1. STATE OF DISUNION: DEMS WANT LARGER OIL WAR
   1. CAPITALISTS' SELF-INTEREST HAMPERS RULERS' CALL FOR WARTIME UNITY
   2. LIBERALS' REPLY TO BUNGLER BUSH: MOBILIZE FOR BROADER CONFLICTS
   3. NEW ORLEANS RACIST ATROCITY NO CONCERN OF POLITICIANS
   4. LIBERALS ALREADY WIDENING WAR, CRACKING DOWN AT HOME
2. WORKERS, PATIENTS BLAST CHICAGO BOSSES' RACIST CUTS
3. Black Rebellions, Workers' Unity Belie Bosses' History
4. Communists Bring Revolutionary Alternative to Anti-War Marches
5. Racist Rulers Fear Unity of Black and Latino Youth
6. Pfizer's Rx for Saving $4 Billion: CUT 10,000 Jobs
7. GIs Protest Iraq War at the U.S. Capitol
8. Iraq Vets Expose Brass's Racism, Refuse Suicide Mission
9. Anti-Racist Iraq Vet Is Highlight of Anti-War Panel
10. Swapping Rulers Won't Help Guinea General Strikers
11. Teachers' Strike in France Could Spark Walkout of 5 Million
12. Military Tribunals Legalize Fascism
13. LETTERS
    1. Anti-War March Lacks Working Class Focus
    2. Future GIs Show Red Potential
    3. Boston Campus Open to Anti-War Action
    4. UN `Peacekeepers' War On Haiti's Workers
    5. Farmworkers Receptive to PLP's Ideas
    6. Bosses Use GI `Appeal' to Derail Their Anger
14. REDEYE
    1. Guantanámo not the only horror show
    2. Gates affirms: US Is in Gulf to stay
    3. Scratch a Democrat, find an imperialist
    4. Wishful thinking won't stop fascist drift
    5. Wounded vets get government runaround
    6. Society is sick in more ways than one
    7. Poverty, `race' make human guinea pigs
15. Ex-Slaves, Seminoles United to Defeat Racist U.S. Invaders
16. PL History: How PLP Fought for Pro-Worker Anti-Racism in SDS

STATE OF DISUNION: DEMS WANT LARGER OIL WAR

In his State of the Union address, Bush spewed a series of lies and half-truths meant to obscure reality, appease opposing factions of capitalists and hoodwink workers. Rebuttals from liberals were just as dishonest. They urged an end to the Iraq fiasco but simultaneously moved for "larger wars." The politicians' tortured, phony rhetoric masks the true state of the bosses' so-called Union. In the face of mounting threats to U.S. rulers' worldwide empire, particularly to its strategic cornerstone, control of the Middle East and its oil, disunity and disarray prevail.

CAPITALISTS' SELF-INTEREST HAMPERS RULERS' CALL FOR WARTIME UNITY

The liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists, including the likes of J.P. Morgan Chase and Exxon Mobil, ultimately requires a full-scale military mobilization of the nation, complete with tax hikes and tighter government regulation of businesses. But many capitalists in Bush's base are unwilling to sacrifice their freedom or bottom lines to the greater good of U.S. imperialism. His address threw bones to both camps, mainly favoring his base. Bush vowed to "balance the federal budget...without raising taxes." The liberal New York Times' January 28th editorial pointed out the absurdity of such a proposal in wartime. He pandered to the anti-regulationists by saying economic growth depends on "more enterprise," not "more government."

Most importantly, Bush said he could achieve "victory" in Iraq with 21,500 already-enlisted troops. Liberals had earlier denounced Bush's "surge" scheme as "too little, too late." Sen. Jay Rockefeller commented, "I don't think he understands the world." (NY Times, 1/19) Bush, however, paid lip service to the main imperialist wing by promising to add 92,000 soldiers and marines "in the next five years" and suggesting a "volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps" to assist the military overseas. But he failed to explain where the new troops would come from, given current recruiting shortfalls. And the Reserve Corps, "like other calls to national service by Bush...lacks an actual plan." (Boston Globe, 1/26)

For U.S. rulers, the picture is far bleaker than the one Bush painted. Their enemies are fast gaining strength. Iran, aided by China and Russia, is on the road to acquiring nuclear weapons and becoming the dominant Mid-East power. Al Qaeda, which represents non-royal Saudi capitalists shut out of the oil bonanza, "is a more dangerous enemy today than it was before 9/11," according to the liberal Brookings Institution (report, 1/18/07). "It has retained its base of operations in the badlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and it has created a new base in western Iraq. It has spread like a virus elsewhere, developing cadre throughout the Muslim world and...in Europe." China's blue water navy project directly challenges U.S. supremacy over oil shipping routes. Its recent missile test puts U.S. military satellites at risk.

LIBERALS' REPLY TO BUNGLER BUSH: MOBILIZE FOR BROADER CONFLICTS

In this dire context, the Democrats chose racist, arch-militarist Sen. James Webb to deliver their response to Bush. (Webb actually wrote a book, "Born Fighting," claiming that U.S. greatness derives largely from an inherited Scots-Irish "warrior culture.") Webb criticized Bush's Iraq debacle mainly because it hinders a broader invasion of the entire region. Webb said he long ago knew that it "would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism and...leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world."

Webb echoes Gen. William Odom, a leading advocate of "redeployment," who recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "Any military proposals today that do not account for both larger wars, as well as the Iranian threat to the Arab states on the Persian Gulf, must be judged wholly inadequate if not counterproductive." Hinting at the massive force build-up needed, Odom says, "two or three million troops" would be insufficient to subdue Iraq alone. Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards keeps up the liberals' war cry, "To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table." (NYT, 1/28)

Playing on the popular myth that Mid-East wars stem from U.S. dependence on imported oil, Bush proposed developing alternative fuels. U.S. rulers may indeed find ways to reduce oil consumption at home, but they will continue to use every means they have, including war, to maintain mastery of the world's oil trade. Along with their British junior partners, U.S. bosses wield tremendous power over other countries by dictating the terms of their energy supplies. Putin's Russian oil and gas blackmail of various European nations pales beside the global strong-arming by Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Shell and BP.

