BROOKLYN, NY, February 23 — Over 200 students, staff and community members from Long Island University participated today in a conference on the situation in Haiti, organized by faculty members. Reports were given by several people who had gone to Haiti since the earthquake, including an LIU student who works as an EMT.

The reports countered the lies and distortions from the press that had spread racist stories of people fighting over food. The eyewitness gave a different picture, of many people helping each other even as they struggle in unbelievably difficult circumstances. The reports also made clear that the U.S. military and UN soldiers there are not helping more people get food and other needed supplies.

PLP members distributed CHALLENGE at the conference and spoke to some of the participants about how capitalism is to blame for the deaths of 200,000 Haitian workers and about the need to build the fight for communism all over the world.

In addition to the eyewitness accounts there were panels on the future of Haiti. During one, several members of the audience made the point that the U.S. military is there to put Haiti more firmly under U.S. control and that people in the U.S. and Haiti should unite to fight against the U.S. military invasion

It appears that capitalism’s Great Recession has created such long-term unemployment that it is leading to “a crisis of historic proportions,” says the policy director of the National Employment Law Project. (NY Times, 2/21)

Of the 15 million “officially” unemployed, 6.3 million have been out of work for more than six months, the highest total since such numbers have been tracked (1948). It is already double the amount of the previous worst record, in the 1980s.

But that’s only half the story. That 15-million figure doesn’t include another 15 million who can’t find full-time jobs or have given up looking, so the long-term jobless number is far more than 6.3 million.

No wonder the NY Times, the capitalists’ leading mouthpiece, laments that “even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.”

Already between the 8.4 million jobs lost in this Great Recession plus another 2.7 million needed just to absorb new entrants into the job market, the economy would require over 11 million new jobs just to get back to when the collapse started in December 2007 (which even then was not full employment). That means “more than 400,000 new jobs a month for three years — wildly in excess of even the most optimistic projections.” (NYT editorial, 3/6)

With all the phony talk of a “recovery” starting (and admittedly a “jobless recovery” at that), even the Times confesses (3/6) that, “The job market may be hitting bottom, but it seems likely to remain mired there.” And the jobs that have been lost are “unlikely to return” — ever.

In effect the Times virtually admits what CHALLENGE has been saying repeatedly; it’s the profit system that is grinding workers down: “Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits,…often achieved by cutting payrolls.” This is exactly the fate that befell the Stella D’Oro workers when an investment company bought the bakery and then sold it when they decided they could make a hefty profit.

Now we can also see the monstrous effects of Clinton’s “welfare reform.” Their rationale for cutting off millions was that it would provide “incentive” for recipients to get jobs. But what happens with a “work-based ‘safety net’ without any work”? More jobless and destitute workers, and not even eligible for unemployment benefits.

So this is what capitalism has brought to the working class, a bottomless pit of unemployment, foreclosed homes, one of four children going to bed hungry. This is even twice as horrific for black, Latino, immigrant and Native American workers, who because of the system’s inherent racist discrimination, suffer twice the jobless rates of white workers.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, when one-third of the working class was on the street, communists led a national movement of the unemployed and organized the basic industries, winning unemployment insurance, welfare and the 40-hour week. But now we see that, as always under capitalism, its economic crises inevitably reverse those reforms.

Communists in the Progressive Labor Party must take up the mantle to organize masses of workers into an anti-capitalist movement that not only fights this insidious racist unemployment — which will be lasting for years and years — but points out to workers that only the destruction of the profit system can end this hellhole of capitalism, something the old “Communist” Party failed to do. Such a movement can become a “school for communism” whose goal would be a society run by and for workers, without bosses, profits, racism and oil wars, a society in which every worker will have a job and work for the advancement of our class. That’s communism. Join us! 

CALIFORNIA, February 17  —  University campuses in this state have erupted against the racism sparked by a racist “Compton cookout party” that mocked black history month. The so-called “Cookout” urged all participants to wear chains, cheap clothes and speak very loudly. Female participants were encouraged to be “ghetto chicks.”

Students at UC San Diego led the way with a series of protests and walkouts condemning the “cookout.” Days later a noose was hung in the school library and more protests  erupted.

Thus far, the anti-racist campaign has spread to other colleges in the UC system. At UC Irvine demonstrating students were arrested after a sit-in at the Chancellor’s office against racism and the budget cuts that face the entire California system. Students at UC Berkeley rebelled against the budget cuts. Many other campuses experienced racist incidents and students have responded with mass protests and related actions.

Many students are linking the racist “cookout” to the decreasing number of black students enrolled each year in the California university system, now down to 2% — victimized by the ending of affirmative action and the lower income resulting from racist unemployment and skyrocketing
tuition costs. 

