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Stella D’Oro Workers’ Heads High, Keep Up the Fight

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13 November 2009 367 hits

BRONX, NY, October 2 — Over 200 bakers, mechanics, electricians, teachers, professors, city workers, day care workers, teamsters, and transit workers chanted together, “The workers, united, will never be defeated!”; “Keep Stella in the Bronx”; and “Whose factory? Our Factory!” in front of the Stella D’Oro factory.

The Stella workers and their supporters are still fighting to keep their jobs and to obtain compensation if the plant is sold. Brynwood Partners (owners of the factory) is in the process of selling the company and equipment to a non-union factory owned by Lance Co. in Ashland, Ohio.

One Stella worker who spoke explaining that the fight continues, and that whatever happens the workers are holding their heads high; the bosses are the losers. Another worker said they never believed that we would last three months on strike. “But they were wrong. They never thought that all of us would stay out. But they were wrong. Not a single one of us went back until we all went back together after eleven months.  They think that we will give up now. But they are wrong.” The multi-racial, men-women unity of the workers defeated the racism and sexism of the Stella bosses.

At one point, the manager of the plant was seen in his car.  One of the shop stewards leapt toward the speakers’ platform.  Grabbing the microphone from a speaker he screamed, “Dan Meyer, you a------, the factory belongs to us!” The crowd roared, “Whose factory, our factory” and surged forward. Only metal barriers backed up by a solid line of cops prevented this hated boss from getting what he deserves.

A spokesman from IBEW Local 3 (electrical workers) explained how Brynwood Co. is stealing from the workers and the taxpayers of NYC because the city bosses had given tax breaks to Brynwood to help them pay for some of the plant equipment.  His suggestion was concrete. When the bosses start to move out the machinery we must be there to stop the trucks.

More and more workers in NYC are reading CHALLENGE and coming closer to PLP due to the heroism of the Stella workers. We ALL need to redouble our efforts to build the revolutionary communist movement that will dump the Brynwood bosses and all the bosses in the ashcan of history. Join us! 

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CHALLENGE, November 11, 2009

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11 November 2009 363 hits

Workers Fight Back
CHALLENGE Inspires Transit Workers to Fight Racist Murders, Union Sellouts

LOS ANGELES, CA — After trying to pass a motion for a “5-minute strike” to protest the racist murder of Darrick Collins by the LA Sheriffs, LA transit mechanics have been trying to increase CHALLENGE networks. The following are excerpts of these discussions:
After the union meeting, a group of CHALLENGE readers, African-American, Latino, and white, went to a coffee shop to continue the discussion. Even though the motion hadn’t passed, there was a feeling of victory, because they had been able to successfully carry out an organized political fight.
A comrade told the other workers,” As we know, there’s a lot of talk of rebellions and other actions against police terror. These things will happen. The question is who will lead them and with what politics. The working class and the Party need more African-American workers to take leadership, and that’s why it’s so important for you to be involved and help build a communist base.”
An office worker in transit, sitting in front of his computer, exclaimed, “Wait a minute...This looks important,” as he read out loud the title of the PLP leaflet, “Wanted for Mass Murder: L.A. Sheriffs and Capitalism.” Then he continued, “Let me turn off this computer and read this right now.” He gave $3 for CHALLENGE and said, “What you’re doing is very good. We need this.”
“What a dog!” exclaimed a transit worker when he found out how the mechanics’ union leader had tried to stop Darrick’s uncle, a driver, from speaking at the mechanic’s union meeting.
“And aren’t we all the same union?”
“No, but when they go on strike, we support them and when we go on strike, they support us.”
A third worker said, “This is the role of the sellout union leaders, to keep the workers separated. That’s why it’s so important that we take leadership. Because with a bigger political base, these sellouts won’t be able to get away with this.”
When he gave CHALLENGE to a regular reader, an African-American worker, he said, “Here, take this 50-cent donation.” But then he took out $2 and said, “Better take this so that the paper keeps coming out. Even though I’m not a communist, I know that this is capitalism — and it stinks.”
In a study group a worker reacted furiously at the treatment received by the driver, and he agreed to begin getting out two CHALLENGES to his friends. Here, a comrade explained what we’re trying to do, “Imagine that its 4:00 pm when dozens of thousands of workers and students are riding the buses home. Suddenly the drivers announce to the passengers that they are stopping for a ‘five-minute strike’ to protest the racist murders of the working class by the cops. They pass out leaflets and ask for the support of all those on the buses. At the same time, young Party members on the buses give speeches and pass out CHALLENGE.”
After a gathering at his mother-in-law’s house, a driver who is a CHALLENGE reader sent us a text message about the funeral of Marco Salgado, a bus driver and Iraq war veteran, killed by the police in Ontario, California (40 minutes from Los Angeles) two days before. The driver who sent the text is helping build the struggle in transit against the racist police murders. He says that he’s shown CHALLENGE and Party leaflets to another seven drivers. “Could you give each edition of the paper to your friends?” we asked him. “Of course I can,” he answered.

WORKERS AND STUDENTS UNITE AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY

Last week two workers from the Los Angeles MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) came to speak to several classes at a local high school about the racist murder of Darrick Collins, a young black man, by the LA Sheriffs last month in a nearby neighborhood. Darrick’s uncle and another transit worker came to our school because some other students at the school had been involved in the protests and leafleting that the Party had initiated immediately following the shooting.
Darrick’s uncle asked the students, “How many of you young people have ever been stopped by the cops just for walking down the sidewalk? Raise your hand. “Several dozen went up. “How many have been stopped twice?” A few less hands. “Three times?” At least a dozen of the 70 students raised their hands.
Another transit worker said “Get involved; confront this brutality. From here, some of you are going to college, some to work, and some to the military. In all these places, you’re going to find the same problems that make it next to imposible for the working class to have a decent life. In all of these places we can buld the fight to overthrow the capitalist system that took Darrick Collins from his family and friends.”
In one class, since the presentations, the concept of working-class unity has been brought up by students several times. In a discussion about the “similarities and differences between Hispanic and African Americans” the first thing a student said was that the two groups had no real differences because they were both part of the working class!
Some students are writing a letter of solidarity to the family of the young man who was killed by the police. Other students are writing a petition against the racist police killings.
This is just one example of the steps forward we can take when we unite our forces: students, teachers, workers, soldiers, etc., together and support each other’s struggles. As one student said later, “Worker and student alliances like these are key to revolution. Only a worker-student-soldier alliance will bring an end to this exploitative and murderous capitalist system. The time for a communist revolution is now!”

D.C. Bus Drivers’ Slowdown Speeds Fight vs. Bosses’ Attacks

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 13 — Metro bus drivers launched a work-to-rule action last week against growing disciplinary attacks. Workers — overwhelmingly black and Latino — are being written up, suspended, and fired by racist bosses determined to soften up workers for the coming cutbacks in health care, pensions and jobs. But Metro workers let management know they’re not taking this increased harassment lying down. With communist leadership from PLP members, they will sharpen this fight-back even further!
The weak union leaders presented this action as simply “following company rules.” Roland Jeter, union vice-president, publicly declared, “We wouldn’t advocate a work slowdown.” But rank-and-file workers who launched this movement see it as the beginning of resistance to management’s attacks.
On the key North-South lines, on 14th and 16th Streets and Georgia Avenue, buses backed up in rows of six, seven and even more as they headed downtown during the morning rush hour, often with delays of 30 minutes or more. This bold rank-and-file action gave workers a sense of their real power, overcoming the union leadership’s lie that we workers would not stick together. We saw who talked the talk and who walked the walk!
At Northern Division, many younger workers indicated they were ready to provide more leadership in this class struggle, to meet fire with fire! But to do this, we must be prepared to clash with the bosses’ whole system. That means more workers must become revolutionaries, not just militants. They must join with the PLP group and plan to fight not only the Metro bosses, but join with workers globally against the whole system of capitalism that destroys the lives of countless workers, both here and worldwide.

Afghan ‘Drug War’ Scam Hides Real War for Oil

Every year, more people die from Afghan opium than any other drug in the world: perhaps 100,000 globally. While 90% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan, less than 2% is seized there. (UN report cited below)

Obama’s War on Afghan Drugs a Deadly Farce

Obama appears to be awaiting the results of Election Fraud II before he decides on a comprehensive war plan for Afghanistan. But one part is already certain. U.S. rulers are insisting that Afghanistan remain a linchpin in the anti-working class global drug trade. While substantial funding for the Taliban comes from illicit drugs, the U.S. has no intention of wiping drugs out in Afghanistan or anywhere else. Drugs are far too useful to the ruling class, both as a means of social control and as a pretext for imperialist military action.
The ruling class’s Brookings think-tank is publishing a new book called “Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs,” promoting “a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation.” Its author, Brookings’ fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, testified in Congress recently praising Obama’s new Afghan narcotics strategy of “defunding and deemphasizing eradication and focusing on interdiction.” In effect, letting the drugs flow gives U.S. forces greater policing power over the Afghan people.

U.S. ‘Fights’ Drug Lords to Secure Pipeline

U.S.-led NATO has made Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province, a focus of its phony anti-drug campaign. It’s no coincidence that the city sits on the route of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline (TAPI). Just three years ago, there were no combat battalions in or near Lashkar Gah. When plans for TAPI resumed in earnest last year, six NATO battalions (mainly U.S. and British) suddenly appeared. Today seven full battalions patrol the Lashkar Gah region, in the guise of “combating drug lords.” In the same period, poppy-producing Kandahar saw a similar troop surge. It, too, bestrides the TAPI route.
A recent UN report, “Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium,” ties the “War on Drugs” to widening and worsening wars for gas and oil:
“Drugs are funding insurgency in Central Asia where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Party of Turkmenistan, the East Turkistan Liberation Organization and other extremist groups are also profiting from the trade. The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world’s most strategic, yet volatile regions. The perfect storm of drugs, crime and insurgency that has swirled around the Afghanistan/Pakistan border for years, is heading for Central Asia. If quick preventive measures are not put into place, a big chunk of Eurasia could be lost — together with its massive energy reserves.” The report’s racist anti-Islamic language suggests strong U.S. influence.

U.S. ‘Anti-Drug’ Bases in Colombia to Target Chavez

U.S. rulers are staging the same charade in South America. In August, Obama upgraded the U.S. security agreement with Columbia to “allow the Pentagon to lease access to seven Colombian military bases for U.S. support in fighting drug traffickers and guerrillas involved in the cocaine trade.” (Reuters, 8/7/09) The top brass’s real objectives are, of course, stifling insurgency in coal-rich Columbia (Exxon Mobil’s biggest source) and establishing a military beachhead against oil-rich and anti-U.S. neighbor Venezuela.
Back in the U.S., illicit drugs, with most heroin originating from Afghanistan, help the rulers in two ways. Using drugs promotes docility among workers, and anti-drug laws strengthen the leverage of the burgeoning police state.
Cops made 1,841,200 drug-related arrests in 2007. More than 350,000 prisoners stand convicted of drug charges. So U.S. authorities condone wide-open drug trafficking, seizing a few shipments now and then for show. The vast U.S. law enforcement establishment stops about 9% of the opiates entering from Afghanistan (UN report).

Racism Central to Rulers’ Drug Policies

U.S. racist discrimination has led to the jailing of most of the black and Latino youth and workers who comprise 70% of the U.S. prison population of 2.4 million, highest in world history. At least two-thirds of these inmates are non-violent offenders (who are not incarcerated in Western Europe).
The racist drug-law sentencing in the U.S. metes out mandatory prison terms that are ten times longer for use and possession of crack cocaine (the cheaper variety pushed in black and Latino communities) than for the more expensive powder cocaine (mainly used among middle-class whites). New York State’s racist Rockefeller drug laws passed 30 years ago imprisoned predominantly black and Latino youth and workers for decades of wasted lives. This is the brutality of racist capitalism.
Obama’s U.S. war machine is not a humanitarian organization. It won’t end the drug scourge because its capitalist masters have no interest in giving up such an effective anti-working class weapon. Communists, however, eradicated the opium poppy from China shortly after they took power in 1949. Now that China’s rulers have fully embraced capitalism, the nation consumes 13% of Afghan opiate production.
The lesson? Stopping drug trafficking, or any evil the profit system thrives on, requires a real communist revolution. We must rebuild such a mass, PLP-led movement on sounder, irreversibly working-class principles.

Stella D’Oro Workers’ Heads High, Keep Up the Fight

BRONX, NY, October 2 — Over 200 bakers, mechanics, electricians, teachers, professors, city workers, day care workers, teamsters, and transit workers chanted together, “The workers, united, will never be defeated!”; “Keep Stella in the Bronx”; and “Whose factory? Our Factory!” in front of the Stella D’Oro factory.
The Stella workers and their supporters are still fighting to keep their jobs and to obtain compensation if the plant is sold. Brynwood Partners (owners of the factory) is in the process of selling the company and equipment to a non-union factory owned by Lance Co. in Ashland, Ohio.
One Stella worker who spoke explaining that the fight continues, and that whatever happens the workers are holding their heads high; the bosses are the losers. Another worker said they never believed that we would last three months on strike. “But they were wrong. They never thought that all of us would stay out. But they were wrong. Not a single one of us went back until we all went back together after eleven months. They think that we will give up now. But they are wrong.” The multi-racial, men-women unity of the workers defeated the racism and sexism of the Stella bosses.
At one point, the manager of the plant was seen in his car. One of the shop stewards leapt toward the speakers’ platform. Grabbing the microphone from a speaker he screamed, “Dan Meyer, you a------, the factory belongs to us!” The crowd roared, “Whose factory, our factory” and surged forward. Only metal barriers backed up by a solid line of cops prevented this hated boss from getting what he deserves.
A spokesman from IBEW Local 3 (electrical workers) explained how Brynwood Co. is stealing from the workers and the taxpayers of NYC because the city bosses had given tax breaks to Brynwood to help them pay for some of the plant equipment. His suggestion was concrete. When the bosses start to move out the machinery we must be there to stop the trucks.
More and more workers in NYC are reading CHALLENGE and coming closer to PLP due to the heroism of the Stella workers. We ALL need to redouble our efforts to build the revolutionary communist movement that will dump the Brynwood bosses and all the bosses in the ashcan of history. Join us!

Mexico: 44,000 Fired Electrical Workers Plan Mass Strike

MEXICO CITY, October 25 — “Strike, Strike, Strike,” clamored thousands of workers inside and outside the offices of the Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union (SME), historically one of the country’s most militant unions. President Felipe Calderon fired 44,000 workers, aiming to destroy the union, while arguing that public companies “don’t work.” Hundreds of thousands, including PLPers, have marched through the city to back the workers.
Dozens of unions, mass organizations, university, farmworker movements and representatives of the AFL-CIO are joining together to support the electrical workers to plan actions and a national strike to be announced on November 5.
Many of the leaders of these groups are reformists and pro-capitalist opportunists who will once again betray the workers. Only guaranteeing communist ideas which workers can make their own can convert them into a powerful revolutionary reality.
This government move follows the privatization of banks, railroads, and the telephone system. Despite the fact that these companies were supposedly not productive, Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest capitalists, using non-productivity as an excuse, bought up TELMEX.
The government blames the workers for the supposed “bankruptcy” of the electric company, but it’s the government — which serves the capitalists — that administered it, not the workers. Whether companies are private or public, workers are being attacked more sharply because of the crisis of capitalism.
The workers are demanding abolition of Calderon’s decree that fired them and complete rejection of the new “economic package” that raises income and sales taxes on workers’ already-poverty wages.
During a meeting, masses of rank-and-file workers applauded thunderously when several speakers demanded paralyzing Mexico City, its factories and schools, take-overs of buildings, highways, and confronting the police who’ve taken control of the Department of Power in downtown Mexico City. But immediately Martin Esparza, SME leader, said, “We can’t fall for provocations...the police and the army are part of the people...we have 100 lawyers who will help us.”
To that the workers again clamored “Strike, Strike!,” forcing other “leaders” to try to calm them. Meanwhile, Esparza is seeking support from the city’s Mayor, and from Lopez Obrador, both of the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
But neither the government, the sellout leaders, Lopez Obrador, nor the lawyers defend the workers’ interests. In 1997 the workers were attacked when the government reformed the Social Security Law. Recently they reformed the law again, depriving millions of older state workers of all rights to a secure, dignified retirement.
This time it’s the workers for the Dept. of Light and Power who are being attacked. Soon it will be those in the Federal Commission of Electricity and the PEMEX oil workers and the whole working class, to serve the interests of either U.S., European or Asian imperialists. No boss or imperialist bloc will defend the working class. They all exploit workers and keep us living in poverty.
In the last few days, marchers have supported the SME and protested massive attacks on the country’s working class. In one march, Oaxaca’s unionized teachers participated and some, together with industrial workers from Mexico City, helped distribute a PLP communist leaflet. It attacked capitalism and imperialism for the attacks on the workers and called for building PLP and communist revolution to destroy this system.
Capitalism, by its very nature, generates exploitation, poverty and wars, killing workers. We workers, the vast majority of the population, are the only ones who create everything of value. In a communist society, we workers will determine how to distribute this wealth we create, eliminating the oppression a handful of bosses imposes on us with their laws, police and sellout leaders.
Mexico’s working class, like workers internationally, are under sharpening attack from the worldwide capitalist economic crisis and intensifying imperialist rivalry. This increases the potential for PLP’s growth. We aim to mobilize all our friends to join this class struggle and be active at work or in school to build CHALLENGE networks and the Party.

France: 3,000 Undocumented Workers in Sit-Down Strikes for Rights

PARIS, October 23 — Nearly 30 worksites were still occupied here today in the 2009 mobilization of 3,000 undocumented workers, striking for “legalization” and for decent working conditions. Since October 12, around 160 undocumented workers have been occupying the FNTP, the building trades’ employers association. On the building’s façade the brass FNTP plaque rubs shoulders with a small red flag.
This Autumn “Act II” 2009 strike follows the big strike movement of undocumented workers in the Spring of 2008 — “Act I.” “We want to come out of the shadows, we can’t go on this way,” Dèh Barou told one newspaper. The undocumented Mauritanian immigrant has temped for eight years in the automobile industry. “We’re exploited, underpaid and haven’t any rights — if we don’t say ‘no’ at some point, things will never change.”
X. Macalou, a fortyish building trades worker from Mali, is a veteran of “Act I,” the Spring 2008 strikes (see CHALLENGE, 5/31/2008). Today he’s a strike organizer, leading the occupation of a temporary work agency by 200 to 300 undocumented workers. The strikers take turns manning a picket line day and night. “We’re ready to hold out to the end,” Macalou said.

Condemn Government’s Racist Policy

On October 10, over 10,000 protesters marched here to condemn the government’s racist policy of case-by-case “legalization” of undocumented workers. They castigated “a policy that segregates undocumented workers in a no-rights zone of administrative uncertainty, preventing their social integration.”
The strike was symbolically kicked off on October 13 when 23 undocumented temporary workers from West Africa who maintain the RATP subway station platforms erected a tent camp in the parking lot of the RATP Paris regional transport depot. They told how “for hours on end, we break up the asphalt on the station platforms, take 110-pound chunks up to street level, and then go back down with buckets of bubbling tar” – all this at night, “without a break, without a safety helmet, without safety shoes, without a mask ... and without ever seeing a doctor,” because none have documents.
Then, without a warrant, the government sent in the police to evict the workers and their tent camp, parroting the racist line of the French fascists, who claim that “foreigners” rob the French social security system. On October 20, the 70 strikers occupying the tax collection office in Vitry-sur-Seine were violently evicted by the police, two workers requiring first-aid treatment.
Fed up with being afraid to walk in the street, tired of being confronted with ID checks, a man from Mali, in his fifties, searches feverishly in his wallet and holds out his building trades worker ID card. Having lived in France since 1994, he has been working eight hours a day in industrial cleaning. “I’ve got all my pay stubs. I pay taxes and sales taxes like everybody else. But I have no right to social security, or to a retirement pension, or to unemployment benefits, because I haven’t got any immigration documents. That’s why I’ve joined the occupation.” To get a job, undocumented workers have to submit fake papers. “Nobody checks if they are fakes when it is a question of paying social security contributions and taxes, but they’re fakes because they don’t give us any rights,” commented Mamadou Sognane.
“If you protest, if you are tired, they tell you that you can go, because there always another undocumented worker who will take the job,” said Aboubacar. He has worked with fake documents, which cost him 4,000 euros, for the past eleven years. Undocumented workers comprise a majority in some trades.
“For the temp agencies, undocumented workers are pure profit,” said Aberkhane Boukhalfa, a union steward who works for Manpower and who makes the rounds of the picket lines “to lend a hand.” The racist super-exploitation of immigrant workers nets super-profits for these bosses.
The strikers are backed by five trade union federations and five associations. A support statement from the Paris SUD-Education teachers union said: “The exploitation of undocumented workers, the most insecure of the insecure workers, opens the way to the destruction of job security for all workers. They are the main victims of a development which is depriving increasing numbers of workers of stable jobs, generalizing job flexibility, deregulating work codes and putting pressure on workers.”

‘We’ll Occupy This Place For a Year if Necessary...’

“We’ve got to set up a solidarity fund to be able to buy food to eat,” said Kouaté Kandjura, one of the spokespeople at the FNTP occupation. “We’re determined to occupy this place as long as is necessary, for a day, a month...or a year if necessary.”
These undocumented immigrant workers are fighting for the whole working class, internationally, setting an example for workers everywhere who are exploited by the same profit system. They’re fighting the bosses’ attempts to divide us by nationality (borders established by capitalists worldwide). The “legality” of workers is based on racist laws that serve the bosses. They use it to set one group of workers against another and thereby drag down conditions of all workers.
The international working class must support this fight and adopt PLP’s slogan: “Smash all borders!”

Wanted for Murder: Bosses’ Racist Healthcare Cuts at Cook County

CHICAGO, October 26 — With almost 50 million uninsured, and racist unemployment at a 60-year high, Cook County Health Services CEO Foley and the new System Board, are slashing services and cutting jobs at a breath-taking pace. There are over 1 million uninsured workers in Cook County and with plant closings and layoffs the number grows every day. These cuts are racist to the core as 82% of the patients are black or immigrant workers.
The new strategic plan calls for closing in-patient services at Provident and Oak Forest hospitals, including the Provident OB service. They are cutting staff at Stroger and issuing a blizzard of memos and write-ups to make workers fear for their jobs. They want to make every patient pay $10 at every clinic visit, even if they can’t afford bus fare.
The Cook County Clinic in Robbins is being sold to the Christian Health System, a private for-profit outfit that charges for care on a sliding scale. If you are one of the thousands of unemployed or uninsured workers in the south suburbs, this leaves you without a doctor or without that $40 you were planning to use to put gas in the car. That’s the racist profit system; you have freedom to choose, health care or gas, food or medicine, a CT scan or next month’s rent.
Staffing in some units is being cut drastically. In the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nursing bosses Antoinette Williams and Zina Jones plan to use 40% fewer nurses for the same number of babies. Not only is this a threat to those we serve, but nurses, doctors, techs and other workers will get fired and  disciplined when mistakes inevitably occur. Nobody will write up the bosses making the cuts.
Cook County patients and health workers have two problems: racist health care cuts and capitalism. The “free-market,” organized around profits, has made public health care an endangered species. Regardless of political party, the President, Congress, Governor, mayor and health board must all serve profit needs rather than workers’ needs. Capitalism’s poverty, stress
unemployment, pollution and wars cause the health problems. The only solution is communist revolution and a worker-run system, where racism and profits are outlawed and meeting the needs of the working class comes first.
This is deliberate, premeditated understaffing, ordered by the same CEO and Board that the medical staff and unions hailed as the “savior of the system.” Maximum work from the minimum number of workers is the standard operating procedure under capitalism. This is doubly true during an economic crisis and two wars (despite the “Peace Prize” president). In a hospital, especially in an intensive care unit, this amounts to cold-blooded, racist murder.
Health workers and professionals must join forces with those we serve, who are the main victims of these attacks, to fight these viscious, racist cuts. We should begin by protesting at town hall meetings, organizing job actions and preparing for a strike to fight these attacks every way we can.
Some people believed the new “reform” board and the new “turn-around” CEO would make the County system better. Forget it! No group of wealthy administrators taking orders from the billionaire bankers, who got bailed out by the Obama gang, can meet the needs of the working class. That’s why we need workers’ power — communism. Join the PLP and help dump this murderous system for good.