NEW ORLEANS RACIST ATROCITY NO CONCERN OF POLITICIANS

Bush's speech tried to win over workers with an income tax deduction for health care, a ploy that, in fact, serves the ruling class. Workers' health, after all, is a genuine concern both for capitalists seeking maximum profits in their factories and those needing fit manpower for their war machine. Health care would still remain beyond the reach of millions of minimum-wage workers, immigrants and the unemployed.

But the true level of Bush's "compassion" for the working class emerged in an obscene omission. He said not one word about New Orleans. The cold-blooded murder, both by neglect and cops' bullets, and ongoing misery suffered mainly by the city's black residents constitutes one of the worst racist atrocities on U.S. soil since slavery. Democrat Webb spoke only of "restoring the vitality [meaning profitability] of New Orleans." Webb failed to blame Democratic mayor Ray Nagin, who stands just as guilty as the Bush gang.

LIBERALS ALREADY WIDENING WAR, CRACKING DOWN AT HOME

Amid the divisions highlighted in the speeches, strong signs appear that the imperialists' main wing is gaining the upper hand. The new head of the Pentagon's Central Command, which stretches from Central Asia through the Mid-East to East Africa is an admiral rather than a general. This shift indicates a broadening of focus from Iraq to the entire Persian Gulf's vast seaborne crude oil exports and to China's coming naval threat. A second U.S. aircraft carrier group is steaming to the Gulf. The U.S. has begun air strikes in Somalia, which commands chokepoints along the world's busiest oil routes. At home, the imperialists are tightening their grip on industry, at workers' expense. Pfizer's announced layoff of 10,000 follows drastically stepped-up regulation of "blockbuster" drugs that siphon capital from the war effort.

While the liberal warmakers battle to get their own capitalist house in order, their bigger problem remains widespread popular opposition to imperialist war, a Vietnam era legacy. The rulers' predicament affords PLP and the working class an opportunity to build for the only viable alternative to the bosses' profit wars, communist revolution.á

WORKERS, PATIENTS BLAST CHICAGO BOSSES' RACIST CUTS

CHICAGO, Jan. 29 -- Despite frigid 10 degree temperatures, more than 500 workers, patients and youth picketed the Cook County Building while about 2,000 more, mostly users of threatened services, packed the budget hearing inside. The target of their anger was County Board President Todd Stroger and the County Commissioners (mostly black Democrats) who are balancing a $500 million deficit with racist budget cuts against the poorest, sickest and most vulnerable victims.

The public health deficit matches exactly the $100 million cut in federal funding, mainly due to the escalating $2 billion-a-week bloodbath for oil in Iraq. The clinic closings and service cuts are concentrated on the overwhelmingly black South and West sides. Thus racism becomes the cutting edge of the fascist attacks needed to finance the rulers' imperialist wars. In some ways, this action of black, Latin and white workers was a more significant anti-war rally than the much larger one held in Washington, D.C. two days earlier.

The AFL-CIO hacks of the Chicago Federation of Labor hijacked today's demonstration, taking it from the nurses who had originally called it, and kept the organized workers on the outside, away from those on the inside.

PLP participated on many levels. We organized workers and patients through various mass organizations, distributed CHALLENGE and PLP literature to many friendly marchers, met new friends and struggled with those closest to us to get more involved in building the revolutionary communist movement to overthrow the racist warmakers and budget-slashers.

Of the total deficit, $100 million is in public health. Stroger and racist Dr. ("I didn't come here for the homeless") Simon, plan to close two-thirds of the public clinics (18), cut services at Stroger, Provident and Oak Forest Hospitals, and eliminate 6,500 jobs. Cook County has more than one million people without health insurance. Over 80% of the County patient population is black and Latino and 70% are employed but uninsured.

Even though there won't be a final budget until February 28, school-based clinics are closing. Four doctors were fired from the Cermak Clinic inside the Cook County Jail. The Surgical unit has been closed at Oak Forest Hospital. The Pediatric ER is closing at Stroger. One doctor said a cut in hours at the Fantus Clinic means 100 fewer patients are seen every day. They are marched over to the Stroger ER when the clinic closes and many spend the night, unseen, only to return to the clinic early next morning. Like Katrina in slow motion, public health is our Superdome. Stroger is our Mayor Nagin.

Today's action was the culmination of two weeks of growing activity. On January 18, about 200 workers picketed Stroger Hospital. On January 23, over 1,500 people packed and surrounded the Markham Courthouse for the first of four public budget hearings. The following day 200 workers and patients picketed Provident Hospital and the next day almost 1,000 packed the second budget hearing in the northern suburb of Skokie. Mostly black women nurses have spearheaded much of this activity.

But the day ended with a thud at an SEIU-sponsored "town hall meeting," where about 350 workers and professionals were subjected to a sleazy panel of preachers and politicians. They told us that Jesus would save us, and if we wanted to help we should tell them which of our co-workers are unnecessary so they can make the "right" cuts! This meeting was organized as a diversion from this morning's rally because SEIU wanted to steer people away from recalling that it gave the Stroger campaign $800,000 in the last election.

We must organize bolder and sharper actions that will expose the union leaders and politicians in a mass way and help lead more workers and youth, especially black and Latino, to join and build the PLP for communist revolution.

Black Rebellions, Workers' Unity Belie Bosses' History

After three centuries of racist brutality and exploitation, the rulers' media offer us Black History Month (BHM), extolling a few black men and women of fame and fortune. Oprah Winfrey, presidential candidate Barack Obama and black Super Bowl coaches will be trotted out to convince us that the system works, allowing individuals to overcome racism. In reality, the system means black workers suffer double unemployment rates, one-third less family income and infant-mortality rates rivaling those of the world's poorest countries. BHM is part of the rulers' body of ideology intended to convince black workers to ignore the super-exploitation millions suffer from all bosses and give their loyalty to bosses of their own "race," rather than uniting with all workers, Latino, Asian and white in loyalty to their class. Loyalty to their "own" bosses, who are part of the capitalist system creating all this exploitation, then misleads them into patriotically supporting the big bosses' wars.

