Since Inauguration Day, the Obama regime has ruthlessly enforced working-class “sacrifices” to protect embattled U.S. capitalists. Workers — suffering Depression-level job, wage and service cuts — bear the multi-trillion-dollar costs of Obama & Co.’s bank bailouts and ever-expanding Middle East energy wars. And on these killing fields, working-class soldiers and civilians unwillingly pay with their lives as Team Obama defends the profits of oil giants like Exxon Mobil, as well as U.S. rulers’ attempt to control energy supplies and pipeline routes to maintain their shaky global supremacy.

Now, with six million U.S. workers whose only income is food stamps and over 30 million unemployed or underemployed, Obama has opened a new war front in Yemen. It reinforces his Afghan surge, Pakistan raids, and non-existent Iraqi withdrawal.

Oil and mineral resources and geography drive U.S. rulers’ Yemen offensive. Significantly, Yemen borders Saudi Arabia, which holds the world’s largest oil reserves. It has been the cornerstone of U.S. geostrategic dominance since World War II when President Roosevelt made a pact with Saudi rulers to defend their dictatorship in exchange for exclusive U.S. access to Saudi oil. And Yemen’s extensive Red Sea and Gulf of Aden coastlines command the export routes for Saudi crude to Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Death Toll Mounts as U.S.-led Oil Wars
Widen to Yemen and Somalia

U.S. rulers have two major foes in Yemen. Al Qaeda forces there represent non-royal Saudi capitalists, led by Osama bin Laden, who, long excluded from it, seek to cut in on that kingdom’s fabulous oil wealth, at Exxon Mobil’s expense. In addition, Iranian-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen, like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, comprise yet another proxy anti-U.S. army. They serve not only Iran’s ayatollahs seeking regional power but also far larger, long-term U.S. imperialist rivals China and Russia. China already has deals for Iran’s oil while Russia supplies Iran’s nuclear needs.

Obama hit Yemen long before the unsuccessful Christmas Day plane bombing. “The United States provided firepower, intelligence and other support to the government of Yemen as it carried out raids this week to strike at suspected hide-outs of al Qaeda.” (NY Times, 12/18/09) And BBC reported (12/21/09), “The town of al-Nadeer [a Houthi stronghold] was targeted by air-strikes [killing] 54 civilians, including women and children,” via Saudi Arabian planes piloted by Saudi royal princes in U.S.-supplied jets — part of the afore-mentioned U.S. deal with the Saudi ruling family.

Bloomberg News (1/3/10) repeats the cause-and-effect lie: “The U.S. and U.K. governments will increase counter-terrorism efforts in Yemen and Somalia as they respond to a failed attempt to blow up an airplane over Detroit.”

Why Somalia and why the Brits? It’s all about oil. Somalia, itself beset by anti-U.S. Islamic forces, mirrors Yemen in bordering Saudi export routes. Pirates based in Somalia have already seized a few Saudi oil shipments. A future, anti-U.S. Somali government could curtail these shipments far more severely.

Obama Uses Fascism to
Stifle Fight-Back

For some time now, step by step, U.S. rulers have tightened the screws on workers’ daily lives:

• Obama’s bailout of GM forced mass layoffs and cutoffs of retiree benefits to make the company financially “solvent” at workers’ expense;

• Racist stop-and-frisk policies in big cities;

• “Random” searches in mass transit, airports and train stations;

• Encouraging informing on fellow citizens (“if you see something, say something”);

• Police and metal detectors in public schools;

• Anti-immigrant raids, harassment and jailings.

All of this is becoming accepted practice in Obama’s “land of the free,” using fear to get the working class to gradually accept fascistic control of their daily lives in a militaristic society. Obama’s targeting of the Yemeni source of a Nigerian rich kid’s “underwear bomb” is merely a pretext to intensify these policies. Now U.S. rulers are using the December 25 airline incident to advance their plans for a police state, of which stepped-up screening of air passengers is only a part. They mean to make Israeli-style racial profiling widely accepted, along with Gestapo-like treatment of the general public.

