, whose primary focus was to be the effects of NAFTA on our educa- tional systems, but whose actual concerns ranged much more widely. The original agenda for the conference was ambitious; it was designed to reflect the concerns of people from all three countries, as well as those of various subsets of the groups -- women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and so on. It included educational sessions, as well as networking and strategy planning, all in two, sometimes three languages. However, it soon became clear that the first priority would be to reach a common ground upon which the differ- ent countries delegations could relate to each other; each "country caucus" (as well as smaller groups within the caucuses) brought vastly different experiences of and expectations for NAFTA to the conference and, consequently, had completely different approaches to the agenda. The Canadian group, in particular, felt little need for education, since they have been living with the disastrous effects of the U.S./Canadian Free Trade Agreement for four years, and wanted to devote energy to action strategies. The Mexican students expressed concerns primarily about the privatization and commodification of their universities, but were more ambivalent in their attitudes toward free trade. The U.S. students, by far the largest group, were remarkably heterogeneous in composition, and thus had difficulty gaining consensus on many issues. Their focus on "group process" and attempts at inclusiveness were something of a curiosity to the other two country caucuses. As a part of the "definition" process, it was decided that the students from Quebec would act as a separate country caucus in order to voice their particular concerns, as would the represent- atives of indigenous peoples of North America. In the first plenary session, representatives from each country gave a general overview of the current and projected situations in their country. Canadian representatives Catherine, Julies, Ian, and David (among others) spoke especially eloquently about the consequences of free trade with the U.S. on the Canadian economy, social programs, the environment, and culture. These included the loss of 50,000 jobs, mostly in manufacturing; a threat to union organization; the creation of a two-tier health care system; the lowering of strict pollution- control regulations; a general shifting of the political process to accommodate market forces; and so on. Mexican students Mara and Marina spoke of the changes that corporate globalization and common markets have brought to Mexican people and their cultures. They stressed the political, economic, and cultural deterioration resulting from the crisis of the 80s, which has led to a general breakdown of democracy and a number of modifications to the Mexican constitution that abolished federally-held lands in favor of international investment. The maquilladora system has produced similar deterioration in health care, education, nutrition, the environment and human rights. They finished by emphasizing the Mexican tradition of strong student activism -- their ability to mobilize thousands of students in the streets to protest tuition hikes and the privatization of the Mexican education system -- and called for students to do the same in response to NAFTA. The U.S. representatives Mike, Hatem, and Michael outlined both the history of U.S. attempts at global economic domination and discussed the pro- jected consequences of NAFTA in this country, in terms of job loss, labor disempowerment, environmental destruction, and erosion of human rights. After this introduction, participants broke up into smaller workshop groups to discuss individual issues. Groups discussed the past and potential impact of free trade on women, on labor, on indigenous people and people of color, on the economic sectors, on the environment, on culture, and human rights. Each group prepared a statement and presented a plan of action. The action plans ranged in scope and ambition from the establishment of a trilingual publication focussing on issues of cultural preservation and celebration, to letter-writing campaigns, to dismantling the World Bank. The whole group concurred on the need to maintain individual and organizational communication and networks. The last day of the conference was devoted to the development and planning of demands, actions, and events on local, national, and continental levels. Though many proposals were made, several presented themselves as more focussed and practical than others. There was general agreement to coordinate an action during the first weekend of April, 1993 to focus on border issues in each area. In addition, the group agreed to work on May 1st actions in solidarity with workers; presumably, they would attempt to work with labor groups opposing NAFTA across North America. Finally, the group decided on a speakers tour, in which students from each of the regions represented would tour the continent, educating students and building networks and momentum for mass mobilization against NAFTA. In fact, the first substantive thing to come out of the conference will be the Campus Action Guide to Free Trade, currently being compiled by INSTEAD, which should be available within the month. This will be a set of articles and fact sheets, along with information about organizations and resources for students and youth groups. Though