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The War So Far: a Failure Worse Than Vietnam by Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad "The need for the White House to produce a fantasy picture of Iraq is because it dare not admit that it has engineered one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worse than Vietnam because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater." Get the answers you're looking for in the subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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October 29 / 30, 2005 Peter Linebaugh October 28, 2005 Jared Bernstein Virginia Tilley Phil Gasper Jennifer Matsui Manual Garcia,
Jr. Monica Benderman Jason Leopold Dave Lindorff
Saul Landau Stuart Hodkinson Ingmar Lee Lila Rajiva Ilan Pappe Niranjan Ramakrishnan Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Cockburn / St. Clair
October 26, 2005 Kathy Kelly Gary Leupp Mike Marqusee Eric Ruder Patrick Cockburn Joshua Frank J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Website of
the Day
October 25, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn Conn Hallinan Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Jackie Corr Robert Day John Sugg
October 24, 2005 Dave Lindorff Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Norman Solomon Bill and Kathleen
Christison
October 22 / 23, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Billy Sothern Saul Landau Ralph Nader Behrooz Ghamari Brian Cloughley Diana Barahona Fred Gardner Lee Sustar Patrick Cockburn Laura Carlsen James Petras Joshua Frank Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Michelle Bollinger Missy Comley
Beattie Kona Lowell Ben Tripp Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
October 21, 2005 Dave Lindorff Winslow T. Wheeler Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Madis Senner Michael Donnelly
Dave Lindorff Ray McGovern Jeremy Brecher
/ Patrick Cockburn Kevin Zeese Ross Eisenbrey Randy Shields Justine Davidson After Lucas
Cranach Joe Allen
October 19, 2005 Christopher Reed Stephen Soldz Chet Richards Patrick Cockburn Scott Richard
Lyons Ralph Nader Website of
the Day
October 18, 2005 Chet Flippo Ron Jacobs Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor Dave Lindorff Virginia Rodino Thomas Healy Ralph Nader Stephen Lendman Patrick Cockburn
October 17, 2005 Peter Linebaugh Norman Solomon Cockburn /
Sengupta Mike Whitney Uri Avnery Harold Pinter Website of
the Day
October 15 / 16, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau Neve Gordon Moshe Adler Christopher Brauchli Diane Farsetta Sam Husseini Monica Benderman Mickey Z. Douglas C.
Smyth Lee Sustar Fred Gardner Elizabeth Schulte Joshua Frank David Vest Ben Tripp Poets Basement Website of
the Weekend
October 14, 2005 Farrah Hassen Ron Jacobs Sasha Kramer Katrina Yeaw Nicole Colson Raúl Zibechi Nikolas Kozloff Website of the Day
Jeremy Scahill Jeff Birkenstein Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher Stan Cox Anis Memon Gary Leupp Dave Zirin Matthew Koehler Werther Website of
the Day
Omar Waraich William Cook Phil Gasper Dave Lindorff Matt Vidal John Gautreaux Diana Johnstone Mark Weisbrot Brian J. Foley Website of
the Day
October 11, 2005 Roger Morris
/ Steve Schmidt Lila Rajiva Bill Quigley Paul Craig Roberts Dave Lindorff Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Mitchel Cohen Tariq Ali Website of
the Day
October 10, 2005 Cindy and Craig
Corrie Joshua Frank Gideon Levy Alan Wallis Mickey Z. CounterPunch News Service Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
October 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Ralph Nader Jennifer Van Bergen Saul Landau Jeff Halper Lenni Brenner Nikolas Kozloff Brian Cloughley Alice Slater John Gautreaux Fred Gardner Niranjan Ramakrishnan M.G. Piety Tom Gorman Mike Whitney Aseem Shrivastava Ben Tripp Poets' Basement
October 7, 2005 Larry Johnson Will Youmans Dave Lindorff Judith Scherr Russell D. Hoffman Jared Bernstein Jennifer Van
Bergen Website of
the Day
P. Sainath Scott Parkin Paul Craig
Roberts Andréa Schmidt Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank M. Junaid Alam Matthew Koehler Robert Pollin
October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Robert Jensen Ramzy Baroud Col. Dan Smith Dave Zirin Paul Craig Roberts Alan Maass
October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Mike Roselle Joshua Frank John Chuckman Alan Farago Mickey Z. Christine & Ethan Rose Gary Leupp Website of the Day
October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig
Roberts Joshua Frank Seth Sandronsky Jeffrey St. Clair
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Weekend Edition The Death of Steel Meant the Death of Jobs, Pensions and Health BenefitsRequiem for Bethlehem Steel?By JOE DeRAYMOND Years ago, we made steel here in Bethlehem. This is a statement of consequence, for the making of steel is not a cottage industry, it is an industry that builds nations and requires the labor and capital of a nation. The Bethlehem Steel enterprise stretched for over five miles along the Lehigh River. In 1970, 25,000 to 30,000 workers swarmed daily through the plant gates, a city within a city of men and women who turned iron ore into steel products. I worked for some months of 1974 in the ingot mold plant, where five and ten ton molds were poured and finished. My first day on the job a fork lift operator erred and placed a ten ton mold on a worker, pinned his legs, then compounded his error by dropping the mold completely. The fork lifts were a ground-level hazard, the mold pits were below you, and the cranes swung the loads over your head. Black dust was heavy in the air. I spent nights in the cooling yard, where a craneman would swing the slag encrusted hot molds to cool, and smash them into each other as he set them down to knock away the slag, which would slam into the walls of the warehouse like