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THEORY / PRACTICE & “HumanNEWS power is its own end”—Karl Marx Vol.LETTERS 59 No. 1 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 $1 WORKSHOPTALKS Rampant U.S. surveillance slouches toward totalitarianism Let RNs give care by Franklin Dmitryev Petraeus, and a current Supreme Court Justice. by Htun Lin Judge Reggie Walton concluded that some safe- So overwhelming has been the past year’s flow • On Jan. 6, RNs from the California Nurses Asso- guards had been “frequently and systematically violat- of revelations about the U.S. government’s spying on ciation (CNA) picketed a new state-of-the-art facility ed.” Other judges noted “systemic” misrepresentations virtually everyone that even President Obama’s hand- at Kaiser Oakland to protest increasing restrictions on to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) picked review panel had to acknowledge it. The Dec. 18 access to care while decreasing frontline care staff. The by the NSA. report by the Review Group on Intelligence and Com- opening was timed to coincide with the implementation Analysts spied on former, current, or prospective munications Technolo- • of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). lovers. gies tacitly responded Management issued a statement: “The nurses’ • Analysts listened to widespread outrage http://www.prawnworks.net/rlg/2013/Brad-Manning-130601.html union has indicated that their picketing involves claims in on personal phone with 46 recommenda- about patient safety and access to care...despite their calls of U.S. soldiers tions, including that the claim, it is not about quality and safety. It is about the overseas. National Security Agen- need to adjust staffing related to the overall number of NSA analyst Adri- cy (NSA) should halt • patients in our hospitals. Our hospital census has been enne Kinne admitted its blanket collection of declining for some time.” listening to hundreds U.S. phone call records. The statement goes on to say: “At the same time, of private conversations Though noting the we are experiencing a shift in care delivery to other ap- between U.S. citizens, potential for abuse of propriate settings, such as medical offices, by phone, some from the Red Cross the state’s mountains of and even online...” and Doctors without covertly gathered data, Borders. Emergency Room (ER) nurses are seeing the nowhere does the report In some cases the opposite: longer and longer patient wait times, as by Obama insiders grap- NSA pretends that only the ER is increasingly congested everyday. Many ple with the question of non-citizens outside of those on the picket line were ER nurses, who just what sort of totali- face this concrete reality, not the dishonesty be- the U.S. are monitored, tarian instrument the One of the thousands of demonstrations around the U.S. and the world in support hind the claim of “decreased hospital census.” but the documents also militarized top secret of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. This one with 2,000 was held June 1, We workers know that the real cause for a “lower reveal that the agency government has become. 2013, in Fort Meade, Maryland, where Manning’s trial took place last year. hospital census” is restrictions in access imposed by routinely evades such re- Indeed, while the management. The hospital census has been artificially strictions. According to review group repeats kept low because of ongoing deliberate cuts in staffing. Snowden, “we are collecting more in the U.S. on Ameri- with a straight face the administration’s pretense that cans than we are on Russians in Russia.” continued on p. 3 it is all about protecting Americans from terrorism, It has been the practice of every capitalist state’s that is clearly not the preoccupation of a massive appa- repressive apparatus to point the finger abroad to at- ratus whose targets include international aid organiza- tack the class struggle and other freedom movements tions, UN climate change negotiators, senior European EDITORIAL Tahrir at home. “Terrorism” is today’s equivalent of Joe Mc- Union officials and foreign energy companies—not to Carthy and J. Edgar Hoover’s “Communist menace,” mention German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who com- which justified disrupting the civil rights movement pared the NSA to East Germany’s infamous secret po- three years later and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and murdering lice, the Stasi; and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff Three years ago, the Egyptian Revolution was fight- people like Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark and her aides, leading to her sharp denunciation at ing for its life in Tahrir Square. For 18 days and nights, Clark. the women and men of the Square faced off against the UN of this “breach of international law.” Citizens President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces and thugs. of