The nightmare of all nightmares

Published in Socialist Worker.

HURRICANE SANDY, which hit land in New Jersey on Monday evening, may be the worst storm to strike the East Coast in recorded history. It has already claimed more than 50 lives in the Caribbean, and it is certain to cause billions of dollars--maybe tens of billions of dollars--in damage in states across the Northeastern U.S.

But the threat of an even greater catastrophe remains--a nuclear nightmare. The effects of the storm could combine to produce the kind of disaster that took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011--itself the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years before.

According to a Time magazine report, Sandy--whose impact has been magnified because it collided, as it hit land, with a cold front crossing the Northeast--will cause deadly flooding:

The real danger comes from the potentially huge storm surges the hurricane could cause along coastal areas. [The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] put the storm surge threat from Sandy at 5.7 on [a 6-point scale]--greater than any hurricane observed between 1969 and 2005, including Category 5 storms like Katrina and Andrew. NOAA's National Hurricane Center says that "life-threatening storm surge flooding" is expected along the mid-Atlantic coast.

And to top it off, the storm is hitting at the full moon, when ocean tides are at their highest point--which will make the flooding even worse.

Some 60 million people will feel the impact of the storm before it's over. Already, half a million people have been evacuated from coastal areas where the storm surge could hit 10 feet or more. Preparations for disaster relief by local, state and federal authorities are unprecedented.

But there's no preparing for the nightmare of all nightmares--if the so-called "Frankenstorm" causes a crisis at one of about two dozen nuclear power plants that are vulnerable to damage.

The fact that this scenario looms above the other tragedies caused by Sandy is further evidence--if more was needed--that nuclear power is too dangerous to be tolerated, and has to go.

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THE NUCLEAR plants are built to withstand a hurricane, but the greatest danger, according to former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, comes from the possibility of a loss of outside power, which is likely to occur up and down the East Coast during the storm.

Gundersen has worked in nuclear energy for 40 years, including as a licensed reactor operator, and has overseen projects at 70 nuclear power plants across the U.S. On the Fairewinds podcast on Sunday, Gundersen pointed out that this is "what happened at Fukushima Daiichi; the offsite power was eliminated."

Even if the plants shut down, according to Gunderson, "what Fukushima taught us is that doesn't stop the decay heat. There is still as much as 5 percent of the power from the power plant that doesn't go away...For that, you need the [backup diesel generators] to keep the plant cool."

Gundersen said that many plants have two or three backup diesel generators, but he says he has encountered situations where one generator failed, meaning that one other generator was all that was available against the possibility of a disastrous meltdown.

Speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on Monday, Gundersen warned:

A bunch of these plants are in refueling right now. And when you're in a refueling outage, you are not required to have all your diesels running. You can be tearing apart one and only have one diesel available. So the concern is that, should they lose offsite power, all of this heat needs to be removed, and you're relying on just one diesel to keep the nuclear reactor cool.

He continued:

The biggest problem, as I see it right now, is the Oyster Creek plant, which is on Barnegat Bay in New Jersey. That appears to be right about the center of [where the storm will hit].

Oyster Creek is the same design, but even older than Fukushima Daiichi unit one. It's in a refueling outage. That means that all the nuclear fuel is not in the nuclear reactor, but it's over in the spent-fuel pool. And in that condition, there's no backup power for the spent-fuel pools. So if Oyster Creek were to lose its offsite power--and, frankly, that's really likely--there would be no way cool that nuclear fuel that's in the fuel pool until they get the power re-established.

Gundersen explained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require nuclear power plants to be able to cool fuel pools with their backup generators. On the Fairewinds podcast, he explained that this would require much larger generators, which the nuclear plants' for-profit operators don't want to purchase.

In other words--once again--profits come before safety.

If the fuel pools get too hot, Gundersen explained, it's possible for the steel lining of the pool to "unzip"--and for the humidity released by the boiling water to damage the structure of the building housing it, which can lead to the release of radiation. Such releases have lasting impacts. New reports indicate that the Fukushima plant may still be leaking radiation into the ocean, contaminating fish--some 17 months after the disaster.

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OYSTER CREEK is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the U.S. It was built to operate for just 40 years after going online in 1969, but its operating license was recently renewed in spite of protest from area residents and environmentalists.

As longtime anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote about the decaying Oyster Creek plant several years ago:

Perched 50 miles east of Philadelphia and 75 miles south of New York City, Oyster Creek could not be licensed at all by today's standards. Its reactor containment was never required to withstand a jet crash and is far flimsier than the lid that blew off Chernobyl Unit Four in the Ukraine in 1986, releasing massive quantities of radiation into the surrounding countryside. Because Oyster Creek's old core is laden with far more residual radiation, a breach could blanket the densely populated American northeast with an apocalyptic cloud of death and destruction.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent inspectors to Oyster Creek and eight other nuclear power plants for "enhanced oversight" during the storm, including Indian Point just north of New York City, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of an accidental partial meltdown in 1979.

On Monday night, the NRC declared an alert at Oyster Creek "due to water exceeding certain high water level criteria in the plant’s water intake structure.” Although NRC officials emphasized that the alert status was the second-lowest of the NRC's four action levels, it admitted that "Water level is rising in the intake structure due to a combination of a rising tide, wind direction and storm surge."

More than 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of Indian Point, which sits on the Hudson River just 25 miles north of New York City. The Hudson is expected to feel the effects of the storm surge from Sandy.

Entergy, the Fortune 500 company that operates Indian Point for a profit, claims the plant will be safe despite the dangers posed by the hurricane. But these claims should be taken with a grain of salt--especially after an un-redacted version of an NRC report, leaked to the press, showed evidence that the NRC and power plant operators have "misled the public for years about the severity of the threat" of flooding to U.S. nuclear power plants located near dams.

