"Our lives are worth more than their profits"

Crisis of “Berlusconism” with a left that’s out of the game

Salvatore Cannavò

Although the Italian political crisis is obviously interlaced with the international economic crisis, which has already gone on for two years, this fact is completely absent from the political debate, which focuses on the unexpected appearance of the crisis of Berlusconism and its centre-right alliance. Unforeseen, of course by all those who have made Berlusconi the spectre to hide the reality of relations between classes and the drift to the right of our country. Thus one of Berlusconi’s most loyal allies, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Gianfranco Fini, has abandoned him and his party to found a new organization, Futuro e Libertà (Future and Freedom). For the Italian right this is a shock, because the infallibility of the leader is thus questioned and a serious crisis - even if it is not, yet, a governmental crisis - announces the end of a cycle, that opened by Berlusconi himself with his entry on the political stage in 1994.

The analyses of this shock and crisis by the Italian press stress especially the "characters” of these two individuals and their personal conflict, concealing the structural aspects. Yet the ubiquitous and structural economic crisis has had a heavy impact on the political equilibria, transforming itself into a political crisis, and sometimes even into an institutional crisis. Just look at the difficulties of President Obama who, after an electoral triumph two years ago, risks losing the majority in Congress. Or again the French case with a similar evolution: triumphantly elected in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy is now at his lowest level of popularity. For sure, economic crisis gives rise to political crises.

The Berlusconi Government won the elections of 2008 primarily due to the bankruptcy of the centre-left. In absolute terms its score in 2008 could not be compared to that of 2001, the highest point reached by Berlusconism. But, thanks to the fraudulent electoral law, Berlusconi enjoys a large parliamentary majority that he has used effectively to attack the workers’ movement at its roots, by undermining its fundamental victories (the Labour Code), reducing real wages (reform of public employment contracts), and redistributing resources in favour of sectors favourable to the centre-right (small and medium-sized businesses, liberal professions, tax fraudsters, big wealth, banks and finance) and by launching, with fiscal federalism, a policy of subversion of the social pact that has dominated the country since the end of the war. The crisis has put this project in question, emphasizing the differences in projects, different interests and political conflicts. The distancing of Fini from Berlusconi is not about questions of justice, but the economy. Fini has defended the civil service (in particular the security forces and education), the South of Italy and an industrial policy based on the compromise between “capital and labour”, criticizing the manoeuvres of the Minister for the Economy, Giulio Tremonti. The analysis of the crisis and the way to exit from it constitute the background of the battle.

In this battle the centre-right has revealed its limits and unveiled its crisis. If, in his fifteen years in politics, Berlusconi has managed to compose a kind of “social bloc” - small and medium-sized enterprises in the North, the illegal economy in the South, traders, the liberal professions, tax fraudsters, but also the assisted lumpenproletariat, youth in temporary work and the old electorate - he has not done so around a common social, and economic vision but by juxtaposing different interests and different sectors in a perimeter bound only by rhetoric and propaganda, i.e. by the ideological strength of the media personality. Eroded by the crisis, Berlusconism - this glue which is keeping the social bloc together – strips this propaganda and rhetoric bare. Today, Fini is the candidate to represent a part of these sectors around a political project going beyond Berlusconi and aimed at redefining a new centre-right political project. The hypothesis of the third pole, more than a strategic project, is a passage towards rebuilding a conservative force, a neoliberal alternative to the centre-left, which is adapted to the needs of the dominant classes.

The crisis weighs obviously even on the dominant classes, the Confindustria (the Italian employers’ federation) and on the banks and financial capital. Today they no longer know whether to bet again on the Berlusconi government, which offers its determination to shred the labour movement - as shown in the conflict at Fiat - or begin the construction of a different equilibrium. If Emma Marcegaglia, the current President of Confindustria, continues to play on the current equilibria, the former President, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, seeks a new solution. The difference between two is emblematic of this uncertainty. The problem is that despite its crisis and erosion - and the crisis highlights the fact that Berlusconism actually has nothing to offer - Berlusconi still enjoys a strong social consensus and his alliance with the Northern League preserves for him the possibility of victory. All this makes for a very uncertain situation. In any case, despite this uncertainty, the offensive against workers has continued without hesitation. Fiat thus benefitted from this phase of the crisis and the fears of workers to end national collective agreements and the need to negotiate conditions of employment with the unions. The Government supports this policy and is considering reform of the Statute of Workers while the attack on the civil service – particularly in public education - continues. This sheds light on the political situation: the crisis of the government, which can only be welcomed, is not accompanied by a crisis of the dominant layers which, instead, tend to strengthen.