During BHM, the bosses cannot afford to teach the real history of mass struggles against slavery, united black and white working-class struggles against racism and capitalist exploitation, or how communists participated in and led many of these heroic actions. Extraordinary singer and actor Paul Robeson may be mentioned, but not his lifetime dedication to the working class and communism. No one will quote his statement that visiting the then-socialist Soviet Union was the first time in his life he felt free of racism.

There will be no allusion to communist historian Herbert Apthecker debunking over 100 years of ruling-class racist academic lies about slaves happy to be exploited by their "benevolent" plantation masters. Apthecker documented over 400 organized slave revolts, several supported by white workers, north and south. Lincoln will be said to have "freed" the slaves without discussion of Harriet Tubman and John Brown organizing an integrated armed band to raid Harper's Ferry to inspire slave revolts. While the raid caused frightened southern slave-holders to secede, 180,000 runaway slaves joined the Union army to fight for freedom for all slaves.

BHM will not notice the 25,000 black and white workers in 1892 New Orleans who overcame segregated local unions and united in an eleven-day general strike. Bosses counter-attacked with racist propaganda, ruling-class led racist riots and a U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing segregation (Homer Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson was fighting to desegregate New Orleans streetcars). Nevertheless, in 1907, white workers overcame lifetime racist indoctrination to follow the lead of black workers in a mass strike, shutting down the entire New Orleans port and winning many of their reform demands.

In the 1930s, black workers played a crucial role in the communist-led organization of mass, integrated industrial unions (in opposition to the racist, segregated craft unions). Communists provided most of the leadership for many other anti-racist activities such as the world-wide protests against the phony rape frame-up of black youths in Scottsboro, Alabama, that exposed the racist Jim Crow system.

In the 1960s and `70s, the newly formed PLP continued this tradition by supporting and participating in black rebellions in Detroit, Newark and New York City where the PLP poster "Wanted for Murder, Gilligan the Cop" became the symbol of angry protests against racist police brutality. In 1975 PLP defeated the racist anti-busing movement in Boston. Since the 1960s PLP has frustrated the growth of racist KKK and Nazi groups (supported by cops and the courts all over the U.S.) by taking to the streets in demonstrations and physical attacks. In this past month, PLP has joined protests against killer kops in Chicago and NYC, bringing communist analysis and militance as an alternative to the silent pacifism of ruling-class agents like Al Sharpton.

From as far back as Karl Marx's statement during the U.S. Civil War that "labor in the white skin can never be free while labor in the black skin is in chains," communists have seen that capitalism cannot survive without the profits from the super-exploitation of black workers. Even though many militant reform struggles have made dents in racist institutions like segregation, the bosses have always been able to use state power to reverse those advances. For instance, the Jim Crow prison chain gangs of the 1930s have merely been replaced by today's largest prison population in world history, incarcerating more black youth than are attending college. Lehman Bros. banking empire began in 1850 as a cotton brokerage house profiting from slavery's exploitation. Today Lehman Bros. finances the Corrections Corporation of America that profits from the frame-ups and non-violent drug convictions that produce over 500,000 present day slaves -- prison laborers earning as little as 23 cents an hour, who are over 70% black and Latin.

Communists must counter the omissions and distortions of BHM with the militant history of integrated working-class struggles against racism. More importantly, we must expose that capitalism and racism always have and always will go hand-in-hand. The working class needs the multi-racial unity that can only be forged in anti-racist struggles. To defeat racist exploitation we have to use that unity to build a communist movement to overthrow capitalism and its racist outrages.

Communists Bring Revolutionary Alternative to Anti-War Marches

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 27 -- PLP brought revolutionary communist politics today to over 100,000 demonstrators marching against the war in Iraq. Led by a group of high school students, we marched through the streets chanting, "The only solution is communist revolution." Sparked by the energy of NYC high school students and others we distributed over 3,500 CHALLENGES and 5,000 leaflets, presenting an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist alternative to the march's pro-Democrat liberal leaders' line of "Bush is the problem--impeach him and everything will be okay."

As we rolled by the corner of First and Independence, one comrade spoke loudly and forcefully that no Democrats or Republicans, no liberal politicians or elections can fix capitalism and that there will be no end to wars under this murderous system. The marchers' response was positive overall, with some openly applauding our analysis. Though we experienced some anti-communist reactions, the majority were interested and supportive.

Workers and students are open to revolutionary ideas. PLP's responsibility is to bring communist politics to all anti-war activities. This demonstration proved that even a small group, but with new young people alongside veterans of our movement, can reach tens of thousands with our ideas. The continued practice and the commitment of our young people will enrich the march towards a communist revolution.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 27--"One, two, three, four, We don't want your racist war!?" "Same enemy! Same fight! Workers of the world, unite!" These were some of the slogans taken up by a group of Iraqi Vets in the anti-war march here of over 3,000. One marcher in uniform yelled "chant louder!" One of these vets asked a PL'er, "What kind of revolution are you talking about?" When he told him, the vet said, "You're preaching to the choir." Another vet hugged a PL'er and told him that he definitely wanted more info about organizing against racism and imperialism in the military. Overall, PLP led militant chants against racism and imperialism in a multi-racial contingent of students and teachers while we distributed thousands of leaflets and hundreds of CHALLENGES.

Racist Rulers Fear Unity of Black and Latino Youth

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 -- After the racist killing of a young black teenager, Cheryl Green, by Latino gang members, the press says the situation has "gotten out of hand" and more cops are needed. The same ruling class that has been pushing racist divide-and-conquer politics between black and Latino gangs now says they have to clamp down on the gangs to end the violence. This is the same ruling class whose system has fostered mass racist unemployment, racist health care, poverty-stricken schools and housing, police brutality and super-exploitation against black and Latino working people. But, of course, to the rulers that situation hasn't "gotten out of hand."

The school board member representing south LA has sponsored a series of youth leadership meetings about "unity," bringing Cesar Chávez' granddaughter to speak at schools about the contribution of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to the farmworkers' movement. We know something about this -- and the struggle against pacifism, sellouts and pro-imperialist politics, and for militant, revolutionary class-conscious struggle in both movements. We fight for the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all.

