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OVERTIME--October 2003 issue
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Dedicated to reflecting the collective wisdom of enlightened workers.

Linda Featheringill
4651 West 41st Street, Down
Cleveland, OH 44109
(216) 661-0794

lfeatheringill@hotmail.com

October 2003
Volume 4, Number 5

Greetings!


US Justice

US Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday made it tougher for federal prosecutors to strike plea bargains with criminal defendants, requiring attorneys to seek the most serious charges possible in almost all cases. The policy directive issued by Ashcroft is the latest in a series of steps the Justice Department has taken in recent months to combat what it sees as dangerously lenient practices by some federal prosecutors and judges.

"The direction I am giving our US attorneys today is direct and emphatic," Ashcroft said at a speech in Milwaukee. Except in "limited, narrow circumstances," he said, federal prosecutors must seek to bring charges for "the most serious, readily provable offense" that the facts can support.

Critics among defense lawyers and some federal prosecutors said the new policy would further centralize authority in the hands of Washington policy makers, discourage prosecutors from seeking plea bargains, and ratchet up sentences in criminal cases that may not warrant them.

"What is driving this is that a tough-on-crime attorney general is pandering to the public and he knows that this will play well," said Gerald Lefcourt, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Several federal prosecutors said they were deeply concerned about the new policy, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.

The policy change is likely to escalate a debate that has become increasingly contentious over how prosecutors and judges mete out justice in the federal courts. With the backing of many Republicans in Congress, the Justice Department has sought to impose greater uniformity and "accountability" in federal cases.

In addition to expanding use of the death penalty, Ashcroft also announced a plan last month to track data on judges who give lighter sentences than federal guidelines prescribe. Dissenters attacked the monitoring plan as a judicial "black list," arguing that denying judges and prosecutors the discretion to analyze the facts of a case is a mistake.

Two Supreme Court justices, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy, have given speeches in the last 6 weeks arguing that congressionally mandated "minimum" sentences, which also curtail judicial discretion, have created a system in which sentences are sometimes unfair or too long. A decade ago, Attorney General Janet Reno enacted a policy to give federal prosecutors more discretion over how their cases should be handled by allowing for an "individualized assessment" of the facts and circumstances of a case.
[E. Lichtblau, New York Times, September 23, 2003.]

A man of the highest benevolence acts, but from no ulterior motive. A man of the highest rectitude acts, but from ulterior motives. A man most conversant in the rites acts, but when no one responds, he rolls up his sleeves and resorts to persuasion by force.
-- Lao Tzo (551-479 BCE), Tao Te Ching, Verse 82.


The US as Fourth Reich

The US is making itself an object of fear and hatred throughout the World. Bush administration spokesmen have promised the world "endless war" against as many as 60 countries, have claimed for the US the right to launch pre-emptive war on any nation the US suspects may become a threat in the future, and have reserved the right to first use of nuclear weapons.

The US now seems about to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq [this essay was dated September 2, 2002]. This war is likely to result in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, not to mention substantial US military casualties and is a war for which the US has support only from US Pekinese Tony Blair and Israel.

Has the Bush regime become unhinged? Or do its extremely bellicose policies serve some arcane strategic purpose the US ruling circles believe will make them worth their enormous political and economic costs?

As ill considered as these war-like policies may seem, there are in fact powerful strategic reasons behind them. They serve as diversionary emblems of overwhelming military power, but there is a more profound goal. This latter goal is what gets us to consideration of the US as the Fourth Reich.

As dangerous as World War II was for world capitalism, war for and against the Third Reich was meant to save the world system of elite rule. The world was deep in Depression in the 1930s. Anti-capitalist sentiment was on the rise and workers’ movements were increasingly powerful. Germany was on the verge of civil war when Hitler was appointed chancellor by the German elite on January 30, 1933 to crush the growing workers’ movement. He proceeded to do this with concentration camps for 100,000 Communists and militant workers. Japan was torn by strikes and anti-capitalist sentiment when the military leadership invaded China in 1937 in a desperate drive for natural resources and national unity. French capitalists were besieged by factory occupations and welcomed the Nazi invaders. Industrial unionism and sit-down strikes were sweeping the US. In the USSR, Stalin was holding onto power through ferocious repression, with executions or the gulag for millions of workers, peasants, and Old Bolsheviks.