Obviously in this situation the parliamentary – but also extra-parliamentary - opposition appears completely inadequate. The confusion and uncertainty in the Democratic Party are not only the expression of its irreversible internal divisions, but the fruit of its complete integration in the framework of the crisis. It should not be forgotten that at the time of the vote in parliament on the European plan of “rescue” of Greece – the most severe attack ever experienced by workers in this country - the Democratic Party was the party most committed to it. A pro-European, pro-austerity and pro-employer stance which is now included in its DNA and allows us to understand why, despite the difficulties of Berlusconi, this party does not find a voice and has no propulsive role in the country.

To the inability of the "democratic” opposition we must add the complicity with the employer’s offensive of a large part of the trade union movement. Fiat is trying to wriggle out of national collective agreements to disorient the workers’ movement, leaving employers with their hands untied by reducing rights at work to the level of before 1968-1969. It does so because its international dimension, since the alliance with Chrysler, imposes on it action to reduce labour costs in the absence of anything else. In this offense it leads all the Italian employers. The government actively supports this policy, but the two minority unions, the ICFTU and the UIL - which, together, have approximately six million members - actively support it. The CGIL, which alone has more than five million members, is opposed to date, but with great hesitation, and its resistance is based on that of the metalworkers’ union, the IMF, in which the trade union left is in the majority. And it was the FIOM which took the initiative for the largest mobilization of this autumn, the national demonstration of October 16, which all the radical left supports.

The central issue of the current phase is the construction of resistance to the crisis by unity of struggles and a process of social recomposition: the unification of the struggles against the crisis is our current task. In the months ahead we must work to strengthen and coordinate the struggles, build on the experiences of the constructed mobilizations built from below (“autoconvocate”"), build unitary committee against the crisis, facilitate unitary relations between trade union lefts and other social actors, such as students, and precarious workers. The demonstration of October 16 will be a step in this direction.

Unfortunately this potential has no immediate strictly political openings. Once again the centre-left here demonstrates its inadequate and ’residual’ character on the political field. The Democratic Party once again offers a “new Olive Tree”, as the motor force of a coalition that would comprise not only the Christian Democratic Union led by Casini, but even Fini’s new party. A perspective which is completely defensive and whose social content represents continuity with the disastrous experience of the centre-left government.

However, the majority forces of the radical left have already chosen alliance with the Democratic Party. These are, firstly, Sinistra e Libertà (Left and Freedom), whose leader, Nichi Vendola, has became a popular leader, and hopes to win the nomination for the Presidency of the Council, and then what remains of the Party of Communist Refoundation, which seeks an electoral alliance only with the hope of returning to Parliament. This is because the Italian electoral system requires it to support the governmental project of the Democratic Party, i.e. remove its own political orientation. This could only produce a kind of Democratic Alliance whose contours are still obscure.

In our opinion, the perspective that remains pertinent but fragile is instead a class conscious left which is able to represent an option other than the Democratic Party and the centre-left. An anti-capitalist left defined by a few simple details: being outside the "democratic” coalition under the hegemony of the Democratic Party; a radical program of exit from the crisis; a perspective oriented to the future, resolutely turning its back on conservatism (including that of the “left”") and nostalgia (which still characterizes much of the Italian left), but on the contrary, delivers an innovative political solution; with a capacity to attract social movements and committees of struggle, especially among the new generations more open to social resistance and an alternative hypothesis. In the event of early elections but also the local elections next spring, we intend to work on the formation of an anti-capitalist list with these characteristics. We are not interested in planting the flag of the Sinistra Critica or announcing “urbi et orbi” our autonomous electoral presence. We want to build a “process” that can lead to a proposal which is attractive, innovative, useful for the struggles and animated by them and by the younger generations. With this proposal we look to the political and above all social forces available to reaffirm once again that our lives are worth more than their profits.