cannonballs. My job was to direct hoses over the molds to cool them. At the end of the night, I had to run down the sidewalk out of the yard, the heat of the combined molds would be so fierce. Other nights, I would find myself deep in the tunnels of the place, avoiding the bosses, coming up to watch the hot steel being poured into molds as workers walked along the edge of the fiery pools of molten metal. Another night, I was flagman for the forklift driver who had dropped the load on the now-crippled steelworker. I had to wake him from his stupor, and watch that no one got near him as he slammed the molds around the yard. It did occur to me that the only one at risk was the flagman, me, as he careened through his work in order to get back to sleep. The union had been established with riots and blood some decades before, and for the labor of their lives the workers now had decent pay, benefits, pension. But the plant was old, the corporation was not reinvesting profits, and by 1974 the system was decayed. There was a dispirited attitude about the place. Soon thereafter, the quick decline came, as the fat government war contracts ended with the end of the Vietnam War. The topheavy management and corporate structure, together with the unionized workforce, could not be supported within a steel industry where the profits were not in making steel, but by melting it down from existing scrap. The profit margin in a vertically integrated steelmaking operation is small compared to the capital required to make the coke, to fire the blast furnaces, to turn iron ore to steel. As the world turned to the steel in refrigerators and junk cars, and to the cheaper labor of Brazil and China, the big steel operations of the US died. Bethlehem Steel died, and in the last quarter century turned into a dark hulk of a plant on a small river, a brownfield contaminated by heavy metals and occupied by the hulks of rotting brick and steel buildings, the skeleton of a steel plant rising in silouhette against a night sky that used to be lit by the flames of the blast furnaces. The death of the steel meant the end of the jobs, the end too of the pensions and the health benefits, as the bankrupt corporation became unable to meet its contract with its workers. It fell into Chapter 11 in 2001, and by 2003 the health benefits of the 95,000 retirees were ended, and the pensions capped as the company turned over its obligations to the government-run Pension Benefit Guarantee Board. The United States now depends on others to take the risks and pay the human and enviromental price to produce the steel that goes into our bridges, buildings, and cars. The United State is the largest importer of steel in the world, over 30 million tons a year. It is the way of this superpower nation to consume, and to shift the production to those parts of the world where the labor is cheaper, the ability to pollute closer to absolute. Even before the plant was fully closed, there was a drive for some sort of steel plant nostalgia. Local people wanted to memorialize the steel industry of Bethlehem, as if it occurred in some distant time, as if steelworkers were heroes of another culture, another era. It is almost as though people do not want to admit that steel could still be made here, that people should be paid a decent wage with decent benefits to produce the stuff of empire, the Empire State Buildings, Brooklyn Bridges, World Trade Centers of the world. In the wake of the corporate
failures of steel in the last years of the twentieth century,
there has been an attempt to re-establish a corporate base in
the deserted brownfields. Here in Bethlehem, this involves pouring
millions of dollars of public money into infrastructure in order
to lure industry to re-occupy the deserted land. The County
built a $13,000,000 road into the old Steel site. The local
congressman's website touts grants of over $16,000,000 to build
roads into South Bethlehem. The local target for a slot machine gaming hall is the ruins of the Bethlehem Steel plant. The corporation that would like to develop it is the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. The bait for public acceptance of this idea is not just property tax relief, but a preservation of the old Steel Plant. The political and economic leadership has decided that the money to preserve the memory of the Steel is in the wallets of busloads of fun-seeking citizens who will spend hour after hour pulling the magic handles of one armed bandits. Las Vegas Sands has promised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a gambling mecca that will preserve the memory of the Steel. The corporate interests who support gambling at the old steel plant have organized Bethworks Now, which is operating a slick public relations campaign to sway local residents. In the Bethlehem area, however,
many of the school boards rejected participation in Act 72, and
opted out of the program, because they refused to give up the
right to control their own budgets. There is also a recognition
that this gambling business is somehow on the dark side of the
moral code, and an understanding that regardless of the morality,
lives will be destroyed by the brutal math of the slots
you play, you lose. So, there is still a slim chance that the
slots proposal at Bethlehem Steel will be defeated, but the lure
of fast money and jobs linked with the promise to preserve a
lasting monument to the Days of Steel will be very difficult
to defeat. I imagine carpeted rows of clanging, whistling and exclaiming machines rattling with coins, transfixed players pulling levers, watching the spinning dials, praying for a jackpot. Will this be the requiem for Bethlehem Steel? Joe DeRaymond lives in Freemansburg, PA, which is
a town of 2000 on the Lehigh River adjacent to Bethlehem. He
can be reached at: jderaymond@enter.net
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair                      |