Under orders from Obama’s authorities, pillows, laptops and blankets will be barred from fliers’ laps in the last hour of flight, along with trips to the bathroom, not to mention snatching blankets covering babies (yes, it’s happened). Such moves coincide with recent Obama administration legalistic jockeying towards open fascism.

In November, Obama’s federal court reaffirmed Bush, Jr.’s abolition of lawyer-client privilege in the Lynne Stewart case, a militant lawyer convicted of supporting terrorism by relaying a message for a client accused of terrorism. In December, another Obama panel enforced federal cop terror by refusing to prosecute the owners of the Pilgrim Pride poultry company for exploiting immigrants after hundreds of these workers underwent jail time, deportation, or both. His immigration agents worked with LA garment manufacturer American Apparel to fire half its immigrant workforce. Obama presides over a vast racist prison system with over 2.4 million inmates, 70% black and Latino. But all workers are its potential victims.

Why The Rulers Need Fascism

As the layoffs, wage-cuts, two-tier wage systems, racist police attacks, billion-dollar gifts to bankers, home foreclosures, millions “living” on food stamps and on the streets — as all this mounts, the ruling class fears workers may begin to rebel, especially if led by communists. They want fascistic controls in place to ward off any attempts to fight this oppression.

Candidate Obama won more than 60 million voters — mainly working-class — to promises of jobs and peace, and advancement for black and Latino workers. President Obama now delivers the opposite. His election, in fact, proves that workers never win by “voting the rascals out.” The problem is not that a “weak” Obama has opportunistically embraced the “special interests,” as some of his disappointed liberal former supporters claim. The problem is the profit system itself. Under it, every politician represents one faction or another of capitalists who gain from exploiting workers in one fashion or another.

Obama serves the dominant, imperialist Rockefeller-led wing of U.S. bosses. These are the biggest capitalists who, in defending the long-range interests of their system, use fascist control to discipline those rivals concerned only with their immediate short-term profits, at the risk of producing, or aggravating, crises like the current one.

So fascism serves many purposes for the rulers: to discipline the working class; make it pay for the capitalists’ periodic crises; combat potential rebellion; and also discipline the “Enron” types in their own class.

The only solution for the working class lies beyond the ballot box, in building a revolutionary, communist party, the PLP, with the long-term outlook of establishing true workers’ power — communism. Then we workers will control our lives and collectively distribute the fruits of our labors, free of bosses’ exploitation, racism, sexism and endless imperialist wars. 

With all the rosy hoopla coming from Wall Street and the Obama administration about the economy “turning around” and unemployment “dipping” to 10% in November, the real picture belies their hot air. As reported by the website <shadowstats.com> which “shadows” government statistics, a “double-dip” recession is in place. “What lies ahead should be a renewed plunge in economic activity.”

The severity and duration of the current Great Recession is unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 1930s. “One in eight  Americans receive food stamps, including one in four children.” (NY Times, 1/3)  Actually, there are about 35 million workers in the U.S. unemployed or underemployed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the November unemployment rate of 10% represents 15.4 million jobless. But those figures do not include:

• At least 9.2 million working part-time, unable to find non-existent full-time jobs;

• At least 2.3 million “discouraged” workers who are not counted because they have not sought a job in the four weeks preceding the government polling;

• The unreported long-term unemployed (more than a year), who the Clinton administration redefined as “beyond discouraged” and are not recorded in any government figures, even as “discouraged”;

• Those youth who joined the military because they couldn’t find a job, except a “job” killing and being killed in two U.S. imperialist wars;

• Those on welfare who would work if a job and child day-care were available;

• Those in prison for non-violent offenses (over half of the 2.4 million incarcerated) who in most countries are not jailed but put in re-hab situations, many of whom would add to the jobless rolls;

• Many of the three million homeless, living either on the streets, in tents or in shanty towns and who government polling fails to reach;

• Those among the estimated 12 million undocumented workers who are “non-persons” in the eyes of government statisticians.

Add that all up and there’s no doubt that U.S. capitalism is in the throes of another Great Depression.

Racist Unemployment

Because of racism embedded in the profit system, conditions are even worse for black, Latino, Asian and Native American workers. Black workers face a jobless rate double that of white workers, and Latino and Asian workers slightly less than double. Unemployment estimates among Native Americans run as high as 90%.