Salvatore Cannavò is a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International and of the leadership of Sinistra Critica in Italy. In November 2009 Sinistra Critica decided to declare itself in political solidarity with the Fourth International thus bringing its political experience and forces to strengthen the FI.

Video link: Black Liberation and Marxism

Omali Yeshitela speaks on Zimbabwe

Revolutionary continuity: internationalism & solidarity

Spanish civil war veteran: Sam Lesser

Sam Lesser abandoned his career in Egyptology for his ideals. While making the final arrangements for his first excavation expedition, at the end of the summer of 1936, a comrade from the Communist Party persuaded him of the importance of fighting in Spain.

by Angeles Rodenas

Sam Lesser was among the first group of British volunteers that joined the International Brigade, the world force against the fascist leader Franco. “We did what we had to do,” he said. At the age of 91 his voice sounds steady and his memories remain intact.

Born to a family of Polish immigrants, Sam became involved in the Communist Party while studying at university. He had also joined the Officers Training Corps and participated in demonstrations in London against the fascist blackshirts before heading for Spain.

He crossed the Pyrenees by bus, pretending he was Raimundo Casado, a Spaniard returning from a holiday in France, even though he couldn’t speak a word of Castilian.

He went to Albacete, where the International Brigade’s headquarters was located. He recalls, “We saw Spain as it was then - primitive. I knew the country was a bit backward but the conditions in which people lived in small villages around Albacete were unbelievable. The only building of any size was the church.”

He spent the first few weeks training. He said, “The weapons were very few and the ones that were first distributed were a bad joke - the rifles came from the Austrian army of 1870.”

Sam recalls mingling with locals during the heat of the afternoon, “In that part of La Mancha there was a lot of saffron grown. We helped the local population, particularly the girls, to remove the stamens of the flowers. We soon discovered that each Spanish girl had a mother with her, so there was no funny business at all.”

His first experience of war took place in the University City area of Madrid. The fighting was very fierce and they had to retreat but not without having stopped the fascist advance in Madrid.

The number of casualties was considerable - from one unit of about 30 only six survived. Recounting this episode reminded Sam of the speech he gave a few months ago in Catalonia on behalf of British volunteers killed in the war and he started reciting it in faultless Spanish.

Several months after his first battle, Lesser was hit by two bullets - one in his foot and the second one in his back. He said, “I discovered that the wound in my back came from my own machine gun company.”

He is still moved by the “Spanish hospitality” he experienced while recovering in hospital: “You are lying there with the clothes you had on and these people came in with everything - soup, toothpaste, toothbrushes, a drink which I first discovered then, zumo de uvas (grape juice). I thought the only zumo de uvas that existed was vino tinto (red wine).”

One of the nurses taught him the ­language and introduced him to the adventures of Don Quixote but couldn’t do much for his worsening injuries.

Lesser was finally sent back home, taking the list of those who had been killed. After recovering, he travelled to Paris where he helped to organise the crossing of volunteers who were arriving from all over the world.

He said, “It was a job that had to be done, but I wanted to get back to Spain.” The opportunity arose when he was put in charge of an international group of women volunteers.

They couldn’t hike across the Pyrenees, but managed to get to Catalonia in a fisherman’s boat. But Sam wasn’t able to take up arms for the Republicans.

“When I went to have a medical examination in Barcelona they told me that I was unfit for human consumption,” mocked Sam. That was the end of his involvement in the fighting and the beginning of a long career in journalism. In July 1937 he started broadcasting in English for the Republican cause.

Lesser said, “The first part of the programme was the military communique and then from time to time we would get British volunteers who came on leave to Barcelona to try to get them to prepare something.” During this time Sam met Margaret, the woman who would become his wife. Margaret was a nurse working in the Spanish refugee camp of Argeles, France.