The ruling class fears the militant, multi-racial working-class unity demonstrated during the 1992 Rodney King rebellion. They know that the anger and potential unity of black and Latino youth represents one of the biggest threats to their plans for wider imperialist war and increasing racism at home. Their biggest fear is that black and Latino youth will unite with white youth as well to fight the racist bosses -- in the neighborhoods, the factories and the army. They've been promoting racist division for a long time. Now they say they're "shocked" and are hoping for unity around pacifism and U.S. patriotism.

PLP has been organizing multi-racial youth communist collectives for more than twenty years. We've fought in the schools where we work for unity against racism, against the bosses' imperialist wars and against racist school cops, racist teachers and against nationalist and racist ideas that divide students and teachers. Lately we've been bringing black and Latino students under the Party's leadership to anti-war marches, to anti-Minutemen demonstrations, to the New Orleans Summer Project and to May Day marches for communist revolution to smash racist capitalism.

At our schools we've responded to the current racist tensions both in brainstorming with colleagues about how to build unity and in the student clubs we work with. In one class, the students wrote poems in tribute to 14-year-old Cheryl Green. One student club is fighting for multi-racial unity during black history month; planning to recite anti-racist poems in Spanish and English about unity, written by the Afro-Cuban communist poet Nicolas Guillen. In another school we're helping to sponsor an art contest: "Striving for Unity." These activities can help build for May Day to expose the bosses and their ideas as the source of racist terror, division and imperialist war. They will call on all youth to join the fight to eliminate racism once and for all with communist revolution.

More PLP members will mean more fighters against the bosses' racism. As a multi-racial group led by PLP loudly chanted at the Minuteman rally in downtown LA: "Racism is the bosses' tool -- We won't be divided and we won't be fooled!"

School clubs must organize to go out to other high schools, including the Harbor Gateway area, site of this murder. Having rallies and leafleting with a multi-racial group of youth can help build the working-class unity our class needs for the long-term fight to bury the racist bosses.

Pfizer's Rx for Saving $4 Billion: CUT 10,000 Jobs

BROOKLYN, NY, Jan. 24 -- Not content with robbing billions of dollars from workers through charging exorbitant prices for medicines, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, the country's largest drug company, will try to maintain its exploitative profit margins by robbing 600 workers here of jobs many have held all their lives. It's part of a worldwide elimination of 10,000 jobs.

The company says it must compensate for lost sales when its patents expire on drugs like Lipitor (and they can be produced generically at much lower prices). The plant has been here for over 60 years, but Pfizer's CEO, Jeffrey Kindler, says "there is little room for nostalgia.... There are no sacred cows." (NY Daily News, 1/23)

No sacred cows except one -- profits. And these worldwide cuts are expected to save Pfizer $4 billion.

The company's announcement follows the shutdown of another long-time Williamsburg factory, Domino Sugar, in 2004, after 150 years of operation. Together, these closings symbolize the borough's vanishing manufacturing base. They are eliminating relatively decent-paying jobs for a large percentage of black and Latino as well as white workers, another step in reducing the wage rates of all workers. Most of these older workers will be unable to find new jobs at the same pay scale, if they can find any job at all.

"I'm just praying...that I can find work," said Roberto Nieves, with 28 years at Pfizer, which also will be laying off his twin brother, uncles and nieces. "We have a mortgage to pay. I have a kid in college and one in high school," Nieves told the NY Post (1/24), as he saw his "American dream" going up in smoke.

Such mass layoffs are symptomatic of how capitalists "solve" their problems, at the expense of workers' lives. When profits are threatened, workers are first to go. That's why we need a worker-controlled communist society, not based on profits, only on workers sharing the value of everything we produce.

GIs Protest Iraq War at the U.S. Capitol

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 16 -- Today three active-duty military personnel, flanked by members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and other supporters presented over 1,000 "appeals for redress" to Congressman Dennis Kucinich demanding an end to the war in Iraq. At this media event, presidential candidate Kucinich and three other members of Congress cynically used these bold GIs to build their own future campaigns, given that the vast majority of voters are now anti-war.

These liberal politicians have no intention of abandoning U.S. imperialists' oil interests in the Middle East. In fact, they will seize on the assertion by the anti-war GIs that, even though they oppose the war, they are "patriotic American[s] proud to serve the nation in uniform." They will use this patriotism (a vile notion that workers and bosses have the same interests when in fact they are diametrically opposed) to build allegiance to the bosses' "national interest." This means supporting capitalist interests including their long-term determination to control the Middle East for their profit! PLPers must constantly expose patriotism as serving only the bosses' interest and win GIs to an internationalist, pro-working class, anti-racist outlook.

The three GI presenters spoke boldly and forcefully about the need to end the war. One Marine declared he had opposed the war from the day it began, but nevertheless served in Iraq with his unit. This contradiction must be resolved by bolder GI actions against U.S. imperialism, however difficult this may be.

This media event was the culmination of six months of agitation at U.S. military installations by active-duty GIs worldwide, and demonstrated the depth of the troops' anti-Iraq war feeling.

The day before in Norfolk, Virginia, a similar news conference drew approximately 100 serious anti-war activists to support these anti-war GIs. The GI speeches stressed the need for solidarity between civilian workers and military personnel in the anti-war movement. One GI cited Martin Luther King's 1967 "Breaking the Silence" speech that publicly attacked the U.S. war in Vietnam, linking the fight against the war to the fight against racism in the U.S.

King's pacifist strategy was wrong since it allowed the rulers to maintain their power and mis-led workers away from militant struggle. Nevertheless, a militant struggle against racism within the U.S. is an integral part of the fight against imperialist war, and must be central to the emerging GI movement.

These actions may well be the first explicit anti-war protests organized by active-duty military personnel during the current Iraq war. Besides many individual acts of defiance (including desertions, refusals to deploy, and small-scale mutinies), they demonstrate GI anger at being used and abused by U.S. imperialism. As one sailor noted, when you're floating off the coast of Iraq and Kuwait and see nothing but oil derricks dotting the horizon, it's not hard to convince your shipmates that the war is about control of Middle-East oil resources and has nothing to do with "democracy" or "national security."

