Statement from US labor against war. Australian labor has to be involved in this debate.
IRAQ
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 4300 US fatalities and an unknown number of Iraqi deaths and personal trauma, the people of Iraq and the US have little to show for it. Violence and economic devastation abound. More than 130,000 US troops and an even greater number of private contractors remain on Iraqi soil. Iraqi workers still have no right to union representation, as the US supported government clings to Saddam’s 1987 anti-union labor law. Global corporations hover over Iraq like vultures waiting for the opportunity to seize control of Iraqi resources
AFGHANISTAN
In Afghanistan, after 8 years of war the US faces another quagmire of death, dollars and destruction, with the added elements of drug lords, massive corruption and untold human dislocation and suffering. This is now President Obama’s war – a war that threatens to undermine both Obama’s and labor’s domestic agenda, much as Vietnam did to LBJ’s.
www.uslaboragainstwar.org
PAKISTAN
Meanwhile Pakistan, a country with 173 million people ruled by a corrupt regime with a nuclear arsenal, is threatened with dangerous destabilization as the US has turned it into part of a military battlefield in what is now a regional war.
MILITARISM
The giant sucking sound you hear is the US military budget of 2/3 of a trillion dollars that consumes 58 cents of every tax dollar as it drains away precious resources from meeting human needs.
Labor can never have a sustainable full employment economy, healthcare for all, an environmentally responsible energy policy, and humane immigration policy while billions of dollars and countless lives are squandered on unwinnable and unnecessary wars that make us no safer but make a small elite very rich. The Iraq and Afghan wars will distract from and overwhelm any possibility of implementing a progressive agenda.
USLAW has had a powerful effect in the labor movement since its formation in 2003, helping to alter how organized labor views foreign policy. But our mission is far from over. USLAW is the only voice of workers that brings them to the forefront in linking the struggle for a just society to the struggle for a just foreign policy.
U.S. labor needs a larger, more powerful and influential USLAW.
Our challenge is to refocus and re-energize our movement, to more clearly make the connection between the economic crisis, a national economy that operates in service to the military-industrial complex and a militarized foreign policy that puts our country at odds with most of the people of the world.
We need to figure out how to make foreign policy a legitimate subject of discussion and an important concern to be addressed by our labor movement – in much the same way concern for the environment and a sustainable economy is now understood to be a legitimate focus for organized labor.
Our task is to expand the vision of the labor movement so that unions serve as more than instruments for reshaping our workplaces. They must become instruments for reshaping our world.
US labor against war
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=20274
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