SLAMMING THE DOOR ON IRAQI REFUGEES
George W. keeps talking about America’s moral responsibility to help the people of Iraq. So … why is he slamming America’s door in their faces?
There’s an ugly story about the Bushites’ war that they’re hoping you and I don’t notice. It’s that their incompetence and arrogance have made the Iraqi people’s lives a succession of miseries. There are the daily killings and maimings, of course – a gruesome reality that, since the start of Bush’s highly touted surge strategy, has spread throughout the country.
But let’s look at the undead. Unemployment is rampant. Even in the capital city of Baghdad, electricity is at best an occasional luxury. Two out of three Iraqis have no regular access to clean water. Children are malnourished, with many dying from preventable diseases. The country’s health-care system is near collapse. Two-thirds of Iraqi children are not in school.
Meanwhile, in a nation of 28 million people, 4 million have been forced by this raging civil war to flee their homes. Half of them are homeless in their own land, while the other half have fled Iraq.
This is where the door-slamming comes in. Since the war began four years ago, how many of these displaced civilians would you guess the Bushites have allowed to seek refuge in our Land of the Free? About 500. That’s it.
Well, surely the compassionate conservatives in the White House have made other arrangements for Iraq’s growing number of war refugees. Uh-uh. In fact, Bush has sat on his hands while two of his wealthiest war allies in the region – Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – have shut their doors to their Iraqi neighbors. Rather than providing financial support for the refugees, for example, Saudi Arabia is spending $7 billion to build a border fence to keep Iraqis out.
To learn what America can and should do about Iraq’s desperate refugees, contact the International Rescue Committee: www.theirc.org.
MORE CORPORATE WAR AGAINST WORKERS
Chicken Little is loose again. Loose in the White House, Congress, and corporate America.
The Chicken Littles are crying that if all new North American Free Trade Agreement-style trade deals are required to include protections for labor in all the countries involved – well, goodness gracious, the sky will fall!
What has them so panicky is a proposal by congressional Democrats to rein in the labor abuses that have come with these corporate-written trade deals. Are the Democrats suggesting radical protections that would put an impossible burden on global business? Judge for yourself: One provision would ban the use of child labor. Another bans slave labor. A third says that workers would have the right to form unions.
Aren’t these good things? Not to the global corporate powers and their political protectors in Washington, D.C. They warn darkly that such protections would boomerang, for other nations would sue in international trade courts to overturn our state laws allowing such practices as lower-wage summer jobs for teenagers.
Excuse me, but an all-out foreign assault on American teenagers working a few weeks at the shore or in the hay fields doesn’t seem terribly likely. Nonetheless, the battle cry of the powerful National Association of Manufacturers is: Defend the Teenagers! Indeed, NAM’s top lobbyist, John Engler, is the Chicken Littlest of them all, wailing that subjecting state laws “to a foreign nation’s challenge would be unacceptable.”
Gosh, maybe John is ignorant of the fact that NAFTA, Central American Free Trade Agreement, and other existing trade deals already subject our state laws to foreign challenges on behalf of global corporations – and that the NAM backed those provisions. Or … maybe John’s just using American teenagers as a political screen to keep his corporate members from having to treat their global workers with some minimal fairness.
Yeah, that last one.
This article appears in May 11 • 2007.