The emergence of a publicly-organized GI anti-war movement offers a great opportunity to escalate the fight against U.S. imperialism and for communism and workers' power. However, the movement's current strategy is largely misdirected towards working within the system. Appealing to members of Congress, while a clever publicity tactic, has the danger of sucking this new movement into supporting the ruling class through the liberal politicians the rulers control, like those who "supported" these GIs.

Currently, the main forces in the ruling class, represented by these liberal politicians, are desperately casting about for ways to control Mid-East oil. Bush's strategy is failing to meet ruling-class needs. The latter may very well sweep away the Bushites through scandals and/or elections, and install politicians who will try to effectively secure U.S. oil and geopolitical interests in the region.

These liberal politicians, like those pretending to support the anti-war GIs, will launch wider wars in the coming period as the battle sharpens between U.S. imperialism and its rivals, from the European Union to China. GI activism could be misled into focusing on legislative or electoral politics. "Winning" (for example, by electing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as president) would just swap the Bushites for the equally (or even more) dangerous liberal politicians. This would work against GIs' short- and long-term interests. They would be cutting their own throats. All politicians are enemies of the working class.

During the 1968 election, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) discovered the hard way that an electoral strategy is bogus. VVAW sent 400 veterans into the supposedly anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy-for-President campaign. Then McCarthy quit (although if he had won the nomination it would have only compounded a losing strategy); the vets were beaten by Chicago's police -- along with thousands of other anti-war activists -- at the Democratic Convention, and VVAW fell apart, demoralized by the failure of the system to respond to its efforts. It revived later when it embraced more of a class-struggle, confrontational approach in its Winter Soldier action (an event to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the U.S. military in Vietnam); in its Dewey Canyon II action (in which vets threw their medals over the fence at Congress) and in its embrace of militancy by active-duty GIs.

The alternative strategy for today's GI movement begins with understanding how the Iraq war is created by the needs of the whole imperialist system, administered by all politicians (liberal and conservative) to benefit the major corporations and banks -- the ruling class. With this analysis, the GI movement can reject patriotism, build ties to U.S. workers and students and to workers worldwide on the basis of multi-racial, international working-class unity. These workers include most soldiers wearing the uniform of the "enemy"!

The GI movement can organize rank-and-file groups (no officers!) to fight the military's racism and imperialism, and oppose orders to fight for the oil interests of U.S. rulers. To secure their own interests as part of the working class, GIs should join the communist PLP and prepare to oppose their commanders. They need to join in a workers' revolution against the entire capitalist system, a system that deems them as expendable tools in the bosses' battle for profits and power.

Iraq Vets Expose Brass's Racism, Refuse Suicide Mission

TACOMA, WA, Jan. 21 -- "Racial dehumanizing doesn't originate with the grunts," concluded an Iraq veteran at "A Citizen's Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Action in Iraq," organized by various anti-war groups near the Ft. Lewis army base. The Iraq veterans' testimonies eclipsed the speeches of the "big stars," like Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers fame. These soldiers brought the questions of racism and class consciousness into an otherwise bleak discussion on legalities and U.S. "democracy" (see box).

Billed as a war tribunal, the Citizen's Hearing was based on the Nuremberg Principals, which, following World War II, said soldiers should not carry out "unlawful" orders that could lead to war crimes. Only a hand-picked panel could ask questions of those testifying, freezing out the 300-plus in the audience. The aim was to gather information on the "illegality" of the Iraq war for use at Lt. Ehren Watada's courts-martial February 5.

Watada refused to deploy to Iraq. He maintains the war is illegal and unconstitutional, violating his oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. If the war was "legal," would he willingly go and order soldiers to kill other workers on behalf of U.S. imperialism? Apparently so. He volunteered to deploy in Afghanistan instead. Anyway, the question of the war's legality is moot because the judge has already ruled the defense team cannot introduce evidence or opinion bearing on the war's legal status.

The young vets in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) broke through this boring "legality" debate. They spoke freely and passionately about their combat experiences. Just about everyone had stories about the racist dehumanization of Iraqis that came from the brass, down the chain of command to the enlistees. In fact, racism was raised many times in the two days of soldiers' testimony. One in particular emphasized that racist indoctrination was meant to blunt class consciousness. He told an inspiring story how he and others led his unit to refuse to go on a suicide mission. This is what PLP members and their friends in Military Families Speak out (MFSO) came to hear.

The panel head tried to use these vets' anger to warn young people not to join the military. We met with these vets away from the cameras and panels. All were excited to hear we knew soldiers who purposely joined the military to organize against racism and imperialist war. They recognized that this was a different strategic outlook than just passively warning people to "stay out." They also agreed it would take mass rebellion among rank-and-file soldiers on the ground to end the war. They took our literature enthusiastically and contact information was exchanged to continue the struggle.

Obviously there's tremendous opportunity here to bring revolutionary politics to these soldiers and their supporters. We intend to go to the gates at Ft. Lewis to talk with them further, and hopefully meet more active-duty soldiers and their families in the surrounding communities. Everyone reading this article should plan, as soon as possible, to reach out to friends and family in -- or thinking about joining -- the military. There's a lot of renewed anger about the war out there now. Seize the day.

Anti-Racist Iraq Vet Is Highlight of Anti-War Panel

At the "Citizen's war tribunal," an Iraq vet told of his orientation in Kuwait by the brass before "going in country." The officer in charge asked the assembled grunts what they would do if their convoy saw an Iraqi kid in the middle of the road. "We'd stop," answered one soldier.

"You never stop for a fucking hajji kid," the office yelled back.

"We'd go down another road," offered another troop.

"You never veer from your path for a fucking hajji kid. You run the fucking hajji kid over!"

"Racial dehumanizing," the Iraq vet emphasized, "doesn't originate with the grunts." It is the conscious strategy of the officer corps, meant to justify U.S. imperialism's brutal atrocities.

To make sure we got the point, he talked about a division briefing in front of the commanding general. Divisional briefings, he noted, were the second highest briefings in Iraq.