Boeing Bosses Building Bridges to Fascism; Workers Need Red Revolution

SEATTLE, WA, October 26 — As CHALLENGE reported (10/28), Boeing International Association of Machinists (IAM) union district president Wroblewski hasn’t found the time to attend our local meetings since the Party’s summer plant-gate demonstrations against the no-strike deal. He has, however, found time to participate in secret no-strike talks in Chicago and Washington, D.C. led by international IAM president Buffenbarger (Seattle Times, 10/22, front page).
This shocker reemphasized how serious the bosses are about imposing fascist conditions on industrial workers. These times call for nothing less than the long-term fight for communist revolution. Increased CHALLENGE networks and revolutionary class-conscious leadership moving workers into class struggle are paramount.
In contrast, the day before many local union officials joined Boeing representatives in company cafeterias praising “20 Years [of] Building Bridges Together,” celebrating joint safety and training programs. More like building bridges to capitulation to fascism!
The UAW at Boeing is doing its class-collaborationist part. Refusing to let workers strike after their contract expired earlier this month at the Philadelphia military helicopter plant, the union leadership rammed through an extra-long 5-year contract last week. This pales before the plans discussed at the IAM secret talks — a 10-year no-strike pledge!

Reject Capitalist Illusions; Build A Workers’ Movement

Wroblewski’s e-mail response to the Times article is patently absurd: “There are no ‘secret talks’ ...just ongoing discussions.” Calls to the International have resulted in equally unbelievable assurances. “Maybe, we’ll wait till the new contract comes up [in 2012] to consider a 10-year pact,” an international official suggested by way of “reassuring” us. Why believe anything these fascists-in-waiting say? They’re clearly not opposed in principal to disarming us for 10 years.
These “reassurances” negatively affect our ability to fight back. We should not underestimate U.S. rulers’ absolute need to develop fascist control as their empire wanes because of international capitalist rivalry. Many of us may have the vain hope of some negotiated, relatively “peaceful” solution.
For years we’ve followed a certain path: Contracts come every three or four years. Often we strike, trying to stop Boeing from cutting our wages and benefits. Sometimes we even override the union’s sellouts. But we never break the chains of wage slavery, only fight to change the shape of exploitation.
As fascism is consolidated, these contracts, more than ever, clamp down on class struggle. “You can’t strike. You are under contract,” the Seattle Times editorial gleefully declares, saying we must give in to the bosses’ demands.
Boeing bosses have used racism to contract out work to factories with predominantly immigrant, black and Latino workforces, at poverty wages, a central part of fascism.
Advancing under these conditions requires strengthening the Party’s anti-racist communist political base-building, our CHALLENGE networks and developing the closer personal ties allowing us to struggle for a revolutionary outlook among readers, sellers, their families and friends.
Real gains are harder to come by because of the bosses’ fascist plans. The union misleaders’ snake oil will never spontaneously disappear. As our campaign against this no-strike deal gathers steam, our success will be judged, in part, on how much we can win workers away from capitalist illusions and to our Party. Let’s replace 5, 10, 20 years of building bridges to fascism with 5, 10, 20 years of building for communist revolution!
BULLETIN — As we go to press, Boeing has abandoned the no-strike talks. U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D.-WA.) and Washington governor Chris Gregorie intervened over the weekend. That led to further direct talks between the IAM general vice-president and Boeing, with the union offering further concessions to get a 10-year pact. The talks’ end most likely means the second 787 production line will be moved to Charleston, S.C., eventually employing 3,800.
The union wants to continue the talks, hoping for a deal that won’t result in a rank-and-file revolt. Last time the leadership pulled a stunt like this, they were greeted with a hail of chicken bones. Let’s make sure this time they have more to worry about than chicken grease on their fancy suits.

Students, Profs Support Hunter College Cafeteria Workers

NEW YORK CITY, October 5 — Over 150 Hunter College cafeteria workers rallied today after receiving a letter saying that their new bosses, AVI, will not pick up their health coverage. The non-union AVI recently took over the contract for these workers but refuses to honor the workers’ old collective bargaining agreement, which included a pension plan and free family health benefits.
The mainly black and Latino workers’ hourly wage averages $10.15/hr., not enough to afford the wage reduction needed to pay for part of their health coverage. AVI also wants to substitute a 401(k) plan for their current pension.
The protest started with union chants but quickly changed to the more class-conscious, “Workers, united, will never be defeated.” There were many support messages from students. Also, the professors’ message declared, “Today it is you, tomorrow it can be me, so we must fight together.” A Stella D’Oro worker linked the cafeteria workers’ struggle to their recent 11-month strike and called for a boycott of the cafeteria. 
The union mis-leaders were exposed when one said they would take a petition to the school president, so the protesters yelled, “Let’s all go.” His response was, “Let’s not rush into things.”
PLP is supporting the workers’ fight while pointing out that although workers view the racist AVI food company as the enemy, we should see the main racists as the Hunter College administrators. They contract this work out to companies that exploit workers on campus while sitting back as if they had nothing to do with it.
In the coming weeks we will demonstrate against the administration and AVI and try to organize a boycott and other actions to build a base for class consciousness and ultimately to win fellow students, workers and professors to see the need for communist revolution.

Derrion Albert Is Not Racist Capitalism’s First or Last Victim

CHICAGO, October 10 — The fatal beating of 16-year-old Derrion Albert on September 24 left more than one victim. Anjanette Albert, Derrion’s mother, was correct when she identified the young men charged with first-degree murder in her son’s senseless death as “victims too.” Capitalism — which creates poverty, homelessness, unemployment and war in its relentless drive for profits — causes this violence. Racism is one of the system’s main weapons that victimizes and divides our class.
Only communist revolution can make a real difference in the lives of the young black workers in these neighborhoods. Communists fight for a future of equality for the entire working class, black, Latino and white. We will have to eliminate the rich bosses who run this society in order to guarantee a future for our young people.

Tale of Two Communities Victimized by Racism

At Fenger High School, located in the “Ville,” an area in the predominantly black Roseland community, only 6% of last year’s students met or exceeded standards on the reading portion of the Illinois State Achievement Test. This community is plagued with an astronomical number of black households now in foreclosure. One-third there lives in poverty, with no job stimulus on the horizon.
Another victimized community is the neighboring Altgeld Gardens. CHA (Chicago Housing Authority) developed this isolated far-South Side housing project for black factory workers during World War II. The Pullman Company dumped its waste on the spot Altgeld Gardens now stands. One of the nation’s five worst concentrations of toxic waste is on Chicago’s South Side. The “Gardens” has a high poverty and unemployment rate and is among the 15% lowest-income communities in the U.S.; 85% of Chicago’s children live in poverty.

The Rulers’ ‘Answer’: Military School and National Guard

The youth violence infecting our communities will only sharpen with capitalism’s economic crisis. Any recovery, just like the Olympics, will not be coming to poor black and Latino neighborhoods. Obama knows this. That’s why he dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) — to the city this week to meet with angry parents, and students. “Chicago won’t be defined by this incident but rather our response to it” was the three-second sound bite Duncan told the TV news cameras. But it’s Duncan’s racist Renaissance 2010 school reform that is directly responsible for driving the escalating numbers of youth deaths even higher.
While running CPS, Duncan closed dozens of public schools, opened more charter schools and sent thousands of students outside of their poverty/gang-infested neighborhoods into new unfamiliar poverty/gang-infested neighborhoods. Before Renaissance 2010, the intolerable number of CPS students fatally shot in these neighborhoods was 15. In the 2006-07 school year it rose to 24; in 2007-08 to 23 deaths and 211 shootings. Now in 2008-09 it’s risen to over 40 fatalities and 290 shootings (five in the first two months). These resemble numbers from Iraq or Afghanistan.
The war-makers’ “answer”? The miniaturization of the schools. Duncan closed Carver High, Altgeld Gardens’ neighborhood school, turning it into a selective enrollment military school. He “turned around” Fenger High School, meaning he fired all the teachers, clerks, engineers, etc., hiring all new personnel.
Mayor Daley and Jesse Jackson’s response is using the National Guard to patrol the streets in these black neighborhoods, to “provide safe passage to school for our youth.” Marilyn Stewart, Chicago Teachers Union president and collaborator with Duncan, responded by calling for special schools that house only “trouble-making” students. They have plenty already; they’re called juvenile detention centers.
PLP’s Education Club took the lead from the youth and held a rally and CHALLENGE sale in the Roseland community, distributing leaflets and 130 papers and speaking on the bullhorn. A college student printed a sign reading, “Beep 4 revolution.”
Overall, the young people were encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive reaction from the workers and youth they talked to. This has sparked a revival in our regular Saturday CHALLENGE sales, and spurred us to join an anti-violence youth organization, enabling us to meet more workers interested in PLP’s ideas on multi-racial unity and revolution. Through such mass organizations, we can help organize anti-racist class struggle, possible school walkouts and mobilizations against these increasing racist assaults.
Progressive Labor Party invites you to join us in building such a movement. The fight for a communist society — the main answer to these racist attacks — will destroy this profit system and replace it with a society based on the needs of the international working class. Join Us!

Reality Produces Qualitative Change; Youth Blames Obama for Racist ‘Mess’

“She wants us to think like Obama?” my student asked incredulously. “He’s the one who got us in this mess!” Moments earlier, we were meeting with a student-led social justice organization. Instead of discussing the fatal beating of a black student and it’s connection to our struggles against public school sabotage, a professor was ringing a chime and announcing, “We are progressing!” to transition from task to mind-numbing task.  This is progress?
The last straw was when an adult said our mission statement was too confrontational. Mission statement authors were stunned when the principal
suggested the students who were fighting at school “take it outside.” The authors were students from near where Derrion Albert had been beaten to death. The moderator added, “We need to think like Obama.”
At this, I walked out. To my surprise, a Summer Project participant was at my heels. I asked why he walked out. Though hesitant in L.A. about blaming Obama, he was dead-set today: “He got us into this mess!” From what the students learned fighting attacks on neighborhood schools, they instantly blamed Arne Duncan for what happened to Derrion. I asked if that made it Obama’s fault and they said “Yes!”
In the hall, we agreed Derrion wasn’t the only victim, all the young men involved are victims of this racist system. If they don’t get killed, they will be lost to prisons. When we returned, the meeting hadn’t changed. My friend struggled with me to give it a chance. I said it’s patronizing the students and wasting time we could discuss issues. I said telling students to be compliant with the system that’s destroying their schools invalidates their experiences with attacks and neglect in their schools.
He asked how PLP meetings are run. “With respect!” was my first answer. “We talk about immediate issues first. Everyone sees themselves as a leader, so everyone makes sure meetings run well. Our job here is to develop our students into leaders.”
Just then, a student interrupted the professor. “Why are we ignoring communication issues [between black and brown students] and talking about pens and paper?” He opened a dam, all the students chimed in, “This isn’t what’s wrong,” “We don’t run meetings like this!” When the students spoke up, my friend admitted, “I was wrong, you were right!”
Last year, this group organized and participated in more actions than ever before. They got the attention of teachers who want to get involved due to our militant line against the (now nationally-led) attacks on, and re-segregation of, Chicago Public Schools. Students who come around PLP are stepping up their political leadership. The student who walked out of the meeting now meets with a club and is pulling this group to the left as we struggle to recruit Chicago students to the Party.
Red Teacher

Anti-Racist Fight Turned Water on for Newark Residents

NEWARK, NJ, October 21 — Forty black and white workers in front of City Hall demonstrated against the racist cut-off of water to over 1,000 tenants and homeowners. People with families and many with small children have been denied water for drinking, bathing, heating and sewage since the end of August. Many of these are tenants in apartment buildings where the landlord is responsible to pay the water bill.
Meanwhile, Prudential Insurance Company has refused to pay its bill of over $2 million, and New Community Corporation, which owns many buildings, land and businesses, owes hundreds of thousands in delinquent bills. Neither has been denied service.
Prior to the demonstration various groups of concerned individuals met to discuss organizing tenants door to door, initiating class action suits and moving to physically turn the water on. Tenants even offered to pay their rent to the City to reinstate water service, but the City took the position that it did not want to “interfere with a tenant-landlord relationship.” Can it be any clearer that the corporations, landlords and City work hand-in-glove to protect profits?
Most people at the demonstration were members of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP). POP demonstrates frequently against police brutality, but the leadership calls for citizen review and never links the capitalist system’s laws to racist oppression. One speaker even pressed for “Black Power.” A nurse who joined the picket line distributed and sold 30 CHALLENGES, pointing out the article on John Brown and the need for multi-racial unity. She spoke, saying that the capitalist system was responsible for this racist attack, and called for action, “Politicians, corporations, all be gone; Black and white workers’ power turns the water on!”
Two days later, the water was reinstated but we know that the City bosses may very well turn it off again come January in their effort to extract every penny from the poorest residents of Newark. We will not cease our organizing efforts to build mass unity among Newark’s workers to prepare for future action against these racists attacks and build communist consciousness that the only way to defeat the attacks against workers is with communist revolution.

Can’t Depend on Rulers’ Laws:
Turn Militant Outrage into Fight vs. Bosses’ System

NEW YORK CITY, October 28 — Hundreds of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 workers are marching across the Brooklyn Bridge today. They are protesting the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) decision to appeal a legally-binding arbitration award granted in August. Some workers also organized slowdowns on October 14, a union-labeled “Day of Outrage.”
Slowdowns and other on-the-job actions are workers’ best responses to these attacks. But the political direction of militancy matters as much as the militancy itself. Reforms under capitalism can be taken away. For lasting progress, workers need to overthrow the bosses and build a communist society where workers hold power and work for need, not profit.
Many transit workers who were fined for the illegal 2005 strike are furious that the MTA is challenging workers for following the arbitration law. Protest signs read, “What part of binding don’t you get?”
The award is based on the cops’ and firefighters’ contracts, whose majority white workforces got better deals than transit. But the city’s racist rulers chose to attack transit’s mainly black and Latino workforce.
The boss’s laws enforce the will of the capitalist ruling class. The Taylor law was a reform “victory” that allowed municipal unions to organize after the 1966 transit strike. But the bosses used it to punish transit workers in the aftermath of the 1980 and 2005 strikes. The bosses’ laws serve their needs, and arbitration is binding only when it favors them.
The August award they’re fighting gave workers an 11% pay raise over three years, and reduced the healthcare contribution to 1.5% from 1.53%. But the 2006 arbitration award, received after the strike, punished workers and so went unchallenged by the bosses.

What Next?

More slowdowns and demonstrations are needed but rank-and-file workers, not union misleaders, or politicians like Bill Thompson, John Liu, and Bill De Blasio, must lead fight-backs. Local 100’s two main factions are trying to direct workers’ anger only at Mayor Bloomberg, for backing the MTA board’s racist decision, but all politicians serve the capitalist class. Following them will lead to similar deals that deceive and attack workers.
Lasting victory means building the Progressive Labor Party to raise the ante of class struggle and organize against capitalism. That’s the only way to ensure that the militant action of October 14 was not just blowing off steam, but serves as a small example of the tremendous class struggle needed to unite for communist victory. J

The MTA — Wall Street’s ATM

The bosses want the city’s workers to resent “greedy” transit workers for their above-average contract. The real greedy ones are MTA bosses and Wall Street banks that made transit generate millions in bank profits.
As Track Equipment Maintainer Kevin Maloney explained in a letter to the civil-service newspaper The Chief (10/9), the real cause of the MTA’s budget woes is “debt service,” not
“out-of-control” labor costs.
Fifty-five percent of the MTA’s funds are paid by riders. To fill the budget gap created by a lack of government funding, the MTA colluded with major banks to borrow money in the form of bonds. Now two billion dollars, nearly 20% of the MTA’s 2009 budget, is going to “debt service” — paying the interest on those bonds. This is the fastest growing part of the MTA’s deficit (Straphangers Campaign).
The liberal Drum Major Institute reported (4/9), “Between 2003 and 2008, debt payments and non-labor expenses grew by 45 percent and 40 percent, respectively, whereas labor costs grew by 16 percent. Debt payments are expected to grow another 51 percent by 2012 — a financially unsustainable trend.”

Capitalism’s Racist Jaws Trap Another Black Airport Worker

NEW YORK CITY, October 26 — Last week a young black worker was pulled over by the cops on his way to work at LaGuardia airport. Initially the cops told the worker he had been pulled over for a broken taillight, but on the ticket, they cited him with not stopping at a stop sign. Why did the police pull him over? DWB (driving while black) seems his most likely offense.
When the racist cops questioned the young worker, they found his license was temporarily invalid and placed him under arrest. After dragging him to jail, the police rifled through the worker’s car and found a laptop in his trunk. The racist cops went to the exhaustive step of running the serial number on the computer. At this point, they discovered it had been reported stolen at the airport six months earlier.
Right now, it is not known if the worker stole the laptop. What is known is this: the NYPD proceeded to contact the fascist airport police, who confiscated the worker’s airport ID, making it impossible for him to work and notifying his bosses of the proceedings, which will undoubtedly lead to his firing. The cops then charged him with theft on federal property, a mandatory felony, and threatened to send him to Riker’s Island prison.
What is also known is this: last November the airport police (to fill a quota of arrests) attacked a worker helping passengers. Every day the NYPD harasses black and Latino workers doing nothing more than coming and going from work. Every week the black worker was harassed by the racist airport bosses for petty uniform violations and the like. And on every flight that the arrested worker loaded and unloaded, the bosses stole thousands of dollars from him and other workers by paying them as little as $7.50 an hour and reaping $10,000s in ticket sales (per flight).
Capitalism is based on wage slavery, a system where bosses steal from workers every day. It uses the brutality of the police to enforce and defend this law. At the same time, it tries to teach us as workers to be individualistic and only look out for ourselves.
PLP does not condone hurting other workers, and this includes stealing. However, we should remember that workers under capitalism steal either because they do not have enough or because the system teaches us selfish individualism and to not care about others. Fighting for communism means not only fighting to meet the material needs of the working class but also fighting for more collective, pro-worker thinking.
This young worker was definitely influenced by capitalist ideology, as we all are. But primarily, he is just one more worker who has fallen into the racist jaws of the capitalist justice system. If he had been a white boss, it is likely that the police never would have pulled him over. But the NYPD pulled over a young black worker, and under capitalism that is often as bad as a death sentence, either by the bullet or by starvation from a lost paycheck.

CHALLENGE Helps LA Teachers Intensify Class Struggle

We are happy to see CHALLENGE again printing letters critical of the work; this will help us to have a useful dialogue about how best to organize for communism in the day-to-day work. In Los Angeles we are doing our best to organize students and teachers in the union meetings and at our local schools around CHALLENGE and to build a base for the revolutionary line of the Party. We have been able to increase our distribution to about 250 papers per issue. We are active in the teachers’ union and this spring organized two illegal one-hour work stoppages against teacher layoffs at our school that were about 90% effective.
These actions were organized by CHALLENGE readers at our schools, raising the need to defy the bosses’ laws and the union contract to fight against the attacks on the schools in school, area and city-wide meetings. We fought for a one-day job action within the city-wide union, and had a successful vote at our schools, but when the union leadership folded in response to a court injunction, we could not pull off wildcat strikes at our schools.
Nevertheless, we have increased the paper sales and recruited a new PL club of young people active in these struggles and in school and the Summer Project. We advanced the political understanding of teacher and student CHALLENGE readers by refusing to let the union leadership define the limits of discussion. As fascism develops, the ruling class uses cutbacks and “school reform” to cheaply prepare the schools for war, especially in a school population that is overwhelmingly Latino and black. We put the struggle against charter schools in that context, rather than opportunistically echoing the “anti-privatization” rhetoric of the union leaders and revisionists (fake leftists).
We have also been self-critical about being misled, like so many honest teacher activists, into believing the hype about “bottom-up” school reform. Many honest trade unionists and good anti-racist teachers are willing to believe in reforms because they want something better for kids. We struggle with our political friends to see that racist capitalism has nothing good for the schools: that “school reform” is a fascist plan to teach a few technical skills and a lot of patriotism as they increase class size and teacher hours, and lay off experienced teachers and union janitors. We’re trying to spread an understanding that reform and revolution are a contradiction, united in the struggle of teachers and students for a decent education.
We are not fighting to make the bosses’ schools work better for them, but for a communist world where education will serve the working class. Calling for a strike against cutbacks and school reform is part of fighting for the political leadership of students and teachers, showing them the direction of the fight for communist revolution and winning them to the Party. Although we have a lot of weaknesses, we measure our success in recruitment, in increased distribution of CHALLENGE, and our friends’ deeper understanding of the attack on the working class as the crisis of capitalism sharpens, inter-imperialist rivalry accelerates and communist revolution becomes increasingly necessary.
Los Angeles Comrade Teachers

‘Recovery’ for Bosses, Depression for Workers

Despite the media trumpeting the end of the U.S. economic crisis, the U.S. is in a depression. This depression is a necessary part of the capitalist system and reflects capitalism’s racist nature. Ultimately, the only way to make conditions better for workers worldwide is communist revolution. 
Capitalism is unplanned and competitive — the measure of success of any company is maximum profit. U.S. manufacturing is in long-term decline compared to its world rivals, mainly due to the falling rate of profit in highly automated U.S. industries. Since the 1970s, falling wages for U.S. workers have meant they can’t buy the very commodities they produce. This in turn has led to one new credit gimmick after another. The latest of these were mortgage scams, which caused home prices to soar. The inevitable collapse of those prices has set off a chain reaction of foreclosures and economic crises. 

Jobless ‘Recovery’

Conditions of workers in Africa, Asia and South America are much worse than those of U.S. workers. But workers here are already at depression-era levels of unemployment. A U.S. Federal Reserve chief concedes that the “official” national unemployment rate would skyrocket to 16% from 9.7% if discouraged workers are added to figures (Agence France-Presse, 8/28/09). Include those workers who work part-time but would take a full-time job if they could find one and that number goes to 21%, fully 30 million workers. 
In Detroit, the former center of the U.S. auto industry, the official unemployment rate is 28.9%, the highest number since records started being kept (ABC News 8/28/09). The New York Times (NYT) reports (8/11/09) that about a third of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six months, the highest number ever.
Unemployment depresses wages and benefits, improving the boss’s bottom line at the cost of higher exploitation of employed workers. Whatever “recovery” takes place for bosses’ profits, it will be a jobless one for workers.  

Racist Devastation

This crisis has a particularly racist character. Even before this depression started, one-third of the so-called black middle class “was already in danger of falling to a lower economic level” (NYT, 9/13/09). As bad as white workers have been hit, black and Latino workers have suffered even more. 
Subprime and other lousy mortgages were aimed disproportionately at black and Latino workers in urban areas. As mortgage rates adjusted upward, more and more black workers couldn’t pay their bills. Also, by 2010 “40% of African-Americans nationwide will have endured patches of unemployment or underemployment”  (NYT, 9/13/09). Those factors combined have spelled devastation for many black workers.

Two Paths: Endless Profit Wars or Communist Revolution 

The strategy of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Obama’s economic team “was to create staggering amounts of money out of thin air” (NYT, 8/20/09). They printed hundreds of billions of dollars, not backed up by actual value, and used that money to “stimulate” the economy. This has created a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. U.S. rulers are arguing amongst themselves about what to do next. But it will take nothing short of a major war or series of wars for U.S. and other bosses around the world to get out of this crisis. 
During the Great Depression, the economic growth of 1934-1936 was followed by government spending cuts. But another collapse followed in 1937-1938. What ended the Depression and gave the U.S. capitalists an advantage over it’s competitors was the destruction of German, French, and British factories in World War II and the mobilization of millions of unemployed into the U.S. military. 
Only the overthrow of the racist profit-driven capitalist society can solve the problem of unemployment and economic wars. Communist-led reform struggles for more jobs, higher wages and against the bosses’ wars can build a base for anti-racist class unity against the bosses. But there are no reform solutions for capitalism’s problems. Communism would organize production to meet the needs of the working class. No profit calculation would enter this picture. Join our fight for a communist world.

Red Eye on the News

Dump toxic costs on the poor

GW, 10/2 – The oil trading company Trafigura last month agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Ivory Coast, after the Guardian and the BBC’s Newsright obtained emails sent by its traders. They revealed that Trafigura knew that the oil slops [waste products] it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste... It is one of the world’s worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable, just another instance of the rich world’s activities. Dump your telly over a hedge and you will be in big trouble. Dump 10,000 in Nigeria and you will get away with it. It suits all the rich nations not to ask too many questions, as long as the waste goes to faraway countries.
The Trafigura story is a metaphor for corporate capitalism. The effort of all enterprises is to keep the profits and dump the costs on someone else. Price risks are dumped on farmers, health and safety risks are dumped on subcontractors, insolvency risks are dumped on creditors, social and economic risks are dumped on the state, toxic waste is dumped on the poor, and greenhouse gases are dumped on everyone.

For insurers, sick are the enemy

MinutemanMedia.org, 9/25 – We hardly need to recite the shortcomings of our malevolent insurance companies. Their executives are paid millions, their duplicative approval systems are bankrupting all of us, and their customers are viewed as the enemy, always sick and presenting medical bills. The obvious goal for them is to sign up folks who are healthy and dump folks who are ill. It’s just good business. That’s the genius of the free market we hear so much about.
To promote this common-sense business model, insurers hire battle groups of lobbyists, pay fortunes to political campaigns, and advertise profligately.