She was recovering in Barcelona from a broken leg. Lesser covered the end of the war as correspondent of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper. Sam said, “I covered our retreat. The border town of Figueras was packed with people on their way to France. The fascist planes started bombing.

“I went to the square and there was complete pandemonium. At the other side of the square I saw Pasionaria, the Communist leader, coming out of a small balcony window. Her words restored some sort of order.”

He was then sent to Paris, where he reported on the “abominable” treatment of the Spanish refugees by the French government. The outbreak of the Second World War brought him back to England to work as an inspector in an aeroplane factory through the conflict.

After the war, he resumed working for the Daily Worker as a correspondent in China, Russia, Cuba and several countries of Eastern Europe until he decided to retire in 1984 at the age of 69.

Lesser said, “Spain has remained always in our minds and in our hearts. If the Republican government had been given its rights by international law to buy arms on the market we wouldn’t have lost the war.

“The experience in Spain didn’t change me politically. The change came for me when I was in the Soviet Union, with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.”

The conversation continued through other chapters of recent history that Sam has witnessed and that would make the memoirs that he regrets not having written.

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© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

Rationalizing stereo­types about gender differences

Are men from Mars and women from Venus?

Popular books push the idea of innate difference

The idea that biology leads to fundamental differences in men and women’s behaviour has become common sense. Cordelia Fine spoke to Siân Ruddick about why this pseudo-science is wrong—and is a justification for women’s oppression

We are regularly told that men and women play different roles in society because of fundamental biological differences. It is often assumed, for instance, that women are less able to think logically because their brains are less structured for reasoning than men’s brains.

Men, meanwhile, are said to be better suited to disciplines that use logic, such as maths and science, but not so good at communicating, empathising or multi-tasking.

In reality, these myths are a cover for a system that continues to discriminate against women.

The human mind is much more fluid than the stereotypes claim, and differences between male and female behaviour aren’t biologically determined—they are learned from society.

Cordelia Fine, a scientist researching the brain, has written a new book called Delusions Of Gender—The Real Science Behind Sex Difference.

She told Socialist Worker, “I’ve been really horrified by how information has been misrepresented in books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

“When I got knee deep in the scientific literature, what seemed to be a very solid structure is actually full of holes and crumbles away in your hands.

“I decided to write my book to explain how these popular books misrepresent and misunderstand what neuroscience can tell us about the differences between men and women.

“I wanted to take all this fascinating research that tells a much more complex and interesting story about gender—and make it accessible to everyone.”

Fine looks at research that knocks down some of the myths about male and female behaviour, and highlights the impact that the stereotypes themselves have on the way people act.

Underestimated

One study looked at two groups of students in France. The first group was asked to rate the accuracy of stereo­types about gender differences in maths and art capabilities.

They were then asked to rate their own abilities in these subjects. Next they reported their scores on art and maths tests that they had taken a couple of years earlier.

The girls reported that they had done better in the art test than they really had, while they underestimated how well they had done in maths—and the boys inflated their maths scores.

A second group of students were not asked about gender stereotypes before reporting their scores—and did not distort their results.

Fine says that, because the first group had gender stereotypes at the forefront of their minds, this influenced how they assessed their own abilities.

She also draws on studies in schools and universities that have shown that stereotypes and expectations not only affect how people rate themselves—they can also affect actual performance.

Shape-rotation tasks are frequently used to measure gender difference in cognition and 75 percent of those who score above average are male. This is used to justify the fact that men are over-represented in science and maths.

But expectations based on gender play an important role in shaping the results.

Fine reports that, when a group of students were told that the task was linked with success in aviation engineering and nuclear propulsion engineering, “men came out well ahead”.

But when the test was “femin­ised”—and students told the task tested skills needed in clothes design, interior design and flower arranging—the effects were reversed.

In other research, different groups took the same tests. One group was told that, due to genetics, men do better. Another was told that women do better for the same reason.

Women’s performance differed between the two groups—they performed just as well as men in the “women do better” group.

The pseudo-science that declares different behaviour in men and women to be rooted in biology also draws on differences in brain size and shape.