The day before, an 18-year-old, only in the army a few months, panicked. He shot at a car rapidly approaching a check-point. These check-points were randomly established throughout the city. You never knew where one would pop up. He then saw the results of his work. An Iraqi mother and her children were dead.

A full-bird colonel, kissing-up in hopes of getting his General star, turned to face the room. "None of this would happen if these fucking hajjis learn to drive," he said, dismissing the atrocity.

After the colonel's testimony, the panel head asked the vet two final (leading) questions. Do you think the U.S. is committing war crimes in Iraq?

The vet had no trouble answering, "Yes!"

The last question showed where the panel organizers were heading. "Would you advise somebody thinking of going into the Armed Forces not to join because they could become part of the war crimes?"

Afterwards, the Iraq vet talked with a Vietnam-era Ft. Lewis VVAW organizer. The Vietnam vet told the young soldier how he had joined the army to organize against racism and the war. Soldiers could do more than just individually disobey "illegal" orders and warn others not to join. They could organize their fellow "grunts" to lead the anti-imperialist movement. He clearly emphasized that his was a different strategic outlook than just passively warning young people to "stay out."

This excited the Iraq veteran, despite having been backed into the limited strategy advocated by the panel head a few moments earlier. He had just begun to read about the GI movement during Vietnam. He asked for more information about it. The anger among these GI's is real. They are potential revolutionary leaders

Swapping Rulers Won't Help Guinea General Strikers

CONAKRY, GUINEA, Jan. 28 -- A general strike -- the third in the past 12 months --shut down this country of nine million for 18 days. January 22 became the bloodiest day in the history of the second republic. A human tidal wave marched across the city, met by police tear gas, riot sticks, grenades and bullets yielding a heavy death toll and wounding thousands. Hired gunmen even shot up the hospitals.

The strike was sparked when 72-year-old president Lansana Conté sprang his embezzler buddies from jail -- Mamadou Sylla, Guinea's richest man, and Fodé Soumah, former vice-governor of the country's central bank.

Echoing Louis XIV, the French absolute monarch, Conté proclaimed, "La Justice, c'est moi." ["I am justice."]

But the causes of the general strike go much deeper. A first general strike in February 2006 won a 30% pay hike for public workers and the adoption of a minimum wage. But devaluation of the franc in March and the end of subsidized gasoline prices in May wiped out these gains, so the trade union battle started up again. In June 2006, the bloody repression of student demonstrations killed about 20 and triggered a second, unsuccessful general strike. In the third strike the unions demanded price-cuts for gas and staple foods, reimbursement of 2,000,000 euros in embezzled public funds, and imprisonment of the accused embezzlers.

Capitalism has caused widespread misery here. The average family spends an estimated 90% of its income on food. Most public workers take home 35 to 50 euros a month, while their families eat 150 kilograms of rice monthly, costing 54 euros. Life expectancy is just 54 years and 70% of adults are illiterate.

Yet Guinea has immense mineral wealth: one-third of the world's bauxite reserves, plus gold, diamonds, iron, manganese, zinc, cobalt, nickel and uranium. But the money winds up in the pockets of domestic and foreign capitalists.

Guinea lies in the French imperialist zone. Seventy French companies operate here in banking, insurance, maritime services, sales of gasoline and automobiles, air transport, pharmaceuticals, hotels, public works and telecoms. French capitalists enjoy a 13.7% share of Guinea's imports, far ahead of China (9.6%) and the U.S. (5.9%).

Over-dependent on bauxite, which accounts for 90% of Guinea's export revenues, and with foreign debt equaling gross domestic product, the national economy is on the brink of collapse. But the world's imperialists only care about looting the country's natural resources. In June, 2005, Canadian Global Alumina, heading a consortium of French and other European companies, signed a $1.5-billion contract to build an aluminum smelting plant. Not to be outdone, the U.S. companies Alcan and Alcoa also plan to build a $1-billion plant.

U.S. bosses want a bigger slice of the pie. Concerned with the political transition when Conté dies (he has leukemia and diabetes) or is forced from power, U.S. diplomats began biennial visits here in March, 2006. Three army generals and Conté's son Ousmane are jockeying to replace the ailing dictator. The unions began negotiating on Jan. 25 over the powers of a "consensus prime minister," supposedly to ease Conté into retirement and defuse the present crisis. (On Jan. 27, the unions agreed to end the strike, reaching a tentative deal after Conté offered to cede some powers to a still unnamed prime minister and to lower rice and fuel prices.)

That strategy is a sure loser. The French daily paper Le Monde (1/28) described the future prime minister as a "strong man" whose job will be "favoring development" -- evidently, in the interests of the imperialist powers. Workers here will gain nothing by replacing one corrupt, blood-soaked politician with another. The only solution for Guinea's workers -- and for workers worldwide -- is to dump all the bourgeois politicians and the capitalist system they serve.

Teachers' Strike in France Could Spark Walkout of 5 Million

PARIS, Jan. 26 -- Longer hours for lower pay! That's the French government's plan for middle- and senior-high teachers for the next school year. Fifteen trade unions representing 99% of the country's 419,000 teachers are calling for a national strike on February 8. Five trade union federations are calling on all 5,000,000 public workers to strike that same day for higher wages and against the planned elimination of 15,000 jobs in 2007.

Teachers' real wages fell by 20% on average between 1981 and 2004 according to a recent study. It says that because the teachers' unions have won smaller class sizes and paid hours off for special teaching tasks, teachers have put up with falling wages "without, in the final analysis, protesting too much."

But teachers' attitudes may be changing. When the government announced its draft decree to take back the class hour reductions, on Dec. 18 half the country's teachers walked out, and 25,000 to 30,000 demonstrated in Paris the following day.

The government is also floating trial balloons on privatizing education. A general inspector of education, Philippe Barret, has written a book -- with the tacit support of education minister Gilles de Robien -- calling for physical education, art, music and drawing teachers to be replaced by private gym instructors and art "professionals."

Worldwide, the capitalists are taking back workers' gains of the past 50 years. This is sparking reform struggles providing an opportunity for revolutionaries to spread the word that there's only way for workers to win gains that can't be taken away -- by overthrowing capitalism and establishing communism.