Big biz decides what media say

MinutemanMedia.org – This is the big picture of the U.S. media system: On the most important issues — questions of war and peace, liberty, social justice, public health and prosperity, and the fate of the planet — it has failed us time and time again.
And that’s not surprising, because the system is founded on a couple of very bad ideas: It’s a bad idea to have journalism mainly carried out by large corporations whose chief interest in news is how to make the maximum amount of money from it. And it’s a bad idea to have as these corporations’ main or sole source of revenue advertising from other large corporations, so that the news industry’s overwhelming financial incentive is to keep those advertisers happy.

Red atheist risked her life vs. Nazis

NYT, 10/1 – Dr. Strobos, a sturdy 89, is honored every so often for the quietly valiant things she did almost 70 years ago as a medical student during the German occupation of the Netherlands: working with her mother, she hid more than 100 Jews who passed through their three-story rooming house in Amsterdam.
That sanctuary... was just a 10-minute stroll from a more fabulous hideout: Anne Frank’s.
Tina Strobos... was seized or questioned nine times by the Gestapo and was once hurled against a wall and knocked unconscious. Why would she take such gambles for people she barely knew?
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said with nonchalance...
But such an outlook has an origin, what Donna Cohen, the Holocaust Center’s executive director, calls “learned behavior.” Dr. Strobos comes from a family of socialist atheists who took in Belgian refugees during World War I and hid German and Austrian refugees before World War II.

Clean the air by poisoning water!

NYT, 10/13 – Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers. Air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.
So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys.
But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day... the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh... “It’s like they decided to spare us having to breathe in these poisons, but now we have to drink them instead.”

Biggest democracy tops child deaths

GW, 10/9 – India’s growing status as an economic superpower is masking a failure to stem a shocking rate of infant deaths among its poorest people. Nearly 2 million children under five die every year in India — one every 15 seconds... World Health Organization figures show it ranks 171st out of 175 countries for public health spending.
Malnutrition, neonatal diseases, diarrhea and pneumonia are the major causes of death...”The difference between rich and poor is huge...The health service has failed to deliver.”

Different law for non-rich

NYT 9/30 – Nearly a million poor people continue to be denied representation in the nation’s courts because legal aid clinics lack sufficient financing...for low-income clients in civil cases across the country...People without means...”lose their homes” and “lose their kids because they don’t have access to a lawyer that the rest of us take for granted.”

Women abused by playboy priests

NYT 10/16 – The group, Good Tidings, was founded by Cait Finnegan and her husband, a former Catholic priest, originally with the idea that they would help priests who had fallen in love...”We were naive,” Mrs. Finnegan said. “We quickly discovered that many of these priests were playboys...they were simply staying and playing. It was the women who needed the support. Unfortunately, many women accept the kind of abuse from a priest that they would never accept if they were dating another man..”
She said that in 25 years, Good Tidings had been contacted by nearly 2,000 women who said they were involved with priests... A landmark study in 1990 by the scholar A.W. Sipe, a former Benedictine, found that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and an additional 8 percent to 10 percent had occasional heterosexual relationships.

Mo’ child left behind...

NYT 10/15 – The latest results on the most important nationwide math test show that student achievement grew faster during the years before... No Child Left Behind law... the law requires schools to bring 100 percent of students to reading and math proficiency by 2014.
On the most recent test, 39 percent of fourth graders and 34 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level.
An unintended consequence of the law has been that many states have lowered the rigor of their standards and the difficulty of their tests to avoid sanctions the law imposes on failing schools, a process Secretary Duncan has called a “race to the bottom.”

China grabs trade of U.S., Europe

NYT 10/14 – SHANGHAI – With the global recession... China is grabbing market share from its export competitors, solidifying a dominance in world trade that many economists say could last long after any economic recovery.
China’s exports this year have already vaulted it past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter. Now, those market share gains are threatening to increase trade frictions with the United States and Europe...European officials are clamoring for China to reduce its flood of exports and pressing for antidumping investigations...
The United States... has largely been silent... because Washington is trying to improve relations with Beijing at a time when it desperately needs China to purchase American debt. “China is getting stronger,” Mr. Tao at Credit Suisse says. “Its competitors are getting weaker... as exporters.”

U.S. politics’ best isn’t good enough

GW 10/16 – It is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversatiom about Obama... Any conversation about what he does morphs into one about who he is and what he might be...
In Oslo, where he was last week awarded the Nobel peace prize, they think he might be Mother Teresa. A peace prize for a leader, nine months into his term, whose greatest foreign policy achievement to date is to wind down one war so he can escalate another, is bizarre, to say the least...
He is now turning out to be the most progressive president in 40 years...But the limits are also all too apparent. Being the most progressive American president in more than a generation is not the same as being progressive... what U.S. politics can produce right now... may just not be good enough.

Nations ducking bill for climate

NYT 10/15 – The price tag for a new climate agreement will be a staggering $100 billion a year by 2020, many economists estimate; some put the cost at closer to $1 trillion. That money is needed to help fast-developing countries like India and Brazil convert to costly but cleaner technologies as they industrialize, as well as to assist the poorest countries in coping with the consequences of climate change, like droughts and rising seas...
Industrialized nations like the United States and those in Europe have agreed in principle to make such payments... but they... put no new cash on the table...
Equally contentious is the issue of which countries should give, and which should receive. Should the contributors be only industrialized nations, or should they include rapidly developing – and increasingly wealthy – polluters like China?
Xie Zhenhua, the lead Chinese climate negotiator... said the United Nations should not expect China to pay.
“Global warming is a result of carbon dioxide from developed countries during their industrialization.”

Environment hits workers hardest

LAT 9/15 – For the affluent leftists in the audience, environmentalism might be about polar bears and other “charismatic megafauna.” But “in the poor part of town, when they say, ‘Oh, the environment is terrible,’ they’re talking about air pollution, asthma, cancer clusters and birth defects.”

U.S. is the problem, not the solution

GW 10/16 – To the editor:
One of the main reasons why the U.S. cannot solve the world’s problems alone is the bald fact that the U.S. – like all of history’s pretenders to world domination – is itself the world’s number one problem... The culture of violence, fear, noise, excess, militarization, money – and celebrity-worship etc, is all conveyed by a mendacious and largely proto-fascist array of media...
At the U.N. general assembly, rapturous applause greeted Obama’s mainly platitudinous 40-minute oration...Gaddafi’s rambling address, which seriously analyzed western hegemony and arrogance as a root cause of international friction and injustice, was consensually dismissed as a predictable lunatic rant...
Let us not forget that it is insane U.S. (and European) warmongering that has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; nor that the 50,000 U.S. soldiers killed (for what?) in Vietnam stand in stark contrast to the “between 1 and 2 million Vietnamese dead” (as it is usually loosely phrased)...Mad “leadership”, though not exclusive to the west, is a significant part of our legacy to the rest of the world.

Steady Rain Couldn’t Dampen Throng Celebrating John Brown’s Raid

HARPER’S FERRY, WV, October 17 — Braving the cold and rain, nearly 300 antiracist workers and students from around the country commemorated the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Celebrants, more than half under the age of 25, acknowledged the need to continue Brown’s fight against racism through multiracial unity and militancy.
Teachers introduced the events in their classrooms and encouraged coworkers to help build for the events. Many months of fundraising, including a 50-50 raffle held in all attendees’ cities, helped make the day possible.
The program kicked off with a recitation of Brown’s speech from his trial, given by a founder of the Harper’s Ferry Historical Society. Brown pointed out that if he was rich, fighting against workers, instead of a worker fighting against the system of slavery, his fate would have been different. When asked about his participation in the program, the Historical Society member was excited about the rally and exasperated with the National Park Service for not including these events on their official activities’ calendar.
Students performed a skit, playing Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass planning the raid. It focused on Douglass’ aversion to violence and Tubman’s actions. Brown’s collective included Harriet Tubman, whose role was celebrated as well. The skit was followed by the crowd warming up with anti-racist and communist chants and singing “John Brown’s Body.”
There was a performance of spoken word and song about Emmett Till, a young black boy, whose lynching helped spark the Civil Rights movement. A performer recreated Till’s fear of his lynching. Another performer sang Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” written after seeing a lynching in the segregated South. The crowd responded with a strong cadence of “smash racism, power to the workers.”
The fired-up crowd thronged together to march through the streets of Harper’s Ferry with militant chants and red flags, taking its anti-racist message to the townspeople and National Park Service visitors. Everyone braved a steady rain reminiscent of the conditions 150 years prior.
A closing rally was held at the original site of the federal armory which had housed the 100,000 weapons which were Brown’s goal. A long-time anti-racist fighter spoke of Brown’s good plan and the lessons the current generation needs to learn to fight racism. He ended with the passing of the “Sword of Struggle” to the younger generation to once and for all smash racism. A college student accepted the sword with humility and renewed commitment to the struggle.
The rally ended with a speech calling for the need to destroy capitalism, fight for communism, and join the Progressive Labor Party. The day’s commemoration reinforced the lessons of multiracial unity, militancy, and boldness as the guideposts to our lives.

Forging Parent-Student-Teacher Unity Inspired by John Brown

BROOKLYN, NY, October 18 — What a week we’ve had at our High School! Class struggle has been alive and well: We’ve helped fight the layoff of a co-worker, built our union chapter, fought back against a racist attack by the principal, and, out of all our activities, nearly 40 students, parents, and friends joined us to celebrate John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (see article above).
We started the week with a parents’ dinner for the parents whose children were interested in coming with us to Harper’s Ferry. Seven students and eight parents came. While we ate we talked about our reasons for going to Harper’s Ferry, and celebrating John Brown’s raid, and the fight against slavery. The discussion broadened, as we talked about layoffs on other jobs. One parent works for a city agency, which has laid off 700 workers and replaced them with temps. Other parents talked about their struggles in their schools.
We explained that the reason we were organizing to go to Harper’s Ferry was because we were revolutionaries who wanted to win other workers to see the need for revolutionary violence to overthrow capitalism, the same way that John Brown saw the need for violence to overthrow
slavery. Three parents came on the trip, and another couple gave us a contribution. A post Harper’s Ferry potluck celebration is in the works.

Organizing Against Layoffs

In NYC, 530 school aides are being laid off (NY Daily News, 10/9), a racist attack because most are black and Latino. At our school, one aide is being “bumped” for a more senior worker who was laid off at another school.
In response, PL members and leaders of the teachers’ union chapter at the school organized a petition to build support and anger among the workers in the building. Almost everyone signed the petition. We then campaigned to bring teachers and other staff to the UFT Delegates Assembly (DA) to get more support. We weren’t able to get other staff to come, but we were able to get our co-worker into the meeting, and pressure the UFT misleaders to help fight for her job.
The following day we had two union-chapter meetings in the school where about 25 workers met to make plans to fight the harassment and micromanagement by our school administration. We also distributed stickers that many staff and students wore, saying essentially, “No Layoffs... Make the Bosses Take the Losses.” We assigned members of each department in the school to build for a dinner on Friday to take our soon-to-be laid-off coworker out after her last day, and struggled with staff to come out to a picket line Friday morning.
Friday morning about 20 staff picketed the school, against lay-offs and cutbacks, chanting, “They say cut back, we say fight back,” and, “The workers, united, will never be defeated.” It was difficult to get more staff out, but we’re setting the stage for more protests in the future.
Mid-day one of our comrades was called into the racist principal’s office and warned not to bring students to Harper’s Ferry. This racist attack on student-staff unity only made us angrier and more committed, and we found later that even conservative members of our staff were infuriated.
We followed all of this activity with a social in a local bar Friday. About 30 of us toasted our co-worker, and shared stories, and built ties.

The Result of This Week

Over thirty-five students, parents and teachers joined us in a day of celebration of the fight against racism with working-class violence and multiracial unity in Harper’s Ferry. We are developing plans, with students, staff and parents, to fight the racist principal. We will start a campaign to fight for student-staff unity. The future is ours, the struggle continues.

HOW WE ORGANIZED

During the summer, some PL’ers began thinking about organizing a trip to Harper’s Ferry to celebrate John Brown’s raid. Some of us were in a position to organize official school trips while others were in a more fascistic situation. In one instance, the principal said if a teacher arranged to meet a student at an AIDS Walk, that would be a “school trip” and it needed his approval. This was obviously false, but this principal was more intent on attacking certain teachers than in educating students.
In one Brooklyn high school, teachers had nearly 50 students interested in the John Brown trip. Everything from politics to logistics was explained to the students’ parents. There was an overwhelmingly positive response. Several parents wanted to go with their children. An information/parent permission slip was produced along with a pamphlet about the activities in Harper’s Ferry. Those materials were circulated to all the interested students.
Excitement grew and new students became interested. Calling parents became a daily activity. Money and permission slips began coming in. A parent informational meeting was organized and a sizable group of parents and their children attended.
In the end, the trip had an excellent turnout. Several parents and dozens of students came. Most thought it was a great trip despite the rain. Now the struggle moves on.
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CHALLENGE, October 28, 2009

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a href="#Stella D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity">St"lla D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity

a href="#Norway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama">Norw"y’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama

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John Brown, Harriet Tubman: Models for Multi-Racial Unity and Action

Inspiration for All Workers:

a name="Stella D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity"></">St"lla D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity

BRONX, NY, October 8 — Stella D’Oro strikers, the working class salutes you!

You have shown the world an unbreakable solidarity that defied the attacks of profit-driven bosses for eleven long months during which not one worker scabbed, not one worker crossed the picket line.

You have shown how Latino, black, white and Asian workers, women and men, immigrant and native-born, can fight the bosses’ racist divisive tools and unite as a class.

You have shown that capitalist sexist ideology can be defeated, as men workers refused to take the bosses’ bribe offers to return to work, refusing to allow their sister workers to suffer a $10,000-a-year wage-cut over five years.

You have not let the bosses’ cops’ intimidation — tearing down your tent shelter in the dead of winter — break your spirit.

You have inspired thousands across the city — postal, transit, hospital and office workers, teachers, students and college professors — to come to support you and take back these lessons to their co-workers.

You have refused to succumb to anti-communism, working with supporters from PLP, discussing our communist ideas, edging closer to adopting the red flag as your flag, waving CHALLENGE as your flag as you entered the factory. As one striker said, "We’ve all been ‘infected’ now. Who knows where we’re all going to end up? But wherever we go, we’re going to spread PLP."

You have seen, on the one hand, the Labor Board supposedly "order" the Brynwood bosses to take you back honoring the old contract and then these same bosses, following their capitalist laws, close the factory, and sell the equipment and brand name to a low-wage, non-union boss in Ohio. From this you can learn the lesson that as long as the bosses have state (government) power, they can manipulate their laws to throw workers on the street.

Capitalism: Billions for the Banks, Joblessness and Debt for Workers

Yes, it is true that, after this long struggle, you have joined the ranks of 30 million other unemployed workers who have lost their jobs, their wages, their savings, their health insurance and many their homes. This must not be minimized. It is the terrible tragedy that a capitalist system, based on the drive for maximum profits, visits on the working class which produces everything of value but sees most of it stolen by the bosses only concerned with their bottom line.

And it is also true that the Obama administration gives hundreds of billions to the bankers who are responsible for these massive attacks on the working class. Meanwhile, it conducts wars seeking control of oil supplies and using our children as cannon fodder to kill brother and sister workers to maintain their profits in their fights with rival imperialists worldwide.

This combined oppression at home and abroad adds up pure and simple to fascism, U.S. style.

Through all this we can see the true colors of the labor "leaders" of unions who with over two million members in this city barely lifted a finger to support your valiant struggle. It is clear that, in their defense of capitalism, they are on the bosses’ side.

It is for many of these reasons that, on short notice, over 50 supporters, mostly organized by PLP, came to salute you, cheering and clapping as you left your final shift. After having chanted inside the factory, "The workers, united, will never be defeated!"— as you did at every shift change leading to the closing — you came out wearing your bakers’ caps, some in white uniforms, seemingly unwilling to let go of their craft.

One rank-and-file leader told us he learned as much in the last three days trying to organize workers to carry out a sit-down occupation than he had in the previous 14 months. His team did their best and did persuade a considerable number, but not, in their judgment, enough of a critical mass to spark a seizure of the factory.

What Is Winning?

So despite having been unable to overcome the whole system, its profit-protecting laws, its cops, its courts, its whole government, victory can be measured in lessons learned for the future:

• The multi-racial unity of black, Latino, Asian and white workers practiced in this struggle must guide our class.

• The international unity of native-born and immigrant from all over the world can defeat the nationalist divisions the bosses use to set us against each other.

• The equality of women and men is essential to every fight against the capitalists whose exploitation and degenerate sexist culture weakens our fight for a decent life.

• The solidarity of all workers — all for one and one for all — is our guiding light.

• The communist ideas of PLP are necessary to fight this capitalist system until it and the bosses’ state power are ultimately destroyed and a workers’ society replaces it in which the working class that produces all value will collectively share the fruits of our labors.

• Our biggest victory can become the joining and building of PLP — and the circulation of its ideas through the spreading of CHALLENGE, the only paper to report the truth of this long struggle — all to lead the overthrow of the racist, exploitative bosses who profit from our sweat.

A simple sign on the fence near the factory revealed the most important strategic lesson here: "The Stella D’Oro struggle shows that workers must take state power — PLP."

This is one battle in a long war against capitalism. The Stella D’Oro workers, especially those who join PLP, can spread their experiences among masses of the unemployed and among all co-workers on future jobs. The collective strength of the working class, led by communist ideas, has the power to eventually smash this hellish system.

Once more, we hail the magnificent struggle of the Stella D’Oro workers, a model for the whole working class.

a name="Norway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama"></a>"orway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama

Why did Barack Obama win the Nobel "Peace" Prize when he presides over two wars and the sharpest assault on jobs and wages since the Great Depression? The short answer is that the award has nothing to do with peace and workers’ needs.

Arms millionaire Alfred Nobel created the prize in his 1896 will, and subsequent war-making capitalists have controlled it ever since. U.S. arch-imperialists Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Henry Kissinger all won Nobels. A more detailed explanation of Obama’s award involves the Norwegian-prize givers’ role in an increasingly deadly global energy rivalry.

Choosing Obama was the brainchild of a committee hand-picked by the government of Norway, a major energy producer and strategic U.S. ally. Its giant Statoil Hydro is the world’s largest source of offshore oil and gas. Until recently, the deputy chairwoman of the Nobel panel, Kaci Kullmann Five, sat on Statoil’s board.

Nobel chairman Thorbjorn Jagland acted as Statoil’s virtual CEO as prime minister from 1996 to 1997 when the company was 100% state-owned. Jagland helped engineer sale of a 24% stake in Statoil to private investors led by U.S. banks State Street, J.P. Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon.

a name="McChrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize"></">Mc"hrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize

Through Obama’s prize surprise, Statoil/Norway is attempting to sway him in the direction of the McChrystal-McCain "surge-for-total-victory" model during the developing Afghan policy debate. Statoil aims to cash in on a U.S.-backed proposed pipeline — named TAPI — to carry gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. (See map page 6)

Next month, Statoil will serve as a "Silver Sponsor" — Exxon Mobil is a Gold one, BP is Platinum — at Turkmenistan’s 14th International Oil and Gas Conference. TAPI will be high on the agenda as western oil majors seek to break Russia’s stranglehold on Turkmen supplies. But TAPI’s success hinges on pacifying Afghanistan.

Tiny Norway plays such a big part in Obama’s war in Afghanistan because it could provide Statoil access to neighboring Turkmenistan’s gas riches. Norway has 500 troops in Afghanistan, a sizable contingent for a nation of 4.6 million, and the largest refugee bureau (Nobel’s current and Statoil’s ex-vice chair Kullman Five is a trustee). A Norwegian diplomat, Kai Eide, a former Statoil adviser, holds the highest UN post there. He recently "expressed support for the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan’s [McChrystal’s] call for more troops." (Voice of America, 9/29/09)

Eide recently fired his top U.S. aide Peter Galbraith for exposing the blatant rigging of Afghan president Karzai’s re-election. Statoil’s envoy fears that publicizing the fraud might fuel Vice-President Biden’s camp, which calls for toning down the Afghan war in favor of pushing into Pakistan.

Norway has cast its lot with U.S. imperialists for the long haul. During the Cold War, it was a staunch anti-Soviet strategically-located NATO member. It now houses NATO’s vast Joint Training Center at Stavanger, Statoil’s hometown. Norwegian, U.S. and other forces regularly practice there, not only for defending Statoil’s nearby oil and gas rigs but for invading Russia, just across the border. The "Peace" Prize move indicates Norway’s rulers are asserting their loyalty to their U.S. senior partners and demanding a piece of the imperialist pie now.

"Peace," as the Nobel Prize embodies it, actually means military conquest by U.S.-led imperialist coalitions and the loss of millions of workers’ lives. War will exist so long as the profit system endures. Capitalism thrives on armed conflict to carve up the world. It would be a serious political error to view Obama’s award as encouraging an end to U.S.-sponsored torture or ending Israeli-Palestinian strife or creating a new opening with Russia or Iran, as the New York Times says (10/9/09). For the working class, safety lies ultimately in joining PLP and building for a communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven war-makers.

a name="Gore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive">">"ore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive

Al Gore’s 2007 "Peace" Prize for his efforts against global warming bears the Statoil hallmark, too. It so "happens" that Statoil, the world leader in trapping carbon emissions at gas plants, would profit mightily from the restrictions Gore advocates. In addition, such caps aim at stifling growth in U.S. rival China and potential rival India. On September 22, Statoil CEO Helge Lund joined the UN’s Expert Group on Climate and Energy, the only oil and gas executive invited. Lund’s booster Gore had helped found the panel.

a name="Hundreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder">">"undreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder

Rockford, IL, October 3 — Hundreds of workers and youth from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan rallied today in Rockford against the racist police murder of Mark Anthony Barmore, a 23-year-old African American man. According to eyewitnesses, Mr. Barmore ran into a church day care center to avoid two cops who supposedly wanted to question him about a domestic violence incident. The cops ordered Mr. Barmore to come out of a closet where he was hiding and then shot him down when he came out, unarmed, with his hands raised.

As he lay on the floor face down and bleeding, they shot him three more times in the back, in front of over a dozen children who might have been killed by ricocheting bullets. Then, according to witnesses, the cops moved the body to rearrange the crime scene and then took family members to the police station and tried unsuccessfully to intimidate them into telling a false story. For this, the cops have been put on paid administrative leave while the case is being investigated.

Capitalism is declining and anger is rising. The real unemployment rate is over 20% and for young black men it’s over fifty percent. The cops fear the militancy of black youth and are intensifying their direct brutal assaults and intimidation in the hope of stopping rebellion. Only when there is fight-back do the big bosses decide to do a whitewash like the "legal" clearing (with Obama’s blessing) of the cop who killed Sean Bell in NYC, or if protests threaten to get out of hand to jettison a few "bad apple" cops.

Several members of PLP from the Chicago area attended the NAACP rally. Over two hundred people, including a number of youth, directed their anger against the cops and the system, instead of against each other. The bosses complain about youth violence but they would rather have youth killing each other than fighting against the capitalist system! When the anti-racist movement of the 1960’s retreated, there was a rapid rise in youth violence and gangs in our cities.

A mass anti-racist movement, led by communists, can channel this anger back against the capitalist system that is the cause of our problems. Of the many speakers that day, only one said positive things about Obama. Most made no mention of him at all. Many in our communities are coming to understand that he is not a cure for racist capitalism and that we have to fight back ourselves. About 40 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed and Party members are making plans with members of community groups to work on more projects together back home.

Over the past 50 years, many national leaders of the NAACP have worked together with the government to take the militancy out of the anti-racist movement, even to the point of attacking grassroots militants and siding with the police against them. But like many other unions, community groups, churches and schools whose leaders push capitalist dead-ends like electoral politics, the NAACP on the local level has many dedicated grassroots members who struggle hard to fight racist oppression. Communists must unite with these militant forces in struggle against racist oppression while we struggle with them to oppose the reformist leaders who support the capitalist system.

Modern racism was born in the slave trade with the rise of capitalism, and capitalism needs racism to keep workers divided and maximize profits from lower wages paid to black, Latino and immigrant workers. PLP has been in the forefront of the struggle to destroy racism and capitalism for almost 50 years. Join PLP and help build a world-wide communist revolution to destroy racism and all oppression once and for all.

Cal Campus Rally Ties Budget Cuts to War Spending

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Oct. 6 — A student-faculty anti-war group held a rally on campus against the budget cuts in the California State University (CSU) system, and the war spending that contribute to these cuts. One speaker explained that in the U.S., war spending trumps all other priorities, amounting to about $760 billion in 2009.