Indian Point hardly has trustworthy record on safety. Studies have found that "thyroid cancer rates in those four counties around Indian Point are also among the highest in the U.S., with a rate of thyroid cancer that is 66% above the U.S. average, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

As of this writing on Monday afternoon, none of the plants in the path of the storm have shut down. Again, this is a case of corporations putting profits before people. As Gundersen pointed out on the Fairewinds podcast, "It would be better if the operators, instead of waiting for the power to fail, shut the power plant down ahead of time." A planned, gradual shutdown places much less stress on the plants' emergency systems than a sudden shutdown.

If the worst did occur at Oyster Creek or another plant, the storm will make evacuation efforts especially difficult. As of Sunday at 7 p.m., New York City subways and buses were shut down, along with Amtrak, Metronorth and New Jersey transit. Major bridges and highways in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were closed, and U.S. Highway 6/202, a main artery in the case of an evacuation related to Indian Point, has been shut down through Wednesday at noon.

And it goes without saying that a nuclear disaster would take place while emergency and disaster response services are already stretched to the maximum dealing with the devastation caused by the hurricane.

The odds are that Hurricane Sandy will pass without causing a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. But the fact that this is even a possibility highlights the insanity of continuing to operate these plants, let alone in close proximity to several of the largest cities in the country.

That all this is happening in the days leading up to an election where both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney support using public funds to build new nuclear power plants reveals the need for a mass movement for a nuclear-free society.

Chris Williams contributed to this article.

Operation Get Rid of the Vote

Published in Socialist Worker.

IT'S ELECTION time, so we'll be hearing plenty of pious tributes to the wonders of the U.S. political system. From members of both parties, as well as the media that cover them, it's a constant refrain that America is the "world's greatest democracy"--where citizens from every corner of society determine how their country is governed with their votes.

Only when you examine these claims, you find a completely different picture. The system is supposedly based on "one person, one vote"--only millions and millions of people are excluded from voting at all, while a tiny minority of people who run businesses and political institutions have considerably more influence over Washington politics than one vote gives them.

The myth of "one person, one vote" in the U.S. has been thrown into particularly sharp relief during Election 2012 by legislation, pushed in various states by Republicans, that seeks to limit who will cast a ballot. These so-called "voter ID" laws are justified as a measure to stop vote fraud--but in reality, they are explicitly aimed at disenfranchising likely supporters of Democratic candidates.

And after Barack Obama's lead in opinion polls slipped following the first presidential debate, the push for "voter ID" laws suddenly seemed like it had the potential to tip the presidential election.

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IN OCTOBER, federal courts blocked enforcement of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, at least for the 2012 election. Weeks earlier, a federal court blocked a similar law in Texas, with judges ruling that the legislation "imposes strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas," according to the Houston Chronicle.

Still, these are only a few of the voter ID laws now in place. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nearly 1,000 voter ID proposals have been introduced since 2001, and a dozen states passed or strengthened such legislation in the last two years.

Voter ID laws fall into multiple categories. "Strict photo ID" laws--which will apply in four states for the 2012 election and are pending, due to legal challenges, in five others--require people to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot. In six other states, and one more pending a legal challenge, a photo ID is required, but voters without one may cast a provisional ballot that will be counted if it meets various other requirements. Three more states require some form of ID, but not necessarily a photo ID, in order to vote. In 13 others, voters are asked for identification, but it isn't required in order to cast a ballot.

In all but one of the states that tightened their ID restrictions in the past two years, the proposals were introduced by Republicans. Over half of the bills were sponsored by lawmakers affiliated with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), according to an analysis by News21.

ALEC, which created model voter ID legislation in 2009, is the same conservative organization behind the "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine" laws that have been used to claim self-defense in the shootings of unarmed Black people like Trayvon Martin in Florida and Bo Morrison in Wisconsin.

The voter ID legislation has a clear aim: Depress the votes of people of color and other groups--young, poor, and working class voters--who are more likely to support Democrats.

Sponsors of voter ID legislation claim the proposals are intended to prevent vote fraud. But actual cases of vote fraud are so rare that this explanation rings hollow. Studies of 2004 elections in Ohio and Washington state found that vote fraud occurred in 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent of cases, respectively. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, "National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often."

Ironically, it is the Republicans who face the most high-profile allegations of vote fraud in this election. The Republican National Committee recently had to cut ties with Strategic Allied Consultants, whose founder was accused of "dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats," according to a local Fox News report. The allegations are based on video in which an employee admits on tape that she was seeking to register only Romney voters. The RNC had paid the company $3.1 million.

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THE REASON for Republican enthusiasm for voter ID laws becomes clearer when you see who is disenfranchised by such laws and other attempts to discourage voting. Voter ID laws, like poll taxes and literacy tests in the Jim Crow South, disproportionately affect people of color.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that "25 percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to 8 percent of white voting-age citizens." Those earning less than $35,000 a year are twice as likely to lack a photo ID--the same percentage applies to people aged 18 to 24.

Some Republicans don't even hide their intentions. As Ari Berman reported in the Nation, the chair of the GOP in Franklin County said he opposed expanding hours for early voting because "we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban--read African American--voter-turnout machine."
Over the summer, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer said GOP officials in his state had talked about suppressing the Black vote, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

For the racists of the Republican Party, voter ID laws are a win-win. They will place new obstacles in the way of people who are unlikely to vote Republican. And by raising the specter of vote fraud, the laws provide another means to rile up and mobilize the GOP base to come out on Election Day.

While the rulings in South Carolina and Pennsylvania will prevent implementation of those voter ID laws before the 2012 elections, they haven't stopped them for good or even prevented them from having an impact on the election.

For example, according to the Columbia Free Times, the federal court decision ruled that the South Carolina law didn't discriminate against minorities. It postponed enforcement because "there wouldn't be enough time to practically implement any changes here before the November 6 elections," according to the Free Times.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Judge Robert Simpson ordered a temporary injunction to prevent enforcement of the voter ID law in 2012--but this could be reversed and the law put in place for the next election. In addition, Simpson's ruling doesn't prevent election officials from asking for ID--only that they can't prevent people from voting if they don't have it. In other words, election officials could still find ways to discourage those without ID from voting.