Military Tribunals Legalize Fascism

Last October 17, war criminal Bush signed into law sweeping new powers for the government's "military tribunals." Several "anti-war" Democratic Senators voted for it. Trials for accused "terrorists" will begin soon.

The bosses' dictatorship is absolute: they decide whether to make it more or less open. Many liberals and phony "leftists" advocate "restoring our civil liberties," but this won't change a capitalist system that installs fascism during crises. The recent Military Commissions Act (MCA) is one more example of this fascist beast, created by the profit system.

The MCA legalizes the round-up and jailing of any non-citizen the President designates an "unlawful enemy combatant." A detained "terrorist" with no right to habeas corpus (no chance of challenging the detention in court) -- will be jailed until trial. The military tribunal can accept secret evidence and impose the death penalty based on that evidence. Although torture is supposedly banned, the President determines what "enhanced interrogation techniques" are legal.

Many people are still convinced that the "war on terror" is based on real and legitimate concerns. They must understand the bosses "terrorism" hysteria for what it really is -- lies to justify a homeland security police state in preparation to crush opposition to endless wars.

U.S. imperialism created the Al Qaeda terrorists and other Islamic fundamentalists to use in their "cold war" battle against the former Soviet bosses. Bin Laden and others had extensive CIA connections. Before 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies, at the very least, were well aware that Bin Laden & Co. were planning to attack a major U.S. target. U.S. rulers are long-time experts at creating pretexts for large-scale military actions. In 1898, they manufactured the Spanish-American War, blaming Spain for sinking the battleship Maine (caused by a boiler explosion) in order to start a U.S. war of conquest. They concocted an attack on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf to rationalize the criminal escalation of Vietnam War.

But 9/11 was nothing compared to the deaths U.S. imperialism perpetrated between Gulf Wars I and II. These two wars and sanctions killed 1.5 to 2 million Iraqis. Two million have left the country. Another 1.5 million are refugees inside Iraq itself -- altogether totaling over 20% of the pre-Gulf War I Iraqi population.

U.S. rulers' care nothing about U.S. workers' or soldiers' safety. They will fight to the last drop of our blood in order to secure their profits and control Mid-East oil. They're furious at Bush & Co. because the Iraq fiasco has squandered the momentum and popular support they had post-9/11. But, they are preparing for "The Long War" (see Army Times, 10/23/06), as they call it -- war to crush rival imperialists.

As this rivalry sharpens, opposition to endless wars will grow. The expanding police state will use the MCA to jail and "legally" murder workers, and especially communists ("enemy sympathizers") who strike against massive attacks on pensions, health benefits and wages and rally against imperialist oil wars. PLP will fight fascism daily, and prepare for our own "long war," using mass working-class violence to meet the bosses' violence and overthrow this exploitative and oppressive system. The future of the working class depends on it.

LETTERS

Anti-War March Lacks Working Class Focus

The January 27th Washington, D.C anti-war march reflected the political line of the organizers and main speakers, which influenced many of the participants. There were far fewer "No Blood for Oil" signs and far more signs like "Escalation: The Wrong Way." The Democratic Party and its supporters, like SEIU's president Andy Stern, are shifting the focus away from immediate or even rapid withdrawal to opposing "the surge." Many signs and speakers attacked Bush for this. The tremendous Bush-bashing ignores the ruling-class consensus that U.S. soldiers should be fighting and dying to maintain control over Mid-East oil for many years to come.

The role of politicians like Kucinich -- who say what many anti-war demonstrators want to hear -- is to convince people that reform is still possible, and that the Democratic Party (no matter how evil) is the vehicle for that reform movement. People like Waters, Conyers, Woolsey and Kucinich play the worst role because they tie people to one of the two wings of the capitalist Democratic Party, keeping them hoping that an inherently violent and exploitative system can change its spots and become peaceful and humane.

Most of the pseudo-left groups spread the delusion that the Democrats can be swayed to defund the war and bring all the troops home. The "Communist" Party and the Committees for Correspondence appear to control the march organizers; they invited Conyers, Waters, Woolsey, Kucinich and other Democratic Party representatives. But equally bad are groups like the "Revolutionary Communist" Party. Their "Drive Out the Bush Regime" rhetoric says the neocons are the problem, rather than a declining imperialist empire desperately seeking to maintain hegemony through military means.

In many good conversations on our union buses, people were torn between an understanding that the war in Iraq stems from the profit system and a government that enforces that system, versus a liberal hope that elections can produce people who won't begin wars and will better people's lives rather than destroy them. So the main contradiction in the anti-war movement is between liberalism/pacificism and Marxism-Leninism and revolution.

Finally, once again the march was mostly white. Since the single issue is the war, racism and class exploitation are rarely, if ever, mentioned. When meat-packing plants are being raided and hundreds of immigrants deported; when affirmative action programs are being demolished and black enrollment in California public universities and elsewhere have plummeted; when hundreds of thousands of workers are laid off by companies like Ford and Pfizer (millions downsized in the past 25 years, three-fourths of whom will never work again or get jobs at lower pay); when workers' health and pension benefits are being slashed, the anti-war movement ignores it.

The organizers' outlook is not to build a class-struggle movement focused on the working class, one centered on anti-racism. Rather, these opportunistic pacifists champion "peace" and "reform." Capitalism, however, isn't playing along, offering only endless wars and "reform" -- of social security, pensions, healthcare, education -- all of which are designed to lower the social wage, and condition workers into accepting less.

A Red Marcher

Future GIs Show Red Potential

Just the word "potential" alone doesn't quite communicate our Party's opportunity to build a communist base in the U.S. bosses' military. The possibilities that now exist, and which will grow as the bosses face more obstacles and crises in Iraq and elsewhere, are undeniable. The U.S. ruling class does not have a Nazi army. But in order to ensure that they never have one, and that we have our Red Army, it is absolutely important that we join the military in order to fight racism, nationalism/patriotism and other capitalist ideas while organizing working-class soldiers.

The bosses are definitely in trouble when it comes to the political and ideological dedication of future soldiers. In my interaction with the youth in the middle of military processing, I found patriotism and anti-Arab racism are scarce.