the conference did accomplish quite a lot, in terms of producing statements, lists of demands, and action plans, its main achievement was the networks that it created and strengthened, not only among the different country groups, but between student groups in the U.S.; rarely do members of environmental groups like the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) have a chance to work closely with students from cultural or labor groups like MEChA or Frontlash. The bonds formed at this conference become one more link in the chain of resistance to the imposition of free trade on the peoples of North America. For information about the Campus Action Guide to Free Trade or upcoming events, contact INSTEAD, P.O. Box 13208, Minneapolis, MN 55414-5208; (612) 379-3905; fax (612) 379-5982; E-mail: instead@igc.org. ---30--- Progressive Dane: A Third-Party Attempt in Wisconsin by Vivek Chibber Efforts at building an alternative to the two-party lock on the system received a boost in Southern Wisconsin (Dane County) this year with the formation of Progressive Dane, a coalition of Left groups and parties. The organization, which formally convened in July 1992, is still little more than a coalition of Left and liberal groups. Chief among these are the Labor Farm Party (which already has ballot status in Wisconsin); the local greens; activists from NOW; members of DSA; Freedom Road; the New Party; and Solidarity. However, it does include many independent activists. One of the exciting aspects of this group is that it has the potential to avoid the pitfalls of supporting the Democrats or the political difficulties of not supporting them, by organizing exclusively around local elections until it has enough power to challenge them head on. The electoral strategy of Progressive Dane is organized around a two-year period. Until 1994 the group intends to run candidates in local non-partisan elections. Since these elections do not require Party affiliation on the part of candidates, there is no obstacle posed by the fact that Progressive Dane does not yet have ballot status in Wisconsin. Candidates simply run as individuals, although backed tacitly, of course, by particular parties. Ballot status is required, however, for statewide and local partisan elections. The next partisan elections are sceduled for 1994, which is also the point at which Progressive Dane hopes to have matured enough to run candidates under its own name. The success of this strategy hinges on the ability of the various groups within the organization to forge a common agenda, and thereby agree on a platform and candidates. If successful, it is likely that the Labor Farm Party will simply transfer its own ballot status to Progressive Dane, making it possible for a more powerful third-party alternative to get off the ground. Experiences in the organization thus far give us good reason to be hopeful. Meetings have been unusually well-attended, attracting around 40-50 people on average; there seems to be a consensus on the need for a broad mass base; and there is a refreshing absence of the petty bickering so characteristic of small Left communities. Just as important is the commitment, at least on paper, to a range of non- electoral activities as a way of establishing links with communities and building a solid base of support. The first test of the group will be as early as this spring, when it intends to run candidates in the local non-partisan elections. If successful -- and there is good reason for optimism here -- the experience will provide a firm basis on which to build for the near future. ---30--- Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Jonathan Kozol, Harper and Row Publishers book review by Lynn Glueck Jonathan Kozols Savage Inequalities scathingly criticizes the unequal funding of US public schools and its consequences. Sadly, his message about racial and economic prejudice indicates that educational opportunities have worsened for the children of racial minorities and the poor over the twenty five years since he wrote his first muckraking book, Death at an Early Age (1967). Interweaving anecdotal accounts of the state of inner-city schools with statistics on the parallel dearth of funding in those areas, Kozol uses a documentary style to convincingly argue his main point: the rich have created educational oases for their children while neglecting the right of the larger public for equal educational oppor- tunities. As Kozol repeatedly explains, the system for financing public schools inevitably leads to vast disparities. Most public schools depend on local property tax revenues for the initial funding while state and federal contributions account for a very small percentage of total operating costs. Since property tax depends on the taxable value of local homes and industries, wealthy suburban communities draw upon larger tax bases in proportion to student population than do cities occupied by thousands of poor people and filled with tax exempt institutions (colleges, churches, etc.). Although poor communities often tax them- selves at higher rates than do affluent communities, they still end up with far less money per student. Furthermore, the rich, owning more valuable property than do the poor, receive back a greater amount of money spent on education through tax deductions, and thereby effectively enjoy a larger federal subsidy for their schools. Kozol