The U.S. Supreme Court has only ruled once on voter ID laws--in 2008, the justices upheld a strict photo ID law in Indiana. This does not bode well for those seeking to overturn the South Carolina law through the courts alone.

The recent rulings against voter ID laws are at least in part the result of efforts of groups like the NAACP and ACLU to mobilize protests against the laws. But it will take a longer and more determined struggle--one that looks beyond the 2012 election--to turn the tide.

Such a struggle, in order to win a real victory over those who would deny the vote to people of color, will have to go beyond voter ID laws to take on the policy of felony disenfranchisement. As Elizabeth Schulte wrote in Socialistworker.org: "Some 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions--and in several states, with misdemeanor convictions--are barred from voting...[m]ore than 1.4 million of the disenfranchised are African American."

Winning that kind of struggle will require challenging politicians of both parties who, in their eagerness to appear "tough on crime," have been willing to strip voting rights from those caught in the web of the New Jim Crow.

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EXPANDING THE right to vote in the U.S. has been a struggle since the founding of the country, when only white male property owners had the franchise. Some of the most important struggles in American history--the women's suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South, for example--revolved around this very question.

What the current situation tells us is that this struggle is far from over. Even if voting ID laws are turned back and felony disenfranchisement abolished, about 20 million immigrants--documented and undocumented--are denied a vote in the country where they live, work and raise their families.

However, making "one person, one vote" a reality in the U.S. will be just one change among many needed to achieve real democracy in America.

Under the two-party system that prevails in the "world's greatest democracy," voters--even if they can cast a ballot unhindered--are effectively restricted in who they can vote for. Their vote is generally limited to candidates of the Democratic or Republican Parties, both of which are heavily funded by the 1 percent and serve their interests.

As a result, voters often encounter elections where neither main candidate represents overwhelmingly popular positions, such as ending the war in Afghanistan or curbing the power of the health care industry. Voters never had a chance to cast a ballot on whether the Bush tax cuts for the rich should expire. Nor does the electorate have any way of affecting what happens in workplaces or the broader economy.

Likewise, there isn't any effective way to use the ballot box to hold politicians accountable for the promises they do make. For example, union members who want to punish Barack Obama for breaking his promise to campaign for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act can hardly do so by voting for Romney, who would only do more to destroy workers' living standards.

Of course, voters are technically free to cast their ballots for a third-party candidate, but election laws make it very difficult for third parties to even run candidates for office. Those who do qualify for the ballot are certain to be ignored as an irrelevance by the mainstream media.

The collusion between the media and the major parties to exclude dissenting voices from the election campaign was illustrated this month with the leaking of an agreement between the two parties to ensure the presidential debates went as planned, with no surprises or difficult questions. When Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala tried to enter the second debate at Hofstra University, they were arrested and handcuffed to chairs for eight hours.

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WHEN IT comes to undemocratic institutions, the clearest example of all is the Electoral College system that actually selects the president, rather than a democratic vote. The Electoral College was specifically designed by the "Founding Fathers" who wrote the Constitution to be a safeguard against voters electing a president opposed by the elite.

Actually, the story of the formation of the U.S. political system shows that the Founding Fathers--who were mainly Southern slave owners or Northern merchants--were deeply suspicious of democracy, and they constructed the Constitution to limit its scope.

Their other chief concern in writing the Constitution was to safeguard the right to "property"--including owning men and women as slaves. Thus, James Madison, known at the time as the "Father of the Constitution," worried in the Federalist Papers that without strict protections for the privileges of property owners, "the most numerous party" would be able to "sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."

Some of the "Founding Fathers" went even further. For example, Alexander Hamilton proposed that both senators and the president be elected, but serve for life, like Supreme Court justices.

As the late people's historian Howard Zinn said in an interview:

The Constitutional Convention was animated by the rebellions in Massachusetts and other places, [which] caused the Founding Fathers to decide to get together in Philadelphia and draw up a document that would create a national government strong enough to deal with rebellions like this. And you have General Knox writing to [George Washington] before the Constitutional Convention, saying, "These soldiers of the revolution come back, and they think because they fought in the revolution, they deserve an equal share of the wealth of this country."

A genuine democracy must be able to achieve justice and equality for the oppressed and the exploited. But extending democracy to every part of our society where injustice, inequality and exploitation are found will require a determined struggle.

Testifying against Israel's apartheid

Published in Socialist Worker. Written with Daphna Thier.

NEARLY 1,000 people gathered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan on October 6 and 7 to hear two days of testimony on the complicity of the U.S. government and the United Nations in Israel's past and present crimes against the Palestinian people.

The testimony took place before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Modeled on a tribunal to investigate U.S. war crimes in Vietnam organized by British philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an effort, embraced by renowned writers and thinkers, to expose the barbarism and oppression against Palestinians carried out by the Israeli government and its allies.

A statement from the Tribunal said that this session in New York City was the last of four that "[aimed] to bring attention to the complicity and responsibility of various national, international and corporate actors in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the perpetuation of Israel's impunity under international law."

The New York session focused particularly on the role of the UN and the U.S. in supporting or failing to prevent or punish Israel's crimes.

Since it has no legal authority, the tribunal relies on its "members' prestige, professionalism and commitment to human rights." The jury for the New York session included activists, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, legal professionals and scholars, and prominent intellectuals, ranging from Native Americans to African Americans born in the Jim Crow South, to people from South Africa and Northern Ireland.

The week before the New York session, it was announced that musician Roger Waters, best known as a member of Pink Floyd, had joined the jury. Waters said in an interview that he had joined the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel a few years ago after he was contacted about canceling a concert planned for Tel Aviv. "It's an absolute tragedy that Palestinians have been thrown off land their families have been living on for thousands of years," Waters said.

This tribunal session was held in the U.S. to call attention to the American government's role as key funder and enabler of Israel's crimes, but also to connect the struggle of the Palestinians with that of African Americans and Native Americans.