War gave the Nazi regime a national purpose and an external enemy to justify Gestapo domination of German life. While Hitler and many of his closest henchmen died or were imprisoned after the war, the industrial elite that placed the Nazis in power prospered. War brought unity and national purpose to the British society, threatened by class conflict. The French Vichy government collaborated with the occupying Nazis to break French workers’ unions. US corporations imposed a No-Strike Pledge on workers for the duration of the war and consolidated corporate power in American life. The German invasion came close to shattering Soviet power, but national resistance to the Nazis in the end saved Stalin’s rule and helped keep the USSR from internal collapse for another 50 years.

Mobilization for war led these economies out of Depression. In the US, FDR’s New Deal programs had negligible effect. What saved the US economy was producing tanks and ships and plans for WWII. Mobilization for war led Nazi Germany from massive unemployment to a labor shortage.

What does this have to do with the present day? I submit that the US has determined (whether with the connivance of its elite partners is not clear) to serve a role similar to that of the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s. The US will play Fourth Reich to other governments of the world, in particular to those most likely to be threatened by mass insurrections and revolutionary upheavals in the coming years: China, certain Western European powers, and South American nations.

The US will go on the attack against many of the world’s people -- especially those who have the misfortune to be sitting on top of a lot of oil -- to insure elite control of world resources and, more importantly, to police against revolutionary movements. All of this will be done in the name of "fighting terrorism." Ironically though, it will be the excessive violence and lawlessness of the US approach that will be most useful to governing elites.

The growing anti-capitalist movement among the world’s workers and other people presents the world business elite with a deeply threatening situation. The elites of each of the countries in which resistance is growing need an external enemy against which they can lead their own people, either in real battle or in moral indignation. They need to be able to say that the problem in Italy or Spain or China is not Italian or Chinese leaders or the capitalist system: The problem is the Americans.

Playing the role of the Fourth Reich will have an added benefit for the US elite. As Fourth Reich-like policies bring the US under attack from terrorist and lead to real war, they will be used to justify tighter and tighter government control of the US population. Constitutional protections will prove as flimsy as the prisoners’ huts at Guantanamo.

The US strategy amounts to a very serious gamble with enormous stakes. While it is intended to intimidate people and make them feel powerless, it does so at the cost of calling into question the ability of capitalism to offer them a secure future. In other words, embarking on endless war will intensify the strategic erosion of capitalist ideological control while strengthening the capitalist state. But while making war will immediately strengthen the hand of the rulers, over time it will undermine their position.

As the airwaves ring with threats by US officials against Iraq, it is sobering to reflect that the Bush regime has staked its entire credibility on more terrorist acts occurring. Indeed, Administration policies in Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq seem calculated to stir up more attacks on Americans. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft have promised us some new terrorist outrage. Let us hope that this Administration does not decide to furnish us with the terrorist catastrophe it has promised.

Will the elite strategy succeed? Only time will tell. The façade of Bush’s post-September 11 power grab seems to be cracking, as more and more Americans connect the dots between the "war on terrorism," attacks on Constitutional rights, Wall Street thievery, and government promises of endless war.