confronts head on the disingenuous claim that there is no correlation between school funding and quality of education by presenting a litany of juxtapositions between well-funded schools in suburban communities and those underfunded in low income and minority populated areas. For instance, in 1988-9, the Chicago suburb Winnetka spent $8,823 per student, while urban Chicago spent $5,500. The difference: New Trier, Winnetkas primarily white high school, can offer their teachers a top salary of $60,000, maintain 27 acres of pristine school ground, stock a library with 60,000 books, and expect 93% of their students to attend four year colleges; while at DuSable, an urban high school with 100% black student population, the top teacher salary is $40,000, the school sits on one city block, the library houses only 13,000 books, and the graduation rate is 25%. Kozol documents that even the most basic requirement for a successful education system, a working physical plant, does not exist in numerous urban schools. He describes a school in New York where four classes try to function inside one gymnasium; a school in East St. Louis which regularly floods with sewage; and one in Camden, New Jersey, where the chemistry labs have no equipment, and the defective heating system melted the majority of their computers. By asking what seem obvious questions, Kozol exposes the hypocrisy involved in the argument that more funding will not improve schools. He asks, if this is so, why do wealthy communities consistently spend up to twice as much money on their public schools? And, if money is unimportant, why are wealthy suburbanites unwilling to equalize funding for all public schools, and why are they quick to engage in costly legal battles to ensure continued privileged isolation of their districts? The illogic and injustice of what has become a mantra-like argument amongst the wealthy is most succinctly denuded by a New Jersey court that Kozol quotes when it found in 1988 that its state operates two separate and unequal education systems: "If money is inadequate to improve education, the residents of poor districts should at least have an equal opportunity to be disappointed by its failure." Ironically, as Kozol points out, the actions of the wealthy run counter to their purported ideological affinities: "on a lofty level wealthy districts may be fighting in defense of ...liberty, local control, or such --on a mundane level they are fighting for the right to guarantee their children the inheritance of an ascendant role in our society." Kozol draws broad connections between the bankrupt school system and the injustices of our capitalist and racist society. For instance, he demonstrates that it is no accident that the most dilapidated schools exist in the poorest areas which are largely populated by blacks and latinos. He also addresses the ways in which inadequate health care further diminishes the educational opportunities of the poor. For Kozol, class and race issues are integrally related, and only radical institutional change can remedy the unconscionable problems. Nevertheless, Kozols solutions (where one can find them) are much less radical than his exposition. While his numerous attacks on the Reagan/Bush regime are powerful, he omits a critique of the Democratic Party lesser evil. According to Kozol, the most promising solution would be more federal control of the school system and a central program for equal resource distribution. But he never mentions how this might be accomplished, nor spends any time discussing efforts (outside the courts) to change the system. His interviews with school children are gripping (if sentimental) and often Kozol seems to have chosen those children with real class consciousness. But he always returns to the same implied refrain: the middle and upper classes should feel guilty (which they should) and the people trapped in poor communities are defenseless and doomed if the rich dont come to their senses. He also suggests that by the time these children reach puberty they are so inured to their brutal world that they have lost the capacity to think or act to change their world. Kozol leaves the reader with the sense that solutions can come only from above. In fact, this is precisely what he hopes for. For example, in a pre-election address to a body of Wisconsin teachers, Kozol began by asking all present to vote for Clinton, without any qualification. This is a president whose "reforms" include backing school "choice," using scholarships as an incentive to push students into the police force, and certainly no commitment to get inner-city schools badly-needed funding. The reality is that Clinton will do nothing unless pressured from below, and there will be no change in the schools unless students, parents, and teachers organize to demand it. Notwithstanding these criticisms, Savage Inequalities presents a well thought-out and useful analysis of the present situation in public education. ---30--- The People of the Shining Path: An Exercise in Brutal Dishonesty by Joel Finkel People in Solidarity are revolutionary socialists who stand for something we call "socialism from below." While we are active in many movements, including labor, Central American solidarity, and reproductive rights, our broader goal is to build a mass-based revolutionary movement that will lead to a socialist revolution founded on democracy and