But as Fine writes, “Unless we’re happy to start comparing the spatial or empathising skills of big-headed men and women to their pin-headed counterparts, we may have to abandon the idea that we will find the answers to psychological gender differences in grey matter, white matter, corpus callosum size or any other alleged difference in brain structure that turns out to have more to do with size than sex.”

Vacuum

In any case, as Fine shows in the research quoted in her book, it is impossible to separate the way people’s brains work from the society that surrounds them.

And Fine stresses another failing of this idea—that scientists can’t examine gender in a vacuum.

Fine told Socialist Worker, “Nobody is just male or just female. We’re all lots of other things, based on class, ethnic background and so on.

“Gender interacts with all these other social identities so it won’t affect everyone in the same way.”

Myths about male and female biology aren’t new, but they are resilient.

The Essential Difference—a book by Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen—is an irritating reminder of how far we have to go. He still pushes the theory that, “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

But real changes in the way we live have had some impact on science.

Fine points out that the transformation that has taken place in men’s and women’s lives undermine claims that biology determines our behaviour.

If women are “naturally” maternal and hardwired to have children, for example, why are more and more women choosing not to?

“The differences that ‘hardwired brain’ theories are trying to explain are getting smaller,” said Fine.

“No one would put forward a neurological theory now explaining why women shouldn’t be able to vote—because women have not only proved themselves capable of voting but also of being voted for.”

Popular

So why do such theories persist and become so popular?

“Scientists are influenced by the society they live in—and the gender inequality that surrounds them,” said Fine.

“Our society is so stratified by gender that it seems like a very important division. It has an impact on science—so when scientists look at male and female brains they will, by default, look for differences.

“Any difference they do find seems important. That study will then get picked up by the media, which is also preoccupied with sex differences, and it feeds into popular culture.”

Despite the changes that have taken place in women’s lives and the resulting changes in ideas, Fine argues that these shifts aren’t automatic. She stresses the need to keep fighting against ideas that turn women and men into caricatures.

“We can’t just assume that gender inequality will continue to decrease,” she said. “It reduces our motivation to work at gender equality.”

Fine concluded, “There is a popular, widely held view that science has definitively shown that we are hardwired in such a way that to strive for equality is pointless and futile.

“But science has not shown this and it’s very important to remember that.”

The impact of gender stereotypes is not confined to the classroom.

Men and women are constantly bombarded with messages about how they “should” behave and what roles are “suitable” for them. For women, the message is often that there is a limit on our horizons.

The prevalence of the pseudo-science that backs this up, despite evidence to the contrary, reinforces how much we still have to fight for.

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, priced £14.99. Go to www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk or phone 020 7637 1848

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© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

France: a higher stage?

France: Trade union leaders resist but pressure from below is piling up for militant action

[excerpt]

Through their general assemblies, workers in key sectors of the economy are pressing for all-out strike action to begin on the 12^th. This is the case in the railways and road transport, in the electrical industry, in the chemical industry (including Total oil industry workers), in ports and docks, in the television and radio sector, and in several branches of the public services, including teachers. Furthermore, school students and universities are starting to move into action. In Rodez thousands of school students took to the streets in solidarity with the struggle against the pension reform, but also to express their hostility to “Sarkozism”. A similar movement broke out in Toulouse. The port of Marseille is already paralysed by strike action....

New stage in Mumia struggle

Two new films fuel debate on Mumia Abu-Jamal

By MICHAEL SCHREIBER

PHILADELPHIA--Two films with radically opposed viewpoints about the case of death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal had their premiers here on Sept 21.

Tigre Hill’s “The Barrel of a Gun” created a huge splash in the media, warranting the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Celebrities, city and state officials, and off-duty cops joined the enthusiastic and highly partisan audience in the downtown theater in which the film was exhibited.

What were they cheering about? Hill’s film centers on the preposterous notion that Mumia and his brother, Billy Cook, because of their alleged fanatical hatred of the police, were hunting for a police officer to kill on Dec. 9, 1981. As a result, that night, they ambushed Philadelphia Officer Daniel Faulkner--and Mumia is guilty of killing him.