No one likes to admit that entities as powerful as the US government and Corporate America are not our friends but our enemies. Still, many people are coming to this conclusion and are finding their voices. What seems undeniably true is that the world has entered a new and dangerous period of war and revolution in which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.
[Condenced from an essay by Dave Stratman, September 2, 2002 @ newdemocracyworld.org]

Unexpectedly enlightened

In the weekend supplement of The West Australian (30 August 2003), there was a lengthy article about the governor of this state. Oh yeah, we have a "Queen’s Man" in every state, plus the Governor General overall. But the views expressed by ex-army commander Lt. Gen. John Sanderson are quire surprising. In essence he says:

"In truth, Iraq has been invaded. This member of the UN was invaded by a coalition of nations, with no mandate of the Security Council and with one single positive explanation. Their one and only reason was the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their use in a terrorist capacity. So somebody has done a really extraordinarily good job of hiding them -- or they never existed. It is clear the Americans did not invade Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam, nor did they have any link with the September 11 events. So what interests prompted them and us [Australia] to embark upon a war that goes on today and seems to be gathering intensity? I can guess but can’t say.
[I can say, though -- OIL. -- Gogglesworth]

"We had all better get moving towards a process of reconciliation, to build moral authority with Arab and Islamic nations . . . . or prepare for a much larger commitment to war than has obviously not previously been contemplated. America has created an environment that encourages terrorism. I believe my job is to foster a more inclusive society because reconciliation should be a priority. In Borneo and as commander in Cambodia, it was clear to me that the only way to succeed was to win the hearts and minds of the people by reconciliation. You can never do that with a gun. The alternative is war, which must be avoided, particularly when weapons of mass destruction lurk in the background."

"Globalisation, with its market forces, actually moves decision making further and further away from the people. They become alienated and there is a sort of despair that leads to the anti-social behavior we see. I am convinced a more inclusive global order should be promoted, based upon reconciliation and unity instead of the widening divisions we have had. We are all on the same spaceship and increasingly, problems of environment and other things impact on every one of us.
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"We can only address this as a global community, and yet we have people fostering divisions that pull us apart. We can’t wait for people to give us guidance on this from above. We have to respond as human beings and build this community from below, from the bottom up, from the grass roots. I find there are a lot of people who want to hear somebody say the enlightened thing because they are just sitting there, waiting. I’d like to see people actually getting together and making a commitment to each other and the community to make this a better place to live for everybody."
[Gogglesworth, West Australia, Australia.]

ECOLOGY

The only way we can preserve the earth is to grant every living entity what it needs to thrive and take from it only what it can afford to give.

Californians care about clearing the still-smoggy skies and protecting the state's 1,100-mile oceanfront from oil spills and urban runoff. For that reason, and because the problem of pollution has been more acute in California than elsewhere, the Legislature and state and local agencies have led most other states in innovative, forceful efforts to improve air and water quality. The Bush administration's response? See you in court.

Never mind the administration's states' rights rhetoric; the Justice Department joined oil companies and engine makers last month in a federal lawsuit to block rules that push conversion of transit buses, trash trucks and other vehicles from soot-belching diesel to cleaner fuels in Southern California. The Environmental Protection Agency insists that the federal Clean Air Act trumps state plans to curb emissions linked to global warming.

Last year, the White House asked a federal court to revive oil drilling off the coast of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. When that suit failed, the Commerce Department rewrote rules to give federal agencies more power over states when it came to drilling and other activities that could taint ocean water and poison fish and shorebirds.

California isn't the Bush administration's only target, nor is the big-footing confined to environmental policy. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has sued to derail the assisted-suicide law approved by Oregon voters. He seeks to undermine California's 1996 voter-approved initiative allowing
sick people to grow or smoke marijuana to help them ease the pain of cancer, AIDS and other diseases. And the Bush-backed credit reporting bill, now before the Senate, would block the far stronger identity theft protections in the privacy law that Gov. Gray Davis signed last month.
The administration's environmental push-back may stem from California's being a pacesetter, a role that grows out of its market size. The state's auto emissions standards, for example, drive pollution-control technology nationally just because so many cars and trucks are sold here. But automakers, oil refiners and manufacturers don't want to march at California's fast beat anymore, and, as Bush backers, they've had the president's ear.

Bush often says states can craft better solutions to their problems than can the behemoth federal government. California has figured out environmental policies that work, and the markets are freely and properly responding to these.

