Election Dogfight Underlies ‘State of Union’: U.S. Ruling Class Faces Internal Crisis

In Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, he said:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

In reality, however, Obama and the U.S. ruling class he serves cannot possibly produce economic fairness. Because capitalism is a super-exploitative, racist, sexist system, based on the drive for maximum profits, it is inherently unequal. “Fairness” would require eliminating the system itself.

Under capitalism, bosses and bankers own the means of production while they themselves produce nothing. Workers create everything of value and, for the most part, receive just enough to survive — if that. Phony “Fair Share” Obama is cynically trying to manipulate Occupy Wall Street-inspired sentiment for the section of the ruling class he represents.

No matter what popular phrases he opportunistically mouths in the run-up to this November’s election, Obama has no room in his agenda for the redistribution of wealth. His proposals to raise taxes on the very rich and to tighten regulation of investors have a different aim entirely. They are designed to enable the most most powerful imperialist bosses to wage the ever-wider wars they need in order to control energy resources and cheap labor, the vital elements in maintaining U.S. supremacy over its capitalist rivals.

War and Taxes At Heart of 2012 Election Circus

But not all U.S. capitalists have the same vested interest in U.S. imperialism. As a result, taxes and war will likely be the central focus of the 2012 election dogfight, which Obama kicked off with his blatant campaign speech in the State of the Union. The candidates’ positions differ according to their capitalist backers’ varying needs. The spectrum runs from arch-imperialist Obama to isolationist Ron Paul.

But for the working class, none of these candidates will solve its problems: mass racist, long-term unemployment; constantly shrinking wages; foreclosed homes; prison-like schools; mass detention and deportation of workers who are immigrants; and a criminal injustice system that imprisons 2.4 million people, of whom 70 percent are black and Latino (see page 5). Capitalist-created horrors confront the working class worldwide even more intensively, especially

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Bosses Fiddle While Planet Burns, and… Big Oil Laughs All the Way to the Bank

South Africa hosted a two-week United Nations conference on climate change in early December, attended by delegates from more than 190 countries.  Called for the nominal purpose of ending greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming, it was one of a long series of failures.   

GHGs threaten all workers

GHGs come from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. By trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, they have already warmed the earth by more than one degree; under capitalist business-as-usual, they threaten to warm it even more. Global warming shifts evaporation and precipitation patterns, leading to more frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe winter snows.  The melting of the big glaciers and ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica, could ultimately threaten to drown small island nations and coastal cities that contain more than 10 percent of the world’s population, including 80 percent of the people living in California.  (See the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST magazine “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org.)

Bosses battle each other rather than global warming

As usual, the competition inherent in capitalism has prevented any meaningful agreement among various nations’ ruling classes.  The lines are drawn most sharply between the ruling classes of the industrialized nations and those of the developing nations. The European Union recently demanded that all countries share equally in limiting GHG emissions, even though the industrialized countries have produced the lion’s share of GHGs to date. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are using this issue in an attempt to stem the rapid Chinese economic development that is pushing the two rivals toward war for control over fuel sources.  The ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan concern oil and natural gas.  All imperialists, whether from industrialized or developing nations, will fight to the last worker’s death to retain such control.

The conference ended with yet another worthless pledge to meet again later to come to agreement.  The world continues to warm and the poorest among us continue to suffer the major burden of climate changes.  That industrialized nations promised to throw in a few pennies to help the developing nations cope with the expenses of cutting fossil fuel emissions only serves to cover this reality, and their culpability.

The only established alternative to fossil fuels, which now provide about 85 percent of the world’s energy, is nuclear energy. Other sources are far less developed and reliable: wind, solar, hydro (dams), and geothermal (tapping underground hot magma). The extreme profitability in fossil fuels means that those corporations and their financial backers will continue to fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in their use.

Given the competition that is a mainstay of capitalism and imperialism, climate change conferences will inevitably disappoint the world’s working class.  Only when workers everywhere take state power will we be able to halt and perhaps reverse global warming. That will require a communist-led global revolution, which is PLP’s goal. Join us.

Keystone Oil Pipeline A Disaster for the Working Class

The U.S. bosses are determined to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas to increase their profits at the expense of workers’ lives and livelihoods.  Recent months have seen mass demonstrations, including encirclement of the White House, to protest this project.  Pipelines inevitably leak, the more so as they corrode with age, and can contaminate entire water supplies.  While the oil projected to flow through the Keystone XL will be extracted with difficulty from tar sands in northeast Alberta, the project has become relatively profitable because of the rising international price of oil. 

Regardless of when Obama decides to permit this cross-border pipeline (most likely after the November election), the working class in both Canada and the U.S. will be the loser. Unchecked, the continued burning of fossil fuels will bring the world closer to the tipping point where global temperatures could rise beyond reversible levels.  (See THE COMMUNIST, Winter 2010, “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org).   Only after state power is seized through communist revolution will the world’s workers be able to guarantee a safe environment for themselves and their descendants.

