PORT-AU-PRINCE, OCT. 28 — Cholera is making a comeback globally, with 100,000 deaths annually, in African countries, and in Pakistan after the floods. In the living spaces of the “wretched of the earth,” workers die all the time of completely preventable diseases. Under capitalism, workers are used only to provide the cheap supply of raw materials, assembled products, and labor power for the rich.

 We watch this with anguish today in the rural, rice-growing Artibonite region of Haiti, where cholera has killed around 300 people to date. The media give medical explanations of the epidemic focused on the contaminated Artibonite River, but never touch on the racism of capitalism which is the real explanation of such recurring, preventable epidemics.

The media blames “underdevelopment,” about which simply, tragically, nothing can be done. Nor can much be done, apparently (“it’s tied up in the Congress,” explained Bill Clinton), about the criminal, total non-delivery of promised U.S. government aid, which might have helped; nor about the thousands of undistributed rehydration kits CNN’s Sanjay Gupta found in a Port-au-Prince warehouse.

The Artibonite River, the largest in the island, is the heart of rich, irrigated  agricultural land long used for rice-growing. When the World Bank program (with Aristide’s agreement) pushed through the import of cheap U.S. rice (subsidized by the Clinton Administration), local production was crippled. On the Aeribonite River, Péligre dam is also the main source of electricity in Haiti.

The dam is now silting up and cutting the energy supply because of deforestation in the mountains. It is part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and therefore the site, like all capitalist nation-state borders, of state violence against workers trying to cross in both directions. The border was closed for a day by the Dominican authorities, who subjected Haitians trying to cross, to an absurd ritual hand-washing and other tests. On the Haitian side, MINUSTAH (UN) troops tear-gassed people fleeing the epidemic. Nothing new there: the border river has often flowed with the blood of workers on both banks.

And now it is the source of cholera, as its water poisons those it once nourished. The bacterial illness is transmitted when people drink water that’s been contaminated by the human waste of an infected person.

Haiti is a setup for cholera. The water purification systems are gone, so people go to the river for water. This is also where people dump their waste. The disease produces a toxin in infected individuals, who experience terrible diarrhea that can result in disabling dehydration in just a few hours. Dehydration is a death sentence for people with no access to good medical care. But it is easily treated with rehydration: you give people fluid through an IV and they will do just fine. 

But why is the river so contaminated, causing cholera?  And why is treatment so limited, causing further unnecessary deaths?  The media will tell us how Doctors Without Borders (Spain) staff a clinic in St. Marc and MINUSTAH troops built a new tent clinic next door. Those are very useful in preventing deaths, it’s true. But they won’t say why a system focused on profit never manages anything but makeshift, last-minute medical care instead of planning health care rationally. Forty percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and 80% lack proper sanitation, including toilets and soap.

The truth is that anything other than maximizing profit will always be secondary to capitalist ruling classes, which is why their responses to perfectly predictable disasters of their making are always so cruel and inadequate. That too is a preventable crime, as preventable as cholera. Unfortunately capitalism is not so easily treated. But we workers without borders are working on it.

Many studies are available which point towards a better understanding of such painful events. Eduardo Galeano (The Open Veins of Latin America) takes aim at flawed capitalist explanations of disease when he sarcastically recommends placing signs in the deadly areas of industrial pollution in Latin America: DO NOT BREATHE.

The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney succinctly punctured the racist myth that certain sectors of our class are doomed to underdevelopment in his much-loved book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which drew on André Gunder Frank’s concept of “the development of underdevelopment.” Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and Patrick Bond’s Global Apartheid show the consequences of modern imperialism to be nothing less than racism on a world scale.

The rural and urban working class of the Artibonite valley must return to the revolutionary history of their region enshrined in Crête Pierrot, where Dessalines in 1802 led African slave soldiers to crush the French army in the turning-point battle of the revolution. Then workers will give a different explanation of what caused so many deaths in so many generations. 