France and Spain learned that over 60 million calls OBAMA’S EMPTY TALK In the end Mubarak was forced to follow Tunisia’s Pres- were monitored in each country in one month. Along with ordering the closure of the Guanta- ident-for-life, Ben Ali, into retirement and shame. The The scope of surveillance by the NSA, just one of at namo Bay prison and secret CIA prisons and ordering light of freedom spread—Square to Square, occupation least 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, is staggering. Secret an end to the use of torture in interrogations, Obama to occupation. It was a historic turning point. documents released by then NSA contractor Edward began his presidency by calling for much greater trans- Millions of Egyptians took to the streets again last Snowden show that the NSA collects—in the millions parency. In reality, his administration did nothing to year to protest President Morsi and the Muslim Broth- or even billions—cell phone locations, text messages, curtail or even talk about the surveillance monster that erhood, a conservative religious group that had refused credit card transactions, computer keystrokes, emails, he took over from George W. Bush. to participate in the initial stages of the revolution. contact lists (address books), and telephony metadata The tepid reforms proposed by the review panel, This was part of a worldwide struggle against reaction- (including numbers calling and called). The NSA’s Spe- completely tied to the interests of the national secu- ary fundamentalist religion that extends to Turkey, cial Source Operations group alone has been reported rity state, were further diluted by Obama in his Jan. Tunisia, Iran, Syria, Sudan, the U.S. and beyond. to store the equivalent of the Library of Congress every 17 speech that grandiosely compared today’s surveil- It was this global struggle that the military coup 14.4 seconds. lance to Paul Revere, equating counter-revolution to that ousted Morsi, and led to the massacre of over 800 The administration has little to say about reported revolution. He did not even commit to the most tout- of his supporters, was meant to stop short. Now, revolu- NSA abuses such as: ed measure: to stop the NSA’s collection of telephony tion continues, and the freedom idea lives, but the old • Whistleblower Russ Tice stated that orders were metadata. The report did admit “that the information world has tried hard to destroy it. Egypt’s newest new given in 2004 to tap the phones of Barack Obama, contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of sec- Constitution, passed Jan. 15 under the military rule of Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Dianne tion 215 telephony metadata was not essential to pre- General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, evokes only faint echoes of Feinstein, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen. David venting attacks and could readily have been obtained” Tahrir. As artist Hanaa Safwat said, “The referendum continued on p. 10 is stained in innocent people’s blood. It has been built on the dead bodies of 800 people in Rabaa al-Adawiya.” WOMEN AND LABOR IN STRUGGLE Syrian revolution ‘brought us together’ Tahrir Square saw women fighting on the front Chicago—About 150 people braved freezing rain to get tired of it. Revolution is what brought us together, lines for their own freedom, challenging oppressive so- hear Syrian revolutionary activists Razan Ghazzawi as Syrians, for the first time. cial relations in practice; under the new Constitution and Raed Fares speak here. The evening was made In liberated areas, people are out of jobs. They have this becomes an abstract guarantee of equal rights. It more poignant by the knowledge that earlier in the day a lot of spare time but very few resources. We have doc- will only mediate existing social relations rather than 62 members of the Free Syrian Army had been killed tors, lawyers, engineers, but they haven’t been able to create new ones. attempting to lift the siege of Homs. We began with a practice. There was a culture of bribery under Assad. Where the essence of Tahrir was informed by the moment of silence to honor them and all martyrs of the Even the jobs that existed weren’t taken seriously. recent history of labor unrest, including mass strikes Revolution. Schools need books. Arabic, basic English, story- continued on p. 8 Razan is a well-known blogger from Damascus. books. A lot of people in liberated areas aren’t think- Raed is an organizer in Kafranbel, responsible for the ing long term now. You here in the U.S. have time to ON THE INSIDE weekly signs that have become famous around the world. think and plan. We can communicate the situation on Here they speak for themselves: the ground. p. 4 From the writings of Dunayevskaya: In Syria there isn’t time to do that. Not even to Charles Denby: worker-editor Razan: I wanted to talk briefly about my work.

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