The Keystone issue

Tar sands oil is known as “sour” crude.  It contains far more corrosive elements than the “sweet” crude derived from large underground oil lakes, like those in the Middle East and under the oceans.  Sweet crude is also more easily extracted, but it is being depleted faster than new discoveries can replace it. Sooner or later, it will likely run out. 

For the time being, Obama has

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DC Occupiers Prepare for Park Cops’ Attack

WASHINGTON, DC, January 31 — After prodding from the richest man in Congress, Darrell Issa of California, who heads the colonial committee overseeing the District of Columbia, the U.S. Park Police are moving against Occupy DC at McPherson Square. Several people have been arrested, including one who was unjustifiably tasered by the cops and a PL’er who is falsely charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. Occupiers have erected a giant tent over the statue of General McPherson (a Civil War hero) and are preparing for an attack by Park Police. Stay tuned!

U.S. Bosses’ New Jim Crow Slavery

When slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of formerly enslaved Africans did not end. Capitalist-inspired racist ideology helped enable the bosses to exploit black labor to a higher degree than it did white labor. Prison chain gangs were fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, injustices cloaked by Jim Crow laws. The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole:  “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States….[Emphasis added — ed.]

“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially unemployment), which was so vaguely defined that any black man could be convicted of it.  Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.”  One key aspect to this sham of justice, then and now, was that state legislatures and Congress define many offenses as crimes without victims — no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Among victimless crimes, possession of drugs is the contemporary equivalent to vagrancy.

With the skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in recent decades, beginning with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and escalating with the “War on Drugs” under Ronald Reagan, a huge proportion of black workers — mainly men — have been re-enslaved.  In Chicago, for example, 55 percent of adult black men have felony records.  Overall, black men in the U.S. are incarcerated more than six times the rate for white men. They have a one-in-four chance of being jailed during their lifetimes; and one in fourteen are in jail or prison at any one time (see PLP pamphlet “Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style”). 

The U.S. prison population, the largest in the world, is 70 percent black and Latino in a country where black and Latino people represent only 29 percent of the population. Latino workers are

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Jobs, Not Jails! Protest Wells Fargo’s Investments in Racist Private Prisons

WASHINGTON, DC, January  25 — For more than two months, the Criminal Injustice Committee (CIC) of the Occupy DC movement has been battling the Wells Fargo bank to stop its support of the racist private prison system. In mid-December, more than 100 occupiers protested at the Wells Fargo branch in the mainly black Shaw neighborhood. Every Friday afternoon since then, a team of occupiers has leafleted there to urge its customers to close their accounts. Recently the CIC has expanded its boycott activities to a second branch office in Columbia Heights, where many black and Latino workers live.

On January 24, a second demonstration was held there in solidarity with protests at the Florida meeting of financiers involved with the GEO private prison company. The CIC also marched in the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade on January 22. The black working-class onlookers gave a rousing cheer to our “Jobs not jails!” chant, and quickly took all of our leaflets and CHALLENGEs.  

The capitalist system requires and reinforces racist institutions in order to maintain social control and maximize its profits (see “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual” at www.plp.org). Capitalism systematically ensures the super-exploitation of African American workers by criminalizing and marginalizing them in what has been called the New Jim Crow (see adjoining article).

More than 60,000 DC residents have criminal records, mostly due to the bogus, racist “war on drugs.” The majority are jailed not for new crimes but for parole violations that are almost impossible to avoid. Half of those with criminal records are unemployed because it is lawful to discriminate against individuals for prior convictions. Wages and working conditions are driven down for these workers, and ultimately for all workers, as a result of this massive branding of black workers.

A similar institutional process is apparent for Latino immigrants,

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Minnesota: March in Solidarity with Occupiers Worldwide

MINNEAPOLIS, January 28 — In international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters of Tahir Square and our fellow anti-capitalists in Athens, London, Paris and Rome, the Minnesota Occupiers held Occupy Space Day in Minneapolis. It was thrilling!

A contingent of 70 demonstrators marched through the Steven Square and Eliot Park downtown neighborhoods protesting income inequality and housing evictions. Minneapolis has one of the Midwest’s highest eviction rates, after Chicago. Our demonstrators were men and women, black, white and bi-racial, union activists, workers and college students. While many were reformist in outlook, many others were anti-capitalists.

The kkkops harassed us initially but left before the march’s main event. In Eliot Park where the march ended there was an anti-capitalist speech declaring international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters in Egypt and with other global protestors against racist, imperialist capitalism.

The speech was in front of an abandoned church that Hennepin County declared county property. An unused church could be used as a workers’ cultural community center. However, the county bosses want to hold onto it rather than give it to workers, so we took it!

One speaker declared, “We take this property in the name of the Minneapolis oppressed!” The doors were forced open and we had a party! We held it for one hour before the cops gave us 15 minutes to clear out or be arrested. We all left together, orderly and disciplined.

Despite that outcome it was a small victory because workers are slowly learning we don’t have to take oppression, that we can collectively fight back. Workers took all the CHALLENGES I had. Personally the march and occupation made me think of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1968 general strike in France.

This is a great time to be alive because the PLP will show millions of workers globally the revolutionary path to communism! 

Minnesota Red