the control of society from the bottom up. Our view of socialism from below contrasts markedly with that of the Stalinists and Maoists, such as the Shining Path guerillas, who would impose their own design from the top down. The People of the Shining Path shows a Peru terrorized by its government. Revolutionary socialists must categorically condemn the Peruvian government of Fujimori and its brutal military. Some might go so far as to describe them as fascist. We also must condemn the imperialism of the United States, and, in particular, its involvement in Peru through the infamous drug war, and through its chief economic weapon, the International Monetary Fund. We should work to expose the massacre of prisoners by the Peruvian government, just as we condemn the massacre of all prisoners, be they political prisoners, prisoners of war, or common criminals. In particular, we need to recognize that the trial of their leader Abimael Guzman is unfair. Everyone has the right to face one's accusers in open court and to cross-examine witnesses -- everyone, including megalomaniacs. No crime of the Peruvian government, though, should be an incentive for revolutionary socialists to support the equally vicious Shining Path, or to believe much of what they see in the video. One positive thing might be said about the video: it shows, although not particularly well, the crying need for a socialist revolution in Peru. From watching it, you get some small idea of the abject poverty and oppression experienced by the vast majority of Peruvians. If ever a socialist revolution needed to be put on the agenda, here is the place. However, the video is also quite a study in indoctrination and self-deception. It is obvious to any outside viewer that the courageous Peruvian peasants who make up the rank and file of the Shining Path are subjects of a cult -- one that has them mouthing the rantings of their leader, Guzman, and chanting his slogans, such as "Long live the strategic equilibrium!" as if they were really their slogans that came out of their own objective conditions. In reality, this so-called "equilibrium" means that the Shining Path has now achieved a major theoretical goal: the ability to brutalize the Peruvian population with the same ferocity as the military. It means that the left now has two enemies against which to struggle: first, it has the traditional enemy, the ruling class, and secondly, it has the Shining Path from which it must protect itself. The video completely misrepresents the state of the Peruvian Left. It would have you believe that there are only two sides in the conflict, the fascist military government on the one hand and the glorious revolutionaries of the Shining Path on the other. What is studiously ignored is the fact that there are literally hundreds of organizations, grass-roots organizations, that are the organic expression of the needs of the working class and the peasants. The entire legal left is left out, as is the fact that there is at least one other armed revolutionary group (one which, for that matter, supports the popular organizations of struggle). Rather than showing you these groups, which are being built from the bottom up, some of which have a very long history, and which are now caught in the middle between two brutal militaries, we are led to believe that the only one true revolutionary group in Peru is the Shining Path, led by the Fourth Sword of Socialism (Marx, Lenin, Mao, and now Guzman, as if Maoism weren't enough for him!), and that no other struggles exist outside of it. This is, simply put, dishonest. As a case in point, there is a short scene in the video in which a group of women is demonstrating behind its red banner, and into which the police wade with their batons and fire hoses. The video would have you believe that this is a Shining Path demonstration being brutally repressed. But when one reads the women's banner, one learns that they are, in fact, members of the Metropolitan Organization of "Glass of Milk" committees and soup kitchens, the leadership of which has been murdered by the Shining Path. Five women leaders of this grass-roots movement were assassinated by the Shining Path. Not only was this not a Shining Path demonstration, but the Shining Path has attacked these same people more viciously than has the military! Another case in point: the video shows the funeral of Maria Elana Moyano; it displays her casket and makes the statement, without apology, that she was executed by the Shining Path. What the film doesn't say is that she was murdered in front of her family and that her body was dynamited. Why? Because she did not agree to the Shining Path's call for an "armed strike." In the previous decade, there had been nine mass strikes called for by the working class and the left in general. Shining Path either ignored or actively attacked these strikes. Moyano, a member of the United Left, and an extremely popular leader and grass-roots organizer, was a revolutionary activist of the very highest caliber. But all such activists are routinely targeted by the Shining Path, as their efforts conflict with both the theory and the practice of the Shining Path, which regards bottom-up organizing as a threat to its top-down approachand its strict adherence to every utterance of its "Chairman Gonzalo." There are numerous other examples of Shining Path's war against the people that are, not