In office just over a year, Obama has achieved mixed results for his beleaguered U.S. ruling-class masters. On the home front, Obama still struggles to pass heath care “reforms” which they need both for cost-cutting as well as for putting the system under tighter government control to deal with all the competing capitalists in this industry. Globally, however, he works wonders for the billionaire owners of J.P. Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and allied U.S. imperialists.

For their benefit, liberal Obama has extended the deadly reach of the U.S. war machine in ways right-winger Bush, Jr., could never achieve. He’s added Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Haiti to the ruling class’s ever-expanding theaters of operation. Israel may soon contain U.S. combat units joining forces with its military to deal forcefully with the Middle-East tinderbox (see below). Obama’s Afghan surge is brutally “securing” towns along the route of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

As for Iraq, Obama has shattered his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops, who will remain indefinitely to safeguard the oilfields they seized, and to threaten neighboring Iran. A February 24 NY Times op-ed piece by Thomas Ricks, an “expert” from the Rockefeller-funded Center for a New American Security, urged Obama to “find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come.”

Mounting Massacres in Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan Surge

Although many who voted for Obama now express disenchantment, his liberal cover still enables him to get away with murder, literally. If Bush, Jr., had ordered Navy Seals to shoot teen-aged Somali pirates or send CIA/Special Operations death squads and Predator drones into Pakistan and Yemen, the anti-war outcry would be deafening. But Obama pulled off these atrocities plus a U.S. military takeover in Haiti, with appalling, racist neglect of the stricken, while posing as a “humanitarian.” (See CHALLENGE editorial, 3/3) U.S. rulers’ motives in Haiti, are in fact drenched in potential oil reserves, as usual. (See article, page 4)

Obama’s Afghan surge force seems to commit a massacre a week, with impunity. “The Afghan human rights commission reported Wednesday that 28 civilians had been killed so far in NATO’s offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Marja.” (NY Times, 2/24)

Noncombatant deaths are sure to mount even higher as Obama targets more densely populated areas: “[T]he United States military is looking ahead toward taking the fight to Kandahar...a much bigger prize than Marja. The city is the second largest in Afghanistan” (NYT, 2/26). The Times forgot to mention what makes Kandahar such a prize — it straddles the TAPI gas pipeline route.

But the free hand in relatively small wars that Obama’s liberal credentials — and the Pentagon’s unchallenged killing power — gives U.S. rulers has limits. Their rivalry with China and Russia, powers which are far stronger than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, is intensifying. U.S. generals’ boasts of success in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot hide the fact that Chinese- and Russian-proxy Iran is relentlessly pursuing nuclear weapons.

Imperialist Dogfight over Mid-East Oil Intensifies; Is It Nuke Time?

U.S. bosses are considering three basic counterstrategies, one ineffective and the other two incredibly dangerous:

• Plan A, already in place, involves negotiations and sanctions. Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs, backed by Beijing and Moscow, mock them.

• In Plan B, which U.S. rulers seem to favor, or at least are resigned to, Iran supposedly gets the bomb. Then the U.S. initiates a Mid-East version of the Cold War — with ally Israel (already possessing nuclear bombs) and the oil-rich, pro-U.S. parts of the region like Saudi Arabia — under a U.S. nuclear umbrella. But actual U.S. nuclear response would have a shorter fuse than during the U.S.-Soviet standoff.

The journal “Foreign Affairs,” the U.S. imperialist establishment’s leading public mouthpiece, laid out the ground rules in its March/April 2010 issue: “When Washington publicly presents its policy on how to contain a nuclear Iran, it should be explicit: no [Iranian] initiation of conventional wars against other countries; no use or transfer of its nuclear weapons; and no stepped-up support for terrorist or subversive activities....[T]he price of Iran’s violating these three prohibitions could be U.S. retaliation by any and all means necessary, up to and including nuclear weapons.” Nuclear-armed China and Russia would hardly stay on the sidelines.

The article continues:  “Washington should also be prepared to deploy U.S. troops on Israeli soil as a tripwire.”

• Plan C has the U.S. (or more likely, Israel) pre-emptively wiping out Iran’s nascent nukes in air strikes. Such an attack would increase tension in U.S.-vs.-Chinese and Russian flashpoints from the Koreas to Taiwan to Georgia to Poland. Iran would unleash its monster “weapon”: closing the Strait of Hormuz, though which most of Iraq’s and much of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports flow.

Our Party has long held that inter-imperialist rivalry inevitably ends in world war (see World Wars I and II). For workers to back imperialist servant Obama is thus a dead-end. But so is supporting any new politician the rulers put in the White House to mislead us. The only sane course is to reject the electoral circus altogether and build a party — the PLP — that can eventually eliminate the billionaire class and their endless profit-driven wars through communist revolution. J