Statement on the war:

By Abel Mouton

ABEL MOUTON WILL FIGHT FOR CITY COLLEGE TO GO ON RECORD AGAINST THE WAR, FOR SHIFTING WAR MONEY TO EDUCATION BUDGETS, FOR UNRESTRICTED EXERCISE FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR THOSE OPPOSED TO WAR, AND FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL DEFENSE OF IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR PROFILED AND HARASSED BY BUSH AND ATTORNEY GENERAL ASHCROFT.

While the terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001 was a horrific tragedy, the Bush Administration's response bodes ill for the future of humanity. The talking heads in Washington DC, Democrats and Republicans alike, are using the attacks in a manipulative and immoral way to promote cheap patriotism, scapegoating, curtailment of civil rights, racial and ethnic profiling, and so on. September 11 has been cynically transformed into an excuse to carry out what the big banks and industrial combines have been planning for a long time: the use of US military might to intimidate and repress workers and poor folks the world over and destroy civil liberties in the US.

In this so-called "war on terror" Bush and company have thus far succeeded in bombing Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, and killing more people than the September 11 terrorists. The Administration is now attempting to build support to attack Iraq, a wealthy oil-producing nation reduced to poverty after over ten years of US bombs and economic sanctions, on patently false pretenses that Saddam Hussein could muster anything like an attack on the US.

On the home front, thousands of immigrants have been rounded up, questioned, and/or deported without due process. Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, racial profiling has gone from being the shame of US law enforcement agencies to being an acceptable institutional practice. The Bush Administration is madly searching for a legal precedent to allow further repressions in US Courts. They have only humiliating failures to show for their efforts so far, but, without the intervention of mass action from US workers, sooner or later, they will get what they are after

The war is as much a local issue as it is a national and international nightmare. Students at CCSF, many of them Arab Americans or from other ethnic groups, are targets of government discrimination. Students and teachers all over the US have been harassed for exercising their constitutional right to criticize US policies, and had their careers and activities disrupted by the "war on terror" at home, which has transferred funds from education and healthcare programs to a false promise of "Homeland Security," and tax cuts for the super-rich.

ABEL MOUTON WILL FIGHT FOR CITY COLLEGE TO GO ON RECORD AGAINST THE WAR, FOR SHIFTING WAR MONEY TO EDUCATION BUDGETS, FOR UNRESTRICTED EXERCISE FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR THOSE OPPOSED TO WAR, AND FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL DEFENSE OF IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR PROFILED AND HARASSED BY BUSH AND ATTORNEY GENERAL ASHCROFT.