The Rockefeller-led U.S. imperialist wing which Obama serves couldn’t have asked for more timely delivery from UPS and FedEx. Arriving the weekend before Election Day, the Yemeni parcel bombs helped shift attention, for a while at least, back to widening U.S. wars.

Until recently, this year’s election had centered almost entirely on the domestic, economic crisis facing U.S. rulers. It reflected a sharpening battle among various U.S. capitalists, waged between the Tea Partiers and the liberal politicians serving the dominant, imperialist faction.

Those forces financing the Tea party, especially the Texas billionaire Koch brothers, are focused on short-run, immediate profits, favoring tax cuts for the rich and little or no financial regulation. The Rockefeller-led group represents the long-range interests of U.S. capitalism, more dependent for profits from, and control of, foreign oil, making imperialist wars abroad vital for their system’s survival. The Tea Party election struggle has been overshadowing the main wing’s most urgent efforts overseas.

The owners of U.S.-based giants like ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase seek to secure the greater Middle East by force, both for its geostrategic energy supplies and to counter rival Iranian, Chinese and Russian expansion.

The bomb-plot headlines about stepping up U.S. attacks in Yemen — which borders Big Oil’s crown jewel in neighboring Saudi Arabia — edged out the latest election-related blurbs from Sarah Palin or the Daily Show. And just a week before the latest Yemeni threat broke, Wikileaks’ dumping of 400,000 incriminating war documents had turned the spotlight on Iraq, and indirectly on Iran.

Wikileaks Helps Brass Write Manual for the Next War

A seething Iraqi civil war, arising in large part from the U.S. missteps Wikileaks highlights, prevents oil companies like Exxon from realizing the six billion barrels per day (bbd) U.S. rulers hoped for when they invaded Iraq in 2003. Production has hardly reached 2.5 bbd.

Masquerading as anti-war and anti-establishment, Wikileaks actually furnishes a self-critical “what-not-to-do” guide for the Pentagon’s coming U.S. clash with Iran. Lacking any legitimate incentive, U.S. brass must rely on anti-Islamic racism to motivate troops to kill. But continued racist mass civilian “collateral-damage” deaths and torturing and murdering prisoners could spark a widespread anti-U.S. Islamic rebellion, reversing any or all U.S. military gains. Exxon could lose its top source of oil in Saudi Arabia.

Main U.S. Rulers Bent on War
Despite Tea Party Gains

Wikileaks and the Yemen plot inject a war focus into the often distracting electoral system that history has saddled on otherwise dominant imperialist U.S. rulers. Every two years just about anybody with enough money can buy a seat in Congress. The main Rockefeller faction worries that Koch brothers-type U.S. capitalists will rally an anti-tax Tea Party voter base to elect representatives that would hinder capitalism’s long-range need for its war machine.

The leading U.S. imperialist think-tank, the liberal, Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has been running a lengthy series titled “Foreign Policy and the 2010 Midterms,” highlighting, in the case of Afghanistan, “Doubts Over the Mission” and “Funding the War.”

And the Wall Street Journal, owned by Republican, but imperialist, Rupert Murdoch, worries, “At issue is whether candidates backed by Tea-party activists may force a shift in the terms of debate over the war in Afghanistan. While Republicans are traditionally hawkish on defense — and foreign policy hasn’t emerged as a major campaign issue — some GOP candidates have expressed skepticism about the scale of U.S. military involvement in the region.” (10/27/10)

On Election Eve, liberal imperialist thinkers were wishing that the incoming Tea Partiers would prove ultimately more imperialist-minded. Stephen Biddle, a CFR fellow, hopes for a GOP split: “One of the divides in the Tea Party is between hard-core libertarians who just plain believe in smaller government, and are basically isolationist in their foreign policy, versus more traditionally conservative Republican Tea Partiers who tend to believe that the non-defense parts of the government are what needs cutting.” (Public Radio International, 10/19)

Frank Rich, the liberal New York Times top Obama watcher, also foresaw a similar pro-imperialist silver lining in Republican election gains:

“Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. ‘We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,’ he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. ‘As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.’ It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge [a la Koch brothers’ types], not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.”