Harry Belafonte, who attended the Saturday session, said the connection between civil rights for African Americans and justice for Palestinians is "a link that I've always recognized...In the midst of our struggles from the civil rights movement to the liberation of South Africa, we have found great synergy in our interests as oppressed people of color. Both benefitted from the presence of each other and we continue to experience the need for one another."

Organizers of the tribunal aimed not only to shed further light on Israel's crimes, but to build connections between struggles against oppression across the globe and inspire others to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

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THE FIRST day of testimony began with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé discussing the impact of early Zionism on Palestine, leading up to the ethnic cleansing that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Pappé testified there was a thriving Arab society in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel. He said early Zionist colonizers viewed the native Palestinians as "usurpers" and "foreign agents," assigning them the Orwellian category of "alien native." These racist ideas remain "at the heart of Israeli Zionist policies towards the Palestinians," Pappé said.

The Zionist movement decided "to ethnically cleanse Palestine...a crime against humanity [such] that only genocide is above it," he said.

Immigration lawyer Susan Akram detailed the Palestinian refugee crisis and the unwillingness or inability of the United Nations to resolve it. There are now 6.8 million Palestinian refugees--half of the world's refugee population--most of them people who were expelled in 1948 and their descendants.

Akram explained that while the UN believes all refugees have the right to return to the homes from which they were expelled, it has not acted to force Israel to respect this right.

Pappé testified that while many falsely trace the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the 1967 war and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in reality, 1967 represented a continuation of the colonial project to establish "Greater Israel." In fact, the desire to take Gaza and the West Bank was a core Zionist aim that went unfulfilled in 1948, according to Pappé.

As law professor John Quigley testified, the U.S. "covered up what it knew about the run-up" to the 1967 war, which began with Israel's surprise bombing raids on Egypt. According to Quigley, neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence believed that Egypt was going to attack Israel. Thus, the 1967 war wasn't defensive, as Israel and the U.S. have always claimed, but a war of aggression, in violation to the UN Charter that Israel is a signatory to.

Journalist and activist Ben White testified that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is an ongoing process. He said the view that Palestinians within Israel represent a "demographic threat" is "commonplace among Israeli academics, think tanks, politicians, laypersons." White testified to the high rates of poverty among Palestinians, and that due to Israeli policy, "there is no practical means for the Palestinians to develop and independent economy."

Vera Gowlland-Debbas, of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, took up the question of the legal responsibility of the UN to enforce international and human rights law, including the issue of UN complicity in upholding a double standard for Israel.

She pointed out that when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force, but the body has failed to act in response to Israeli crimes such as the construction of the separation wall in the West Bank or Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, the barbaric assault on Gaza.

Suzanne Adely, a lawyer in attendance at the tribunal and member of the National Lawyers Guild and Defend the Egyptian Revolution Committee in New York, said in an interview, "We can't just say it's a double standard. Actually, structures such as the UN have been intentionally created by capitalist and imperialist entities to perpetuate and control this system, not make it more just."

Raji Sourani, a leading Palestinian human rights attorney from Gaza, was supposed to testify about conditions under occupation. However, the U.S. State Department refused him permission to enter the country. Instead, Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, spoke about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has resulted from the Israeli siege.

She described Gaza as an "open air prison for 1.6 million people...Closures imposed [by Israel] are illegal collective punishment." Mirer denounced Operation Cast Lead, during which Israel killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, as an "illegal war of aggression." Some 95 percent of factories in Gaza are closed because Israel won't allow in necessary raw materials, unemployment is around 50 percent, 1.1 million Gazans rely on food assistance, and two-thirds live in deep poverty.

Mirer spoke ominously about Gaza's water supply, which is under threat because of a lack of sanitation equipment and supplies banned by the Israeli blockade. "If massive investments in water treatment and desalinization plants are not taken immediately, the whole population of Gaza will be subject to a water crisis of genocidal proportions in a very few years," Mirer said.

The end of Ilan Pappé's presentation stood out during the first day of testimony, as he made a passionate appeal for a one-state solution as the only just solution:

The idea of two states is a Zionist idea...do not shrink Palestine into 20 percent of its geography and do not shrink the Palestinian people into 50 percent of who they are. If we are going to seek a just and peaceful solution...we should include everyone who is affected and who was affected so that we can build together a stable future.

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THE SECOND day began with Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer residing in Ramallah, who explained how the U.S.-brokered "peace process" has helped to legitimize Israel's crimes.
She explained how the Oslo Accords of 1993 aided the annexation of large parts of the West Bank to Israel and legitimized this in the eyes of the international community. According to Buttu, "34 separate countries established relations with Israel...so rather than Israel feeling disdain that it was still an occupier and a dispossessor, it was now suddenly being rewarded."

Katherine Gallagher a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, spoke about how the U.S. uses its veto power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to protect Israel from accountability for its war crimes and other violations of international law. Of the 82 times the U.S has vetoed UN resolutions, over half were to protect Israel.

Noam Chomsky testified via Skype on the history of the relationship between U.S. interests in the region and its policies regarding the Israel/Palestine question. He began by acknowledging the 30-year anniversary of the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Lebanon that left roughly 20,000 Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians dead, including the massacre of as many as 3,500 people at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Phyllis Bennis, co-founder of the U.S Campaign to End Israeli Occupation, testified that public opinion continues to shift in favor of those working for justice for Palestinians--but also that public opinion has limited influence on U.S. policy. "When we look at the history of the United States, we see the legacy of genocide, of slavery, of disempowerment," Bennis said. "But parallel to that we see another history...a history of resistance, right from the beginning."

Craig and Cindy Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, the 23 year-old U.S. activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, made a surprise visit to address the tribunal.

Cindy Corrie spoke about the need to focus on civilian deaths, speaking of several dozen Palestinians who have been killed by Israel for nonviolently protesting the separation wall in the West Bank. "They all must be remembered," she said. "We must have accountability."