Over the period since the Iraq war began in 2003 up to 2008, the U.S. has reduced the funding for states and cities to provide services like Medicaid by about $136 billion, including about $16 billion for California. The one-time stimulus grant to California in 2009 of $8 billion doesn’t even make up for funds diverted to the wars in the previous five years! Clearly the fight against campus budget cuts must be linked to the fight against imperialist wars.

Two other speakers protested a racist change in the admission policy that is a part of the cutbacks. This policy gives preference to students from other parts of the state, and is likely to reduce the percentage of black and Latino students on this campus.

Another speaker explained that the current economic crisis "provides us with a clear view of the priorities that the state of California, the United States, or, more generally, any profit-driven economy must take." He pointed out that California’s huge spending on its racist overcrowded prison system, where 70% of released inmates are sent back to prison, takes billions that should be spent on education and public services. The state spends $49,000 each on its 170,000 prisoners, more than 60% of whom are black and Latino, but has reduced state support of the CSU to $4,600 per student. "We should take the economic crisis as an opportunity to see clearly that the state’s priorities are not in the interests of working people, and recognize that these policies for war, for prison and for education cutbacks are not in our common interest as a working class."

Several hundred students heard some part of the rally, 300 leaflets were distributed, and about a dozen students signed up to be contacted further. It is our responsibility as communists to show students and faculty that fee increases and layoffs are a result of racism and imperialist wars created by capitalism.

Workers Must Destroy System

Capitalism Breeds Racism

Many of us identify ourselves by "race" and ethnicity in daily conversation as well as on government forms. However, according to the American Anthropological Association, there are no biological foundations or genes for "race." Humans are genetically more alike than different, yet the idea of "race" is embedded in our everyday dialogue. This is because "race" is an idea, a concept carefully reinforced and reproduced by capitalist society in order to maintain itself.

Over 140 years after the end of chattel slavery in the U.S, the ruling class still wields racism, as it’s most vicious tool against the world’s workers. In New York, official unemployment among blacks is four times the rate among whites. The college graduation rate of blacks is half that of whites in the U.S. Around the world, virtually every measure of health, from infant mortality rates, to stress and high blood pressure, to diabetes and heart failure, is worse for blacks. In the U.S., 1 in 10 black males age 30-34 is in prison, 1 in 4 is in the criminal justice system. On a daily basis young black and Latino men are gunned down in the streets by racist cops, or killed by crime that rises with the unemployment and poverty rate.

Obama A Cover For U.S. Imperialism

The election of a black president has not blunted racism. On the contrary, the bosses hope that Obama provides a cover to the horror of U.S. Imperialism. Already the ruling class is licking its chops at the rise in black military recruitment since Obama’s election. These young men and women will be sent to kill and risk death in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile destitute workers from Uganda are being used as soldiers in Iraq, paid only a fraction of the wages of the U.S. military, and used as shields in a protective ring around U.S. mega-bases. Building anti-racist, international unity among these soldiers with a revolutionary outlook is the way forward to eliminate racism.

Racism is not merely a vestige of an old system, but an essential part of capitalism. From the very beginning of capitalist society, the ascending ruling class was profiting enormously from slave labor and indentured servitude, a system by which poor workers were committed to a single boss for a set period and then "freed" to become wage laborers. But as black and white indentured servants began uniting with Native Americans to resist exploitation in this new social order, race laws were enacted and brutally enforced to divide the colonial work force.

In 1662, Virginia passed a law that enslaved blacks for life. Legislation was passed to determine what a "black" person was since so much intermarriage occurred. These laws were also used to justify the enslavement of children produced from the rape of black slaves by the colonial rulers. While black slavery was enshrined in law, a 200-year genocide against Native-Americans was carried out, led by butchers such as Andrew Jackson who would go on to become President.

a name="‘Founding Fathers’ Justified Slavery"></">‘F"unding Fathers’ Justified Slavery

Slave-owning racist Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence, said in 1789 that he could never imagine a "biracial republic." The hypocritical "founding fathers" needed to justify their brutal ownership of enslaved African workers while simultaneously touting the "ideals" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The Abolitionist movement grew in reaction to the continued brutality of chattel slavery. Many people spoke out. John Brown and Nat Turner led the most militant attacks on slaveholders, with John Brown trying to unite white and black workers alike. They planted the seeds for anti-racist actions that played out in the U.S. Civil War, and continue to inspire workers all over the world.

At that time the ruling class was becoming divided between the Northern industrialists and the Southern slaveholders. The industrialists used the mass hatred of slavery to weaken the southern bosses, eventually leading to the Civil War. After hundreds of thousands died fighting slavery, Lincoln saw it was no longer politically tolerable and reluctantly ended chattel slavery in 1865.

The limited politics of the struggle didn’t allow for racism to be defeated, as the Abolitionists did not make the fight against capitalism the issue, but only against slavery. So, chattel slavery became wage slavery; it didn’t end, they just changed the rules. The bosses have since stolen trillions of dollars of additional profits through the super-exploitation of black, Latino and Asian workers being paid lower wages.

After chattel slavery, new laws against integration, called Jim Crow, physically and politically separated workers. White capitalists, using former confederate officers and soldiers to protect their privilege through terror, formed the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They attacked black workers organizing, speaking out or uniting with white workers.

Great strikes such as the New Orleans General Strike of 1892 illustrated that white and black workers could see past racism as the struggle united them. They fought scabs and the U.S. army and were stronger together than they ever could have been apart. From the 1930’s to ‘50s, uniting black and white workers in the struggle against racism became a cornerstone of the old Communist Party.

Communists Led Fight Against Racism

From building a mass movement to defending the young black men framed in Scottsboro, to organizing integrated sharecroppers and steel workers unions in the south, the communist movement led the fight against racism. Our Party came out of this movement, and by learning from its successes and mistakes and fighting many battles against the Klan, Nazis and racist cops, we have advanced our understanding of racism.

In June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when many thousands of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest another police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their "flag."

PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the old "Communist" Party tried to simultaneously cool the rebels and attack PLM. We defied being banned from Harlem by the state, and held a mass demonstration during the height of the rebellion calling for the bosses, their judges, and their cops to be hanged.

In the ‘60s and beyond, the bosses have tried to turn anger against racism into a wedge to keep workers of different "races" separate. Nationalist groups like the Black Panther Party called for blacks to stick together in a militant way. More mainstream ideas called for black-owned business, black cops and black politicians. President Obama is the ultimate figure in the disarming of the struggle against racism. His rhetoric about the "post-racial" society is an attempt to delude workers into not seeing the realities of racism all around them.

Racism As Widespread As Ever

The foreclosures and unemployment rates of the current economic crisis affect blacks more than whites. Racist police brutality persists, and during his candidacy, Obama’s only comment on the assassination of Sean Bell was that the police were justified. During his inaugural speech, this supposed trail-blazer described himself as following in the footsteps of the "founding fathers" who created the racism he downplays.

Racism was created by the ruling class and developed as capitalism developed. It allows bosses to keep workers of different colors apart so they will not join forces to rebel. Racism creates a group of super-exploited black and Latino workers, keeping wages lower for all, as workers fear asking for more because others work for less.

The most heroic class struggles of workers have been waged by building multi-racial unity. The battle of the Stella D’Oro workers over the last year has been the most recent example of this, with workers of every nationality standing in solidarity and male workers refusing to take deals that would not benefit the women workers in a stand against sexism as well. PLP was founded on the belief that we must fight racism in order to create a new world and that only a communist revolution can destroy this capitalist creation. The rulers built racism to make more profits for themselves. Workers don’t need or want the ideas that separate us from each other. Workers will destroy racism as they destroy the whole capitalist system and build a world that serves our needs instead.

Haitian Revolution Crushed French Slave-owners

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the most important revolution of its time. Haiti was the richest colony in the Caribbean, and it would have been a launching pad to begin a French offensive into the North American continent. The enslaved workers of Haiti, with nothing but meager weapons, managed to defeat the powerful French army. They fought Napoleon’s armies that were rampaging all across Europe, and they gave that despot his first defeat. The uprising was successful in overthrowing the French landowners, as well as defeating the European armies that came to France’s aid in order to restore "order." The former slaves also freed the slaves of the Spanish colony that would be later named "The Dominican Republic." The former slaves managed to wipe out their oppressors, but they were trapped in the ideology of race. They saw white workers as the enemy, and this racism became nationalism as it was co-opted by pro-capitalist misleaders like Toussaint L’ouverture.

The Haitian Revolution foreshadowed the failures of all of the future National Liberation Movements, as they did not fight against all bosses, but only the white bosses, not recognizing just how virulently racist the black slave-holders were. Haiti became the first example of neo-colonialization as well, as the capitalist nations forced Haiti to pay billions of dollars in today’s currency in reparations to the French slave-owners, thus impoverishing the Haitian workers and enslaving them economically to the designs of the imperialist nations. Haiti has been punished to this day for daring to rise up and defeat capitalism while it was ascending, and their great revolution has been carefully removed from the capitalist’s textbooks.

Bus Mechanics Fight Union Hacks, Demand Action vs. Racist Murder

LOS ANGELES, October 12 — After a bus driver’s nephew, Darrick Collins, a young black worker, was murdered by a racist county Sheriff (see CHALLENGE, 10/14), we asked the driver to speak at our union meeting of mechanics about this racist terror. When we talked to the family at the funeral, they called the uncle, and after a long phone conversation he said he’d be glad to speak to other union members. He related a dozen other recent police killings, news of which we distributed in our PLP flyers, "Wanted for Mass Murder: LA Sheriffs and Capitalism."

We told the driver we wanted to introduce a motion to condemn the Sheriff’s Dept. for this brutal racist murder and call for a five-minute work-stoppage in protest. "But," we said, "we know the union leadership will do everything they can to prevent the motion." The driver was unfazed, saying "I’ll have to get time off from work to make the meeting, but I‘m coming."

When the driver arrived at the meeting, the union president said, "You’ll have to wait outside. You’re in the driver’s union. This is a mechanic’s union." This "warm show of unity" toward another transit worker brought by a mechanic was followed by the divisive union hack’s warning the membership, "Watch your pockets!" (In other words, "he’s just here looking for money.")

But the rank-and-filers at the meeting rejected the mis-leadership’s motion to exclude the driver, saying they wanted to hear the brother. The Party, through CHALLENGE readers and friends, fought to make sure workers supported this fight in the union and at work.

a name="‘We’re the ones they come down on…’"></a>‘W"’re the ones they come down on…’

After waiting half-an-hour in the lobby, the driver was received and spoke humbly but urgently for us to take a stand against the killings. "I didn’t come here for pity or charity. I came to raise your awareness. I’m no one special; I’m just a blue-collar worker like all of you," but he warned, "We are the ones they come down on, the ones they kill, like this young man in my family."

Then there was a long discussion where workers talked angrily about experiences of racist police terror and jailings, while the union president sat numbly at the back. But soon he resumed his real role by ruling a job-action motion "out of order." "We have contracts," he cried. "We would get huge fines like New York City’s transit union [in 2005]." A service attendant asked sarcastically if we could now expect cops to shoot us with picket signs in our hands, when we go on strike, recalling a cop killing of a man with a stick in his front yard. "We won’t be going on strike," the president told him. But another worker said, "We need to go on strike!" Another worker said that everyone should wear red arm bands in protest of the racist murder of Darrick Collins.

Afterwards, in discussions in the parking lot, a black technician thanked a worker for inviting him and "for staying on my ass to make sure I came." One mechanic was disappointed in himself for not "shoving the president’s words down his own throat. It crossed my mind to make a motion to give a thousand dollars to the family since the driver never even thought about money. "He [the president] insulted all of us."

For The Future

As U.S. capitalism declines, it increasingly unleashes racist terror. Workers plan to take this motion to the drivers’ union as well. Even though we didn’t win the motion, more workers are reading and distributing CHALLENGE. The confidence of newer and older PLP members in the workers and the Party is growing.

Our leaflet, distributed outside and inside bus divisions, declared that these racist, cold-blooded murders by the bosses’ death squads are aimed at instilling terror in all workers, to accept passively the bosses’ economy of sacrifice and their genocidal wars for oil. It called for revolution to destroy racist capitalism.

Advocating a political strike against a capitalist system that thrives on racist exploitation and mass murder at home and abroad deepens workers’ understanding about the nature of the beast we’re fighting and the need to destroy it, together with its cops and union misleaders. In this fight, we’re going beyond calling for removing Sheriffs from transit security and restoring the Transit Police, as suggested by the union president. Instead we’re raising the need for communist revolution to bury our class enemies entirely.

a name="‘I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’"></a>"I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’

[A CHALLENGE reader received this message from a friend in Afghanistan.]

Today there was an explosion in an area in Kabul close to the U.S. embassy, NATO and ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), killing 80 people, not 16 as the media reported. I don’t know when they will stop killing innocents. The U.S., NATO and ISAF, the Taliban, the Jihadis (warlords) — they are all killing innocent people. Westerners are committing most of the explosions and killings.

I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave. If they can’t bring security, why are they here?

The election will go to the second round. There will be chaos and, according to the constitution, a state of emergency. There will be a loyal jirga (a nation-wide council of representatives) but I’m afraid that the warlords who are now in power, like Masud, Rabani, Fahim (vice-president and minister of defense), Sayyaf and Dostum will dominate it again.

All those in power, including [president] Karzai, are rich, making money from the situation. They have militias and weapons and are only looking to fill their pockets. (Russia and Iran recently gave money to two warlords who control territory close to the Russian and Iranian borders.) They are criminals. They stole the reconstruction money. In eight years of U.S. occupation, they built no public projects. Even foundation work has not been started!

Who will bring work, education and security? Do you think the Americans will do this? They have done nothing in the last eight years. And they say they will not leave until 2015.

The military situation is very bad. They have plans to divide Afghanistan like Yugoslavia. But they will not succeed to divide Afghans; we will fight against that.

A friend in Afghanistan

CHALLENGE Comment — PLP supports our friend and the exploited masses in Afghanistan. We are fighting wherever we can against the U.S. rulers’ imperialist invasion of that country, which leads to our thoughts about the question our friend poses: "If they [NATO and U.S. troops] can’t bring security, why are they here?"

U.S. bosses invaded Afghanistan not to bring its people security but to attempt to control oil and gas pipelines from that region and its strategic military position, in their inter-imperialist rivalry with China and Russia. All of the forces the writer mentions are enemies of the country’s workers and farmers. This bosses’ battle is what is killing innocent people.

The U.S. ruling class is trying to remain the world’s dominant power to be able to exploit the world’s working class, not bring it security. In fact, it is these profit motives that are the source of the insecurity that tramples on the aspirations of the masses in Afghanistan and everywhere else, including on the U.S. working class.

a name="Imperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars">">"mperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars

The threat to U.S. political and economic domination of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas today centers on pipelines that U.S. oil companies and rival coalitions of the area’s weaker powers are proposing to build to transport oil and gas to lucrative markets in Europe and Asia.

Afghanistan is a vital transit route for U.S. multi-billion-dollar oil and gas exports, going from the energy-rich Caspian Sea on Afghanistan’s northern border to the Arabian Sea. Five U.S. oil giants — Unocal, Chevron, Pennzoil, Amoco and Exxon — have invested heavily in the region, said to have the greatest energy potential outside the Middle East. Bush-Cheney, with strong oil company ties, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to secure a flow of oil and profits. This policy — not the hunt for Al Qaeda — is also the driving force behind Obama’s continued military occupation.

Last year’s stand-off in Georgia highlighted the potential of Russia-U.S. military confrontation. Behind the clash was the U.S.-backed BTC pipeline, which by-passes Russia and Iran to transport Caspian oil from Baku in Azerbaijan through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan, the Turkish port on the Mediterranean.

In May, Iran signed a deal to export 150 million cubic meters of gas per day to Pakistan via a proposed Iran-Pakistan pipeline, which Russia and China are planning to fund. (India, initially involved in this project, recently backed out at U.S. insistence, sweetened by a deal giving India U.S. nuclear power technology, although India’s decision may not be final.) It would be routed through the Pakistani province of Baluchistan which shares a common border with Iran. China is potentially interested in extending the pipeline to its northwestern provinces bordering Pakistan.

All this intensified the conflict between Iran and the U.S. and revealed the dangers the U.S. faces from its so-called allies, Pakistan and India, and from its major competitors, Russia and China. The latter’s economic growth depends on a steady supply of oil and gas so it’s also making deals with Iran, whose oil reserves rank as the world’s fourth largest while its gas reserves are second to Russia — much of it undeveloped.

The Iran-Pakistan deal revived a proposed rival U.S. pipeline, TAPI (see editorial, CHALLENGE, 10/14), which would transport gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. TAPI is funded by the Asian Development Bank whose major investors included U.S. financial institutions and oil companies.

TAPI would go from Turkmenistan through Western Afghanistan, head south across Helmand province — the stronghold of the Taliban and local drug lords — through the neighboring Pakistani province of Baluchistan to the Arabian Sea for shipment to Europe and Asia.

The Afghan government is expected to receive 8% of TAPI’s revenue. Given the corruption in Afghanistan, very little of that would benefit the desperately poor Afghan population. There will be more civilian deaths, refugees and devastation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the U.S. fights to protect the proposed pipeline routes.

In Baluchistan, where nationalist groups are already fighting for greater autonomy from Pakistan’s central government, the presence of a Pakistani pipeline could precipitate a break-away. Anger is rising at that government throughout Pakistan’s four provinces and federally-administered tribal areas.

Pakistani Senate Deputy Chairman Jan Muhammad Jamali told the Upper House recently, "Time is running out…. There is no other option left but to grant provincial autonomy to all the provinces, including Baluchistan."

U.S. government circles have also considered a Yugoslavia-style break-up to be advantageous to U.S. domination in the area. Baluchistan — where the CIA has been secretly training and funding the rebels — would become a U.S. client state, creating a buffer between Iran and India. It would help thwart China which is building a refinery in the Baluchistan seaport of Gwadar to be connected to the proposed pipeline taking Iranian oil north to western China.

With challenges and confrontations from enemies and allies, U.S. imperialists will do what they’ve always done to hang onto their economic and geopolitical power: use more military force.

To fight against these warring imperialists who are sucking the blood out of the masses, a revolutionary party is needed, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to mobilize the working class and the peasants towards the goal of destroying the profit system which is exploiting tens of millions in this region.

Racism Rampant in France

PARIS, October 7 — Brice Hortefeux, France’s Interior minister — the "top cop" in charge of the national police and the gendarmes — has been subpoenaed to appear in criminal court on December 17 for making racist insults. The chances that the bosses’ courts will condemn a government minister are, of course, microscopically small.

The suit was brought by the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples (MRAP) following the Internet publication of a video in which Hortefeux cracks racist jokes about North Africans. Hortefeux first tried to deny his racism; later he apologized to the French Council of the Muslim Faith.

Government Racism

Before being promoted to Interior minister, Hortefeux was the Immigration minister who (as CHALLENGE reported 10/31/07) launched a racist anti-immigrant rampage. Immigrants were so terrorized that they leapt from windows to escape the police, some leaping to their deaths.

Hortefeux’s racism is replicated by the cops he commands. One recent example: on May 9, during a clash between police and youths in the Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel, the cops fired tear gas and "flash balls" [rubber bullets] in all directions. Two black men lost their eyes.

Bruno, 31, a truck driver, told an interviewer: "It was a friend’s birthday. About a dozen of us were ordering sandwiches.... The riot police…entered the housing project, [and] started firing right away.... I wasn’t involved at all... I was eating with my friends, like we often do. And all of a sudden I was hit right in the head.... I fell down…. My friends…took me to the hospital.... My eye is dead. There’s no hope…. They’re going to operate to take it out and put in a prosthesis."

A rigorous study of police ID checks published on June 30 and conducted by the CNRS (a research organization financed by the Ministry of Higher Education) shows that the cops stop "Arab-looking people" seven times as often as whites, while blacks are stopped 11.5 times as often.

The Ministry of Higher Education itself spreads racism. Every year, the ministry-run academy of overseas sciences offers a 4,000-euro (US $5,880) prize for the best book dealing with "the positive aspects of colonization."

Similarly at the Ministry of Education, Serge Bilé and Mathieu Méranville have just published a 160-page book detailing the racism faced by black teachers on the part of the ministry, fellow teachers, parents and pupils.

a name="Bosses’ Racism">">"osses’ Racism

The bosses’ racism here — revealed in a university study published September 9 by the Observatoire des inégalités — shows that, on average, to get a single interview for an accounting job, a person with a Moroccan first and last name must send out 277 job application letters. A person with a French first and last name, with exactly the same qualifications, only has to send out 19 letters before landing a job interview.

According to sociologist Saïd Bouamama, the bosses here try to get all workers to accept this racism by promoting so-called "positive stereotypes." In a Sept. 29 interview, Bouamama said that "for this system to function correctly, they have to add an ideology that makes this situation less revolting. For example, blacks are supposedly better bouncers because they are ‘more diplomatic.’ North Africans are supposedly ‘naturally good’ in the building trades, and Asians are ‘painstaking’ in the garment industry.... There are supposedly ethnic capacities, or rather qualities. The strategy is to get as many people as possible to accept as self-evident the limitation of blacks or North Africans to a certain type of job."

Racist discrimination in housing, according to a French government study (September 3), shows landlords twice as likely to invite people with a French name to visit an apartment as people with an Arabic or African name, and four times as likely to sign a rental contract if the applicant is white.

Because of this racism, 22% of North African immigrant families live below the poverty line, compared with 6% of the general population.

France is sick with the racism bred by capitalism and imperialism. Racism generates super-profits through the super-exploitation of these groups. Their low wages drag down the wages of all workers. Most importantly, racism prevents the working class from realizing the class unity necessary for communist revolution, which is the only way to eliminate capitalist exploitation, the material basis of racist ideas. That’s why communists here and everywhere fight racism and promote the multi-racial unity of the working class.

a name="3 Minutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies"></">3 "inutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies

"A system that destroys decent jobs doesn’t deserve to exist," said a Machinist at a recent Boeing local union meeting. That was too much for the local president.

"Three minutes, brother!" he shouted, invoking a seldom-used rule to cut us off. Eventually he succeeded, but not before we called for demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins against a system that offers us nothing but fascism and war.

Interestingly, the district president Wroblewski hasn’t attended our local meeting since PLP’s well-received, much discussed Summer Project demonstrations at factory gates. We were protesting the no-strike deal demanded by the company, Democratic and Republican politicians and the bosses’ media. "Are you surprised?" asked another machine operator. "He knew we’d string him up if he ever agreed to such a thing after you guys passed out those leaflets at the gates."

But we should have no illusions; the union mis-leadership is trying desperately to find some kind of accommodation. Two meetings ago, the district president’s representative denied that Wroblewski even discussed this issue when he had a private meeting with the new Boeing Commercial Aircraft chief. He then droned on praising Wroblewski for "listening to the company’s ideas."

Cutting Through the Rhetoric

"That’s the worst non-denial denial I ever heard!" exclaimed an exasperated shop steward at an impromptu post-meeting meeting that discussed how to take the offensive. Now the bosses and their agents are floating code words like arbitration and contract extensions in a poor attempt to camouflage the no-strike regime.

Capitalism’s economic and political crisis is forcing the major union mis-leaders to look for new positions in an increasingly warlike world. Their trade union politics demand it.

At IAM (International Association of Machinists) national meetings they spread the illusion that the system is basically sound, that militant rhetoric and electing the right politicians can answer any "temporary" attacks. They contend the system will soon right itself and resume negotiating decent contracts. "It’s enough to make you sick," said an honest official after returning from just such a gabfest.

But actually the top union hacks have become overt members of the repressive bosses’ state apparatus. The New York AFL-CIO chief now heads the New York Federal Reserve, meeting with bankers from Chase and Goldman (government) Sachs to plot the salvation of the empire. The IAM international president calls for a national (actually fascist) industrial policy and commission in which he will no doubt be a major player.

To expose this charade, the union meeting speaker listed nation-wide examples marking the bosses’ real plans for re-industrialization through intensified racist exploitation. These include shutting down Pratt and Whitney aerospace engines in Hartford, Conn., moving the work to low-cost, non-union Georgia; closing unionized G.E. in Arizona to take advantage of cheaper non-union labor in the Southeast; moving work from Republic Doors in Chicago after a historic sit-in; and closing the Stella D’Oro bakery after a courageous 11-month strike and moving the work to a non-union outfit in Ohio.

The list ended with the threat of erecting a new Boeing-787 line in South Carolina after workers there rejected the union. "We can no longer assume that even hard-fought contracts can provide any immunity from the attacks of this sick system," concluded our speaker.

Adding an exclamation point, the company just announced another billion-dollar charge for the new 747 primarily because the crisis has forced airlines to delay orders. This means "thousands of layoffs" (NY Times, 10/7). So far this year the company has charged $3.5 billion to production delays. What seemed impossible just a short while ago is now a marked possibility: a federal take-over like GM, trashing our contracts and mounting job cuts.