So why can't the feds, especially if they're not going to make matters better, just leave California alone?
[Editorial, Lost Angeles Times, September 21, 2003]

Hyperthermophiles -- an entirely different life form

A few years back, Dr. Derek R. Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts found that a few kinds of bacteria used iron as a means of respiration (just as humans use oxygen to burn food) and that a surprising but common byproduct of this form of microbial breathing was magnetite, a hard black magnetic mineral. The scientists wondered if hidden swarms of microbes might account for the vast deposits of magnetite that dot the earth and sea. So they turned to one of the strangest, most ancient of environments -- the deep sea's volcanic gashes, where mineral-rich waters hot enough to melt lead gush forth to nourish riots of life ranging from microbes to eight-foot-long tube worms. From the deep Pacific and other sites, the scientists obtained many samples of hot fluids.

To their surprise, they found that all the heat-loving microbes, known as hyperthermophiles, could breathe iron and make magnetite. Not only that, but one type broke the high-temperature record, thriving at an astonishing 250 degrees F [about 120C] -- far above the boiling temperatures usually associated with sterilization.

"It was a crapshoot," Dr. Lovley said of the hunt. "The surprising thing was that all the hyperthermophiles turned out to use iron."

That discovery, he and other scientists say, suggests that all life on earth may have originated from a microbe that breathed iron -- potentially a key insight to learning about the chemical pathways that eons ago led to the dawn of biologic evolution.

In the quarter century since the discovery of the hydrothermal ("hot water") vents, scientists have found a world's worth of life: hundreds of unfamiliar species, new genera, new families and whole new orders. Together, they constitute major gains in measures of global biologic diversity, and they have gained a name: the dark biosphere.
The ocean floor was once thought to be a wasteland that possessed no light, no heat, no plants and very little life, if any. That image shattered in 1977, when oceanographers working deep in the Pacific found bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and long tube worms.

When brought to the surface, the creatures smelled of rotten eggs, a sign of sulfur. It turned out that the ecosystem's main energy source was sulfur compounds emitted by the hot vents, in particular hydrogen sulfide. The primary producers (like plants on land) were tiny microbes thriving on volcanic heats and chemical energies rising from the earth's interior.

The dark ecosystems forced scientists to conclude that not all life on earth depends on the sun's energy or on photosynthesis.

As similar communities were found in the deep, intrigued scientists theorized that the vents were perhaps windows on a deep microbial world, a hidden biosphere extending for miles into the earth's crust, with a total mass rivaling or exceeding that of all surface life. Even stranger, they suggested that life on earth might have begun in such realms, nurtured by a steady diet of hot chemicals.
[From an article by W.J. Broad, New York Times, September 9, 2003.]

Climate Change

Rising temperatures are revolutionising British life, forcing changes on industry and the general public.

Fish: Fishermen are having to learn to catch different species of fish in warmer waters. British sea temperatures are now higher than previously recorded. An extra 1C rise in temperature pushes haddock, cod, plaice and lemon sole 200 to 400 miles north. There have been more frequent sightings of species such as hammerhead shark, triggerfish and sun fish and an increase in catches of rarer southern fish such as red mullet, black bream and cuttlefish in Isle of Man waters. Cornish fishermen have been forced to start rearing lobsters in captivity to prevent them being preyed upon by triggerfish.

THIS AND THAT

"Seasons of Life and Land," an exhibit of 49 photographs from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, went on display over the weekend at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. When they were shown at the Smithsonian Institution in the spring, Subhankar Banerjee, the photographer, complained that the exhibition had been moved downstairs and the captions had been altered under political pressure from supporters of the Bush administration plan to drill for oil there. The Smithsonian denied it; in any event, the captions now appear as he wrote them.
[Staff, New York Times, September 22, 2003.]

Right-wing Revolution

Paul Krugman is a mild-mannered university economist. He is also a New York Times columnist and President Bush's most scathing critic.

Accustomed to the vigorous ivy league tradition of calling a stupid argument a stupid argument (and isolated, at home in New Jersey, from the Washington dinner-party circuit frequented by so many other political columnists) he has become pretty much the only voice in the mainstream US media to openly and repeatedly accuse George Bush of lying to the American people: first to sell a calamitous tax cut, and then to sell a war.

