Using the method of dividing the working class along lines of citizens and noncitizens, the Bush administration is vigorously defending far-reaching attacks targeting working people. These include a military order setting up tribunals--called kangaroo courts by even some conservative Republicans--anywhere in the world with power to execute people, and instituting a range of measures that allow unlimited detention of immigrants.

The massacre of 800 prisoners of war who rebelled against being questioned by CIA agents, and the pushing back of the lightly-armed Taliban forces with a daily bombing campaign since October 7, are both outcomes largely to be expected when the most heavily armed and brutal empire goes to war against an underdeveloped country that is devoid of a revolutionary leadership capable of mobilizing workers and peasants to defend their country.

In his speech to the United Nations and in statements to the press, U.S. president George Bush is succeeding in getting across the point that the U.S.-led war is against the Taliban government, and that Washington will launch a similar assault on any other government it deems in violation of its dictates.

Bush and administration officials are now openly floating their next targets, testing the waters and laying the groundwork for new strikes. Included are Iraq--where Bush is now expanding his mandate to countries that possess weapons of mass destruction--and Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, claimed by the administration to be countries where the Al Qaeda organization operates.

With imperial arrogance, Washington is bluntly telling sovereign governments what to do. For example, Bush told Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih at the White House November 27 that "there are additional steps when it comes to al Qaeda that Yemen could and should be taking." A CNN article November 28 noted, "U.S. officials praise the response of the Philippine government," which has sought deeper military collaboration with Washington and invited military advisers into the country, "but are privately critical of Indonesia's efforts."

With Washington pursuing an unconditional surrender course with the Taliban, summed up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement that his "hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner," U.S. imperialism is sending an unambiguous signal to every government on earth. In Central Asia, Washington is not running up against a relationship of forces that is preventing it from winning the war, setting up bases in Afghanistan, and expanding its military foothold in the Central Asian republics.  
 
Garrison state
Regardless of the exact makeup of the new Northern Alliance-dominated government in Kabul (this will be decided by Washington as it continues its war in Afghanistan, not around a table in Bonn, Germany), the regime will be beholden to Washington and dependent on its continued military backing. The inability of the Northern Alliance to take a single city held by Taliban forces before they were pounded into surrender by U.S. warplanes is testimony to the dependence of the government-in-formation.

In the decline of the world's final empire, Washington has been forced more and more to shift its policy toward imposing garrison states with imperialist troops placed indefinitely as an occupation force. Although this appears strong at first, as it did when the Roman Empire imposed garrisons across its far-flung realm, it is a move from weakness.

Unable to keep tribute flowing into the coffers of the banks, corporations, and coupon clippers who live off the wealth produced by working people through an expanding world capitalist economy, the final empire of financial capital must now send its military forces out to do the job. It will only bring with it an increasing toll on the lives of workers in uniform, a drain on the population through taxation, and devastation of country after country as the imperialists seek to salvage their declining system.

Although disguised in UN or NATO garb, the imperialist powers have set up protectorates in Bosnia and Kosova in the 1990s. A recent Washington Post editorial pointed to the imperialist occupation troops in Yugoslavia as an example for Afghanistan. "UN-led, NATO-policed nation-building in places like Kosovo is entirely workable, but it requires lots of military force, lots of international administration, lots of economic aid--and even more patience," it stated.

As for Osama bin Laden, Washington prefers that he remain at-large a while longer. The longer they can use him as symbol of "terror" the more legitimacy they can bolster abridging workers' rights at home and continuing their war against the people of Afghanistan.

Washington has placed a $25 million bounty on bin Laden's head in hopes that an Afghan, not a U.S. soldier, delivers him "dead or alive." Rather than making bin Laden a martyr murdered at the hands of widely hated U.S. forces, they prefer to have a local do the job for a bribe.

After all the folderol of the U.S. rulers' "war on terrorism," all that has transpired is another imperialist war and another garrison state imposed by brute military force.  
 
