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CounterPunch
October
3, 2002
American Journal
October Surprises
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
October surprises are built into our system, since
elections come in November. Cliffhanger movies in Hollywood's
old days could not have staged it better. Leaving aside hurricanes
roaring out of the Gulf of Mexico, we now have, aside from the
thump of the war drums: a lockout of some 10,500 dockworkers
at every port on the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, with
the owners and big retail chains like Wal-Mart begging Bush to
help them break the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
(ILWU). In the event of a strike Bush could start by imposing
a ninety-day back-to-work order under the Taft-Hartley law.
He could escalate by trying to place
the longshore workers under the aegis of the Railway Labor Act
rather than the National Labor Relations Act. The former allows
the government to close down a strike by fiat and impose a settlement.
Another line of attack would be to try
to undercut the ILWU's strategic ace in the hole, its status
as a bargaining unit for every port on the Pacific Coast. Before
Harry Bridges won that right for the union back in the 1930s,
the owners could simply whipsaw the different bargaining units
by shifting shipments from a struck port to one still operating.
The Administration has already had Tom
Ridge hector ILWU leader James Spinosa with a phone call declaring
that a stoppage would be injurious to the country. Implication:
that the dispute would be cast as a terrorist attack by longshoremen
against the national interest. The White House has also threatened
to bring in the Navy to work the ports.
How tempting it must look for Bush and
his political managers! Amid the war cries against Saddam they
could stage a reprise of Reagan's onslaught on the air traffic
controllers, with Bush waving the flag and deriding the longshoremen
as Al Qaeda's auxiliaries, overpaid and bent on resisting modern
technology that could fortify America's competitiveness on the
battleground of world trade. He could even wave some appliance
from Wal-Mart, made by a Chinese teenager working for 20 cents
an hour, and proclaim that 50 percent of its retail price could
be blamed on the greed of the dockworkers.
Actually, the longshoremen stand as a
good symbol of what organized labor can do: get its members a
decent wage (after thirty years or so of dangerous, skillful
work they can maybe hope to earn what an MBA in his mid-20s,
two years out of the Wharton School, would demand on walking
in the door at a Wall Street firm); display a social and political
conscience; and advertise the unfashionable idea that blue-collar
work does not have to mean a starvation wage, looted pension
fund and no healthcare. If you want the latter, drive, as I have,
down the streets of Odessa, Texas, which is where George Bush
formed his notions of what constitute workers' rights and a livable
wage, and which has a murder rate that regularly battles Miami
for first place on the national charts.
Talking of organized labor, Bush's Homeland
Security bill is on life support because enough Democrats have
stigmatized it as a savage assault on the right of federal workers
to organize. If passed on Bush's terms, some 170,000 employees
would lose everything they've won over the past six decades.
And we have a white-lipped economy. In
the second quarter alone, pension wealth fell by more than $469
billion, or 5.3 percent. There was a 3.4 percent net decline
in wealth in that quarter, with its successor shaping up to be
just as bad. Leading economic indicators and housing starts have
fallen for three months in a row. There is rising unemployment,
and the housing-price boom might be stuttering. Oil prices are
up 40 percent this year. Bears rampage through the market.
We've now seen seven straight quarters
of declining investment in plant and equipment, and a sharp drop
in the growth of consumer spending over the past four or five
months. The retail industry is having a miserable season, which
the shutdown on the West Coast is scarcely going to help.
There's increasing public awareness that
the performance of many of America's mightiest corporate names
has been faked. In late September federal prosecutors announced
they're opening a criminal probe into Xerox's accounting practices.
WorldCom revealed that it probably misreported $9 billion in
revenue, not $7 billion. Numbers from the telecommunications
sector now lack any credibility, and given the fact that overcapacity
in that sector tops 90 percent, the stage is set for total collapse-not
just of WorldCom, but Verizon and the others.
Now move on to the financial-service
firms that abetted all the fraudulent shenanigans of companies
like Enron and WorldCom. Consider their exposure in multibillion-dollar
suits from pension funds that ended up holding the bag. The official
rate of profit on capital stock in the nonfinancial corporate
sector as a whole is now at the lowest level since World War
II, except for 1980 and 1982. If this were Bill Clinton, the
commentators would be flaying him alive for wag-the-dog attempts
to use war as a way to distract attention from economic bad news.
