Military spending comes at the expense of local communities...

[The following was adopted at the CPUSA convention]

Whereas, U.S. military spending for FY 2011 is projected to be $1.4 trillion and this massive, wasteful spending is the might behind US transnational corporate domination and the enrichment of the military-industrial complex;

Whereas, It comes at the expense of states and local communities, struggling with a $180 billion collective deficit, devastating cuts to social services and education, and massive layoffs of public workers;

Whereas, US military spending plus the cost of two wars and hundreds of U.S. military bases worldwide are a chief obstacle to funding massive federal jobs creation, public education, health care, mass transit, affordable housing, other infrastructure needs and aid to the states and municipalities;

Whereas, Militarization of the economy negatively impacts economic growth, the same money could create far more jobs in the public sphere. Deep cuts in military spending are a social imperative;

Whereas, Despite the Obama administration exemption of cuts in military spending, there is a growing recognition of the destructiveness of high military spending and the costs of militarism;

Whereas, A 2009 Pew Research Poll revealed a total of 55% of Americans wanted to decrease (18%) military spending or keep it the same (37%); only 40% wanted it to increase. Some members of Congress have renewed a call for a 25% cut and the elimination of Cold War weapons systems as a first step;

Whereas, The Obama administration is under intense pressure from the right wing, some corporate ruling and military circles to continue militaristic policies and the historic imperialist trajectory of US foreign policy. However, the Obama administration, also reflecting counter-currents, has taken some important steps in the opposite direction. This creates new opportunities to demilitarize the economy and change our foreign policy;

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Read other resolutions adopted here...

War makes you poor

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Real causes of high deficits

by Joel Wendland

The government reported this week that federal deficit set a record at more than $80 billion, just for the month. They expect the total deficit for the year to easily eclipse $1 trillion.

Republicans are ranting and raving, trying to distract voters from their responsibility for the deficit which doubled when they controlled Congress and the Presidency under Bush.

Here are two basic reasons why the deficit is so high:

1. Taxes for the richest Americans have steadily declined, eroding federal revenues by hundreds of billions.



And don't give me the line that if you raise taxes on the rich there will be a recession. If that tired argument were true we wouldn't be calling the economic crisis that started in December 2007 and just now seems to be ending the "Great Recession."

2. The second main reason is Bush's war of choice in Iraq. Totaling over $720 billion today, the Republicans, who started that war and called anyone who refused to go along with it traitors, still have provided no plan to pay for it. If we follow their argument about how our grandchildren will have to pay for deficits, this trillion dollar war of choice, by definition an atrocity, will take generations to pay for.

Lowdown on Michigan Primary Results

By Joel Wendland

Of Michigan's more than 7,141,000 registered voters, only about 1,470,000 went to the polls, or about 20% voter turnout. TV people talked about it being snowy and cold, but it really wasn't so bad. It was worse in Iowa for the caucus, as I understand it.

Sen. Clinton won the most votes on the Democratic side, as only she and Kucinich were on the ballot. She did not campaign here; only Kucinich did. So for the most part this was an uncontested election.

Yet Clinton garnered nearly as many votes as the Republican front-runner.

Interestingly, "uncommitted" Democrats scored about 40% suggesting some dissatisfaction with Clinton's candidacy and somewhat embarrassing for her, but not a national news story to be sure. Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor) went "uncommitted," and three of the states other biggest counties – Wayne County (Detroit), Kent County (Grand Rapids), and Oakland County (Detroit suburbs) – edged for Clinton by slim majorities, suggesting that she has a lot of work to do to convince Michigan voters – both Black and white.

Exit polls indicated that African Americans would have voted for Obama by more than 7 to 3 if he had campaigned in the state.

Hold on, though, Michigan. Clinton did very well in the debate in Las Vegas. I especially enjoyed her line about Bush's "pathetic" attempts to beg lower oil prices out of OPEC. Her strongest qualities are her sharp anti-ultra right programs and her detailed plans for tackling the looming economic crisis. She has also come a long way on the war.

For the third straight primary/caucus, the big story, however, has to do with turnout. Even though the Republicans came here and pretended they cared about jobs (offering no solutions like fair trade, union rights, ending Bush tax breaks to companies who move out of town and country a la DeVos' Amway, etc.), they couldn't get Michigan voters excited about Republican ideas or four more years of a Republican presidency.

In states where Democrats contested the elections and debated the issues and talked about bringing the troops home from the war, about change, about universal health care and creating jobs, about ending our dependence on oil, about workers' rights, people came out in icy weather in Iowa and balmy weather in New Hampshire.

Real "Political Correctness"

For many years now the right-wing in the U.S. has used the term "politically correct" to caricature those who try to remove racist, sexist, militarist and other like minded forms of speech from popular usage. The right has also applied the term to those who criticize racist, sexist, militarist and allied policies. The underlying assumption that the right seeks to develop is that such language and such policies are "normal" and acceptable and really represent what people think, even many of the people who are are critics.

The term "politically correct" has an interesting history. "New Left" radicals of the Abbie Hoffman variety, whose politics were closer to anarchism than to Marxism, used the term among themselves to make fun of "old left" or Communist activists who in debates sought to find the "correct position" (in terms of theory and practice to inform policy) which, when one stops to think about it, is what any political group that is not either sectarian or opportunist should be doing.

The "new lefties" used the term to make fun of what they considered to be "old left" dogmatism. The right has used its version of "political correctness" to caricature those who oppose both its policies and those who reject the "good old days" when racist politicians used the N word routinely in Congress, racist, sexist (including crudely homophobic) stereotyping and humor permeated mass media, and those who criticized nuclear radiation and/or proliferation, along with the Korean and later Vietnam Wars, were condemned as either Soviet agents, "Communist dupes," or "tenderminded" vaguely effeminate individuals who had no knowledge of the real world.