surprisingly, left out of the video. Over the strong objections of the local townspeople, they killed a religious worker from Australia, Sister MacCormack, who worked with orphans. They claimed that she was making the people lazy and preventing them from being self- reliant. They have murdered perhaps fifty members of the United Mariateguista Party (PUM), and hundreds, if not thousands, of peasants, labor leaders, and community leaders. The list of their crimes is simply too long to mention here. In the end, the Shining Path creates a self-reinforcing cycle of bloodshed in Peru; the Peruvian military has also murdered thousands of peasants after accusing them of being Shining Path sympathizers, while the Shining Path, in turn, uses government violence as an excuse to step up their own, in order to maintain the "strategic equilibrium." The majority of Peruvians is caught in the middle of this dirty war. For a more balanced and complete picture of Peru, readers are encouraged to pick up a copy of Peru - Time of Fear, by Deborah Poole and Gerardo Rinique, soon to be published in this country by Monthly Review Press. ---30--- Somalia: "Humanitarian" Intervention? A Solidarity Statement Short-term historical amnesia is a wondrous thing. The government that gang-raped Nicaragua and sponsored death- squad murders across Central America, while pouring weapons into the Shah s and then Khomeini s Iran, Saddam Hussein s Iraq, Halie Selassie s Ethiopia-and Siad Barre s Somalia, is now hailed for a "humanitarian mission to feed the starving children of Somalia." It is putting the bullies, warlords and drug-dealing gangsters of Somalia in their place as an act of charity and world leadership, untainted by mere considerations of military or political interest. Right. A hundred thousand civilians are dead in Iraq from disease and deprivation caused by U.S. sanctions. U.S. ships are blockading Haiti, with the express purpose of preventing its starving and persecuted population from leaving. Every day 40,000 Third World children under the age of five die from malnutrition and disease that simple access to clean water would save. The allocation of ten percent of the military budget of the major capitalist powers would fund the prevention of these deaths within a decade. Better yet, if Washington is interested in preventing starvation in Third World countries, it could cancel their debts. It is important to attempt to understand Somalia, but it is more important first to understand the United States government and its motivations. And the most basic and necessary understanding is that there is no humanitarian imperialism. Let s be clear: Any alleviation of suffering that happens under U.S auspices in Somalia is welcome of course in itself, but very limited-and secondary in relation to what this intervention is about. What is it about? For some on the left who are seeking to make sense of this rather new and confusing situation, it appears to be a move by the United States to secure a military base as a strategic counterweight against militant Islamic movements in the Middle East. Well, maybe, but we re not convinced. For one thing, Washington could have created a permanent, massive military land base in Kuwait, but saw no need. And anyway, doesn t it pay the state of Israel five billion dollars a year for that kind of thing? It appears to us more likely that the intervention in Somalia has to do with a new phase in imperialist politics- not any major strategic stakes in Somalia itself. Indeed, a great part of the tragedy there, results from the fact that the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti), which used to be strategic for the superpowers, ceased to be so when the Cold War system collapsed. Stuffed with weapons from old proxy wars, particularly from the sponsorship of the Siad Barre dictatorship by the United States, Somalia after the dictatorship fell, entered into internal war without end, a war which was ultimately about nothing but itself. Thus, according to the newly fashionable imperial terminology promoted by the outgoing and incoming administrations, Somalia is a "failed state" that needs to be taken over as an international protectorate (for its own good). There is not and cannot be respectable discussion of a failed system, called world capitalism, of which not only Somalia but the entire African continent are among the chief victims. Nor is it acceptable to extend the "failed state" concept to the United States of America, where a large portion of the African-American and Latin population in cities from Washington D.C. to New York to Los Angeles lives under conditions that beg for emergency resolutions to be implemented by the U.N. Security Council. Perhaps there are two clues to the meaning of this allegedly humanitarian intervention. First, the fact that (in contrast to the instantaneous mobilization for Operation Desert Shield/Storm) it took place only after mass starvation was looming in Somalia for at least a year suggests that it is not driven fundamentally by a material interest like control of oil or military-strategic calculations. Rather, this relatively reluctant intervention ultimately responded to the need and opportunity to assume the appearance of a friendly policeman, intervening to put down the bully on the block -- hiding the reality of who actually destroyed the neighborhood. Second, the promulgation of the