Craig Corrie said, "If you back over my car, I know you can replace my car. But you run over my daughter, I don't know what justice means. You have to prevent it from happening. So we have to keep preventing and preempting in our justice."

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AT A press conference held the day after the tribunal wrapped up, the jury's findings were announced. As in the previous sessions, the jury found Israel guilty of numerous violations of international law, including violation of the Palestinians' right to self-determination and refugees' right to return, as well as the "acquisition of territory through war."

The jury charged Israel with violating international humanitarian law prohibiting mistreatment, torture and prolonged administrative detention of Palestinians, and it confirmed the judgment of international activists that Israel is an apartheid state. "Because of their systematic, numerous, flagrant and sometimes, criminal character, these violations are of a particularly high gravity," the jury found.

The U.S. government has been guilty of complicity with Israel's crimes, according to the Russell Tribunal jury: "Since the Six Day War in 1967, the U.S. has provided unequivocal economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel in order to establish a qualitative military superiority over its Arab neighbors in violation of its own domestic law."

The U.S was found guilty of "obstructing accountability for violations of the Geneva Conventions" and "abusing its veto power within the Security Council," and it was charged with "continuing to provide economic support for the settlement expansion" and "failing to condition military aid to Israel...based on its compliance with human rights norms."

The United Nations was convicted for its failure to prevent Israel's violation of international law, which the UN is legally mandated to uphold.

The jury called for civil and criminal litigation against the perpetrators of the many crimes about which it passed judgment--and for the reform of the UN, including abolition of the veto power for permanent members of the Security Council.

Finally, the Russell Tribunal jury called for the mobilization of activists and trade unions for justice in Palestine, and for worldwide involvement in the BDS movement against Israel until the country complies with international law.

Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, addressed the tribunal at the end of the second day. He called on unions in the U.S. to take a stand in support of the Palestinian people as they had against South African apartheid.

Vavi said in an interview that international solidarity on the part of unions and others is "absolutely critical. Any form of denial of human rights anywhere constitutes a reason for us to extend our hands of solidarity across borders."

Lousy work, if you can get it

Published at Socialist Worker.

AT THEIR convention last week, the Democrats put their record on jobs front and center, claiming to have brought the economy back from the abyss of the economic crisis. They said they had a vision for the economy that will provide workers with a decent life while restoring American industry's competitiveness.

That's no surprise--after all, polls show that jobs and the economy are by far the most important issues for voters. But behind the back-patting and boasting lies the reality of a continuing jobs crisis--and a future in which whatever gains working people won in the past are discarded in a global race to the bottom, leaving U.S. workers to produce more for less.

The U.S. government's monthly report on employment underlined the problem. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employers added a net total of 96,000 jobs in August--barely enough to keep up with population growth, much less make up for the mass layoffs during the Great Recession. Long-term unemployment continues to plague more than 5 million workers--around 40 percent of the jobless--who have been without work for over 27 weeks.

As Socialistworker.org pointed out in an August editorial, more than three years into the weakest recovery in history, "[T]he U.S. economy still needs to generate about 10 million new jobs just to make up for losses from the 2007-09 recession and provide employment for young people entering the workforce."

A closer look at the BLS report reveals even worse news. The official unemployment rate declined in August to 8.1 percent--but that's only because more people dropped out of the labor force, and therefore weren't counted in the jobless rate. The BLS's U-6 measure gives a more accurate picture--it includes the unemployed, those employed part-time who would want full-time work, and discouraged workers and others "marginally attached" to the labor market. The U-6 measure stood at 14.7 percent in August.

Another statistic--the employment-population ratio, which measures the percentage of the population age 16 and over that has a job--is at its lowest level in three decades. Since reaching a high point of 63 percent in mid-2007, the figure fell to just over 60 percent as Barack Obama took office and continued to decline before leveling out around 58.3 percent, where it remains today.

African Americans and youth of all races--two groups who mobilized to vote for Obama in unprecedented numbers in 2008--are facing the highest rates of unemployment. Jobless rates for African Americans continue to run at about double the rate for white workers, and official unemployment for workers aged 20 to 24 is 13.9 percent, more than twice that for older workers.

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THIS IS one face of the economic crisis still plaguing workers: Three years into the economic "recovery," there is simply not enough work for millions of people who want it.

But there is another jobs crisis--one that gets less publicity. It was summed up aptly by the title of a report released this month by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR): Bad Jobs on the Rise.

The CEPR report defines a "bad job" as "one that pays less than $37,000 per year (in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars); lacks employer-provided health insurance; and has no employer-sponsored retirement plan." While these jobs are a step up from unemployment and abject poverty, workers with bad jobs still struggle to get by. They can't look forward to retirement, and without health insurance, they live under the threat that a chance illness or injury could mean financial ruin.

The CEPR found that the share of "bad jobs" in the U.S. economy has increased significantly--nearly one in four jobs were classified as bad in 2010, up from around one in six in 1979. By 2007, the figure for bad jobs was already 22.1 percent--so the trend predates the recession.

The decline was sharpest for those without a high school degree--more than half had a bad job in 2012, compared to one quarter in 1979. Workers aged 18 to 34 were also hard hit, going from 22.4 percent with a bad job in 1979 to 38.5 percent in 2010.

In the past, having a college degree offered significant protection for older workers. But young college-educated workers are increasing likely to find themselves in a bad job, according to the CEPR--plus they face the added burden of paying off increased student loans. More than 15 percent of workers aged 18 to 34 with at least a college degree had a bad job in 2010. Young workers with some college were more than three times as likely to have a bad job (43.5 percent) in 2010 as in 1979 (13.1 percent).

According to the CEPR, the increase in the proportion of bad jobs was primarily driven by a decline in the number of jobs that offer health insurance or retirement plans. And as researchers point out, their figures understate the actual decline in workers' living standards by not accounting for the marked deterioration in the quality of the employer-provided health care and retirement plans where they are still offered.