But the right has been in power at the national level for most of the period since Ronald Reagan became president and broke sharply in his policies with previous Republican administrations in regard union busting, undermining existing civil rights legislation, and rejection of detente in the cold war, so the concept of "political correctness" as it is used today has nothing to do with real politics in the U.S. Like most positions associated with the right-wing, should be turned inside out if one is to get to the truth.

I mean that when the right argues that "socialized medicine" for example doesn't work and has been a failure through the world, the easily verifiable truth is that it has been an enormous success through the developed world when compared to the U.S. system. When the right contends that tax cuts and deregulation create enormous productive "economic growth," the record shows that such policies produce stagnation in real wages and a decline in productive investments as against speculation, which makes the "growth" largely parasitic, "creating" cheap labor jobs at home and abroad and greatly increasing the real income gap between the wealthy and the general population.

When the right contends that there is no"reliable" scientific information to support an imminent danger from global warming and other man made environmental problems, the scientific evidence that there is both a huge and immediate global environmental crisis is overwhelming

When the right-wing says that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because of Hussein's relationship to Al Qaeda and his secret development of "weapons of mass destructive, (even they prefer to forget about these statements today) no one should be surprised by the fact (as most of the world pretty much knew in 2003) that Hussein's government had no relationship except one of mutual hostility with Al Qaeda and that the UN inspections that had been going on for years in Iraq were solid evidence that his regime had no weapons of "mass destruction."

Similarly, when the right uses the term "politically correct" to mock opponents of the death penalty and proponents of gun control, it is important to understand that both tgun control policies and the elimination of the death penalty is today the norm in most of the developed world and one result is significantly lower crime rates and much lower violent crime and homicide rates.

Given the power of the right and its control of media (which by the way it constantly berates as "liberal" in order to detract attention from its control) we can't so easily get rid of the term "political correctness," which thanks to the power of U.S. media is now used internationally. But we can perhaps turn the term around and apply it to real politics, showing that "political correctness" in language and policy as defined in the United States in recent years by the right should be used to expose the distortions of reality that the right perpetrates.

Let's start with organized labor, which media largely makes invisible in the U.S. It is "politically correct" to call anti-union shop laws under section 14B of the Taft-Hartley law as "right to work" laws (a pleasant turn) or anti-"closed shop" laws (again something that is positive). Non union workers who are brought in to break strikes and then take the jobs of the striking workers are called "permanent replacement workers" under real political correctness. Now I am not saying that the term "scab" used for more than a century by the labor movement is objective, but "permanent replacement worker" is a very positive term for those who are rewarded for breaking strikes and busting unions.

Labor leaders are still in mass media widely referred to as "union bosses" especially when strikes are going on and corporate leaders, who unlike labor leaders have not been elected by members but by various boards that they often control, are called CEO's (chief executive officers) or merely executives or by their rank in the company. This is real political correctness as applied to class relations.

When workers lose jobs, the politically correct term today is "downsizing," not layoffs, because that is too unpleasant (not that downsizing is so effective, now that the general population associates it with hard times).

Let's look at civil rights. Real political correctness, as practiced by the right, calls affirmative action policies "reverse racism," which the Supreme Court has recently endorsed when it used the 1954 Brown decision to violate school board integration plans. Without planning and policy implementation to redress long-standing social injustices, the injustices will continue in fact in some form even if they have been removed in law, so affirmative action complements rather than contradicts both the spirit and letter of Civil Rights legislation.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, for example, simply eliminating the Hitlerite race laws that had been used to murder millions and persecute many millions more, was not a solution. The survivors and others victims couldn't simply be left to fend for themselves in a society where the many of the individuals and certainly the non Nazi public and private institutions which had carried out the policies of the fascist state were still in tact, just as the individuals and institutions which sustained Southern de jure segregation were in tact in the U.S. after the 1960s, not to mention the individuals and institutions who practiced de facto racism through the country.

At the time in postwar Germany , by the way, (although I understand that this analogy is by no means very broad and some may disagree with it) many former Nazis, who now defined themselves as "anti-Communist conservatives," contended that while the previous policies of anti-Semitism had not been right and and led to bad things, the present postwar policies of "philosemitism" (portraying Jews as innocent victims of persecution who deserved reparations and other compensations for their suffering) represented the other extreme and was also wrong. Now that Hitler was gone, Germans, particularly the millions who had been active Nazis, could both forget and deny the past and become good "free world" cold warriors.

Where African Americans and other minorities are concerned, the right-wingers who mock criticisms of racist speech and policies in the U.S. today as "political correctness" are essentially saying what those postwar Germans were, albeit in a very different context and, unfortunately, with much more influence in the media. We are neither racists nor anti-racists, and now that segregation is over, we can deny and forget about it, except of course to criticize those who continue to fight racism as advocates of a "double standard" when it comes to minorities (which former Nazis and other German rightists accused "philo-Semites" of having when it came to Jewish people).

There are many other examples of real political correctness (calling the Bush administration's modern day version of the Alien and Sedition Acts the "Patriot Act" calling torture "rendition" and other things, and of course the CIA's classic phrase for killing people, "termination with extreme prejudice"). And these are real political correctness because they are language used to define in a distorted way real political policies by agencies of government with real political power

At a time when the right uses a wildly propagandistic distortion of language to caricature its critics, and then projects in the Freudian sense through the term political correctness what it is doing onto its critics, it is time that the left begin to actively expose the distortions and outright lies that permeate mass media, identify their origins and political purposes, and move to the offensive in the battle of ideas which inform politics.

Norman Markowitz