The right-wing union leaders understood the implications of all this. That’s why they risked discarding any illusions of "democracy" to cut us off. Our friends and CHALLENGE readers were aware of the stakes as well. To win this struggle, these co-workers must help bring this developing revolutionary working-class understanding to the vast center in the shops, selling CHALLENGE to their friends and workmates, building class struggle and recruiting communist leaders.

Who Needs Three Minutes?

Unlike the union mis-leaders that must conceal their class-collaboration schemes, we "communists distain to conceal our views and aims." What Karl Marx said 137 years ago is still true today.

One doesn’t need three minutes to state the obvious: capitalism can’t meet the needs of workers and must be smashed. As the Communist Manifesto declared, "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist Revolution. [We workers] have nothing to lose but [our] chains. [We] have a world to win."

LATE BULLETIN — More auto union sellouts in the works: The "leaders" of the UAW at the Philadelphia Boeing factory (making mostly military helicopters) scheduled to strike October 19, won’t call the local out on strike despite the contract expiration.

Meanwhile, the UAW leadership accepted an agreement at Ford freezing wages for new hires and containing a no-strike clause at the end of the contract. It awaits a membership vote. More next issue.

Red Eye

Big biz media let Katrina die

MinutemanMedia.org, 9/10 — Four years later, corporate media outlets seem to have largely forgotten about Katrina and its survivors, let alone the conversations about race and poverty that were supposed to accompany it. Neither the Washington Post nor the Los Angeles Times ran a single piece on Katrina in the week surrounding the anniversary. ABC and Fox News didn’t mention the hurricane or its aftermath once. In the New York Times, readers found only a few articles on Katrina; it mentioned that "fundamental problems" still exist, like high unemployment, and some neighborhoods that seem "barely touched" since four years ago. Race, the elephant in the room, wasn’t mentioned a single time.

In addition to the estimated 1 million people still displaced by Katrina, rents in the New Orleans area have increased by 40 percent since the hurricane, and an estimated 11,000 people are currently homeless there. A report also reveals striking racial disparities in the impacts.

Capitalism globalizes toxic waste

NYT, 9/27 — Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws. Trash is bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European laws may simply be burned or left to rot, polluting air and water.

The temptation to export waste is great because recycling properly at home is expensive: Because of Europe’s new environmental laws, it is four times as expensive to incinerate trash in the Netherlands as to put it – illegally – on a boat to China.

"The traffic in waste exports has become enormous."

Jobless recovery, poverty growing

GW, 9/25 — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week that the recession is "very likely over." Bernanke cautioned that the recovery may not be strong enough in 2010 to generate significant job growth or bring down unemployment. The global recession is expected to push 89 million more people into extreme poverty by the end of 2010, the World Bank said last week.

9/11 outrage outranked by Vietnam

Creators.com, 9/11 — As assaults on a society go, the Sept. 11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed... come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote.

Oil wealth doesn’t reach workers

NYT, 9/27 — Destruction, or at least a lack of progress, has been the fate of most nations unlucky enough to sit on top of large pools of oil today. They have grown corrupted by oil, their leaders relieved of the need to show accountability as long as they can buy off well-connected foreigners and pay for the security and protection they need from their own angry, disenfranchised citizens.

Equatorial Guinea’s vicious leader, Teodoro Obiang, plunders virtually every cent of his nation’s wealth, aided by Riggs Bank of Washington, which sometimes sent employees to the embassy to pick up bulging suitcases of cash. Locals don’t even get the benefit of jobs because the manual labor is supplied by Indians and Filipinos brought in by Marathon Oil. One does manage to find a booming source of local employment: young Guinean girls called "night fighters" because they jostle for a chance to sell their bodies to the oilmen from Texas or Oklahoma. "Más Petróleo = Más Pobreza." So say graffiti on the pipelines.

We feel better working together

GW, 9/25 — Team players can tolerate twice as much pain as those who work alone. Researchers at Oxford University found that members of its rowing team had a greater pain threshold after training together than when they performed the same exercises individually.

Working as a group is thought to boost the rush of endorphins, a feel-good chemical that is released in the brain.

California may be leading a rout

GW 9/25 — Arnold Schwarzenegger described California as a "golden dream by the sea" when he was inaugurated as the state’s governor six years ago. The state that ocne boasted the best public schools, colleges and highways in America now has some of the worst. Its healthcare is ranked lowest of all the 50 states. Its prisons are overflowing; it has six of the 10 worst cities in the U.S. for air pollution ; its public finances are a disaster. In many ways, the golden state’s sickness is an extreme, hypertrophied version of the politico-economic problems of the whole United States in the early 21st century. The odds may be against the reformers.

Some big co’s block climate fight

NYT 9/28- In a rational world, the looming climate disaster would be a dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not? This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For decades the dominant political ideology has extolled private enterprise, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through [collective] action.

Socialists can’t bury capitalism

NYT 9/29- Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, European Socialist parties have not found a compelling response. In France, asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: "No – it is already dead."

The French Socialist Party "is trapped in a hopeless contradiction." It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left.

Just how sexist can rich men be?

GW 9/25- Food and sex, sex and food. Well, boys, here comes the best ever food-and-sex combo. Nyotaimori, the Japanese practice of eating food off a woman’s naked body, has arrived in London. The Nyotaimori evenings will rotate monthly around a number of posh restaurants and will cost just over $400.

With Nyotaimori the woman can be your plate and while she plays dead you can prod your metal chopsticks all over her naked form. What could be better?

Rich capitalisms starve the poor

GW 9/25- Eliminating the millions of tons of food thrown away annually in western countries such as the U.S. and U.K. could lift more than a billion people out of hunger worldwide, experts claim. Excessive consumption in rich countries inflates food prices in the developing world making grain less affordable for poor and undernourished people in other parts of the world. "There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. That means we’re taking food out of the mouths of the poor."

John Brown, Harriet Tubman: Models for Multi-Racial Unity and Action

On October 17, PLP’ers celebrate the raid on Harper’s Ferry as a revolutionary action showing today’s need for militant, anti-racist, multi-racial, revolutionary struggle!

The southern slaveholders were terrified by the Harper’s Ferry raiders’ militant, multi-racial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:

"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."

From Childhood, Brown Vowed to Fight Slavery

This trust among whites and blacks did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive slave boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed blacks and whites were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.

As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y. near a black community of former slaves. Blacks were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).

Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist and former slave.

Tubman Single-handedly Freed 300 Slaves

Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her "owner" tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.

Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 slaves to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, "I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger."

Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.

Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other black raiders, discredited the image of black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern slave-owners and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.

Black Rebels Petrified Slave-owners

To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The slave-owners, although talking of "docile" blacks, knew this well. They were petrified of potential black rebels and of "outside agitators." They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.

Today the "outside agitators" are PLP communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, black nationalists and sellout union "leaders" to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?

Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the "natural" segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the black and militant white abolitionists, multi-racial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.

Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradiction. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by "race" but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul "versus" country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.

Class Struggle Trumps Racism

As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multi-racial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latino workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to re-hire all the fired immigrant workers!

In the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers struck for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure.

John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons. Militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nation-wide.

Multi-racial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.

PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multi-racial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant anti-racist demonstrations, build a multi-racial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery supporters did against slavery — taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.

Join PLP

We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party.

Today’s supporters of anti-racist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 150 years ago — that revolutionaries like the raiders then and PLP now are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multi-racial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.

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Challenge October 14 2009

Stella D’Oro Struggle: One Battle in Long War vs. Capitalism

NEW YORK CITY, September 25 — “Whose jobs? Our jobs! Whose factories? Our factories!” rang out today in front of the world’s largest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, in the heart of Wall Street. Over 400 supporters of the Stella D’Oro workers came from workplaces citywide — post offices, train depots, hospitals, offices, high schools and colleges. They marched from the Goldman Sachs billionaires (who back the new owner, Lance, Inc., (see below) to City Hall where billionaire Mayor Bloomberg watches Stella close while campaigning on “promises” of more jobs.
Thousands of office and other workers saw the marchers — many organized by PLP — fill several blocks on Broadway at rush hour, shouting their anger at bosses who dump workers in the street. Stella supporters in two statewide unions, NYSUT (teachers) and NYSNA (nurses), won support resolutions phoned into the rally. Another rally is set for Friday, October 2, at 3 PM, at the plant.
But the struggle at Stella D’Oro is coming to a head and needs more than another rally. Lance plans to move production to Ashland, Ohio, where it will pay much lower wages and benefits. The Stella layoffs are slated to begin around October 9. The bakers’ union is negotiating with the old boss Brynwood, who is taking a hard line on severance pay and other serious issues. Little time remains. A union meeting is set for October 3.
The workers refused Saturday overtime last week, protesting the firing of one of their leaders on trumped-up charges. They have written a letter to the Ashland Lance workers (see p. 5) explaining what happened to them and asking for support. Last week in New York the teachers’ delegate assemblies of the UFT (K-12) and the PSC (college) greeted Stella workers with a standing ovation. They can count on growing support as they step up the fight.
The chant, “Whose factories? Our factories!” reflects an understanding of both the present and the future. In the present, we know that all value — including the Stella D’Oro factory and its machinery — has been created by the labor of workers and is rightfully ours. In the communist future, workers will run the factories and all of society ourselves, for the benefit of our class. PLP fights for the day when, as communist workers, we will treat ourselves with dignity and respect, not like we’re treated today — exploited and abused and dumped on the streets when the owners can make more money elsewhere.
The unity of black, Latino and immigrant which made the strike strong represents a model of anti-racism for our class to follow.
Other pseudo-leftists in the support committee tell the workers that we’re only fighting for their jobs. PLP disagrees. Of course we’re fighting for these jobs. But as communists we tell workers that we are fighting a war, not just a battle, a war with capitalism, not just a battle with Brynwood and Lance.
Of course you don’t win a war by losing battles. WE FIGHT TO WIN! ALWAYS! PLP will fight alongside the Stella workers 100% if they make a last stand for their jobs. But we also hear many workers asking for answers to bigger questions, many who understand they must prepare and organize now to fight the next battle and the one after that.
A Stella D’Oro worker at a workers’ meeting said, “We’ve all been infected now. Who knows where we’re all going to end up. But wherever we go, we’re going to spread PLP.” Many say they’ve learned they must fight for the whole working class, as their letter to the Ashland workers shows. Some see they need to join and build PLP in order to do that. They are supporting other workers like the cafeteria workers at Hunter College and the CUNY Research Foundation workers, both having staged walkouts last week.
Together we can raise the stakes for all workers, from fighting for crumbs from the bosses’ table to fighting for communist power to build a new egalitarian workers’ society, free of racism and imperialist war. Join us!

Rulers ‘Debate’ War: Afghanistan or Pakistan? Both Are Killers

The Obama administration’s internal debate about U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan reflects one inter-imperialist conflict within another still graver one. The first involves the struggle between U.S. and Russia over neighboring Turkmenistan’s vast energy reserves. The other is nothing less than the global dogfight for capitalist supremacy among the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China, with emerging nuclear powers Pakistan, India, and Iran in supporting roles.
Meanwhile, nuclear-armed Pakistan, with bin Laden hiding out and the potential to destabilize India, is possibly a greater threat to U.S. supremacy than exists in Afghanistan.
As CHALLENGE’s last issue pointed out, the original U.S. Afghan invasion and every surge since have aimed at securing the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route. But questions about the project’s near-term feasibility amid fears of an Islamic fundamentalist takeover in unstable Pakistan have caused a tactical split inside the dominant imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists.
One faction bets that the influx of up to 45,000 more U.S. troops that General Stanley McChrystal calls for can guarantee TAPI. Energy strategist Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a top level think-tank. Its heavy-hitting advisors include assorted former admirals and generals and warmonger Ken Pollack. In 2002, Pollack — working for the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations — wrote a book titled, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” Luft recently urged that:
“The Obama administration should actively promote...the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline....[W]hile providing the impoverished Afghan government with a steady revenue stream in the form of transit fees... TAPI would allow Turkmenistan to sell its gas to India, enriching two U.S. allies (Afghanistan and Pakistan) rather than selling the same gas to Europe, enriching a U.S. enemy (Iran).” (International Analyst Network, 9/25/09)
Begun in the late 1990s by the Clinton administration and Unocal (now Chevron), TAPI is financed from the U.S. government-dominated Asian Development Bank.

Obama’s First Afghan Surge:
Mistaken Gamble On Supposed
Russian Weakness

But one daunting task facing U.S. rulers is prying TAPI’s sole supplier, former Soviet republic Turkmenistan, from the grip of a growing Moscow-led anti-U.S. alliance. Until recently, two-thirds of Turkmen gas exports have gone to Russia. China and Iran take most of the rest. Gas-rich Russia and Iran don’t need Turkmen supplies for their own domestic needs but use them to augment their power as regional and global energy brokers. They’re trying to copy the racket the U.S. ran throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when, more than self-sufficient in oil, it used military might to wield Saudi, Iranian, Iraqi and Kuwaiti energy sources as a worldwide imperialist weapon (with junior partner Britain’s help).
In April 2009, with gas prices falling, Russia demonstrated its physical control over Turkmen energy by closing a valve on the country’s main export pipeline, causing it to explode. Obama & Co. mistakenly interpreted this act as a lasting rift between Turkmenistan and Russia and sought to exploit it with a 21,000-troop surge to buttress the TAPI pipeline. But Russia still has the upper hand.
Knuckling under completely, Turkmen president Berdymukhamedov slavishly said, “Negotiations... [with] Russia have allowed us to resolve some technical issues related to the functioning of Central Asia-Centre pipeline.” (Industry newsletter Upstream Online (9/22/09) The latter added, “Turkmenistan needs to agree with Russia soon to avoid pressure from export revenue shortages.”

Pakistan Better Near-Range Target For Long-Term U.S. War-Makers

To oppose the “subdue-Afghanistan-now” camp, another section of U.S. imperialists has anointed a “voice of reason” spokesman — Rory Stewart, new head of the Carr Center at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Stewart was governor of a U.S.-U.K.-occupied Iraqi province in 2004. With these credentials, he testified to Congress on September 16.
Trying to sound a phony anti-war note, Stewart said Afghan tribalism essentially made the country unwinnable but strategically worth the presence of special forces assassins: “The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000.”
But then Stewart revealed his, and his ruling-class masters’ real target: “Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations.”
In a later interview Stewart presented his now famous feline analogy, “It’s like you’re going into a room with an angry cat and a big tiger....The angry cat is Afghanistan and the big tiger is Pakistan. Pakistan has nuclear bombs. Pakistan has Bin Laden. Pakistan can destabilize India.”
Whatever course Obama and his ruling-class masters takes, it will be a disaster for our class. A drive for pipeline terrain in Afghanistan will kill tens of thousand of Afghan workers and working-class GIs. Expanding the U.S.’s semi-secret war in far more populous Pakistan will murder many more and help set the stage for World War III.
The working class has no interests in this debate among the rulers — but must organize against its consequences. We can’t stop the rulers’ wars just yet. But by building a working-class party with a revolutionary communist outlook, we shall eventually be able to crush the billionaires’ profit system and its ceaseless mass slaughter.

U. of Cal.: Need Strike vs.
War-Inspired Racist Cuts

CALIFORNIA, September 24 — Thousands of students, campus workers, staff and faculty walked out and rallied across the ten campuses of the University of California (UC) system today, in a huge worker-student alliance protesting fee hikes, worker layoffs and wage-cuts. The UC system has a budget shortfall of $813 million and is furloughing faculty, raising student fees, and firing workers, staff and part-time lecturers. Student fees rose 9.3% this quarter, and a UC Regents proposal would raise fees from 30% to 50% by the next academic year. This comes after tripling of fees in the last ten years.
Many campus workers have lost their jobs and been forced onto furloughs — a cut that further slashes their poverty wages. At these rallies PLP called for a strike against a racist capitalist system that cuts education to wage expanding imperialist wars and bail out banks.

UCLA

Around 1,000 UCLA students, faculty and university workers walked out in support of the UC-wide walkout against the system’s budget cuts.
The UC regents and state politicians claim the state’s budget crisis has forced these cuts. But in fact, they reflect the priorities of a capitalist system in crisis. Federal aid, an important source of funding for the UC system, has been slashed, like in all states. The single most important reason for this reduction is the billions upon billions U.S. rulers are spending on imperialist wars for oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For instance, while UCLA has closed its undergraduate writing/tutoring center because of a lack of funding, the Department of Energy has exempted military research labs like UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore from cuts. In addition to war spending, California in particular has increased spending on its state prison system at a higher rate than on public education. California erected 23 new prisons while building one new UC campus.
During the rally here, most speakers representing various unions criticized the cuts but blamed the UC regents and argued for equal distribution of the cuts among students, workers and administrators. A PL student, one of just three students the union officials allowed to speak, explained the relationship between the cuts and spending on war and fascism. He concluded that politicians are part of the problem, not the solution, seeking to shift responsibility for the crisis onto workers.
The most important gain that can emerge from this struggle is showing that students and workers have power when they unite to fight back, and that a system that cannot meet their needs must be destroyed.
When the rally moved to Murphy Hall, site of the Chancellor’s office, about 60 students broke away from the main group, eluded the cops and sat in the hallway just outside the Chancellor’s office. Several led chants, such as “UC regents, we see racists!”; and, “No cuts, No war, the cuts are for the war!”
Union reps joining the students tried to quiet them, arguing a delegation was inside negotiating with administrators. Several students refused to listen and eventually the union reps broke solidarity with the students, stating they were leaving the building, and demanding that all union workers do the same. The union had agreed not to engage in civil disobedience. After about an hour, administrators agreed to organize a meeting between the Chancellor and students and workers within a week.
Student organizers met after the events to plan another meeting to continue organizing actions against the budget cuts. There is disagreement about the type of actions and objectives. Some think the struggle should focus on pointing out that the UC system has money but has simply “mismanaged” the budget. Others argue for organizing actions that empower students and workers, understanding that the long-term objective must be communist revolution. J

More Action

On another California campus, over 700 students, workers and professors mounted a noon-time rally and speak-out backing the walkout and a one-day strike called by the University Professional and Technical Employees union. “Make the Bosses Take the Losses!” and “Same Enemy, Same Fight, Workers and Students Must Unite!” were two of the chants led by a large picket line that blocked the main campus plaza. Several speakers pointed to the need to defend public education and other social services, while others explained the ways the cutbacks affected them.
Speakers declared that “anti-war” Obama and the Democratic Congress, much like Bush and the Republicans, were still funding wars for oil profits and Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan and giving trillion-dollar bailouts to predatory banks and corporations. Meanwhile workers lose their jobs and homes and social programs are gutted.
The crowd cheered when another speaker exposed Obama’s supposed “shared sacrifice” as a lie and questioned the existence of a system that wages war and bails out banks while attacking education and health care for workers and students. Still another speaker received huge applause when showing that the cuts are both racist and attack all working-class students, and that now it’s clearly rich vs. poor, with the rulers reserving the universities for the elite only.
At a later afternoon rally of about 200 students, speakers outlined the racist nature of the cutbacks, pointing out that California spends more on prisons than any other state and that by 2012 prisons will outspend education. Since the 1990s, fewer and fewer black and Latina/o youths attend the UCs, but in California the incarceration rate for young Latinas/os is twice that of white youths and six times for young African-Americans.
Students responded emotionally to workers who described the hardships they face from the cutbacks, layoffs, subcontracting and poverty wages from one of country’s richest public universities.
The workers’ picket-line militancy sparked students’ and other staff members’ anger. They loudly yelled, “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated”; and, “Workers’ Struggles Have No Borders.” Workers led in revealing the class nature of the fight on the campuses.
CHALLENGE was recognized and warmly received by many. PLP was the only group that distributed a Spanish-language leaflet to these overwhelmingly Latina/o immigrant workers. The bilingual leaflet called for a revolutionary communist movement to end imperialist wars and the fascist attacks against workers and students. Many were happy to see PLP participating and distributing leaflets and CHALLENGES at the protests on several campuses.
The day’s events’ preparations did not lack struggle and disagreements over the nature of the cutbacks and the crisis. In prior planning meetings, arguments erupted around the day’s message. Some argued for a narrower, more specific message: “save public education, a public good.” Worried about alienating themselves from others, some feared raising the issue of the economic crisis and capitalism.
Other organizers, including several PLP members and long-time CHALLENGE readers, advocated bringing the larger capitalist crisis into the day’s actions and speeches. People were open to critiques of capitalism and the crisis, but disagreements persisted over connections to the state budget crisis, the crisis in the UCs and the larger financial crisis. The discussions were heated at times, but ultimately productive.
The speeches moved a little more to the Left than initially expected by some organizers, due to the political discussions in the planning meetings and while working on different tasks for the day’s protests.
We need to fight the cuts and widening war with the growing understanding that a racist profit system which puts the needs of the oil profiteers and capitalist bankers over the health, safety and education of the working class must be destroyed. While the faculty union leaders say we should fight for the “sanctity” of public education, this is capitalist public education, with its racism, patriotism, war research, and anti-worker ideas. Education will only serve the working class when workers take power through revolution, in a communist society dedicated to meeting the needs of the international working class.

PLP Unites Workers, Wins CHALLENGE Readers, Rebuts Union Hacks

PHILADELPHIA, September 20 — At our hospital the nurses recently attempted to organize a union. This organizing drive was part of a national campaign associated with the California Nurses Association (CNA). The CNA was the moving force in winning the law improving nurse-to-patient ratios in California. This reform victory has given the CNA a great deal of prestige among nurses and they are using this prestige to organize nurses around the United States.
The drive to organize PASNAP, the local CNA union, was part of an agreement between CNA and our Tenet Healthcare bosses who promised that they would do nothing to oppose the union campaign. The Tenet bosses’ promises proved worthless.

Bosses Attack

The capitalists followed the same dirty tactics at our hospital as they did at every other hospital where the union campaigned under the agreement. First they hired several hundred young nurses just out of school and assigned anti-union nurses to orient them to the job. Then they found a reactionary nurse educator who was technically not in management to contact the American Right to Work Committee. Through this committee she brought in a union-busting consultant to run a full-fledged anti-union campaign.
Despite all of this boss treachery, after a six month campaign the union had won a significant majority of the nurses to sign pledge cards and filed with the federal government’s National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) for an election. But on the night before and during the two days of the election the bosses called the young nurses into the head nurse’s offices on all the floors and told them that they would lose their jobs if they did not vote against the union. These threats were a violation not only of the agreement with the union but also of the National Labor Relations Act. Because of this boss treachery the union lost the election by a vote of 309 to 267. The union has filed suit with the NLRB in an attempt to overturn the results and start a new organizing campaign.

Communist Response

At the beginning of the PASNAP campaign, several black workers from 1199 SEIU — the largest healthcare union in the U.S. — asked us in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to run a competing union campaign for 1199. The argument of these black workers was that all the workers at our hospital should be in the same union because we need unity to be able to fight the hospital bosses.
PLP has a long history with our hospital’s workers and some have joined PLP and distribute CHALLENGE. Keeping in mind that all unions defend capitalism, which serves the bosses, our PLP collective recognized that the primary goals were expanding our CHALLENGE networks and bringing our base closer to joining the Party.
But in response to our base, we now had to decide whether to join the campaign on the side of PASNAP or 1199. The question was raised whether communists had an obligation to remain loyal to 1199 since this is the union that the so-called “non-skilled” and most of the black workers are in. PASNAP is modeled after racist craft unions that openly advertise themselves as “professionals” that exclude so-called “non-skilled” jobs held by many black, Latino and immigrant workers. This racist elitism is offensive to the 1199 workers.
Considering the sentiments of our base and friends, we contacted 1199. We also surveyed the nurses and found a mixed reaction to 1199. But the 1199 leadership never responded with any serious organizing efforts. All 1199 did was distribute literature portraying themselves as committed servants of the people and PASNAP as a flunky union that had entered into a sweetheart deal with the Tenet bosses. PLP has a long history of struggle against the 1199 leadership and we know both CNA and 1199 are enemy organizations. When our friends in 1199 saw the pathetic response of the union leaders, they advised us to continue with PASNAP.

Anti-Racist Victory in Long-Term Struggle

PLP is now building a unity committee — composed of both nurse union organizers and-rank-and-file 1199 workers opposed to the do-nothing 1199 leaders — that would struggle against hospital bosses and any divisive tactics initiated by the capitalist labor leaders on either side. Workers in both groups read CHALLENGE. This is a victory in itself.
PLP hopes to bring these CHALLENGE readers together into PLP to fight the racist and craft divisions that the bosses and their labor lieutenants try to force on us. We must eventually win a great number of workers skilled and unskilled to a multiracial mass movement that will overthrow capitalism and replace it with an egalitarian anti-racist communist society.