This argument first came to light in the 2007 book, “Murdered by Mumia” by Maureen Faulkner and far-right Philadelphia talk-show host Michael Smerconish. The chief prosecutor in Mumia’s case, Joseph McGill, has put forward the same sinister story, declaring on Smerconish’s radio show that “it’s awfully coincidental” that Cook was driving his Volkswagen the wrong way on 13th St. a moment before the shooting. However, no evidence has ever been presented that Cook was driving the wrong way on a one-way street before Faulkner pulled him over, and McGill said nothing about this in Mumia’s trial.

It’s no surprise that the Fraternal Order of Police, a range of public officials, and radio jocks like Smerconish worked to make “The Barrel of a Gun” a major media event. Nevertheless, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Annette John-Hall called Tigre Hill’s effort “a film that fails to connect dots.” She wrote (Sept. 24) that although she “admires” Hill for being provocative, “I’ve got to admit, I left the screening of his movie shaking my head in disbelief.”

Annette John-Hall points out that the core of Hill’s argument is that Mumia was indoctrinated with a cop-hating philosophy over a decade earlier, as a 15-year-old member of the Black Panther Party. But the timeworn “angry Black man” syndrome, she says, is not much to hang a murder charge on.

Unfortunately, the Philadelphia prosecutor used the same “Black Panther” ploy during Mumia’s sentencing hearing in 1982. At that time, McGill cited for the jury a remark that Mumia had made while he was a Panther member: “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” an adage attributed to Mao Zedong. McGill chose to ignore the fact that, following the 1969 murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago cops, Mumia had made the statement in order to characterize the bloodthirsty tactics of police agencies in the United States.

But Tigre Hill blindly follows McGill’s distortion and makes it the centerpiece of his film, “The Barrel of a Gun.”

The other film that was unveiled in Philadelphia, “Justice for Mumia: The Case for Mumia Abu-Jamal,” lays out some of the evidence that was ignored by the prosecutors--and by Hill. The film’s producer, Baruch College/CUNY professor Johanna Fernandez, said at the press screening at the National Constitution Center that “this film is about due process. It’s about not convicting someone in the streets.” If you do that without seeking the facts, she said, “you are proceeding on prejudice.”

Fernandez said that the filmmakers have been working on the film for four years. They undertook the project largely because of their concern about the endemic horrors of U.S. prisons and “justice” system.

But according to the film’s website, the filmmakers “decided to confront Tigre’s film with a more thoughtful exploration of the [Abu-Jamal] case” after they “saw the series of initial trailers that he released six months ago. Contrary to his claim of having found ‘rare new insight’ into the case, the trailers pointed to a rehashing of the basic arguments put forth by ADA Joe McGill, who wanted to win a death sentence by any means necessary. We want to elevate the dialogue at a time when reasoned voices are needed.”

The filmmakers interviewed Pedro Polakoff, who had photographed the crime scene soon after Faulkner was killed and Abu-Jamal was wounded, though his photos were ignored by police investigators. They also interviewed J. Patrick O’Connor, the author of “The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” who argues that Billy Cook’s business partner, Kenneth Freeman, was present in Cook’s Volkswagen that night and was the actual shooter of Officer Faulkner. Some of Mumia’s family members speak out in the film, and touchingly convey how many lives have been disrupted by Mumia’s unjust and brutal incarceration.

Mumia himself phoned in to the panel discussion that followed the press screening. When one of the panelists asked him how he has kept his sanity after being locked into his death-row cell for almost 30 years, Mumia responded simply: “I feel surrounded by love. That might sound a little corny, but guess what--it’s the truth.”

Linn Washington, a Temple University professor and writer for the Philadelphia Tribune, mentioned in the panel discussion an item that might help to demolish the spurious “ambush” scenario put forward by Joseph McGill, Maureen Faulkner--and now Tigre Hill.