Over the last 10 years especially, a growing portion health care costs has been shifted onto workers. According to the Los Angeles Times, "The typical family of four with employer-based coverage saw its total monthly health care tab almost double between 1999 and 2009...[Rising] out-of-pocket medical bills...virtually wiped out income gains over the decade, leaving the typical family with just $95 more a month to spend on things other than health care in 2009, compared with 1999."

Today's employer-provided retirement plans have been hollowed out, as well. Over the past few decades, reliable "defined-benefit" plans that pay out a set amount for retirement have in most cases been replaced by "defined-contribution" plans, such as 401(k)s, where workers instead pay into a fund that is linked to financial markets. The percentage of private-sector workers with defined-benefit plans declined by half in the past 20 years, and 401(k)s have not picked up the slack: among those aged 50 to 64, three-quarters have average retirement savings of just $26,395. And half of them have no savings for retirement at all.

According to the CEPR report, "[T]he decline in the economy's ability to create good jobs, in our view, is related to a deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale." This is the inevitable result of the continued drop in the U.S. unionization rate, which has fallen below 12 percent, lower than it's been in over 70 years.

Corresponding to this has been a drop in labor militancy. In the 1970s, on average each year, nearly 1.5 million workers were part of a work stoppage involving more than 1,000 workers. In the 2000s, less than 130,000 workers participated in such a strike in the average year, less than one-tenth the previous level, even though the U.S. workforce is 50 percent bigger since the 1970s.

By attacking unions, employers have been able to chip away at workers' income and especially their benefits--thus capturing the lion's share of income gains over the last three decades, a major reason why inequality remains at levels not seen in the U.S. in 80 years.

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ALL THIS has taken place under both Democrats and Republicans--a bipartisan character to the bad jobs crisis that was underlined when the Democrats held their national convention in the anti-union, "right-to-work" state of North Carolina.

At the convention, former President Bill Clinton bragged that since 1961, nearly twice as many private-sector jobs were added under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. He said that Obama had created 4.5 million private-sector jobs and had "laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators."

As CNN points out, the claim about 4.5 million new jobs under Obama is misleading. There are not 4.5 million more people working than when Obama took office.

The 4.5 million figure is "is an accurate description of the growth of private-sector jobs since January 2010, when the long, steep slide in employment finally hit bottom," CNN reported. But when the job losses of the first year of the Obama administration are factored in, there is "only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date." And once the million jobs lost in the public sector are taken into account, there has actually been a net loss of jobs over the last four years.
For his part, Obama claimed in his speech:

We are making things again. I've met workers in Detroit and Toledo who feared they'd never build another American car. And today, they can't build them fast enough because we reinvented a dying auto industry that's back on the top of the world. I worked with business leaders who are bringing jobs back to America, not because our workers make less pay, but because we make better products--because we work harder and smarter than anyone else.

In reality, employers are relocating jobs to the U.S. in large part because workers in this country are being compelled--as a result of high unemployment, the ongoing erosion of living standards and the dismantling of the social safety net--to worker harder and longer for less.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reported that Caterpillar opened a new non-union plant in Indiana, where new hires make $12 an hour, after closing a plant in Ontario where union jobs paid twice as much. Other major corporations, such as Boeing, have shifted production within the U.S., from regions with higher rates of unionization and higher pay, to regions where workers can be forced to accept less.

According to an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group, the U.S. is "expected to experience a manufacturing renaissance as the wage gap with China shrinks and certain U.S. states become some of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world."

This begs the question: Who are these jobs really "good" for? While they may help workers scrape by and pay (some of) the bills, employers are the ones who truly benefit. And what is good for the 1 percent is bad for workers.

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THE FACT is that, on the whole, the jobs that are being created, in addition to not being plentiful enough, provide workers with an inferior standard of living, compared with the lost jobs they are replacing.

According to the National Employment Law Project:

In the two years since U.S. employment reached its lowest-point in February 2010, jobs in low-wage industries have grown significantly faster than employment as a whole. This trend...is expected to continue: the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7 out of the top 10 top growth occupations over the next decade are low wage ones."

Meanwhile, 92 percent of the top 50 low-wage employers made a profit last year, and 63 percent are more profitable now than they were before the recession.

According to the BLS, the professions that will experience the biggest growth by 2020 are registered nurses, retail salespersons, home health aides and personal care aides.

While nurses--who are skilled workers and disproportionately likely to belong to a union--are still able to make a relatively good living, the other jobs pay poverty wages. In 2010, median pay for retail sales workers averaged just $10.09 an hour ($20,990 a year for full-time work), while that home health and personal care aides averaged $9.70 an hour ($20,170 a year).

Then there's the auto industry. Obama, Clinton and all the Democrats tout the auto bailout as among the administration's greatest achievements.

As left-wing journalist Laura Flanders wrote, the bailout of the auto industry was, in fact, begun by George W. Bush before it was taken up by Obama. And the Obama administration used the bailout to demand concessions from autoworkers that "amounted to a slash in all-in labor costs from around $76 per worker-hour in 2006 to just over $50." After the two-tier wage structure the United Auto Workers conceded several years earlier, "[N]ew hires start at $14 per hour--roughly half the pay and benefits of more senior line workers," Flanders wrote.

In other words, rather than a Democratic plan to save good blue-collar jobs, the auto industry bailout was part of a bipartisan effort to use the economic crisis as a pretext to replace good jobs with bad ones.

The result of all of this is that household income has actually fallen more during the recovery that began six months after Obama's inauguration than it did during the recession that preceded it. The majority of working people are worse off today than they were three years ago.

Of course, the recovery hasn't been a complete failure. The rich have done just fine. More than 90 percent of total gains in income during the first year of the recovery went to the wealthiest 1 percent, and corporate profits as a share of the economy are at a record high, while wages are at a record low.
While Republicans are attacking Obama for his poor record on job creation and the economy, they are obviously doing so not out of concern for the plight of working people, but in an attempt to win the election--since their policies would be a disaster for working-class people, employed or unemployed.