Arms merchant Grumman and arch-imperialist financier Goldman-Sachs have similar interests as Exxon’s and JP Morgan’s war-making goals.

After an expected setback at the polls, the liberal imperialists’ message to the masses is to rally for Obama in 2012. The ballot box, however, is a dead end; every candidate fronts for one capitalist faction or another. PLP strives to build our revolutionary communist party through militant action in the factories and unions, on the campuses and among working-class GI’s, in the churches and other community mass organizations, against the imperialist billionaires and their politician stooges.

Such action will hasten the revolution to obliterate the profit-driven war-makers and establish the working class in state power. J

Wikileaks: Another Liberal Rulers’ Mouthpiece

Wikileaks didn’t fall from the sky. Its mastermind Julian Assange sports a lengthening liberal imperialist pedigree. In June, a profile in the ultra-liberal, Establishment New Yorker magazine canonized him as a quirky but supremely well-intentioned truth seeker. Assange and pals were front-runners for a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation whose president, Alberto Ibarguen, sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the top U.S. imperialist think-tank. Knight eventually turned Assange down, but only when dealing with the Times proved far more lucrative to liberal rulers in terms of public opinion. The Rockefeller-led liberal cabal of National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting System, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting have become, through their grantees Radio Pacifica and its “Democracy Now” program, the main media defenders of Assange and his Army intelligence mole Private Bradley Manning.

Would Iran Invasion Solve Capitol Gridlock?

The brightest glimpse of imperialist light through the dark Tea Party tunnel comes from Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Widely-cited Stratfor analysts provide U.S. corporations with global political insights they can use to boost profits. On October 27, Stratfor’s founder George Freidman predicted Congressional “gridlock” on domestic issues in the wake of November’s elections but said:

“If Obama were to use foreign policy to enhance his political standing through decisive action, and achieve some positive results in relations with foreign governments, the one place he could do it would be Iran.” Freidman combines the same warning of risks and wishful thinking that accompanied Washington’s initial forays into the endless Iraqi and Afghan conflicts:

“An attack on Iran would not be an invasion, nor would it be a short war. Like Yugoslavia in 1999, it would be an extended air war lasting an unknown number of months. There would be American POWs from aircraft that were shot down or suffered mechanical failure over Iranian territory. There would be many civilian casualties, which the international media would focus on. It would not be an antiseptic campaign, but it would likely (though it is important to reiterate not certainly) destroy Iran’s nuclear capability and profoundly weaken its conventional forces.”

As drastic as its proposal sounds, Stratfor in no way sits on the lunatic fringe. The ultra-establishment CFR immediately posted the piece on its own website, billing it a “Must Read.”



ISRAEL, November 2 — Arab and Jewish women day-care workers are showing multi-racial unity by battling against their extreme sexist exploitation. While some are fighting only for a wage increase, others are also demanding direct employment with full wages and benefits, as well as for an end to their demeaning working conditions.

Day-care workers are employed through a kind of a scam. They’re considered “freelancers” and thus ineligible for a minimum wage and legal benefits. But the bosses treat them as employees. While they earn about $1,500-$2,000 a month and work far more than 50 hours a week, they’re forced to pay operational costs out of their own pockets, so their net wage is usually below $1,000. Their bosses constantly bombard them with increasingly irrational and expensive demands disguised as “safety regulations” but actually amount to wage-cuts.

Last July, more than 700 day-care workers from throughout the country rallied in front of the ministry of employment, commerce and industry in Jerusalem, fueling their struggle with great enthusiasm and energy. (There are about 2,400 day-care workers in this status; more than 1,000 are unionized).

After this successful demonstration, which displayed the workers’ strength, the government offered them a 4% annual wage increase, eventually totaling about 10%, as well as a pension arrangement and the formation of a trilateral forum. It will decide day-care system policy, including representatives of the workers, the government and the employing NGO’s.

