Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
WHAT HURTS MORE? Torture in Abu Ghraib prison by Saddam Hussein's thugs or torture in Abu Ghraib by American brutes? Torture to sustain a vicious dictatorship or torture in the name...
...n Harold Meyerson provides a trenchant analysis of the political season in this issue...
...New Republic, May 24, 2004...
...Bush's policy seems governed by his electoral calendar, not Iraqi needs...
...Ted Marmor points out that conservatives respond to our burgeoning health care woes with old time religion: markets solve everything...
...n Americans ought also to be disturbed by the responses of some of our shrillest right-wing voices...
...In the meantime, Mr...
...Americans ought to be unsettled by them...
...Torture to sustain a vicious dictatorship or torture in the name of democracy...
...If a corporation— say, Halliburton—carried out a "mission" as the Defense Department did in Iraq, would its executives keep their jobs...
...A Maoist prison or a communist-capitalist one...
...Bruce Vladeck places the Bush Medicare reform in the context of conservative efforts to weaken all social insurance...
...National "values" were at stake...
...n I sometimes wonder if a Defense Department committee wasn't established to envisage all blunders that might be made in Iraq, and then proceeded to make them policy...
...Would they be able to wave a logo and outsource accountability...
...A torture victim might be excused for finding these queries absurd...
...Tom DeLay, Republican House leader, opposed congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib because it would be "like saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street...
...If you prefer our times, read "The Condition of the Working Class in China," a devastating petition presented by American trade unionists to (and dismissed by) the Bush administration: "China's unremitting repression of labor rights robs China's workers of wages, health, and dignity...
...MC...
...China's ruling communists read Engels well, just not from his viewpoint...
...By lowering wages by between 47 percent and 85 percent, China . . . also diverts millions of manufacturing jobs from countries where labor rights are not so comprehensively denied, increasing unemployment and poverty among workers in developed and developing countries...
...The flag should be washed, not burned, he protested...
...What hurts workers more...
...n During a charged moment in the Vietnam era, socialist Norman Thomas reacted against extremists within the left who alienated many Americans by vulgar, demonstrative acts...
...Didn't DeLay once insist urgently on congressional inquiry into a presidential fib about an affair...
...n If you want to know why the early left protested unrestrained markets, read Friedrich Engels's description of the social misery they produced in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845...
...Why not a national flag-washing day timed to the Republican convention, more precisely to Bush's acceptance speech...
...Although I don't think Iraq and Vietnam are comparable, I do think Thomas's idea ought to be retrieved, especially after Abu Ghraib...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