B’klyn Students Defy School Bosses, Stick It to the Fascists

BROOKLYN, NY, Sept. 24 — “These kids are amazing,” a black worker repeatedly told passers-by in his neighborhood. He was referring to a militant, multi-racial group of several hundred students who gathered outside their high school to oppose a racist, anti-gay rally by right-wing nut-jobs from the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, KS. While the Westboro crazies have only managed to recruit fifty members in over thirty years and their “rallies” rarely include more than a handful of their tiny membership, they are part of a growing trend of right-wing extremism in U.S. politics and society today.
As dangerous as their message is, however, the main danger these and other openly fascist groups pose is the way they push broader masses of workers and youth into the arms of the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class. Westboro, for instance, protests the funerals of U.S. soldiers slain in Iraq, claiming the deaths are divine punishment for supposed tolerance of homosexuality in the military. This position is so extreme that many workers, wanting to oppose the right-wing sentiments, end up taking a stance that supports the war.
The racists of the “tea party” movement aren’t mainly a threat in and of themselves, as bad as they are, because they don’t have a mass base. The worst aspect of their growth is that they move masses to rally around president Obama and the ongoing project of imperialist war and growing fascism he inherited and is expanding.
At the Brooklyn high school the administration worked hard to get students to “respond” to the WBC by ignoring their impending visit. Yet students, some who are beginning to work more with the PLP, led a campaign through their school club to reject this dangerously mistaken position by mass-producing anti-racist stickers for their peers to wear the day of the protest. When the WBC showed up after school over three hundred students, many of whom knew CHALLENGE, showed up to outnumber, outlast and drown out the handful of fascists who showed up.
The slogans the students mobilized around ranged from the plainly liberal “love don’t hate” to the sharper “reject racism” and “no free speech for racists.” The students’ defiance of the advice to ignore growing fascism represents a sure step in the right political direction and a solid basis on which to further the growth of the PLP.
The day before the racist crazies came, five students from the school went with some teachers and four Stella D’Oro workers to the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Delegate Assembly (DA).
The emergency DA was scheduled to “discuss” contract demands put forward by the union’s negotiating committee. However, at the Labor Day parade the Saturday before, two PL’ers challenged the UFT president to put Stella D’Oro on the agenda, and to welcome Stella workers to the DA.
At the Assembly students distributed a PLP leaflet — and several UFT’ers distributed CHALLENGE. We won the struggle to bring the Stella workers to the stage after we had to wait for a parade of politicians to waste our time. The president of the union, Mulgrew, chairing his first DA, presented himself as a working-class guy who welcomed our class brothers to the DA. He announced that everyone should go to a Wall Street area rally later that week to demand that Stella stay in the Bronx.
On the other hand, the members of the DA know who really brought the Stella workers to the DA. We know union leaders like Mulgrew are loyal to the rulers, and the lack of any pro-student demands in the UFT contract proposal only highlights which side Mulgrew is on.

Tool Workers’ Strike Solid, But Union Relies on Bosses’ NLRB

CHICAGO, Sept. 25 — Over 70 workers at SK Hand Tools in Chicago and McCook, IL went out on strike August 25, after the company cancelled their health benefits, with no notification to the workers or the union, Teamsters Local 743. This strike has captured the attention of many workers and the media, with health care “reform” being in the national spotlight. The company also proposed to cut their wages by $4.00/hour, another 20% pay cut, and cut their vacations in half. The workers voted overwhelmingly to strike, and have maintained a 24-hour picket line ever since.
These workers, many of them on the job for 20 and 30 years, produce quality tools such as Craftsman. While the company sells them at a premium price, most of the workers make only $14 to $19 an hour. The company cuts would actually put some of them BELOW the minimum wage! All of the workers we have spoken to felt they had no choice but to strike. This struggle just proves the point that capitalism does not meet the needs of the working class as even those who have skilled jobs have no real security.The ruling class can destroy our standard of living whenever they decide it’s necessary to increase their profits.
The leaders of the union have not organized the workers to completely shut down or seize the plant, as the Republic Door and Windows strikers did last winter here. A small group of managers is coming in and out daily, trying to keep up some production. Instead the union is relying on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to decide in their favor that the company’s actions amount to “unfair labor practices.”
As we pointed out in the Stella D’oro strike, relying on the bosses’ NLRB is not the way to fight the bosses. As soon as the NLRB decided in favor of the Stella workers, the Stella bosses announced they would close the plant and move it elsewhere. Only by relying on the working class, and fighting for state power can we defeat these bosses and move toward a communist society of equality.
The SK strikers have shown tremendous resolve and fight. Many of them marched in the Immigration March in Chicago on Labor Day, and then joined the AFL-CIO Labor Day Festival in Pullman. Workers of many different nationalities, colors and unions welcomed them to both events as the heroes of the day. PLP members and friends have made some visits to the picket line, bringing food, water and our communist politics to the strikers. We need to do much more of that, both to learn from the struggle of the SK workers, and to spread our ideas through CHALLENGE newspaper of communism, anti-racism and equality.

Fascist Terror: Racist LA Cops Murder 4 Black and Latino Workers in 6 Days

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 14 — LA County Sheriffs murdered Darrick Collins, 36-year-old black father of two, in the Athens section of South LA. They were supposedly looking for two robbery suspects, but shot unarmed Darrick Collins three times in the back in his own backyard at night through a wooden gate. The fatal shot hit him in the back of the neck, the other two in the back. They later said Collins and his friend were not the suspects they sought.
There have been demands for a full investigation. Collins has a very large family and larger group of friends who are all demanding justice. Students in PLP who live near the Collins family went to the home to offer support. They were invited to the funeral, where speakers told what a good father, son and friend Darrick was. Afterwards the youth took PLP leaflets to the neighbors and some of the family members. Many expressed agreement and want more action against the killer cops.
After the racist murder got a lot of publicity Sheriff Baca announced that such “officer-involved” shootings would be investigated more rapidly. This was meant to calm the angry family and friends. A pastor at the funeral who was a skillful speaker said that black people have been lynched by the Sheriffs for generations. He said they had blood on their hands. Then he called on the mourners not to be angry at the police, but to turn to religion. But clearly hundreds of mourners at Darrick Collins’ funeral are angry and want something done.
Just six days after killing Darrick Collins, the LA County Sheriffs had killed three other men in separate incidents, bringing the total number of murders by racist cops in Los Angeles this year to 13. The cops and press claim the three men were armed. Only one of them, 17-year-old Travion Richard of Long Beach, has been named.
Only a few days later, a combination of local, state and Federal police agencies brought 1,200 cops to carry out a gang sweep in northwest LA, arresting 88 people. This show of force by the LAPD, DEA and other agencies, along with the brutal murders of Darrick Collins, Travion Richard, and the other two men are part of the racist terror that goes hand in hand with cuts in services, skyrocketing racist unemployment, cuts in education and health care, and widening imperialist war.
Fascism doesn’t start full-blown but develops one small step at a time. In Los Angeles this year we’ve seen a whole series of steps that add up to a big jump in fascist conditions. PLP has been organizing against the budget cuts in the UC system and the fascist reorganization of the schools. We will continue organizing students and workers to protest these racist murders and the capitalist system that must rely more and more on racist terror and fascism both at work and in the streets. Fascism is a double-edged sword. With revolutionary leadership, anger, deep hatred of the capitalist system, and the need to get rid of it will overcome both fear and cynicism and build the movement that will lead to a communist revolution where workers’ power will put an end to the murdering fascist bosses once and for all.

El Salvador FMLN’s Capitalist ‘Reform’:
Mass Unemployment, Daily Killings, $1-a-Day ‘Wages’

El SALVADOR — “To us, the right-wing position of Funes and his FMLN government hasn’t been a surprise. CHALLENGE wrote about this possibility” said a comrade in a meeting. Another affirmed, “we should cut out all the articles from CHALLENGE about Mauricio Funes, the FMLN and it’s capitalist program of reforms applied by the Arena government (“solidarity network,” the credit card law, etc) to show workers who had illusions in change that we were right when we criticized Funes and the FMLN.”
Ramon Diaz Bach, member of the Central Civic Movement, has said that the Funes capitalist model has failed. “Continuing to insist on a failed model is dangerous for the country.” Bach lamented that despite the failure of the capitalist model, Funes is not showing signs of change. (Diario CoLatino, 08/08). Diaz Bach is a social Christian liberal, ex-director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industries of El Salvador and ex-Vice Minister of Economy (1984) during the administration of the Christian Democratic Party. Today he is a prominent member of the leadership of the FMLN, which wants liberal changes and small reforms, amidst world-wide capitalism in a severe economic crisis, because he’s afraid that the worker-peasant-student masses will seek a real communist change.
In the Funes government and the FMLN, in spite of the promises of change, criminality continues. There are daily killings all over the country. An average of 12-14 people killed every day shows the failure of the capitalist system to give the working class a secure life. The farm workers continue surviving on $1 a day. Unemployment from layoffs this year alone number 55,000 workers thrown out into the street, who join the army of hundreds of thousands who are looking for jobs that don’t exist. Additionally, family remittances from the U.S. have decreased by 10% compared to a year ago.
The illusion that things have improved is confronted with the harsh reality of more of the same. Many of our friends still say that this isn’t the Funes that they knew, who confronted power, who put government functionaries on the spot. But we shouldn’t forget that Funes was never, nor will ever be a communist. His critique and bravery were liberal-reformist. He was always a defender of capitalism, supposedly “democratic”. That was his limit.
The ferocious right wing Arenas Party, brutal in its repression, now shows itself to be so understanding that the government investigator Mitofsky says Funes has the support of more than 80% of the population. He says they are full of hope for the new government “of the left.” Now, the capitalist media even praises Funes. “If the bosses’ press, like Prensa Grafica, TCS, and others accept him, something’s wrong,” stated a worker.
The bosses’ system will not be destroyed though the voting booths. Elections maintain the capitalist system and we must fight against them. The electoral parties and opportunists want to trap the working class in elections. Our mission is to get our class out of this trap, and our most powerful weapons are to fight back against the bosses’ murderous attacks and build more groups of CHALLENGE readers and sellers.
Hundreds of workers demand their CHALLENGE newspaper. Study groups are spreading around the country and Central America. Some comrades who for years have distributed our literature are asking for more CHALLENGES. The cadre schools are being organized and prepared by experienced PLP comrades. The topic of contradiction between the bosses’ system and the workers’ system (communism) is discussed in these meetings with the seriousness that the working class demands. Our uphill battle continues its march.

Stella Strikers’ Open Letter to Ohio Workers

The Stella D’oro strikers have asked CHALLENGE to print excerpts from an open letter from Stella D’oro Workers in the Bronx to Lance Workers in Ashland, Ohio:
Dear Workers at Lance:
We work at the Stella D’Oro bakery in the Bronx in NYC. Many of us have worked for the company for as many as 30 years.
In 2006, a private equity firm, Brynwood Partners, bought Stella D’Oro to squeeze out a higher rate of profit for its investors. In 2008, Brynwood’s demanded that the assembly line workers accept a 25% wage-cut, as well as a reduction in health benefits, sick days and vacation time. Our union offered to negotiate but Brynwood said, “Take it or leave it,” and imposed the new terms.
Lance managers will tell you that we were greedy. But how could we accept a 25% wage-cut? Our rents and mortgages weren’t going to be reduced, nor were food prices, or college tuition payments for our children! It was the greed of the multi-millionaires who run Brynwood Partners that forced us to strike.
For eleven months we existed on unemployment insurance, but not a single person crossed the picket line. Then word of our struggle began reaching people throughout the city. Transit workers, teachers and professors, postal workers, students and others came to our picket line. Thousands came to plant rallies, union members throughout the state donated money to support us, and thousands of customers refused to buy Stella D’Oro products during the strike.
At the end of June, the NLRB ruled that the company had to take us back and bargain in good faith. We thought we had won. But only a few days later, Brynwood announced that it planned to close the plant in October, in a city with 10% unemployment.
You know what happened: Brynwood sold the Stella D’Oro name and plant machinery to Lance, which plans to make some of its products in Ashland. We know that unemployment is high in Ohio, as companies have moved better-paying jobs to low-wage areas. That’s what Lance is doing here! It has no intention of giving you the same wages and benefits we had won through years of struggle. It will pay you a fraction of our hourly wage, give you an inferior health plan, and provide fewer sick days and vacation time. And we bet it won’t bring all 135 jobs to Ashland, just as it didn’t rehire all the unemployed Archway workers when it took over your bakery.
We want you to know that we don’t blame you for what’s happening. We also want you to know that we’re not going down without a fight. We can’t afford to lose our jobs. There will be rallies throughout NYC demanding that Stella D’Oro stay in the Bronx.
The owners want to keep us separate, pit the Ashland and Bronx workers against each other. But every gain for labor has come when working people united and fought together for things they needed: a shorter work-week, pensions, health care, social security. In these rough times, our unity is more important than ever. We ask you to understand our position and offer whatever solidarity you can.

LETTERS

Salvador ‘Left’ Pro-Capitalist

What irony that the contingent of the fighters from El Salvador’s FMLN, which is today a political electoral party, can’t use the word “revolution” in their meetings and street actions. They are left with the populist “change,” an infamous ruse to fool and mislead the working-class masses from El Salvador to China. I was a member of the FMLN. Thanks to PLP, I’ve been rescued from the claws of capitalism.
Today I can see a party which claims to be leftist accommodate and adapt itself to a profit system where the bosses don’t care how much blood has been spilled or struggle waged, and to fall into state capitalism. During the 1980’s the Salvadoran Communist Party joined the FMLN. This organization still exists and is very well known for worshiping and praising capitalism. What real communist ideas could this party present to us? If they currently quarrel among themselves, it’s a fight over positions inside the FMLN. We shouldn’t be fooled by these sellouts.
We are internationalists. We hear Latin American leftists talk and I ask myself, “What left?” There isn’t one, and that’s why indigenous slavery continues, as well as wage slavery. These nationalist “leftist” groups have made us accommodate for centuries to the bourgeoisie when they are our enemy, those who we have to destroy. That’s why in El Salvador’s PLP we’re fighting for communism, so that the working class sees the light of a new world.
Recently, ex-fighters, refugees of the FMLN, met in Sweden with the goal of founding the Communist Party of Sweden. We communists of PLP don’t go around founding parties based on nations, because we want one world, one class without borders, without the disgrace of money, without racism or races. We don’t want a different party in each country. The nationalist parties divide the working class and that’s why there’s not enough working-class unity. We fight for the slogan “One class, one international party, one fight for communism.” PLPers continue to organize the red army.
A Red Comrade

Need More Info on LA Fight

In the last CHALLENGE (9/30), the page 3 article “Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform,” is a scathing attack on L.A. school reform, but not much of what we are doing about it. PLP has been active there for some time, with some of our most committed cadre. But this reads more like a leaflet that might have been distributed at the meeting. We, as readers, need more information about what actions they are organizing.
For example, it says that some teachers called for a strike at an area union meeting. How? Did they make a resolution? Did they give out a flier? Did it get discussed and/or voted on? What was the response of the union leaders? How did they take them on in the meeting? What was the response of other teachers? How are they working in the union to spread these ideas? How are they answering questions teachers have? How much support is there? How are they building a base for PLP?
The article closes by saying that “a trade union response is totally inadequate,” and “PLP calls...[for a] strike...based on expanding CHALLENGE networks...” Are they expanding? If so, tell us how so we can follow that example. If not, what are the obstacles? The formulation makes it sound like PLP is trying to organize a strike led by us and our base, outside the unions and other mass organizations. If so, that would be a big mistake.
Unions and other mass organizations are reform groups, even if we lead them. The same is true for strikes at Stella D’Oro and Boeing, or job actions against transit workers getting killed in Washington, DC. But if we are not in the thick of these struggles, fighting for our communist outlook and trying to lead workers in sharper more militant actions, we will just be spinning our wheels.
The fake-left Trotskyite groups are always “calling” for a General Strike, or demanding the union leaders do something. But they are not the least bit interested in making anything happen. They attack PLP for “working with the liberals” because we are active in our unions. We shouldn’t make their same mistake.
The revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin said that by fighting for the political leadership of the workers and leading class struggle, unions could become “schools for communism.” The founder of scientific communism, Karl Marx, said that workers would have to wage 50 years of class struggle in order to be fit to rule. By fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers within mass organizations, we can expand the circulation of CHALLENGE and the size and influence of PLP.
A Chicago Comrade

Criticizes Slavery Graphic

In the Sept. 30, 2009 issue of CHALLENGE, the article on the upcoming commemoration of the Harper’s Ferry raid is illustrated with a 19th-century engraving of a slave rebellion. This picture is pro-slavery propaganda. It portrays the slaves as half-naked “savages,” whereas the “civilized” slave-owners are all fully-clothed. The slaves are shown barbarically exterminating an entire family: the mother lies dying in the foreground; on the right, a slave is about to saber a girl, while on the left another is about to club a little boy to death. Both children have their hands raised in an appeal for mercy. This sort of propaganda was used to persuade white people in the South and North that they had to support the slave-owners because slavery was the only way to prevent black people from massacring everyone. I think it was a mistake to use this pro-slavery propaganda to illustrate an anti-slavery article.
A friend

Workers Unite to Battle Racist School Closings

Hundreds of black, Latino and white workers rose in unison, fists pumping, to chant “RESIGN NOW” and “NO SCHOOL CLOSINGS” at the entirely black and Latino school board of a southern city during a mass community meeting. Roused by speeches of anti-racist community activists and friends of PL, more than a thousand people, led by black workers, forced the school bosses and their hand-picked “community” advisory committee to cower in their seats.
This was the sixth in a series of meetings to let the community blow off steam regarding the proposed closings of a third of the city’s public schools, including the only high school in the historically black East Side. But school bosses underestimated the intelligence and anger of the working class. Over the course of earlier meetings, workers exposed and challenged the school board’s effort to pit neighborhood against neighborhood, Latinos against blacks, by letting the “community” pick among alternate plans, each one cutting someone else’s schools.
At an earlier meeting, a speaker exposed the fascist war machine’s goal to turn schools into jails. At every meeting, a Latina woman who had led struggles against school closings two years earlier, challenged the district’s history of divide and conquer. She pointed out that even neighborhoods not under direct attack would be harmed by overcrowding and the threat of future school closures. At the third meeting a school teacher finally labeled the board’s actions for what they were: RACISM! A gasp was heard from the hundreds at that meeting.
Activists from groups including PTAs and opponents of earlier school closings, returned repeatedly to community meetings to fight back and reject the call that working-class parents and students pick their own poison. Organizers circulated petitions, went door-to-door and spoke in churches to bring workers to protest school closings. Parents repeatedly defied commands to limit comments and to choose one of the proposals for school closings.
Following these meetings, the superintendent suggested he would delay closing high schools in the areas of the greatest protest, though many other schools will be shuttered. But there is a contradiction embedded in thinking this a victory and even in the chant “Resign Now!” Hundreds of the most militant anti-closing fighters believe that the hiring of a new superintendent or the election of “better” school board members will allow power to be shared and bring long-lasting improvement. In fact, some honest community activists served on the task force that created the school closing plans out of a desire to create a fairer district. As they worked under the direction of hired experts to frame school closings and to meet funding cuts that economic crisis and war brought, they were used to provide cover for the ruler’s exercise of state power.
Despite hating the superintendent and his plan, many do not realize that the real rulers, the capitalist class, are using the layers of elected and appointed community members of all “races” to create the illusion that real, permanent reform and improvement is possible. A new superintendent will not change the ruling class’s need to cut school funding in the face of economic crisis and war. The rulers never share power. Right now, their needs to bail out the banks and to continue oil war in the Middle East mean the rulers have to reduce education, lay people off and foreclose houses.
In numerous discussions since then, the points raised by communists and their friends hope to move the discussion from the specific reform plans proposed by the bosses to the context of system-wide crisis that spawned these reforms. These discussions are urgent because capitalism cannot be reformed — it must be destroyed and replaced with a system run for and by the working class of the entire world. As we deepen our understanding and win more friends, we can also develop plans for even more militant actions, like walk-outs in schools or occupations of school board offices, which would help us learn even more and become better fighters for revolution.
The rulers’ plans depend on racist and fascist attacks on working-class people. But the rulers sometimes underestimate the power of the working class to learn from experience and from communist leadership — even in a short reform battle that likely cannot be won. This power of the working class is also very weakly understood by the workers themselves nowadays. But participating in these battles and making friends for the lifetime battle for communist revolution strengthens our class’ understanding of its power and the ability of PL to grow and guide the working class to revolution.

LA School Compact ‘Racist attack on students...’

LOS ANGELES, September 22 — An emergency informational teachers’ union meeting here discussed a proposed “Compact” between the union, the LA Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor, the Universities and the Schools Board. If this “Compact” passes, the union leadership will be enforcing the education reform agenda of the main section of the ruling class to reorganize schools on the cheap for the bosses.
The Compact would expand so-called peer review, determine No Child Left Behind intervention, expand charter and “iDesign” schools (where the teachers partner with a corporation to compete with charters and end up unwittingly helping do the bosses’ job for them). The goal is to make the school system cheaper and more adept at teaching minimum levels of math and English with lots of patriotism so students join the military and/or work in war plants for low wages.
When a comrade roundly condemned the Compact, he was heartily applauded by the teachers. He declared: “I’m a communist, not a democrat or a socialist. Socialists can’t make up their minds. This LA Compact that our leadership has brought us is a racist attack on our students. The fact that this union’s leadership would work with the Mayor, the School Board and the Chamber of Commerce on this should tell us it’s not in our interests.
“This Compact comes in the context of capitalist crisis and widening war. It represents a fascist reorganization of public education to meet the needs of the rulers, not our students. Fascism comes through dividing the working class and attacking one section more fiercely, and through racism. Our students are mainly black and Latino. The bosses are cutting education and health budgets but not the war budget. We must fight these attacks, including those on substitute teachers, with a united strike.”
PLP showed that the whole “compact” is a fascist assault on students and teachers. Others opposed the compact for each individual attack but concluded that it could be okay if it didn’t take away from “community organizing.” Our comrade argued that during an era-defining economic crisis and two wars, collaboration between the union leadership and the bosses would attack the students, on the road to fascism. He called on teachers to oppose the social-democrat/social-fascist union leadership and build for mass actions towards a political strike against the Compact, the cuts and the war.

Reformism A Trap to Maintain Bosses’ Power

MEXICO — In recent years, many very militant movements have arisen, producing problems for the ruling class. These include the mass struggle of APPO and teachers in Oaxaca; the miners in Pasta de Conchos in the state of Coahuila; the peasants in San Salvador Atenco in the State of Mexico; as well as the very militant movements of the Ford workers, and the recent struggle among the taxi drivers who put the transportation bosses in check (including the local government).
All this demonstrates the immense potential of the working class. However, it also shows a lack of sufficient organization and above all the understanding that to truly liberate ourselves from the bosses’ yoke, we will have to struggle for a real communist revolution.
In these struggles we’ve fought for crumbs, even though workers made the whole cake. No sooner do we win small wage increases (reforms), they take them away by raising prices on basic products, speed-up, layoffs and even jailings and death. We need to take the means of production away from the bosses. We don’t need them because we’re the ones who produce everything. Yet the bosses live like kings without working.
If we fight under the bosses’ laws, we’ve already lost, since capitalism’s laws are designed to protect the interests of capital. When someone goes against the bosses’ interests, we’re repressed by the bosses’ police and sentenced in the bosses’ courts, accused of “terrorism,” drug trafficking or whatever other crime they can invent.
Government branches that supposedly “defend” workers’ interests — the Department of Labor, the Congress of Labor, human rights groups, etc. — are regulated by the capitalists’ government. We workers will always lose under the bosses’ laws; all our efforts get turned around.
Given the treadmill of reform, the working class needs to build a long-term struggle — participating in reform struggles but understanding that workers need to be politicized and consciously see the nature of the reform struggle, to understand how capitalism functions. We must primarily recognize that racism, nationalism, sexism and religion are ideological tools manufactured and used by the ruling class to keep dividing our class and subject us to the bosses’ interests.
Even if momentarily we win some crumbs from the bosses, as the taxi drivers here who formed a cooperative, sooner or later the bosses and their government will end up controlling the movement through their laws, or corrupting the leadership as has been the case in other movements.
It’s not that we distrust these workers, but it’s our obligation as a Party to warn about how
capitalism functions. Such analyses can prevent the capitalist system from co-opting us, from allying ourselves with one or another branch of the ruling class, which doesn’t help our class in any way.
As we participate in these class struggles, we workers must make our main priority building the Progressive Labor Party, with mass CHALLENGE networks, so that we can continue giving leadership to the international working class. Our goal is building a communist society that liberates us forever from all the misery of capitalism.

Red Eye on the News

Back Afghan pipeline, US backs you

Pythian Press, 8/29 — Through the years power in [Afghanistan and Pakistan]... has switched back and forth with our being on whichever side suited us at the moment. At different times we have supported groups including Osama bin Laden, a Saudi and our current sworn enemy....
It is suspected that our allegiance is largely to whoever is supporting an oil line from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan to a Pakistan port.