Thus far Bush has remained aloft on his magic carpet, but he's
losing altitude steadily while Wall Street chews its lip and
foreign denunciations pour in.
America no longer has "Wise Old
Men" or senior reps of the ruling class like John McCloy.
At moments like this, such senior reps would step forth with
measured warnings to Bush about his reckless path. These days
we're left with Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, neither
of whom carries credibility. The best senior we have going for
us is Senator Robert Byrd, who has shown his party the way forward
with spirited attacks on war fever and the Homeland Security
Department.
If the economy continues to slide, Bush
and his circle will face a truly desperate gamble, trying to
figure whether a $200 billion war on Iraq will save them (war,
after all, can produce some healthful deficit spending) or just
plunge them into the mother of all messes. It could be that the
true picture, in Hollywood's idiom, is Bush tied to the track,
hollering War as the economy rolls right over him, and then over
the cliff.
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
Talking
to Your Kids About Fascism
Will Youmans
The New
Anti-Apartheid Movement: The Campaign to Divest from Israel
Deb Reich
Report from a Mad World
Todd Chretien & Sue Sandlin
"It's All About Power on the
Docks"
Kurt Nimmo
Poetry
as Treason
Amiri Baraka
Somebody
Blew Up America
Alexander Cockburn
October Surprises
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
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October 2,
2002
Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
President Nuts?
Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
Rotten in Klamath
Linda S. Heard
Might Sharon
Nuke Iraq?
Joanne Mariner
When
the Judge Says:
"I Botched It"
Peter P. Mahoney
A Vietnam
Vet Makes the
Case Against War on Iraq
Mark Engler
From the
Quarantine
Agaisnt Greed
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
Jennifer Berkshire
Converging Against Capitalism
October 1,
2002
Benjamin Shepard
On the
Road Again:
IMF/World Bank Protest
Reveal a Revived
Movement for Global Justice
Dr. Susan
Block
Cockfight
at the
Baghdad Corral
Krystal Kyer
Growing Union Opposition
to War
Ron Jacobs
Born Without a Spine
Scott Loughrey
Mysteries
of 9/11
Jeremy Brecher
Collective
Security is Working
Brenda Norrell
Troy
Black Feather on
the American Flag
Sam Bahour
Wake Up
and Smell
the Occupation
Richard Harth
Contrary
to Reason:
Adieu, Hitchens, Adieu
Carol Norris
Rumsfeld
the Surrealist:
Things Related and Not
Ben Tripp
Lists Upon
Lists
September
30, 2002
Rep. Barbara
Lee
Alternatives
to War
Kurt Nimmo
Iraq: The
Vision
of the Velociraptors
Zeynep Toufe
"We
Own the World, We Ignore the Children"
Dave Marsh
The Troubador's
Highway
Tariq Ali
Taking
It to London's Streets
Neve Gordon
Bush's
War of Self-Adulation
September
25 / 29, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Dogs of War,
the Bears of Wall Street
Ben Tripp
Hunting with George
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Haywire: Boeing's New Navy Fighter Fails Bomb Tests
Joanne Mariner
Naming Genocide
James T. Philips
Riding to Maine
Anis Shivani
Life of a Bum
David Vest
Too True North
Jacob Levich
Case of the Missing Terrorist
William MacDougall
British Immigration Tests
Edward Hammond
Pentagon Develops Illegal Chemical Weapons Capability
Molly Secours
Bush's "I" Words:
Intervention & Impeachment
Edward Lazarus
Civil Liberties After 9/11
Lee Sustar
Employers Attack
Anthony Gancarski
Ledeen's Mad World
Krystal Kyer
Bush the Magician
David Wiggins
West Point Grad:
Bush Threatens World Peace
September
24, 2002
Chet Batsmack,
American
The American
Century
Paul de Rooij
Smear Mongers
George Szamuely
International
Kangaroo Courts
Jack Wheeler
Janet Reno: America's Saddam?
Linda S. Heard
Portrait
of Uncle Sam
Gary Leupp
Random
Thoughts on Anti-Americanism
Wayne Madsen
Germany
Leads the Way
William Hughes
George
Will: War Pimp
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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