U.S. capitalism needs, and thrives on, this racism to rake in hundreds of billions in super-profits — the difference in income between white workers and the super-exploited. It’s equally useful to the bosses as a weapon to divide and weaken the entire working class’s ability to fight back.

In the 1930s, a huge communist-led movement of the unemployed involved hundreds of thousands, and at times millions, taking to the streets and fighting for welfare relief and unemployment insurance. Both were eventually won by this mass struggle. But, as with all reform gains, the ruling class chops away at them, so that Clinton’s “welfare reform” removed millions from even this dole, while the bosses’ laws leave 60% of the jobless ineligible for unemployment benefits.

Launching such a movement now in the shops and unions could pressure the rulers to reverse some of the screws they’ve put on our class. But even more importantly, it could unify the working class’s fight against this system that forces workers into such dire straits. A mass movement uniting the unemployed and employed, can become a school for communism, out of which PLP — involved in the leadership of such a fight — could win masses to join PLP and see the necessity of a revolution to wipe out capitalism. 

BROOKLYN, NY, December 21 — As soon as students at our school heard about the rally against Metrocard cuts, they got together to figure out plans to mobilize our friends and teachers. We were furious about the MTA’s latest proposal to cut free and reduced-fare student Metrocards for all NYC students in order to balance their budget. This racist attack against the overwhelmingly black and Latino school population would cost families about $1,000 a year for each child when one-in-three black workers and one-in-four Latino workers are unemployed. Half-a-million students use free or half-fare Metrocards to get to school.

Once again the bosses are forcing the working class to pay for their ongoing capitalist crisis and imperialist wars. This system, that can’t provide basic education and transportation for its young people, must be destroyed.

Over the weekend we decided to hand out flyers by the train station most students use, calling for a walkout and then to go to the city-wide rally. All day students talked with their friends about the actions. We passed out leaflets in the cafeteria and in their classes. We made signs for the rally and there was a sense of excitement throughout the school.

Some teachers used their history classroom to help organize for the rally. They said that these attacks are part of a class war being waged against the workers by the ruling class. The point was made that we could see these attacks as a test, to see how New York City students will respond to ongoing attacks.

In one class, students organized a debate. The resolution was: “Mayor Bloomberg should pay for NYC’s economic crisis.” Twenty-six students supported the resolution while only three argued against it. This debate led to even more discussions about whether a walkout and protests were the correct way to deal with budget cuts.

One student talked about the need to fight back and explained that the reason why the budget cuts exist is partly because of the trillions of dollars being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for oil. He pointed to all the bases the U.S. has built in the Middle East and told students not to have any illusions about the U.S. pulling the troops out.

When two o’clock came, a small group of students, signs in hand, went around the school knocking on classroom doors and encouraging students to walk out. Unfortunately the walk out was smaller than we had hoped. More time was needed to really organize such an event. Although some students got discouraged, the students who did go to the rally were glad they went and plan on continuing to organize more actions in the school.

When we got to the rally, Charles Barron and other city council members were making speeches and playing loud music. The music was so loud that it drowned out most attempts at chanting led by students. As PLP members arrived with our own bullhorns, we began to give speeches exposing this latest racist attack as part of the capitalist system, and raising the need for communist revolution. We explained that since trillions are being spent on imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan, bailouts for the banks and auto industry and debt service to the banks, the bosses must increasingly attack the working class. This began a series of speeches made by students, all expressing their anger at this attack.

One young man said that students had joined the rally to show their anger, not to celebrate. He directed his comments at the politicians and demanded that they turn the music off. Within seconds the whole crowd was chanting “Turn the music off.” The bosses’ politicians were isolated and students then took charge of the rally, chanting and picketing in the cold for the next hour. Three students, who made speeches about the need to fight back, were speaking on a bullhorn for the first time.

We learned a lot about what it takes to organize class struggle with both boldness and patience. We are gaining confidence in our ability to defend revolutionary ideas. One student expressed it this way: “This wasn’t my first experience walking out from school, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. I was excited and proud to be part of this movement and I know we will fight back and win students, teachers and workers to our side.”