Moore: Voting will cure capitalism

NYT, 9/23 — In the end, what is to be done? After watching “Capitalism,” it beats me. Mr. Moore doesn’t have any real answers.... This isn’t the story of capitalism as conceived by Karl Marx... and it certainly isn’t the story of contemporary American capitalism, which extends across the globe and far beyond Mr. Moore’s sightlines.
Neither is it an effective call to action: Mr. Moore would like us to vote, which suggests a startling faith in the possibilities of social change in the current political system.

Cuba honors black rebel’s demise

NYT, 9/13 — A bricklayer who began working at age 11, Mr. Almeida was the only black commander among rebel leaders. He was one of the most important and decisive voices in the battle to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista....
Mr. Almeida, the Castro brothers and Ernesto Guevara, and Argentine known as Che, were among only 16 who survived the landing, in which most of the rebels were killed by government troops.
“No one here gives up!” Mr. Almeida shouted to Guevara at the time, giving the Cuban revolution one of its most lasting slogans and ensuring his place in Cuban Communist history....
He was a member of the Communist Party of Cuba’s Central Committee since its creation in 1965.

Afghan women see little liberation

LAT, 8/23 — “Liberating the women of Afghanistan” was often cited as one of the reasons to seek “regime change.” More than seven years later, however, the situation for Afghan women remains dire....
Educational gains plummet when girls hit secondary school, with just 4 percent of female students reaching 10th grade. Violence against women is endemic; women in public life are regularly threatened, and several have been assassinated.
Things got much worse recently when President Hamid Karzai officially promulgated legislation that would make the Taliban proud. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern....
The Kabul government and its backers are supposed to be different from the people they are fighting. Yet with regard to women’s rights, Afghans might conclude that there isn’t as much difference between the two as they had hoped.

What Afghan ‘win’ really means

Tribune Media Svc., 9/5 — ...Geocorporate interests control international relations....
[US] leaders... assume the mindset and agenda of those anonymous interests. In Afghanistan, this agenda includes [US] regional dominance [and] the flow of oil (the pipeline).... This is what “winning” in Afghanistan really means...

System ranks profits over health

NYT, 9/10 — ...Reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system....
There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry....
It’s more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Russian energy clout breeds conflict

GW, 9/18 — Russia’s stranglehold over dwindling global energy resources was dramatically confirmed last week when figures showed that the country has become the world’s biggest exporter of oil, producing almost 10m barrels a day in August, according to the International Energy Agency.
Russian production toppled Saudi Arabia from the number one spot. It is already the world’s largest exporter of gas, and supplies around a third of the European Union’s consumption.
The news is likely to heighten unease... over the Kremlin’s tightening grip on energy reserves....
“The question is will Russia want to exploit its feeling of superiority and demand a seat not just at the table but at the head of the table.”

Pfizer drug sales ‘endangered lives’

GW, 9/11 — Pfizer had been charged with mispromoting medicines and paying kickbacks to doctors.
Pfizer pleaded guilty to... promoting a drug for uses that were not approved by medical regulators....
A Pfizer sales representative in Florida... blew the whistle....
“At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that...”

Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid
Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution

In mobilizing the October 17 Harper’s Ferry march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid and to finish the job, two keys to revolutionary change stand out: revolutionary violence and multi-racial unity.
Revolutionary Violence
The government of a capitalist society enforces the exploitative and racist oppression of the working class by any means necessary, including violence by the cops at home and the military abroad. The capitalist state asserts a monopoly on the right to use violence, and uses it whenever workers and rebels threaten the bosses’ rule — on picket lines, in community rebellions against racism or in insurrections threatening bosses’ investments worldwide. The working class has no choice but to meet this capitalist violence with organized mass violence of its own. Failure to do so guarantees defeat.
Consider the Garrisonian abolitionists in the 1830s and ‘40s. They felt that with “moral suasion” slave-owners would eventually surrender their slaves. But “morality” will never trump the economic advantage of exploitation by elite classes, be they slaveholders or capitalists. The battle in Kansas (see CHALLENGE, 9/30) and the raid on Harper’s Ferry brought home that truth, and the ensuing Civil War demonstrated most certainly that only great violence could end the exploitation of chattel slavery.
Slavery was violence. The capture in Africa, the leg irons and imprisonment of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic on slave ships, the whip of the overseers to enforce interminable backbreaking work, and the master’s branding iron, jail cell and noose maintained slavery. The federal government guaranteed the legitimacy of this daily violence in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and supporting laws, and used its armed might against both Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry Raid.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 restated the Constitution’s provision making it illegal to aid escaped slaves but now required citizens of Northern states to actively assist their recapture whenever asked by private slave-catchers and/or federal marshals. Refusing to help could mean six months in prison or a $1,000 fine, even if the person seized had never been a slave at all! No trial by jury was allowed in such cases, since Northern juries would not generally convict someone who opposed slavery. No supposedly escaped slave could ever testify.
The 1857 Dred Scott Decision deepened this tyranny. The Supreme Court ruled that no black person, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen and had no right to bring a case to court. This essentially legalized slavery nation-wide and officially endorsed racist doctrine.

Racist Laws Still Exist

Similar practices continue today! The U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffs checkpoints on roads leading north from Mexico (sometimes hundreds of miles above the border), randomly stopping and searching vehicles, particularly those containing people who “look Latino.” Those who cannot prove their citizenship or produce documents showing they’re legally in the country are jailed and deported. ICE has employed similar tactics in raids on factories, movie theaters and wherever Latino workers are concentrated.
Similarly, the police beat and kill African American and Latino workers with impunity across the country. No jury trial for them, just cops acting as judge, jury and executioner! Killer cops are rarely indicted and virtually never convicted. Such state terrorism is designed to keep workers docile, divided and intimidated, echoing chattel slavery.
And so our class faces a violent, mighty foe. We must not shrink from what must be done today, organizing in factories, in the military and on campuses, not merely to resist but to turn the guns around on the world’s most violent ruling class. But such violence must be based in the masses.
Consider John Brown’s trip east after the January 1859 battle in Kansas. During this journey, his band of 15 helped 11 slaves escape and confronted and defeated 60 government soldiers trying to capture them. He fought and moved about with confidence since thousands of anti-slavery activists backed him wherever he went. In fact, when the Kansas governor demanded, via telegraph, that the U.S. Marshal at Springdale “capture John Brown, dead or alive,” the marshal responded with great irony, “If I try to capture John Brown, it’ll be dead, and I’ll be the one...dead!”
Similarly, Brown boldly declared that since President Buchanan had offered $250 for his capture, Brown would give $2.50 for the safe delivery of James Buchanan’s body.
A massive, militant anti-slavery movement existed, powerful enough to markedly limit federal government action. It had grown from the thousands who escaped from slavery and from their supporters. John Brown did not march on Harper’s Ferry to create a movement, but to put that movement on the offensive, just as he’d done in Kansas.
The Progressive Labor Party has mobilized against hundreds of demonstrations and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Minutemen. Only the presence of hundreds of cops prevented the fascists from being torn apart by anti-racist fighters led by PLP. Similarly, it was only the power of the federal government to enforce laws that protected the slave-owners from being crushed by enslaved workers and their allies.
As the communist movement grows once again, we must prepare to defeat ruling-class violence with mass, working-class violence that sweeps away all capitalist institutions and bosses. Nothing short of this will enable us to rebuild a society based on equality, collectivity and sensible management of the planet’s resources for the needs of the working class, now and in the future.
(Next issue: The Importance of Multi-Racial Unity)
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CHALLENGE, September 30, 2009

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Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks: ‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’

Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul

Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts

Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform

Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks

Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation

Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System

LETTERS

Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War

Eyewitness to NATO Afghan Slaughter

Reject Capitalist Ideas

Sotomayor As Judge Can Only Take Rulers’ Side

Book Reviews: Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes

Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control

Red Eye on the News

  • Teenagers bumped down, jobless
  • A raw health deal for immigrants
  • For profit, cheat the low-wagers
  • Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist
  • In poorest areas, sick dial 911
  • US drove Sioux off sacred mount
  • Insiders dumping their own stocks

Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World

Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks:

‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’

NEW YORK CITY, September 12 — Stella D’Oro bosses told its workers this week that they will be thrown on the street and that their bakery will be closed — the brand and some machinery having been sold to Lance, a non-union company. It will make the products at a bakery in Ashland, Ohio.

Stella workers, having struck for 11 months in a fiercely militant struggle against wage-cuts, descended with their supporters on the otherwise silent Labor Day parade today. Their contingent of 350 filled a city block with banners, signs, and chants of “Keep Stella in the Bronx: Fight, Fight, Fight!” and “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated.” Cleaners from Domestic Workers United and musicians from the Rude Mechanicals group made the chanters’ rhythms dance and sparkle.

The effect on workers marching past was electric. Eyes brightened, fists went up, the booming chants echoed from scores of marchers, especially the many ranks of construction workers walking behind or riding on their heavy rigs. Imagine those rigs surrounding the Stella plant, preventing any machines being moved out!

“Keep Stella in the Bronx” struck a real chord with New York workers who identify the Bronx as a working-class borough. If they didn’t know about the Stella struggle, they do now.

PLP’s Stella supporters helped build the action from within our own unions and mass organizations, and continued the flow of CHALLENGE sales and chants like, “Kick the Bosses in the Ass: Power to the Working Class;” and “Make the Bosses Take the Losses: Keep Stella Open.” PL’ers added the chant, “Whose Factory? Our Factory!” which attacks the essence of capitalism, and the internationalist chant in Spanish, “From north to south, from east to west, we’ll win the battle, whatever the cost.”

The workers are planning a September 25 march and rally from Wall Street, site of Lance’s banker, Goldman Sachs, to City Hall. PLP members are backing the workers as they absorb this heavy blow, helping them contact the Ashland workers to explain what happened here, and planning how to fight for their jobs.

The bosses’ laws protect their ownership of the means of production, enabling them to move around assets indiscriminately without any thought about the effect on workers. None of us is safe under their rule. The Communist Manifesto described this inevitable destructive effect of capitalism back in 1848: “Everything solid melts into air.”

But workers inevitably resist being discarded like a bad batch of cookies. We’re learning from such battles that the real war is against capitalism itself, and that our international revolutionary party can create an alternative, a communist society where workers rule and share all the value we produce. But for that to happen, we must melt capitalism into the air.

These are days of hard political debate and soul-searching struggle among the Stella workers themselves. Their communist party, the PLP, is among them with practical help and unbreakable friendships, with the ideas of CHALLENGE, and with trust in the working class.

It is workers such as this dynamic international group at a small Bronx bakery who will help make PLP a mass party able to destroy the whole rotten system.

Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul

Most everyone has come to understand that the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq was all about oil. But not even the oil barons knew just how much was up for grabs. Now it’s revealed that Barack Obama has 8.2 million reasons not to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq anytime soon. That’s how many barrels of oil companies like Exxon Mobil claim they can pump every day — if it ever becomes safe for them to operate there.

Stunning production targets emerging from Iraq’s ongoing oilfield licensing talks with major firms put it on a strategic par with oil kingpin Saudi Arabia. The rising stakes underlie the recent upsurge in Iraqi factional violence and guarantee not only a permanent U.S. military occupation but future deadly “surges” to help Exxon & Co. realize their goal. Production today stagnates around 2.3 million barrels a day (mbd).

Invading Iraq was the brainchild of U.S. Big Oil. Occupation plans took shape in a high-level joint project of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the James A. Baker Institute, imperialist think-tanks both closely linked to Exxon Mobil and J.P. Morgan Chase. Just before the 2003 invasion, the CFR-Baker cabal issued a report, “Iraq: The Day After,” promising that “U.S. and allied military forces will quickly occupy, control, and protect oil fields” in order to “achieve more significant increases — say, to 6 mbd by 2010.”

When the Bushites bungled the invasion by sending too few troops, the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists blamed renegade neo-cons like Cheney and Rumsfeld for launching a misguided “war of choice.” But U.S. imperialists cannot afford to walk away from the 8 mbd windfall that new technology makes possible.

Saudi Rulers Unreliable Allies for U.S. Rulers

Controlling 8 mbd of Iraqi crude would sharply reduce U.S. dependence on shaky Saudi Arabia as the world’s sole “swing producer,” meaning a country having enough spare capacity to adjust production in an economic or military crisis.

But Saudi royals rule a powder keg. Though they profit from the most lucrative long-term deal in capitalism’s history, serving as Exxon’s biggest oil supplier, their 30 million subjects receive nothing from this bonanza. They sympathize more with al Qaeda and Hamas than with Washington. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former chief of Saudi intelligence, in an op-ed piece in the NY Times (9/13/09), said it would be unwise for his country to normalize diplomatic relations with U.S. ally Israel. The prince fears that Saudi workers’ anger at Israel’s concentration-camp treatment of Palestinians may dethrone his oily dynasty.

So Exxon Mobil-led groups have bids in for 6.3 mbd, or almost four-fifths of Iraq’s potential [See Table]. Meanwhile the U.S. war machine remains ever poised to invade Saudi Arabia to prop up its ruling princes if the masses were to rebel. The Pentagon has massive bases to the north (Iraq), to the east (Bahrain and Qatar), to the west (Djibouti) and to the south (Diego Garcia).

However, Exxon & Co. shouldn’t start counting their Iraqi chickens just yet. Iraq still has no national law governing oil contracts. And no sooner had Iraq held its first oilfield auction in June, “the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government condemned it as unconstitutional.” (Energy Intelligence, 9/7/09)

More ‘Surges’ On The Agenda?

Fighting among rival Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and attacks on U.S. bases have intensified since the oil projects were revealed. The NY Times (9/13/09) suggests that U.S. troops may have to seize the streets again: “After the withdrawal of most American combat forces from Iraq’s cities on June 30, violence has remained a constant, with attackers able to plant and detonate bombs....seemingly with impunity.”

U.S. rulers and their allies are ready to worsen an already sickening equation: over one million dead Iraqis and more than 4,000 dead GIs “in exchange for” eight million daily barrels of crude.

We need a sharpening fight against U.S. imperialism — in the shops and unions, the communities and churches, among GIs, and in all mass organizations — to mount militant battles against the U.S. bosses’ deadly goals. Out of these class struggles, tying the mountainous racist and economic attacks on the working class to the need to exterminate the profit system, we can build a mass PLP that can lead a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and its endless oil wars.

Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts

WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 4 — Over 300 Howard University students, CHALLENGE readers and workers protested the administration’s plan to cut services and jobs, and hike tuition. Workers from SEIU Local 32BJ joined in the rally in support of the students and also demanded that the University stop its plan to contract out union jobs.

The Howard University Student Association (HUSA) raised 13 demands, including the firing of the executive leadership in the Office of Student Affairs due to their efforts to censor students; a public, transparent budget so students could see just how real the supposed deficit is; improvements in on-campus housing facilities; expansion and upgrade of the computer network; and a recycling plan to comply with the law and to reduce global warming.

Administrators refused to meet with the protestors, some of whom decided to march into the administration building to confront these bosses despite the HUSA leadership’s effort to stop them. The campus police shoved and kicked some of the students, including militant members of the Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC), to keep them out. Hard to believe that the new president’s slogan is “Students First!”

The economic crisis is hitting universities hard, and they in turn are hitting students and workers with big tuition hikes, cuts in services, layoffs, contracting out union jobs, and a more repressive atmosphere. The source of the economic crisis is the capitalist system with its single-minded focus on maximizing profit at the expense of everyone else. The universities’ role is to actually serve these capitalist interests.

During the same week that the protest occurred, Howard University announced a $2.5 million grant program from the Director of National Intelligence to develop a curriculum that will feed a pipeline of students into the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. This effort to provide more agents for imperialism complements the existing Howard University ROTC programs. ROTC enrolls almost 200 Howard students per year by bribing them with scholarships to become the executioners of workers and students in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are waged so that U.S. corporations can continue to dominate world oil markets and pipelines and maximize their profits. Military officers and intelligence agents are hit men for U.S. imperialism!

The struggle that heated up this week must begin to join with workers and students around the world to eliminate the source of the vicious attacks they face from profit-hungry imperialists across the globe. A concrete step these students can take in this process is joining the PLP.

Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform

LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 14 — At the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) area union meetings last week, some teachers called for a strike against the attacks on students and teachers, showing that “education reform” is fascist and part of the rulers’ moves to prepare for wider war.

On August 25, the Board of Education voted to turn over up to 200 lower-performing schools and 51 new schools to charter school operators. This is fascist reorganization of the local school system by a U.S. ruling class that is in an on-going war and an era-defining economic crisis. After years of neglect this school reorganization is a qualitative shift as the bosses attempt to create a school system that will produce technically-trained and patriotic young workers to join the military and future war production. PLP needs to work among these youth who are future workers and soldiers, key forces for revolution.

This school reorganization is also being pushed in Obama’s so called “Race to the Top,” where his education secretary Arne Duncan, has proposed a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grants to carry out “school reform.” States like California, where teachers’ unions had won laws that prohibit tying teacher evaluation and pay scales to student test data (so called “merit pay”) will be ineligible for these funds. But Duncan was in Sacramento recently to help State Senator Gloria Romero’s bid to change the law to make California eligible. And the LA Board of education just voted to enter the “Race to the Top” competition, also agreeing to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. These tests emphasize patriotism. Tying test scores to teacher evaluations is a way to enforce teaching patriotic lies and allow administrations to get rid of higher-paid older teachers while hiring younger teachers for lower wages and benefits.

In the face of the current attack, UTLA leadership is urging teachers to write local proposals to do school reform themselves. While the union pays lip service to organizing the Charter Schools, they are not even trying to organize all teachers, including charter employees, into the same bargaining unit. UTLA President Duffy, loyal servant of capitalism, calls on teachers to get involved in so-called grass roots school reorganization such as the innovation division, “i-design.” Such reorganization would be done to meet the ruling class’s needs, but would have to be approved by the school board and probably require a corporate partner. This is not grass roots; it’s doing the bosses’ patriotic work to remake the schools to better prepare students for war, to defend a system of exploitation, racism and war. Local school control means teachers working with students and parents to administer their fascist system. We can’t unite with those who oppress us, exploit us and send us off to war!

More layoffs and foreclosures are coming, so patriotic education reform will take on more importance for the bosses. A trade union response to this attack is totally inadequate. PLP calls on teachers, students and parents to organize a strike against the fascist reorganization of public schools. Organizing such a strike, based on expanding CHALLENGE networks, builds the unity of parents, teachers, and students to prepare us for the struggle to get rid of the capitalist system and build a communist society.

Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks

EL SALVADOR, September 13 — Recently at a meeting of teachers from El Salvador and Honduras, the latter (a member of the federation of Honduran workers) thanked the Salvadoran workers for their working-class solidarity in the face of the current crisis besetting workers in Honduras following the coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya is a millionaire member of the Honduran bourgeoisie who opposed trade deals with the U.S. and its allies, instead veering towards the Russian and Chinese imperialists through Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

The teacher from Honduras told of the temporary reforms financed by Chavez (to expand his influence in the region), enabling Zelaya to raise teachers’ wages to $1,000 a month (as compared to $500 a month for a teacher in El Salvador); afternoon snacks at schools; free uniforms and notebooks, among other measures. This has put Zelaya in conflict with sections of the Honduran ruling class, who were angered by Honduras joining ALBA (Chavez’s trade alliance) and Petrocaribe (Chavez’s oil alliance).

In Honduras they barely had time to cry for Roger Vallejo Soriano, a 38-year-old teacher shot in the head last July 30th during a demonstration protesting the coup, when another teacher, Martin Florencio Rivera, 37, was stabbed 25 times and killed after having participated in a wake for Soriano. All this is part of the brutal repression carried out by the security forces of the government of Roberto Michelleti.

Soriano was a victim of the on-going attacks by the police and the army, along with rapes of women. The teacher who spoke at the meeting was sprayed with cancer-causing chemicals when she participated in the marches.

In response to a PLP comrade’s question about the lessons drawn from this brutality, workers from Honduras replied: “We definitely must organize much better against the attacks of the system; we’re certain that the international bosses, including those in El Salvador, were involved in this coup.”

Said a PLP comrade, “If the bosses are organized, why can’t the international working class be organized for our own interests.”

This story reminded us of the massacres teachers in El Salvadoran suffered in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A PL teacher who participated in these struggles and saw the army and police kill many teachers in front of their students related his experiences in the teachers’ resistance in El Salvador and invited the teachers from Honduras to organize with PLP internationally to resist the bosses’ attacks.

The teachers and the international working class must see that the return of Manuel Zelaya, another capitalist exploiter, or any other capitalist president, will not end our problems. Those who exploit and kill the workers continue in power. There’s no reason to keep electing them.

The working class must fight for power by building its international party to organize for communist revolution, not continue supporting the murderous, rotten capitalist system. We must spread our networks of our revolutionary communist newspaper CHALLENGE internationally, to organize at work, school and in the fields to fight for a just system, communism. That’s how we can avenge the deaths of our class brothers and sisters.

Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation

PARAGUAY — One year after taking power, “Leftist” President Fernando Lugo’s promises have proven to be empty. Liberation can only come when the latifundistas (large agricultural capitalists) are expropriated, imperialists are expelled, industrial capitalists overthrown, and workers seize power through revolution with communist goals of equality and collectivity.

Since he led no revolution and workers did not take power, Lugo, like all capitalist politicians, maneuvers among the U.S. and European imperialists, the Bolivarian Bloc, and the Brazilian ruling class to try to cut deals for the Paraguayan capitalists and landowners. These deals have all deepened the exploitation and oppression of workers in Paraguay.

He has made health care free in public health centers, begun to develop limited social programs for children, and attempted to cut a better deal with Brazil over the price it pays for energy from the jointly-operated Itaipu Hydroelectric plant. But these reforms pale next to the severe exploitation workers face in Paraguay.

Soy, Sesame and Capitalist Poison

Paraguay is the 6th largest producer of soy in the world. The players in the sesame and soy game in Paraguay are the small rural farmers, Paraguayan and Brazilian Agribusiness, large landowners (Latifundistas — 2% of the population owns 70% of the land!), and major U.S. companies including Monsanto, Cargill and Syngeta.

The agrochemical and biotech companies are helping the latifundistas force peasants off their land by legal tricks and poisoning crops. How? The majority of the soy produced in Paraguay is based on Monsanto Corporation’s transgenic seeds that are genetically modified for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate. Massive spraying of glyphosate kills everything else, including small farmers’ crops. Lugo’s solution? Ban such spraying 100 yards from waterways, wetlands, roads and populated areas. But this barely touches the problem of the small farmers, and may even be reversed given the power of the latifundistas and their imperialist allies. In 2008, the soy production rate was twice what it was in 1998. The major effect of the soy planting is that it has effectively displaced thousands of rural farmers who plant subsistence crops. Activists have begun to occupy big farms and have mobilized in the streets of Asuncion to fight against the expansion of soybean plantations.

Corruption, Courts, Cops

The Paraguayan Supreme Court judges were appointed over decades by the Colorado party (the fascist party that had historic ties to Hitler) and is both corrupt and powerful. The judges refuse justice to workers. For instance, they have been deaf to the appeals and demonstrations of workers seeking justice in the Ycua Bolanos case. This involved a fire at a supermarket whose owners (Coloradoans) ordered their security guards to lock the doors, killing over 350 people. President Lugo has opposed the appointment of another Coloradoan, Lovera Canete, to the court, but has declared he will not veto the right-wing Senate’s appointment of him.

Even more shocking, however, to Lugo supporters, has been Lugo’s decision to allow fascist Sabino Augusto Montanaro to re-enter Paraguay. Montanaro fled when the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship fell in 1989 because he feared retribution due to the torture and murders he ordered of Political Military Organization (OPM) fighters, Paraguayan Communist Party members, and their allies. In fact, Montanaro was directly responsible for the assassination of the guerilla column Mcal Lopez. Lugo puts out the welcome mat for this fascist trash? Not the mark of a friend of the working class!

The Way Forward

Workers in Paraguay have a long way to go in the class struggle. Lugo misleads workers into the arms of latifundistas, capitalists, and imperialists, weakening the resistance to exploitation in the same way that Obama’s popularity is misleading many workers into supporting imperialist war in Afghanistan.

Instead of supporting these phony leftists and building false hopes that sooner or later demoralize our class, we must build a revolutionary communist movement for change based on workers’ power, rather than on wishful thinking that a charismatic leader will deliver when the state apparatus is firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Joining with PLP members around the world would be an important step in this process in Paraguay.

The Face of Poverty

• 2,156,312 Paraguayan workers (36%) live in poverty, of which 1,172,274 (19%) are living in extreme poverty. Four out of every 10 Paraguayans are poor.

• 40% of the poor receive 11% of the total resources produced in the country while 41% of the resources are concentrated among the 10% richest.