Overreaching in the assault at home
Where the U.S. ruling class has run into trouble is at home--where they have overreached their moves to militarize the United States, establish tribunals by presidential military edict, and secretly lock up noncitizens without the right to due process. Although these moves were largely not opposed to begin with, the progress in the war is now being undercut by the lack of preparation for winning acceptance of the population for these sweeping measures.

For many youth and working people, the new repressive legislation and wider spying powers for U.S. police agencies, as presented by Attorney General John Ashcroft--a known opponent of abortion rights and affirmative action--begin to smell of more of the same assault on civil liberties and past gains that the employers and their government have been pushing for years. Many workers and farmers don't like the idea of having to carry around a national ID card, the idea that someone they know with a green card could be arrested and never heard from again, that a co-worker who immigrated from another country could be picked up and jailed indefinitely because they are deemed to be a threat to national security, or that a worker such as Michael Italie can be fired by a boss for simply expressing his political views.

Hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee this week are one reflection of the divisions engendered within the Democratic and Republican parties by the Bush administration's moves--divisions that also represent a break in what has been bipartisan backing to the imperialist war drive up to this point.

By pressing this assault, the Bush administration is building opposition to the imperialist war drive, the growing militarization of the United States, and the increasing centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch of government.  
 
Synchronized recession looms
Meanwhile, as the contradictions in world politics deepen, evidence is mounting that the world has entered a synchronized economic recession, affecting both the semicolonial and imperialist countries. In spite of a decade-long assault by the employers to push back wages and working conditions, accompanied by their government's assault on the social wage, the U.S. rulers have proven unable to reverse the long-term decline in their rate of profits. While they won a market edge over their imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan as a result of the blows they dealt labor, they only temporarily held off the inevitable economic downturn. Eliminating the business cycle under capitalism, despite all the bourgeois economists who made a living off predicting that it was a thing of the past during the 1990s "boom," was never in the cards anyway.

The Washington Post announced that the United States has been in recession since April. Industrial production fell by 1.1 percent in October, the 13th consecutive month of decline and the longest unbroken fall since 1932. Output was 6.3 percent lower than a year ago. The consumer price index fell by 0.3 percent, the largest drop since 1986.

Inflation fell to just 2.1 percent in October. During the 1992-2000 economic upturn, inflation never exceeded 3.5 percent over a consecutive 12-month period. In previous booms inflation rose as high as 6 percent or more. Also in October, manufacturers used just 74.8 percent of their production capacity, continuing their decline to the lowest level since 1983.

The New York Times pointed to growing fear that "the United States, like Japan today, could suffer an extended period of declining prices--that is, deflation--which could deepen what economists anticipate will be the economy's first recession in 10 years."

Although the cost of services is still rising, consumer prices have remained flat over the last six months, the first time in 15 years they have failed to rise over a sustained period. The prices that businesses pay for raw materials have fallen for six consecutive months.

This reflects mounting deflationary pressures on the economy, which are already beginning to lead to declining prices for commodities, a more rapid fall in the capitalists' rate of profits, and the always accompanying squeeze on workers through major layoffs and plant closings, longer hours for those employed, and deteriorating working conditions.

One example of the deflationary pressures and intensified price competition that working people are barraged with is the proliferation of interest-free loans for automobiles, computers, home electronics, and numerous other commodities. Department stores are already marking down items 20 percent or more, and computer prices continue to plummet.

The Times, in an article titled "The World's Economies Slide Together into Recession," reported that world economic growth this year has dropped below 2.5 percent, the indicator the International Monetary Fund uses to declare a recession. Germany's gross domestic product fell in the third quarter after remaining flat in the second, as unemployment hovered at 9.5 percent. Japan reentered recession after a brief respite from what has been a decade-long economic crisis. Industrial production was down by more than 12 percent in September and wages declined from last year.  
 
 
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