ideology of "failed states" suggests an alternative: that this intervention has an important legitimating function for continued post-Cold War militarism, and possibly for a whole new phase of interventions. Without claiming that this explanation is conclusive, we will briefly explore its implications as an hypothesis. Keep The Weapons Coming The Gulf War was a stunning military success, and an even more amazing political failure. Bumper stickers crowing "These Colors Don t Run" gave way to "Saddam Hussein Still Has A Job, Do You?" Contrary to all expectations the war failed to reelect Bush; and it left the Gulf region itself less stable and more miserable than before. (Will the next official Menace be the threat of Iran arming with ex- Soviet nukes?) Understandably enough, the general U.S. populace and even parts of the ruling class have the strange idea that the resources expended in forty-five years of Cold War confrontations should be redirected to rebuild a rotting society and economies at home, that foreign adventures have lost much of their reason as well as effectiveness. There is no longer an evil empire, and interventions to "stop the spread of Communism" lack credibility and even relevance. Worse, with the electoral victory of the Democrats, people who voted for Clinton might get the mistaken impression that his promise to "focus like a laser beam on the economy" meant that the United States would stop being the cop of the world. If not effectively addressed, this notion might revive peace-dividend hopes and become the basis for a real ideological threat to the $300 billion military budget. Not only does this prospect haunt the military profiteers - who influence the government but do not control it - more importantly it runs counter to the basic intentions of Clinton himself. Clinton desperately hoped at the beginning of his administration to avoid foreign military crises. He never intended to end militarism - and there is a huge difference! The problem: How to demonstrate to the naive population that the military machine must be preserved nearly intact? For such a purpose, Somalia suddenly presented itself as a nearly ideal intervention, at least initially. The landing presented no military risk, inasmuch as strategic targets were already occupied by a mass of electronic news media ready to feed the ultimate prime-time infotainment experience to North American living rooms. The intervention was an unusually popular one, particularly with a large segment of the African-American community, which historically has had the sharpest and most critical understanding of U.S. interventions from Vietnam to the Gulf. Somalia also affords the outgoing and incoming administrations the opportunity to demonstrate once again, to the domestic population and to governments around the world, that the United States is the only candidate for world policeman. This is both a strength and a weakness for U.S. imperialism. It has no military-political rivals on a world scale; there are no regional forces in Africa or the Middle East who could assemble a coalition to distribute food, let alone begin to address the crisis in Somalia. United Nations efforts had failed almost completely. U.S. power thus stands alone. But for that very reason, having entered Somalia the United States might find it difficult to leave. Imperialism has no strong "second team." The United Nations, well aware of its own importance, is pressuring Clinton to commit to a deeper political intervention - disarming the military factions, brokering a truce, creating a new police force and government structure - than could possibly be accomplished in a quick operation, if ever. Precisely because of its unique strength, a U.S. intervention could far outlast its domestic support. Small wonder that policy planners fear getting "bogged down" in a quicksand of their own making. That would be ironic justice, indeed. Capitalism and Chaos Somalia is undoubtedly a distinctive crisis, but not necessarily a unique one in the new world disorder. As 1993 opens, the world, from the Balkans to the former Soviet Union, to the Middle East, to Africa and the Indian subcontinent, offers a spectacle of national disintegration, social collapse, and ethnic cleansing never seen in the lifetime of the post-World War II generation. Tragically, at least for the moment, we are witnessing not social revolutions or successful national liberation struggles, but the consequences of a failing world capitalist system, without the immediate rise of working- class and progressive alternatives. That is why the present situation is a difficult, sometimes demoralizing one for the left. Yet we should remember that it is also fraught with crisis for imperialism, not because capitalism is presently threatened by a rival political-military state system or by an immediate threat from below, but because it is itself a rotten and imploding system. This system, unable to promote authentic development in Russia, or Poland, or the global South, or South Central Los Angeles for that matter, requires some kind of global cop. And the only available cop remains the United States military machine, even if its own people and even some of its ruling elites lack enthusiasm for the job - with the United Nations to play an auxiliary or cosmetic role, depending on the circumstances. Somalia is perhaps, at least partly, a "demonstration intervention" to