• 15 of every 100 Paraguayans survive on less then 1 U.S. Dollar a day and 30 out of 100 survive on 2$ a day.

• 78% of Paraguayans have no type of health care — 4,741,046 people

• Unemployment affects 8.7% of the population

• Underemployment affects 26.5% of the population — more than 760,000 people receive minimum wage.

• 133,000 women are illiterate and 15% are from the countryside.

Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System

Every September, parents send their children back to school in the hopes that they will learn, grow and prepare for bright futures. But the capitalists who run the public school systems have their own racist plans for our children. As the economic crisis deepens and inter-imperialist rivalry over the worlds’ resources expands, the capitalist bosses become more and more entrenched in their own problems. Desperate to bail out their crumbling financial system and to prepare for more military conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses spend billions. Shamelessly they continue to steal from the working class to save themselves and their system.

The current budget crises affecting U.S. school systems is a clear statement of capitalist priorities. These cuts are strangling a school system that was already failing our class’s children. In big cities where the majority of students are black and Latino, and families are already disproportionately suffering from unemployment and low wages, the cuts will be the worst.

In Los Angeles, classes will average 42 students. In NYC the school budget has been slashed by billions. This is forcing larger class sizes and cutting anything the Dept. of Education considers non-essential: art music, foreign language, sports, and after-school programs. In Chicago, where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honed his skills at cutting services to black and Latino students, many reading coaches, after-school and tutoring programs were eliminated. In San Antonio, schools full of black and Latino students are being shut down.

Washington, D.C, with a nearly all-black public school system, has been in the forefront of the bosses’ reform experiments, even as students continue to suffer. There, cuts are leading to layoffs of teachers as well as less money for vouchers and charter schools. While the schools are slashed, not a dime has been cut from the billions of dollars in interest going from the education budgets to the banks.

The attacks on working-class students are driven by the current crisis of the capitalists. In the 1950’s, the U.S. had emerged victorious from World War II and was launching the Cold War. U.S. bosses had the money to build huge factories that produced steel, autos, airplanes and factory equipment. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the U.S. bosses drove to invest in education for the “Space Race.” Now the U.S. is a power in decline. Those higher-paying industrial jobs are almost all gone. And the school systems with working-class students, always the poorest, are being gutted.

Capitalists view our children only as fodder for the bosses’ system. To the extent the bosses do care about educating working-class youth it is to have a politically loyal, skilled workforce to exploit. Technical education and patriotism are being pushed for black and Latino students. The advocacy for technical education reflects the growing need the ruling class has for skilled workers like engineers, drill press operators, and machinists, jobs needed for war production. Developing curriculum for the schools to create a workforce prepared for war is often masked by rhetoric saying the U.S. “needs to compete” with international rivals.

President Obama’s speech to school children on September 8 urged them to “set high goals, knuckle down in their studies and persevere through failure.” (NYT 9/9/09) Many parents embrace hard work and perseverance for our children but the subtext of the speech is that if children don’t succeed in life, it must be their own fault because they did not work hard enough. This idea ignores the reality of the capitalist world. No matter how hard school children work, they will not be allowed to all become doctors or lawyers. They will not even all have jobs. Capitalism relies on a pool of unemployed workers to keep wages low. In the current crises, unemployment is even higher; teaching workers to blame themselves prevents them from blaming the true cause of unemployment — capitalism.

Capitalist schools spend much time dividing students into different groups. Tests are designed to magnify differences and assign arbitrary cut-offs, so children get sorted into different programs from gifted and advanced placement to prison-like dumping schools. Capitalist schools prepare a select few to steer towards the elite professions. The majority of students are left to fight for low-paying jobs or join the military (see letter, p. 6).

“Tough Choices, Tough Times,” the report of the rulers’ New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, proposes that capitalism’s divisions be further entrenched in the schools by forcing students into a defined path after the tenth grade, either college-bound or vocational. Obama wants school children to knuckle down in their studies and persevere through a system that is failing and that fails to offer them the future they deserve.

This latest economic crisis and the quagmire of constant war have left the rulers in a political bind. Individualism is a cornerstone of capitalism and since the anti-war and anti-racist rebellions of the 60’s the U.S. bosses have championed the politics, the art, the music and the philosophy of “me-first.” Schools collaborated with a curriculum rich in the stories of individual success and national progress as the result of individual “can-do” spirit or single-minded pursuit of individual success in the face of great odds.

The fact that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet communists has been written out of history books. The bosses rewrote the truth of racism in the United States as the fiction of enlightened individuals struggling to champion the ideals of individual freedom. Slavery became an unfortunate “mistake” rather than the conscious policy of 250 years of racist rule codified in colonial law and the Constitution and enforced with ruthless violence that continues to define U.S. society today.

Obama tried to shift the message of individual success when he told students, “Don’t give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.” National service has been a part of the Obama campaign since the beginning and now Obama is calling on schools to teach children to serve their country and to be inspired to sacrifice for the good of the nation. But it’s not “their” country, it’s the bosses’.

Obama and the rest of the ruling class know that the schools have been failing our children for a long time. They cynically use their own failure to meet workers’ needs as a rallying cry for reforms. Many of these reforms have won the support of parents and teachers who hope that they will improve education; but none of these reforms will change the fundamental problems of a system that doesn’t care about working-class children. After years and years of education reform plans, 39% of children in the U.S. live in families earning less then the amount needed to meet their basic needs. (Center for Children in Poverty) Capitalism cannot educate the majority of children, and for the bosses it is not a principle whether students learn to accept inequality in a large school or a small one.

Reading CHALLENGE in the last few years, one can see many examples of fighting against anti-working-class attacks in the schools: from high school students protesting budget cuts and walking out against police brutality, to college students demonstrating against a pro-torture professor and developing a Freedom School when summer session is cancelled. The Progressive Labor Party is not training students to calmly accept the life capitalism has in store for them. We want students to learn real history and real skills, to learn to organize, to learn to fight back and to learn to serve our class by building the fight for communist revolution.

LETTERS

Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War

Why do soldiers from different countries join the military to fight each other? Many times it is because they cannot get a job.

The San Francisco Chronicle (2/17/09) reported that a U.S. colonel said he believes the increase of militant activity is not ideologically-based but stems from poor Afghans being enticed into fighting by their need for money. Afghan officials “believe it’s the guys who say, ‘Hey, you want $100 to shoot an RPG at a humvee when it goes by,’ and the guy says, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that, because I’ve got to feed my family.’”

Pentagon officials say that the economic downturn and a rising unemployment rate are making the military a more attractive option. Undersecretary of State David Chu said the military does “benefit when things look less positive in civil society.” (SFC, 11/30/08)

The bosses want us to fight each other so they can be rich and control their country’s economy. We should unite with these other workers so we can fight for a better life for all of us instead of killing each other for the benefit of the rich.

Internationalism is a communist idea. It says workers of the world have more in common with each other than with the bosses that run the country they live in. The bosses teach nationalism and patriotism to convince us to ally with them, but remember, every ruling class teaches patriotism; only the communists teach internationalism.

California reader

Eyewitness to NATO Afghan Slaughter

[The following letter is from an eyewitness in Afghanistan to the events described below, which gives the lie to U.S. military reports on who was killed and how many.]

I was at a burial ceremony of our colleague cousin who died in the latest explosion. He was not a Taliban, only a villager. Most of the victims were civilians.

The bombing was in the Chardara district, 15 kilometers from Kundaz City. Some say it killed over 200, gathering to obtain fuel from hijacked tankers. Then came the NATO airstrikes. It included a few Taliban, the others are all villagers.

What are these bastards doing? Killing innocent people — is this democracy?

Today around 10:20 AM a vehicle suicide bomber exploded himself on Khanabad Road, close to Lodin village on the way to Khanabad, killing one German soldier and injuring two. The bomber was from Chardara; three members of his family died in the airstrike bombing.

A friend in Afghanistan

Reject Capitalist Ideas

In my workplace I can listen and talk to workers, many of whom are low-paid and trying to survive selling knick-knacks at traffic lights in the city of Bogota, Colombia.

For a long time, but especially since President Uribe Velez came to power, the working class has been fooled and kept busy by the media, which has blamed the misery in which we live here on only the symptoms of capitalism. It’s common to hear that it is because of pyramid schemes, the guerillas, the paramilitary, the worldwide crisis, traffic restrictions, too much rain, not enough rain, holidays, bank taxes, monopolies, landowners, bad governments and other innumerable reasons, that we live in poverty, violence and social decay.

That is why workers look for whoever can take them out of this state of misery. I tell people that the only culprit is the capitalist system itself. It is the system that produces individualism, racism, imperialist wars, sexism, and the miserable conditions workers are forced to live under, by a small minority that has the fascist state under its control.

That is why the only solution in our hands is to dump capitalism for its opposite, communism. That’s a system with no bosses, no wage slavery, a society controlled by workers united in Progressive Labor Party. This is not easy, but we should begin by rejecting practices such as consumerism and sexism, and strengthening the reading of political texts and dialectical materialism, reading, contributing to and distributing CHALLENGE — being a communist under capitalism.

CHALLENGE reader

Sotomayor As Judge Can Only Take Rulers’ Side

The recent hoopla about Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court helped the bosses reinforce an illusion they’ve worked hard at building: that the Supreme Court is “above politics” and makes rulings that protect or help people and limits bad things the government does. They constantly repeat how the Court’s rulings “ended segregated schools” (who’s kidding who!), legalized abortion and protect people from unfair police actions.

Many working people cheered her appointment because she comes from a working-class Puerto Rican family living in a Bronx, NY housing project — so she must be “one of us,” right? Wrong! No matter where she came from, she’s an Ivy League-educated judge who earned her promotion through a long history of doing the ruling class’s work in the courts. After all, that’s what the courts are for.

The rulers push the appearance of a Court with one black justice, one Latina and (now) two women as a body “representing” diverse sectors of society. But the essence is that there are two main antagonistic classes in capitalist society: workers who produce everything of value and bosses who exploit them for their private profit. There are no workers on this Court, never have been and never will be. Once Sotomayor became a judge, she joined the bosses’ side.

The Supreme Court is part of the structure of this class rule. It has two important jobs: maintaining the illusion that there’s justice for workers, and helping the ruling class police itself, sorting out differences and keeping the bosses in power. Does it matter who’s on the Supreme Court? Largely, no. The Court makes its rulings by interpreting constitutional law to meet the needs of the ruling class at a particular time.

During slavery the Court upheld it. When workers began to unionize and strike, the Court gave the bosses injunctions to stop them. When the air traffic controllers struck, the courts helped Reagan fire them all. And when the bosses needed a cover for election fraud, it turned to the Supreme Court to elect Bush. So when the bosses — especially the main liberal wing Obama represents — need to make the Court “look a little better” to workers, they appoint a Sotomayor.

In a future communist society, the “courts” will also represent its ruling class: but then it will be the working class. The “courts” will be workers who decide who has violated the rules the working class established to enforce working-class rule, and how they can be rehabilitated, if possible. The Sotomayors, Thomases, Roberts and Scalias will then be part of the garbage can of history.

Brooklyn Red

Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes

Book Reviews: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, New York, 2008); and The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, by Van Jones with Ariane Conrad (Harper One, New York, 2008).

These two books on global warming were published last year as the Obama campaign moved into high gear. Friedman is a NY Times columnist. Jones is a human rights activist who Obama appointed as Special Advisor for Green Jobs but then was forced to resign recently after being attacked by right-wing Republicans for supposedly being a “Marxist.”

Both Friedman and Jones recognize that today’s severe global warming is due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) in industry, transportation and in the generation of electrical power. They both recognize the urgent need for a solution. But they both (incorrectly) suggest, in different ways, that the capitalist market can solve this problem, if only governments worldwide would adopt “the correct policies.”

In his book, Friedman is an unabashed apologist for U.S. imperialism. Jones, on the other hand, denounces the U.S. history of genocidal theft of Indian lands, slavery and the ongoing racist treatment of black, Latin, Asian and Native American working-class people, as well as the extreme sexist discrimination against women. Racism/sexism and global warming are the “two biggest problems” (his subtitle) facing the world.

Friedman writes as though racism and the current oil wars never happened and calls on the U.S. to regain its mythical moral leadership in the world (after Bush allegedly destroyed it) by taking the lead in decreasing GHG emissions. Jones, on the other hand, calls on the U.S. government to solve global warming by creating green jobs to build clean energy usage that will also help to abolish the inequality of income and opportunity suffered by black and Latino workers. He says neither problem can be solved without solving the other.

The two authors seem to be living in two different universes — Friedman in fantasyland while Jones is almost in the real world.

While Jones doesn’t defend the war-criminal U.S. ruling class like Friedman does, he appears clueless about the nature of capitalism. He doesn’t recognize the antagonistic relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. He doesn’t see the capitalists’ absolute need to promote racism and sexism to enhance their super-profits and to maintain their political power — control of the state. This enables them to exert their class domination over both the working class and over competing imperialists.

Though Jones advocates the full involvement of “minority” workers to pressure the government to foster use of solar panels, windmills and other forms of clean energy, he proposes that such a coalition be led by “progressive” businessmen. (!) This position is misleading pie in the sky, typical of those like Jones who toy with revolutionary ideas at one point in their lives and then reject them to pursue a career in the Democratic Party.

His central error is not understanding that capitalism, with its driving profit motive, cannot stop using fossil fuels without dismantling virtually the entire body of physical capital in the world, replacing it with new physical plant and modes of transportation employing clean energy sources. The world’s capitalist classes can never agree to do this.

The world’s imperialists are locked in life-and-death competitive rivalries with each other. No “global policy” that interferes with their battle for maximum profits can possibly be written and enforced as long as these imperialists fight with each other over control of the world’s resources and markets.

The main battle we face in the movement against global warming is defeating the misleading strategies of writers like Jones and the fantasies of liberals like Friedman. We must redouble our efforts to demonstrate that only the abolition of capitalism, classes and production for profit instead of for use can lay the foundation for a renewed planet. Only the world’s working class, led by its communist party PLP, once having seized power from the capitalists and consolidated its power through revolution, will be able to clean up the world, revolutionize production processes with safe, clean energy and save the planet.

Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control

The fight between the U.S. imperialists and their Russian, Chinese and Iranian rivals — for control of the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia region and the pipeline routes to take these resources to market — is leading to wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually to an inevitable global confrontation. Controlling this region is crucial to the U.S. bosses’ efforts to regain absolute control of oil-rich Middle East, which have been the basis for their dominant imperialist position since the end of World War II.

Obama chose to concentrate on the Afghanistan war in hopes the U.S. backed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline) could be built. This pipeline, bypassing both Russia and Iran, could reverse Russian-Chinese advances in the energy-rich former Soviet republics, giving the U.S. control of this strategic region.

If successful, together with a new string of U.S. bases in the area, TAPI would put Russia and China on the defensive militarily, break Russia’s growing world energy monopoly, especially of the European Union’s energy market, and position the U.S. bosses to potentially starve China of the energy resources needed to fuel its economic and military rise.

It would also free the U.S. military machine to deal with Iran, if it hadn’t capitulated by then. Iraq could then be more easily pacified and U.S. imperialism’s dream of extending its hegemony well into the 21st century would be within reach.

As U.S. imperialists’ political, economic and military hegemony shrinks, their ability to control the outcome of world events becomes limited. An example is the recent Afghan presidential election, aimed at getting rid of Karzai, who has become an obstacle to their geopolitical goals in the area. He’s been cozying up to China and deepening his ties with the warlords of the Northern Alliance, backed by Russia, Iran and India.

Their electoral scheme failed. So far, with 99% of the votes counted, Karzai is the winner with 54% against the U.S candidate Abdullah Abdullah’s 28%. Plan B was to claim massive fraud and call for a run-off election rigged to guarantee Abdullah”s victory. But some among their ranks like Zbiegnew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, disagree with this plan. They claim it would further destabilize Afghanistan and increase the “growing risk …that the Taliban …be viewed as a resistance movement against foreign occupation… and that would be a strategic defeat.”

The U.S. ruling class is clearly at odds over this. Some are making frantic efforts to force Karzai into a unity government with his rival Abdullah Abdullah (known in Afghanistan as “Obama’s wife”). Others see no option but to accept Karzai and to configure a government run by their ambassador Eikenberry and General McCrystal. Some call for the “Afghanization” of the war while others demand Obama’s unfailing commitment to his surge. Some, with Saudi Arabia and Britain, are working for a negotiated settlement with the “good Taliban.”

Besides, some of their European allies also disagree with the plan and are reluctant to send more troops. German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the elections, while demanding, with leaders from Britain and France, an international conference to force the “Afghanization” of the war so “that the international engagement can be reduced.” Brzezinski agrees, arguing it might reduce “the growing risk of the war becoming a war of foreigners against Afghans,” and the Europeans allies “might be less likely to pull out entirely…. [Leaving] the U.S. alone in the lurch.”

Whatever tactics the U.S. butchers finally decide on, pipeline TAPI may never fly. It is detrimental to the ambitions of China, Russia and Iran. A U.S.-Taliban agreement will never bring peace to Afghanistan as the warlords of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s sworn mortal enemies, will fight desperately to survive.

Even if the U.S. imperialists carve out an independent “Pashtunistan” from Afghanistan-Pakistan, as some are planning, the war is likely to widen as the area’s instability helps China and Russia further consolidate their grip on the Caspian-Central Asia region. The Iranian nuclear issue — nothing but a fig leaf to hide the vital role of Iran’s energy resources and strategic location in the fight for world domination — is rapidly forcing a showdown between the U.S., Russia, Iran and potentially Israel.

How many more millions must be murdered, maimed and displaced for the profits of the imperialists of the world? No election, peace agreement, U. N. resolution or slick-talking politician like Obama will ever put an end to this butchery. Workers, students and soldiers, getting angrier at the cutbacks and layoffs, need to see that the widening imperialist genocide, inherent in capitalist crisis, is costing $billions and murdering so many members of our class! Students need to unite with soldiers and workers who bear the heaviest burden for the capitalist war economy. Only an international communist-conscious working class under the leadership of PLP can put an end to this bosses’ inferno, with a communist revolution.

Red Eye on the News

Teenagers bumped down, jobless

NYT, 9/15 — This August, the teenage unemployment rate — that is, the percentage of teenagers who wanted a job who could not find one — was 25.5 percent, its highest level since the government began keeping track of such statistics in 1948. Likewise, the percentage of teenagers overall who were working was at its lowest level in recorded history.

“There are an amazing number of kids out there looking for work.”…. Explanations…mostly boil down to being at the bottom….Half of college graduates under age 25 are in jobs that do not require college degrees, the highest portion in at least 18 years….This has led to less…room for new workers at the bottom.

A raw health deal for immigrants

NYT, 9/6 — President Obama is…giving repeated assurances that [undocumented] immigrants would be excluded from any subsidized benefits under health proposals before Congress….

At the same time, [undocumented] immigrants would not be exempt from the obligations in the House bill…Most [undocumented] immigrants in the country would be required to buy health insurance or face tax penalties.

And since they would be barred from subsidies, they would have to pay for coverage at full rates, regardless of their income level.

For profit, cheat the low-wagers

NYT, 9/2 — Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago….

Researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of an average weekly earning of $339.

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were [undocumented] immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites….One of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed.

Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist

NYT, 9/3 — Paul Robeson’s story is not forgotten, but is dimly remembered, particularly by the young. Born in 1898…he became the dominant college football player of his time, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was Rutgers class valedictorian and earned a law degree from Columbia University.

He almost single-handedly legitimized black spirituals and folk music as an art form and became perhaps the most famous concert singer as well as a reknowned actor….

He became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue.

He also became an enthusiastic, unflagging admirer of the Soviet Union, something he never renounced or backed away from, even in the face of Stalin’s [critics]. He embraced socialism, not capitalism, as the future. He was blacklisted, had his passport revoked, and, in many ways, was written out of history books….

“I’ve sat in on classes where people are talking about the 30’s and about civil rights and about Martin Luther King, and there’s this gap, as if this man never existed. He’s one of the giants of the movement, and no one knows.”

In poorest areas, sick dial 911

NYT 9/4 – Among the hidden costs of the health care crisis is the burden that fire departments across the country are facing as firefighters much like emergency room doctors, are increasingly serving as primary care providers.

About 80 percent of the calls handled by Engine Company 10 are medical emergencies because firehouse serves one of the city’s poorest areas, where few residents have health insurance, doctors’ checkups are rare, and medical problems are left to fester until someone dials 911….Those calls involved heart attacks, diabetic sores, epileptic seizures and people complaining of shortness of breath.

US drove Sioux off sacred mount

NYT, 9/2 – I have to admit: Mount Rushmore bothers me. It was bad enough that white men drove the Sioux from hills they still hold sacred; did they have to carve faces all over them too? It’s easy to feel affection for Mount Rushmore’s strange grandeur, but only if you forget where it is and how it got there.

Insiders dumping their own stocks

NYT, 9/8 – Better-then-expected corporate earnings in recent months have been the result of companies saving money through job cuts rather than raising revenue through sales growth. It is worthy of note that directors in the US have taken advantage of the rally on Wall Street to offload shares in their firms.

Obama message getting blurry

Jimmy Fallon (TV) – The President is going to deliver his speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next Tuesday. It will be about how if you study hard, you can become the most popular person in the world for eight months, then suddenly, not so much.

Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World

On October 17, 2009, PLP’ers are joining many others at Harper’s Ferry to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Harper’s Ferry raid which sparked the Civil War that ended chattel slavery in the U.S. Join us!

Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Osborne Anderson, John Brown, Harriet Tubman — these bold leaders of the anti-slavery struggle understood that the millions of enslaved Africans and millions more of the workers and small farmers oppressed by the slave oligarchy would, under the right conditions, rise up against slavery. They acted on this confidence in the masses and shook the world, from Charleston, S.C. and Southampton, Virginia, to bleeding Kansas and Harper’s Ferry. We should emulate this boldness in our struggles today, for the oppressed of the world will also, under the right conditions and communist leadership, rise up to destroy their exploiters.

Racist ideology intensified in the run-up to the Civil War as the rulers tried to ideologically undermine the anti-slavery cause. Blacks were portrayed by Southern slaveowners as an “inferior breed,” “happy” with slavery, and unfit because of their “inferiority” for a life of freedom alongside whites. Racists in the North repeated the picture of blacks as servile, shuffling, meek, cowardly and dancing in blissful ignorance.

These lies continue today in various forms and are applied to every ethnic group of workers to keep people divided and demoralized. Left out of today’s picture is the eleven-month Stella O’Doro strike in NY, the sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, the massive outpouring of opposition to the racist attacks on the Jena 6, black students who fought back against oppression in Louisiana, and hundreds more actions, large and small, around the world.

Anti-slavery rebels knew, contrary to the racist images, that enslaved and free blacks and anti-slavery whites planned and carried out ingenious and daring escapes from slavery with courage and fortitude in the face of whippings, jailing and death. Thousands of slaves escaped to the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, to the Florida swamps, and to the mountains of Jamaica to form egalitarian maroon societies in defiance of the slave system, defending their communities by any means necessary. Slaveowners and their racist apologists claimed that these fighters were the “lunatic fringe,” but John Brown and other anti-slavery activists knew better.

The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 terrified slaveowners because it demonstrated that every enslaved person was a potential “assassin” of his “beloved” master. Brown and other activists eagerly studied the formation of armies of thousands of the enslaved on the island of Santo Domingo and their success in annihilating their French masters in establishing a black Republic of Haiti in the 1790s.

These experiences led to two profound, if simple, conclusions: people fight back against oppression and their struggle causes change. These conclusions are often poorly understood. Today, many workers say, “Nobody where I work wants to do anything” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” or “You can’t win.” Or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But PLP knows better, and acts on the historical knowledge contained in those two simple conclusions.

While the anti-slavery movement grew apace, the European revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were sharpening the working-class fight against wage slavery. Based on their participation in the revolutionary movement and their study of history they developed the philosophy of dialectical materialism. This philosophy, outlined in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, proven true over the years, explains that class struggle is the motive force of history. Periods of seeming passivity among the oppressed, however prolonged, are replaced by blazing struggle, like the explosion of a seemingly dormant volcano. Systems of class exploitation, although they seem at times, permanent, and even “natural,” end. We are no longer cultivating crops and building pyramids in the Nile Valley. Slavery is ended. Feudalism has ended. Capitalism will also end.

Most people do not yet realize this, just as most people in 1859 did not yet realize that slavery was on the verge of extinction. The enslavement of Africans and the system built on this edifice had existed for over 200 years and appeared permanent, like capitalism today. But, with the growth of the PLP and a communist revolution in the face of imperialist war and the continuing crises of capitalism, communism will replace capitalism and all forms of class society.

  1. CHALLENGE, September 16th, 2009
  2. CHALLENGE, September 2, 2009
  3. CHALLENGE, July 29, 2009
  4. CHALLENGE, August 12, 2009

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