Confusing for those who like their politics to consist of nicely pigeonholed leftwingers criticising rightwingers, and vice versa, will be the incendiary essay that introduces Krugman's new collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, published in the UK next week. In it, he describes how, just as he was about to send his manuscript to the publishers, he chanced upon a passage in an old history book from the 1950s, about 19th-century diplomacy, that seemed to pinpoint, with eerie accuracy, what is happening in the US now. Eerie, but also perhaps a little embarrassing, really, given the identity of the author. Because it's Henry Kissinger.

"The first three pages of Kissinger's book sent chills down my spine," Krugman writes of A World Restored, the 1957 tome by the man who would later become the unacceptable face of cynical realpolitik. Kissinger, using Napoleon as a case study - but also, Krugman believes, implicitly addressing the rise of fascism in the 1930s - describes what happens when a stable political system is confronted with a "revolutionary power": a radical group that rejects the legitimacy of the system itself.

This, Krugman believes, is precisely the situation in the US today (though he is at pains to point out that he isn't comparing Bush to Hitler in moral terms). The "revolutionary power", in Kissinger's theory, rejects fundamental elements of the system it seeks to control, arguing that they are wrong in principle. For the Bush administration, that includes social security; pursuing foreign policy through international institutions; and perhaps even the basic notion that political legitimacy comes from democratic elections - as opposed to, say, from God.

But worse still, Kissinger continued, nobody can quite bring themselves to believe that the revolutionary power really means to do what it claims. "Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent," he wrote, "they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework."

"Exactly," says Krugman. "There's this fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the radicalism of the threat we're facing." But those who point out what is happening, Kissinger had already noted long ago, "are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane."

Which is how, as Krugman sees it, the Bush administration managed to sell tax cuts as a benefit to the poor when the result will really be to benefit the rich, and why they managed to rally support for war in Iraq with arguments for which they didn't have the evidence. Journalists "find it very hard to deal with blatantly false arguments," he argues. "By inclination and training, they always try to see two sides to an issue, and find it hard even to conceive that a major political figure is simply lying."

Or, to quote a state department official who put it pungently to a reporter earlier this year, describing the dominance of the Pentagon hawks: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup'. And then it all makes sense."
[Condensed from an article by O. Burkeman, The Guardian (London), September 19, 2003.]


We think that God has never made
A country we should not invade.
[Calvin Trillin, The Progressive, September 2003. Submitted by A.J. of Alabama, USA.]


The earth is round, Elvis is dead, and climate change is happening now -- and this administration doesn’t get it.
[Annie Petsonk, international counsel for Environmental Defense, a nonprofit New York-based advocacy group. Quoted by Newhouse News Service, September 28, 2003.]


Some 48% of US residents think that this country has had special protection from God for most of its history.
[Pew Research Center.]


Reality check on the US "annual economic growth rate": It is not true that any growth above zero equals prosperity. About 1% expansion is needed to take care of new entrants to the labor pool. And about 4% is required to keep ahead of productivity gains, so that currently employed workers will not be added to the unemployment heap. That means we need an annual growth rate of 5% in order to maintain the level of prosperity (?) that we have. Therefore, when your local newspaper crows about economic growth rates of 4% to 4.5%, remember that means we are actually falling further behind.
[Figures taken from an article by P.G. Gosselin for the Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2003.]

More US Justice

Early morning screams, lasting an hour, chilled the cavern-like hallways that acted as echo chambers and startled everyone out of their hard-found sleep. The 20-year-old Black male screamed that someone was looking at him, which was impossible under the circumstances. He finally stopped and spent the rest of the morning attempting to find someone to talk to him through the air vent. Another 20-year-old Black male began shaking and twitching like those subjected to sensory deprivation in immersion tanks. The guards were keeping him like an addict in a strip cell. His eyes darted to the vent that offers the only contact with his peers. Welcome to the world of a $90 million supermax prison. This particular Midwestern state’s monument to abuse is considered to be the worst such facility in the country because of its windowless, vacuum-like environment and psychologically challenging conditions. Mostly young, non-white, under-educated, and marginally emotionally or psychologically impaired prisoners are subjected to a degree of sensory deprivation that was previously found only in the cells of Lefortovo prison in the former Soviet Union.