give imperialism legitimacy for its police actions in other arenas. The first responsibility for the left, then, is to deny that legitimacy, in Somalia or anywhere else. The children of Somalia are not beneficiaries, but victims, of this system and the rich white ruling classes who run it. ---30--- True Stories Compiled by Dylan Tante A Place Called Hope >From a full-page ad in the New York Times on the first day of the Clinton Era: "Three ways to spell Hope: Lockheed C- 141 Starlifter, Lockheed C-130 Hercules, Lockheed C-5 Galaxy...These military airlifters are some of America s greatest ambassadors." Storming the Palace As the Clinton caravan rolls into Washington, the town has been consumed with an almost revolutionary fervor. Even George Will - usually no fan of revolutionary upsurge - has apparently found the spectacle inspiring: "Like Lenin and Trotsky returning from Swiss and Siberian exiles," he wrote in a recent Newsweek column, "the American left, at long last a winner of a presidential election, has, as it were, surged forth from the Finland station and stormed the Winter Palace, so now America s propertied classes are at the mercy of...Lloyd Bentsen. Only in America." Mr. Popularity The new President himself seems to show the makings of a first-rate practical jokester. While running for President, he denounced George Bush s policy of returning Haitian refugees back into the arms of the Haitian dictatorship as "illegal" and "immoral." Turns out he was just kidding! In a recent radio address to Haitians, the sly Arkansan made clear that the joke was on them: "The practice of returning those who flee Haiti by boat will continue...Those who leave Haiti by boat will be intercepted and returned to Haiti by the U.S. Coast Guard." Clinton transition spokesman Brian Atwood explained: "Obviously, President-elect Clinton is a very popular person in Haiti. We would like the Haitians to continue to view him as a popular president and stay in Haiti and admire him from there." Party Chairman Commerce Secretary Ron Brown found his plans to celebrate the inauguration with style stymied by pesky party poopers unwilling to get into the true spirit of change. After collecting tens of thousands of dollars from his good buddies at Anhauser Busch, J.C. Penney, Pepsico, and Sony, the former Democratic Party Chairman was pressured to cancel his "Friends of Ron Brown" party by small-minded cynics who worried about the perception of conflict of interest. Ginny Terzano, a Brown spokeswoman, robustly denounced this nasty cynicism. A Chicago Tribune article quoted her explanation: " You...reporters are under the illusion that corporate interests are paying for this just to cozy up to Ron Brown and that s just not so. Asked why a corporation would want to pay for such an event, Terzano replied, Because they were asked to . " For his part, Clinton was baffled by the criticism. "I mean, he was party chairman," Clinton told the New York Times. "They were going to have a party." Mother Dearest Luckily the new President is getting good advice from his comrades on the left. In the latest issue of the hip- radical magazine Mother Jones, Jonathan Marshall sternly informs the economic Commander-in-Chief that "raising tax rates on the rich, as you proposed in the campaign, is good populism but bad economics." Marshall suggests a unique progressive strategy to confuse and outflank the enemy: "Let s steal the Republican s thunder, and perhaps even garner their votes, by surprising them with a menu of spending cuts. If it took a cold-warrior like Richard Nixon to open the door to China, perhaps it will take a liberal like you to rein in the budget." Burning Desires Remember L.A.? As Clinton himself recently told the New York Times, the "tensions...in Los Angeles are still not what I wish they were - they re still not as good as I wish they were." But even without good tensions, life isn t all bad in the City of Angels. In a recent Ann Landers column ("While looting in L.A., they found romance"), a baffled Angeleno explained his sweet dilemma: "On April 30 of this year, the L.A. riots were in full swing. I was with a couple of friends, and we got carried away. One guy suggested that we join the rest of the crowd and loot a Korean dry cleaners. The scene was incredible. There were about 20 people grabbing as much stuff as they could before the store was set on fire." The letter writer found himself scuffling for a "great leather coat" with a woman named "Wanda"; "Baffled" agreed to give the coat to her if she agreed to go out to dinner. "She was beautiful, Ann...We hit it off right away and I knew that night we were perfect for each other. We plan to be married next April." The dilemma: "Many out-of-town family members will want to know how we met. Should we tell them the truth?" Hogan s Heroes Headline in the Chicago Tribune: "Germans warning that neo- Nazis are bad for the nation s business." Hey, kids! Send your "True Stories" (newspaper clippings or xeroxes) to Dylan Tante at Left Turn, c/o Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Ave., Detroit MI 48210. Left Turn is put out by the youth of Solidarity, an organization for "socialism from below." For information about physical subscriptions and Solidarity, call 313-841-0160, or write Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Ave., Detroit, MI 48210; for internet subs, mail tavis@cs.bu.edu