The Republicans in Congress have opposed the extension of unemployment benefits, despite record levels of long-term joblessness. They call for tax cuts for the rich, paid for by slashing what remains of the social safety net, and Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker have been at the forefront of union-busting efforts aimed at eliminating public-sector workers' collective bargaining rights. Although not alone in pushing for austerity, some of the deepest budget cuts at the state and local level have been pushed by Republicans.

Still, Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the jobs crisis, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. The politicians of both parties have twisted the truth to paint themselves as champions of good jobs and their opponents as job killers. But neither Democrats nor Republicans have a solution to offer that would guarantee jobs providing comfort, dignity or security.

These will only be won by turning the tide and rebuilding a fighting labor movement.

College, Inc.

Published by Socialist Worker and the Indypendent.

IMAGINE A business that rakes in billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, but provides its customers with a defective product that fails for more than half of them--though that track record hasn't stopped the business owners from enjoying ever-increasing profits.

Sounds like the parasites of Wall Street or the insurance industry, doesn't it?

But according to a U.S. Senate report, the same is true of a growing number of colleges and universities--the expanding sector of higher education that is run for profit.

The Senate report is a shocking exposé of a new growth industry that turns out to be another scheme for the 1 percent to make money at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

But anyone who investigates the for-profit college scam will be struck by something else, too--the abuses of College Inc. are extreme examples of a trend toward privatization and business-like operations throughout all of higher education, which threaten to undermine the system as a whole.

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FOR-PROFIT colleges are capturing a greater share of students nationwide. Over the past 10 years, the for-profit higher education industry has tripled in size, with fall enrollment growing to more than 2.4 million in 2010. That increase is seven and a half times faster than the 28.8 percent increase in enrollment at public colleges, according to the College Board.

This is despite the fact that for-profit colleges are more expensive than even the most prestigious public institutions. Bachelor's degrees average $62,702 at for-profit institutions, versus $52,522 at flagship state public universities. The average associate degree at a for-profit college costs $34,988, more than four times the $8,313 at the average public community college. Certificate programs at for-profit colleges average $19,806, compared with $4,249 at community colleges.

It's no surprise, then, that students at for-profit colleges are more likely to end up deeper in debt. Fully 96 percent of students at for-profit colleges borrow to pay for tuition, compared with 48 percent at four-year public and 13 percent at community colleges, according to the Senate report, titled "For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Access," the result of a two-year investigation by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Democrat Tom Harkin.

"Independent students, who make up most of the for-profit student body, leave for-profits schools with a median debt of $32,700, but leave public colleges with a median debt of $20,000 and private non-profit colleges with a median debt of $24,600," the Senate committee report found.

As a result, according to the New York Times, "Students at for-profit colleges make up 13 percent of the nation's college enrollment, but account for about 47 percent of the defaults on loans."

Although the profits generated by for-profit colleges end up in private hands, the vast majority of revenues come from the government, in the form of federal grants and federally guaranteed student loans. According to the Harkin report, the Apollo Group, the largest of the for-profit education companies and operator of the infamous University of Phoenix, "$3.1 billion in federal student aid, in addition to $46 million in military education benefits...86.8 percent of the company's revenue, and $925 million of their profit, is attributed to federal taxpayer sources."

At the same time that states, pleading poverty, are slashing public university budgets and the federal government now charges interest on loans to graduate students while they're in school, more than $30 billion are funneled each year to for-profit colleges from the federal government, in the form of grants and loans.

Despite paying (and borrowing) significantly more, students at for-profit schools are less likely than their counterparts at public four-year institutions to leave school with a degree. Of the nearly half a million students who enrolled in an associate degree program in 2008-09, the report found that nearly two-thirds (62.9 percent) had dropped out by the middle of 2010. Over half (54.3 percent) left their bachelor's degree programs by that point.

And studies show the benefits of a degree from a for-profit school are likely negligible. A study published in June by two Boston University economists found that while those who get degrees from public or private non-profit colleges and universities experience significant benefits, including higher wages and lower unemployment, students who attended for-profit universities don't. As Time magazine reported:

The [Boston University] researchers found that six years after they enter college, for-profit students are more likely to be unemployed--and to be unemployed for periods longer than three months. And, further, if they are able to find a job, students who attend for-profits make, on average, between $1,800 and $2,000 less annually than their peers who attended other institutions.

This isn't surprising given how little of their inflated tuition prices for-profit colleges actually spend on students' educations. The Senate report estimates average per-student spending at for-profit colleges to be just over $2,000 in 2009--and some spend much less.

For example, the Apollo Group, which "educated" over 500,000 students in 2010, spent just $892 per student on instruction. According to its own estimates--which the bosses at the University of Phoenix reserve the right to change at any time--a bachelor's of arts degree at the school will likely cost over $10,000 per year, while a bachelor's of science degree runs nearly $15,000 annually, well over 10 times the amount spent on teaching.

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FAR FROM being the most efficient way to deliver a service, as proponents of free enterprise like to claim, market-based, for-profit approaches to higher education result in massive waste. Instead of student instruction, the bulk of tuition money goes to marketing to bring in new students, multimillion-dollar salaries for top executives, lobbying politicians and, last but certainly not least, profits.

Marketing is a top priority to for-profit institutions. An investigative report by theVillage Voice revealed that recruitment is typically aimed at the most vulnerable--for example, veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries--and often involves outright fraud, such as encouraging under-age applicants to lie to their parents and the federal government about their eligibility for financial aid.

Last year, the Institute for Higher Education Policy released a report revealing that low-income students are four times as likely to attend a for-profit college as students from more well-off families. And low-income women are disproportionately likely to attend for-profit schools, enrolling at twice the rate of low-income men.

A number of these students would have attended public schools in the past--according to the report, the portion of students who grew up in poverty who enrolled at four-year public institutions dropped from 20 percent in 2000 to just 15 percent in 2008.