Washington pointed out that the Philadelphia Bulletin, in an article written the day after the Faulkner killing, stated that the taxi cab that Mumia had been driving the night of the shootings had been found with a flat tire. It seems that Mumia had radioed his dispatcher to have a mechanic go to the intersection of 13th and Locust (where the shootings took place) to fix the flat, and he also had telephoned his brother Billy to give him a ride home. After arriving, Billy parked his car on Locust St., and Officer Faulkner then pulled his police car right behind him.

It is very difficult to imagine a planned hit on a police officer, in which the shooter is sitting in a cab that is registered to him and disabled with a flat tire, radios his dispatcher of his whereabouts, and then expects to depart in a “getaway car” sandwiched between a parked car and a police cruiser.

Prof. Washington and Dave Lindorff (author of the book, “Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal”) described at the panel discussion a ballistics test they had recently conducted. The test was meant to mimic the conditions stated in Mumia’s trial, in which prosecutors said that Mumia fired three times at Faulkner from a distance of three feet while the police officer was lying face-up on the sidewalk. Accordingly, the two journalists fired a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber pistol (like the one entered into evidence as the murder weapon) into a slab of concrete similar to that of the sidewalk at 13th and Locust St.

The experiment demonstrated that under those conditions, a bullet would have left prominent dents in the sidewalk. However, the photographs of Pedro Polakoff as well as police photos from the scene do not show any bullet marks.

This raises a question over the testimony of the prosecution’s two “witnesses”--prostitute Cynthia White and cab driver and convicted arsonist Robert Chobert--who testified they saw Mumia shoot Faulkner while the officer was on the ground.

No other witnesses can remember White even being at the scene. Moreover, Chobert’s taxi, according to photos taken at the scene, was not in the position he said it was--behind Faulkner’s police car. And if it were there, Chobert’s view of the shooting, as he described it, would have been blocked by the police vehicle. Washington’s and Lindoff’s article describing their ballistics test can be found at http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff09202010.html.

U.S. Cold War against DPRK never ends

US Often Weighed North Korea `Nuke Option'

By CHARLES J. HANLEY and RANDY HERSCHAFT

October 10, 2010 "AP" -- NEW YORK — From the 1950s Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.

Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea's capital during the war. The U.S. military services later vied for the lead role in any "atomic delivery" over North Korea. In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea on 15-minute alert to strike the north.

Just this past April, issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "all options are on the table" for dealing with Pyongyang — meaning U.S. nuclear strikes were not ruled out.

The stream of new revelations about U.S. nuclear planning further fills in a picture of what North Korea calls "the increasing nuclear threat of the U.S.," which it cites as the reason it developed its own atom-bomb program — as a deterrent.

"This is the lesson we have drawn," North Korea's vice foreign minister, Pak Kil Yon, told the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 29.

The new information is contained in Korean War documents released by the CIA to mark this June's anniversary of the start of the conflict; another declassified package obtained by Washington's private National Security Archive research group under the Freedom of Information Act; and additional documents, also once top-secret and found at the U.S. National Archives, provided to The Associated Press by intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid.

Expert observers are speculating that North Korea, which conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, may soon stage another. Pyongyang's program "has now reached an extremely dangerous level," Kim Tae-hyo, a South Korean government security adviser, said in comments published Wednesday in Seoul.

In a report on global nuclear threats, analysts at Washington's Stimson Center identify six overt warnings by high-ranking American officials since 1976 that the U.S. would resort to nuclear weapons against North Korea if warranted. But U.S. threats go back more than a half-century, to long before North Korea split its first atom.

In mid-August 1950, just seven weeks after North Korea invaded South Korea and five years after two U.S. atomic bombs killed at least 220,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. nuclear weapons were first assigned to the new war theater, according to a declassified Army planning document obtained by the AP.

Retreating U.S. and South Korean troops were then desperately clinging to a last-ditch salient in Korea's southeast, from which they soon broke out in a counteroffensive that took them into North Korea.

That November, after Chinese troops joined in defending North Korea, then-President Harry Truman rattled the nuclear saber at a Washington news conference, saying, "There has always been active consideration of its use."

Regional U.S. commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in interviews published posthumously, said he had a plan at the time to drop 30 to 50 atom bombs across the northern neck of the Korean peninsula, to block further Chinese intervention.