It was pretty clear that the union leadership wanted and supported the government’s proposal, but the rank and file rejected it because it did not answer their needs. The proposed wage increase will start from an extremely low level since they’re considered to be “freelancers” and thus not eligible for minimum wage and benefits. The offered wage increase will not be a significant change in their current situation; it won’t even raise their salary above the minimum wage.

The workers also suspect that the ministries of finance and employment, commerce and industry will try to trick them, like the ministry of finance did when it simply ignored agreements with the students’ union.

Day-care workers must rely on their own unity and militancy to continue their struggle to win better conditions and make the bosses pay. But as long as the Israeli government and the capitalist system it defends holds power, any gains workers win can be taken back.

The unity of Arab and Jewish day-care workers is a beacon of the anti-racist and anti-sexist unity that’s needed to build a revolutionary movement to end the exploitation of all workers in the Middle East. 

DETROIT, MI, October 16 — “Eventually, we’ll all be Tier 2!” That’s what one woman said as about 200 autoworkers picketed outside the locked gates of UAW headquarters at Solidarity House today. They were protesting a 50% wage cut for 40% of the workforce at the Lake Orion GM assembly plant, UAW Local 5960. Workers came from a number of plants and locals, including Local 23 at the Indianapolis stamping plant where workers rejected wage-cuts, defied the Governor and ran UAW International reps out of their union hall.

Under the new contract, Tier 2 workers will make $14.50/hour and work alongside Tier 1 workers making $28/hour. Fearing a repeat of the Indianapolis rebellion, where wage-cuts were overwhelmingly voted down, 457 to 96, workers would not be allowed to vote on the wage-cuts. This is UAW President Bob King’s “UAW for the 21st Century,” where GM and the union “share common goals and a common vision” of keeping U.S. bosses on the top of the heap with a future of low wages and endless war.

The ability to cut wages without a ratification vote was implanted in the 2009 national contract, which was ratified, as a precondition for the Obama bailout and restructuring of GM and Chrysler. That contract slashed starting pay for new hires to $14.50/hour. In the fine print that was never included in the “highlights” distributed to workers as they voted, it also says that to produce sub-compacts at a profit, GM and the UAW “will work together...to arrive at innovative ways to staff these operations.”

The Lake Orion workers were laid off last November and GM began retooling the plant to build a subcompact and compact car. The first workers called back will work at full wages and benefits. The rest of the workforce will come back at Tier 2 wages and either wait for a Tier 1 opening due to retirement or try to transfer to another GM plant.

One worker said, “The union knew the plant was going to be two-tier…they just waited till the last minute to drop it on us.” And they plan to “drop it” on many more workers in order to keep members. “This is not going to go to other plants unless we are able to bring a [subcompact] car into Ford or Chrysler that we don’t currently have. We might look at something similar for that situation,” King said.

King forgot to mention imposing poverty wages on workers when he spoke at the October 2 March for Jobs and Justice. But that is really what it was all about. When you unite with the bosses and march behind them, you are on the slippery slope to fascism and world war, because that’s how they solve their crises. They blabber about Republican “extremists,” but it wasn’t the Tea Party who slashed 200,000 auto jobs and cut our wages in half. It is King and Obama, acting on behalf of the biggest bosses and bankers in the world. 

The liberals and union reformers also gave us the first non-union GM plant in the U.S. since the 1930’s; a new lithium-ion battery plant near Detroit. The plant is partly government subsidized, did not call back one unemployed UAW member and pays less than $14/hour.

Since the Chrysler bailout of 1979, the UAW has given up billions in concessions and more than a million jobs, all in the name of “job security.” Today they represent less than half of the U.S. auto industry and have lost two-thirds of our members. Class collaboration does not save jobs. Our security lies with the international working class, sharper and sharper class struggle and the development of mass communist consciousness. Ultimately we have to overthrow the bosses and abolish wage slavery with communist revolution.