Such deprivation is normally used in modern interrogation techniques to break the will of the prisoners, effectively disassociating them from both the free world and the prison communities from when they have come. Such techniques are only employed for several weeks in such an interrogation. At this facility, these techniques are employed for up to a year or more.

The 6-by-12 foot [roughly 2 x 4 meters] "segregation" cells are dominated by a 3-by-7 foot slab of concrete and steel that acts as a bed. Toilet, sink, and shower are also incorporated in this room. The walls are painted off-white and a light stays on 24 hours a day -- also a feature in interrogation cells.

For only 5 or 6 hours per week prisoners are allowed recreation in a concrete room whose only feature is a 12-by-8-inch [30 x 20 cm] vent, mounted high in the room, so they can receive their only fresh air in the otherwise enclosed facility. Few take the option to leave the cell. Perhaps this is because the recreation pens are more depressing that the cells themselves or perhaps a small view of the sky is not enough to placate the hours of state-imposed solitude. Prisoners may not see the sun or sky for the entire time they "serve."

Add the lack of newspapers, magazines, and even family photographs -- and you have a vacuum that allows no social growth, even within the prison environment. From the very first day, the same psychological problems seen at California’s infamous Pelican Bay have been present at this facility. These young prisoners will, after their short sentences, go from a supermax facility that experts consider worse than Pelican Bay, directly back to the street community.

In the late 1800s, prisoners were led into Pennsylvania’s "eastern penitentiary" with black sacks over their heads to disorient them. Now the prison system has come full circle to the stark, windowless environment of the newest, and most expensive, supermaxes in the US. Once abandoned as cruel and unusual, the high-tech version of the black hood has returned.

With nothing to do and very little experience in such total isolation, prisoners begin to degrade emotionally and psychologically. Often this process is even worse in the younger prisoners, who are used to high volumes of external stimulation. Now, lacking that, they begin to turn on themselves and others.

Prisoners are not allowed to retain cups and utensils. Even bags must be returned to guards to avoid their use in such "entertainment" (as some supermax prisoners call it) of throwing feces or urine at guards.

The isolation affects guards as well, since their traditional role has been reduced to that of servants. Their performance suffers. Recently, such lackluster performance resulted in a prisoner in an observation cell being dead for several hours before he was finally checked.

The existence of these high-tech cathedrals of cruelty defines, exactly, the degree of a society’s civilization, verifying the wisdom of Dostoyevsky. This is especially ironic in a country that attempts to define the "moral high road." Only a few scant years ago we as a nation were showing our disdain for such places and practices in other countries, all the while secretly creating our own.
[Robert Taliaferro, News & Letters (Chicago), July 2003.]

Next month: We’d love to know what you think.

These are our usual classifications:
-- Open - questions, comments, tirades, etc.
-- RSVP. React to previous statements.
-- The ecology.
-- Clippings from newspapers, etc.

On the Web:
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[Socialism Marx DeLeon for a real union]

Money. Overtime is free, but there are expenses and any help with these would be appreciated. Please make checks payable to Linda Featheringill and mail to me at 4651 West 41st Street, Down, Cleveland, OH 44109. Contributions will be acknowledged in the next issue, or you can remain anonymous if you wish.

Finances at the end of September 2003:

Balance.........................5.57
Contributions .................80.00
Supplies and stationary -0-
Copying........................35.29
Postage........................34.05
Total expenses.................69.34
Balance........................14.23
Contributions: Anon. 10.00, M. McKinney 20.00, A.A. 25.00, Anon. 15.00, J.D. 10.00.

And, to Everyone, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Linda Featheringill.