Based on previously declassified documents, however, historians believe the U.S. came closest to unleashing its atomic arsenal against North Korea in April 1951, on the eve of an expected Chinese offensive.

With Truman's signoff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered A-bomb retaliation if large numbers of fresh Chinese troops entered the fight. In the end, the U.S. military repelled the Chinese push and the weapons were never used. But Pentagon planners retained the option.

In September and October 1951, Air Force B-29 bombers conducted simulated atomic-bombing runs against Pyongyang, dropping dummy weapons on the North Korean capital, according to a newly obtained Army planning document corroborating earlier disclosures.

By early 1953, the U.S., frustrated by stalled armistice talks, pondered launching a new offensive against the north Koreans and Chinese. The Pentagon's Air Staff recommended using A-bombs to achieve victory "in the shortest space of time," according to a Feb. 20, 1953, memo from the Air Force director of plans, Maj. Gen. Robert Lee.

Added a top-secret CIA Special Estimate, "The Communists would recognize the employment of these weapons as indicative of Western determination to carry the Korean war to a successful conclusion."

Then, in a series of memos in May, June and July 1953, Air Force generals reported progress in planning an "atomic offensive" to "destroy effective Communist military power in Korea" if the armistice talks broke down completely.

On July 27, 1953, an armistice was signed. Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later credit the nuclear threat — conveyed through back channels to Beijing — for pressuring the Chinese into an agreement.

Even without nuclear weapons, three years of U.S. conventional bombing had devastated North Korea, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The nuclear planning didn't stop with the fighting. On Aug. 20, 1953, declassified documents show, the Strategic Air Command sent Air Force headquarters a plan for "an air atomic offensive against China, Manchuria and North Korea" if the communists resumed hostilities. "OpPlan 8-53" called for use of "large numbers of atomic weapons."

The post-armistice respite, meanwhile, stirred up inter-service rivalries.

Air Force commanders asked for more nuclear-capable F-84G warplanes in the Korea theater "to offset the Navy's greater and more immediate atomic delivery capability," the declassified documents show. But one colonel warned against arousing "the Army-Navy suspicion that the Air Force is trying to steal the atomic bomb act" in Korea planning.

By the late 1950s, all the services shared in an "era of relative atomic plenty," as an Air Force memo called it. The number of nuclear warheads in South Korea and nearby Okinawa — in artillery shells, short-range missiles, gravity bombs and other weapons — peaked at about 2,600 in 1967, civilian researchers would later determine.

In 1969, after the North Koreans shot down a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan, then-President Richard Nixon's lieutenants had these nuclear tools at hand for laying out retaliatory options.

"USAF tactical fighters armed with nuclear weapons are on 15-minute alert in ROK (Republic of Korea) to strike airfields in North Korea," said the contingency plan Defense Secretary Melvin Laird sent to White House national security chief Henry Kissinger, a document obtained by the National Security Archive.

In the end, Nixon decided against military retaliation. The Pentagon had noted that the reaction of China and the Soviet Union, both nuclear-armed, was unpredictable.

In 1975, in response to a perceived North Korean threat of renewed war, President Gerald Ford's defense secretary, James Schlesinger, openly confirmed the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea for the first time, and warned North Korea, "I do not think it would be wise to test (U.S.) reactions."

President Jimmy Carter's administration later scaled back the Korea-based arsenal, and its complete withdrawal was announced in 1991, although the North Koreans at times accuse the U.S. of maintaining a secret nuclear stockpile in the south.

Korea specialists generally accept Pyongyang's stated rationale that it sought its own bomb for defensive reasons — "as a response to the U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea," says author Selig Harrison.

Yoshiki Mine of Japan's Canon Institute for Global Studies, who as a diplomat dealt with both disarmament and North Korea, said the northern regime feels its existence as a nation is threatened.

The U.S. nuclear option "does give the North Koreans an excuse to develop, acquire and own nuclear weapons," Mine told the AP. "They have indicated many times that as long as this basic security is not secured, they would not abandon nuclear weapons."

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