ESTADOS UNIDOS   

Currante del World Trade Center pide a Bush no hacer la guerra

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 19, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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A WORKER FROM THE WTC: "DON'T LET BUSH USE OUR
PAIN TO PUSH THE WORLD TO WAR"

By John Catalinotto
Former World Trade Center worker
New York

Could you imagine this a year ago? It's September 2002.
Under the pretext of a "war on terror," Washington is waging
an aggressive war against any who resist its domination of
the world--from Afghan istan and Iraq to the guerrillas of
Colombia and the progressive nationalist government in
Venezuela.

What made this possible was the Bush administration's
exploitation of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Sometimes, looking downtown, I almost expect to still see
the World Trade Center towers. On Sept. 10, 2001, I worked
late on the 31st floor of Tower Number 1. I felt justified
sleeping late the next morning. I was late enough to see the
towers burning, and Tower 2 collapse, and lucky enough not
to be inside.

Most of my 1,900 co-workers on floors 18 to 31 made it out.
But 11 died, including one in his wheelchair and one keeping
him company. Everyone in the office that day was
traumatized. They climbed down smoky staircases dripping
with water from automatic sprinklers.

To escape falling debris, one co-worker out on Liberty
Street had to leap over a woman killed by a wheel from the
airplane that crashed into Tower 2.

Like the rest of the city's working class, about a third of
my co-workers were immigrants--mainly from China, Russia,
South Asia, the Pacific islands and Latin America.

The company survived. In a month everyone was back at work--
everyone but the 11 who died and 6 percent of the company's
work force who were downsized. That plan had been in the
works long before the attacks, as part of capitalist
restructuring. Our work time was increased 6 percent without
extra pay.

A year later, the families of those who died on Sept. 11 got
substantial financial compensation. Many workers, like some
who bussed and waited at the Windows on the World
restaurant, have remained jobless. One has said he wished he
had been caught in the rubble, where his compensation would
have been more valuable to his family.

The World Trade Center towers were places where tens of
thousands of people worked. That's the human side of the
equation.

SYMBOLS OF U.S. DOMINATION

But the towers were also symbols of U.S. economic domination
of the world, of so-called globalization that reduces
hundreds of millions of people to starvation and which
aroused a powerful worldwide movement to fight it.

The Pentagon, also hit that day, is the symbol of U.S.
military domination, and of the bombs dropped on Korea,
Vietnam, Iraq and Yugoslavia--that have killed many, many
more than the 3,000 in the towers.

Together these buildings symbolized the grip that
Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood have on the Middle
East, sucking out the oil and money, and pumping in a
foreign culture. Holding down the masses and stifling the
educated middle classes. Propping up the intrusive Israeli
settler state.

U.S. foreign policies and practices, especially throughout
the Middle East, aroused a deep anger. And, even according
to the official story, this anger found expression through
organizations that Washington itself had funded and aided
for decades as part of its war against
communism.

Those who killed themselves and 3,000 others may have
intended a blow against U.S. domination. And the destruction
of these symbols was indeed an insult to the perceived
invulnerability of the U.S. state. But the slap in the face
broke no teeth.

A PROPAGANDA WEAPON

On the contrary, the Sept. 11, 2001, attack put a propaganda
weapon in the hands of the most right-wing, aggressive
faction in the U.S. political establishment. It stunned much
of the population into passivity, and made it possible for
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz
and others in their grouping to exploit the pain and fear
the attack inspired to push the country toward a permanent
state of war abroad and repression at home.

Right now the threat of a major assault on Iraq seems the
biggest danger. But along with this-or waiting in line
behind it-is a war against all peoples and parts of the
world that resist "globalization." Henry Kissinger, in a
1999 talk at Trinity College, admitted that "globalization"
means the domination of U.S. financial and strategic
interests.

U.S. advisers and weapons pour into Colombia, now openly to
battle leftist guerrillas of the FARC and ELN who have been
fighting the oligarchy. U.S. troops are back in the
Philippines, allegedly to battle "Islamic terrorists" but
really to intervene against a people's liberation army.

U.S. agents and money move against the progressive Hugo
Chávez government in Venezuela, which neighbors Colombia at
the north end of a continent that is in a depression deeper
than that of the 1930s.

Suffering Afghanistan is now permanently occupied by U.S.
troops, ruled by a president who can't survive without a
team of 70 U.S. bodyguards.

Meanwhile U.S. bases proliferate from Eastern Europe to
Central Asia, setting up a modern version of the old Roman
Empire, with its capital in Washington.

Those of us who worked in the towers can rightly ask
ourselves, "Will we let Bush and Company use our worries and
sorrows as an excuse for the Pentagon to wage war on the
world?" As an indication of the answer, the sister of the
worker who died keeping his friend in the wheelchair company
has become a spokesperson for anti-war causes.

I, for another, say no, and I'll be demonstrating this
decision in the weeks that come.

- END -

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