Students of color are also disproportionately represented at for-profit schools.According to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research: "African Americans account for 13 percent of all students in higher education, but they are 22 percent of those in the for-profit sector. Hispanics are 15 percent of those in the for-profit sector, yet 11.5 percent of all students."

For-profit colleges use student recruitment techniques similar to those used by the brokers who pushed sub-prime mortgages during the 2000s--the predatory housing loans that disproportionately targeted African Americans and Latinos, and poor and working-class borrowers. According to the Voice, for-profit colleges:

buy lists [of potential students] from companies like QuinStreet, which made its name providing leads to subprime-mortgage brokers...The idea is to prey on people's hopes and desires, offering that yellow brick road to the American dream: an education and a better job. [Recruitment workers] are trained to identify emotional weaknesses and exploit them.

In fact, a recruitment staffer quoted in the Village Voice article, who worked for Education Management Cop., an operator of for-profit colleges owned in large part by Goldman Sachs, said, "Half the people I worked with, their previous job was in the mortgage industry. They targeted people in that industry...They were the ones that did the best because they were so unscrupulous."

Like those who orchestrated the sub-prime mortgage crisis, top executives at for-profit education companies have been rewarded with multimillion-dollar compensation packages.

According to the Senate report, "[T]he CEOs of the large publicly traded for-profit education companies took home, on average, $7.3 million each in fiscal year 2009"--about seven times the amount earned by the highest-paid heads of the most prestigious public and private non-profit institutions. The best paid of all was Richard Silberman, CEO of Strayer Education, Inc., whose compensation totaled $41.5 million in 2009, placing him among the highest-paid corporate executives in the world.

And that's not to even mention profits. For-profit "education" is incredibly lucrative. Senate investigators say that "many of the companies had profit margins that topped most of Wall Street...the 30 companies examined by the committee generated $3.6 billion in profit, or 19.4 percent of revenue [in 2009]." ITT Educational Services Inc. and Strayer Education Inc. had profit margins of 37.1 percent and 33.7 percent, respectively. On average at these companies, a greater share of total revenues went to profits than to educating students.

And it's the usual suspects who are making money. The Senate report found that "by 2009, at least 76 percent of students attending for-profit colleges were enrolled in a college owned by either a company...traded on a major stock exchange or a college that is owned by a private equity firm."

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THE SENATE report paints a picture of the for-profit higher education industry that looks an awful lot like the sub-prime mortgage industry, whose collapse triggered the financial crisis of 2008.

Wall Street firms and other big-money investors are raking in billions backing companies that aggressively target low-income people, especially Blacks and Latinos, offering them an inferior product at higher costs. More often than not, students at for-profit schools end up in massive debt with little or nothing to show for it.

Even worse for those caught up in the scam is that student loans, unlike mortgages, cannot be discharged through bankruptcy--and lenders can even garnish Social Security payments to collect on outstanding debts. Without major reforms, student loan debt will cripple many of these borrowers for the rest of their lives.

And just like they let the banksters off the hook for the financial crisis, political leaders have refused thus far to do much of anything about the schemes of the for-profit education industry.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced new regulations that were supposed to identify education programs which burden students with high levels of debt--for example, by measuring how many attendees get "gainful employment." But the new rulers were full of enough holes that even the worst offenders among for-profit colleges could pass muster. According to Higher Ed Watch:

Responding to a massive lobbying campaign from the for-profit higher education industry, the administration watered down their proposed regulations to such an extent that only programs that flunk all three of the department's low-bar gainful employment tests are considered to be out of compliance. That means that only programs at which fewer than 35 percent of former students are repaying their loans and where the typical graduates have annual student loan payments that exceed 12 percent of their total earnings and 30 percent of their discretionary income would have eventually been in jeopardy of losing access to federal financial aid.

The for-profit college industry paid good money to avoid any trouble in Washington.According to the Village Voice, "The industry had discovered the value of paying protection money to Congress. It spent $16 million on lobbying last year alone, buying a dream team of former officials that includes former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) and no less than 14 former congressmen."

To add insult to injury, the bulk of the millions that for-profit colleges spend on lobbying comes from the federal government--the source of most of the industry's revenues. So they are essentially using government money to prevent the government from regulating them.

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THE ABUSES of for-profit colleges are an inevitable result of applying the profit motive to a public need like higher education.

In business, the drive for profit trumps every other consideration. For-profit colleges make their money by minimizing costs and maximizing revenues--in this case, spending as little as possible on educating students while charging them as much as possible; spending intensively on marketing to bring in new "customers," regardless of whether or not they actually finish their degree or receive a quality education; and extracting as much of the revenue as possible in the form of profits and lavish salaries and bonuses for top executives.

However, while for-profit colleges are responsible for the worst outrages, they are merely more grotesque examples of a broader trend toward the privatization of public higher education and a "business model" approach to education.

In recent decades, tuition and fees at public colleges has tripled, while grants are increasingly replaced with loans, leaving students drowning in debt. Instead of a public service provided by the state, higher education has been transformed into a prohibitively expensive product, paid for with debt.

Many of the loans students take out to attend public and private non-profit colleges generate massive profits for private lenders. For example, Sallie Mae, the largest lender to students, was privatized in 2004--it rakes in billions from its operations.

And an investigation by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo a few years ago found widespread evidence of unethical and often illegal relationships between lenders and college officials at hundreds of colleges, benefiting the student lending industry at the expense of students.

There are plenty of other examples of how higher education generally is following the privatization trends. Many public universities outsource aspects of their operations to private, for-profit corporations. Full-time professors are increasingly being replaced with lower-paid adjuncts, who lack benefits and job security.

Finally, although public universities and private non-profit colleges are not supposed to generate a profit, trustees and top administrators are often able to enrich themselves in various ways at the expense of students, staff and professors.

So while for-profit colleges are an extreme example of the failure of the market to meet human need, the threat to higher education posed by the pursuit of profit runs much deeper. Addressing this means building a movement that demands higher education--provided by full-time professors with union protection, job security, and good wages and benefits--as a human right.