For instance, I was bunked with one young Asian recruit at a hotel as we both awaited processing. During dinner we became comfortable with each other. When we finished I asked, "So, are you the patriotic type?" Without even a blink, he responded a solid "NO!" When we noted the certainty that we would both be deployed to Iraq, he told me he didn't want to go because he had enlisted for economic reasons, and that he'd rather just find ways not to fight, even in battle.

Another time I nearly broke out laughing on a bus to the processing station. The young recruits -- white, Latino and black -- were discussing possibly winding up in Iraq. One young white recruit asked the only lifer (a career military soldier) on the bus if he'd go to Iraq. He responded in a fervently patriotic fashion. The recruit just blinked and attempted to hide his sarcastic response with a half-smile sneer. It was tense but I could see similar smirks on many of the recruits' faces.

On another day, I was profoundly reminded that we must have trust in our class and about the need to be with the soldiers through thick and thin. While waiting for a doctor, many young recruits were discussing Iraq again. To my astonishment, one remarked, "This war isn't worth one dead American soldier." I quickly and quietly added, "And not a single dead Iraqi one either." All these mainly young white working-class recruits there didn't stare at me and react in a racist and patriotic manner; rather, they all sternly nodded in agreement!

It breaks my heart that I was rejected because I didn't meet military standards, that I won't be there with them in the long run. But even from my modest interactions with these future soldiers, it's evident that the word "potential" is an understatement. Sure, it will still take a lot of intense and lengthy struggle for us to make serious headway, but it can happen.

Political work in the military can be scary, but it's more rewarding than frightening. It isn't a sacrifice; it's a necessity. Knowing this eventually enabled me to overcome my own internal contradictions in order to try. Surely, if I could, many others can too and carry this work further forward.

To fulfill this task more seriously and effectively, we must win more to do it! This work is vital and empowering for our class. Our Party should host a series of study groups and PLP schools for young people on this subject.

It's central to winning a working-class revolution and finally eliminating racism, sexism and our class's exploitation and oppression. Our brothers and sisters in uniform need us.

Red Youth

Boston Campus Open to Anti-War Action

Since fall, military recruiters have been showing up in the Student Center at the predominantly black Roxbury Community College (RCC). They approach students who are playing pool in the Game Room or hanging out in the Cafeteria, offering free ipod downloads as bait. Until recently, the student body was pretty passive and unaware, but now a group of students and faculty are exposing the recruiters as agents of U.S. imperialism. Next week, for the first time, students and faculty will be confronting Marine recruiters on campus. An anti-war movement is taking shape here.

During the last few months a few students and faculty, including PLP'ers, refused to let the campus forget that wars were raging in the Middle East. The faculty union sponsored a conference about how we educate students about military recruiters on campus. The union pledged to be present with literature about the war whenever recruiters set up a table at RCC. The student Pizza and Politics Club held discussions in which a former Marine, recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, brought home the reality and consequences of the war.

Now, the development of student leadership is the order of the day. As long as youth stay focused on their own individual problems, the rulers have a free hand to turn them into passive wage-slaves, cannon fodder and killing machines. The RCC student organizers must teach their fellow students class consciousness, the understanding that their problems stem from capitalism's inevitable oppression of the working class. Above all, students must learn that it is possible for our class to grasp world events and change society and that their friends who do decide to join the military can play a vital role in leading such change. They can demonstrate that collective action is possible, and that young people can be motivated by more than materialism and selfishness. Reading CHALLENGE will help them to develop a deeper understanding of how capitalism works and confidence in our class's ability to destroy it. However, ultimately, it is only by leading struggles, such as the impending confrontation with military recruiters, that they will learn how to lead future fights against the bosses in the barracks or on the job. Guiding this process is the profound responsibility of the PL'ers on campus.

Boston Red

UN `Peacekeepers' War On Haiti's Workers

Wherever the U.S.-led United Nations "Peacekeeping" forces go, you can be sure there's money to be made, even in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. The highly-organized gang of rulers, going back to Papa "Doc" Duvalier and Baby Doc -- both supported by U.S. rulers -- caused Haiti's dire poverty. During that time, the island's resources were stripped of mahogany, the farmlands were devastated by erosion and many workers were forced into slave labor on sugar cane plantations under Dominican Republic bosses. Tens of thousands have also become cheap labor in France, the U.S., Canada and Martinique.

When former president, Jean Aristide came to power for the second time in 2000, the Zinglindo gangs developed. They terrorized working-class people in the capital, Port au Prince, breaking into houses, robbing, raping and even killing women. Aristide was unable to control these gangs and his power diminished. The Bush administration organized a "rebellion" by the former Tontons Macoute (fascist thugs) and then sent the Marines to kidnap Aristide and remove him from power.

Then a 3,000-strong UN "peace-keeping" force replaced the U.S., French and Canadian imperialist troops, supposedly to avoid a civil war among rival criminal gangs. A puppet government was created, led by Gerard Latortue. But as we discovered, neither the UN nor the Latortue government were ever concerned about the Haitian workers.  

In the past 18 months, the gangs' tactics have changed to kidnapping many tourists, who are forced to pay thousands of U.S. dollars for their release or be killed. People now fear traveling to Haiti. Last December, the new government of Rene Garcia Preval was forced to close schools very early, before Christmas, because students were being kidnapped from schoolyards.

So then, before Christmas, hundreds of UN troops, led by the Brazilian army of the "socialist" Lula government marched into Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas (where many of these gangs operate), and using heavy weapons randomly fired into people's houses, killing many women and children.

Money is literally being squeezed from the blood of workers and their children -- all in the presence of UN troops and 5,000 Haitian police. Nothing changes; the situation only worsens! We need to dump their "peace-keepers" and their governments and go for communist revolution. Only under workers' power will we productively live in peace.

Haitian comrade

Farmworkers Receptive to PLP's Ideas

We are continuing to work here in California's San Joaquin Valley, passing out leaflets and distributing CHALLENGES to the farmworkers. Recently we've had very good discussions with a family from Oaxaca, one of whom is a teacher. Here he's working in the fields.

The repression suffered here leads to passivity. The supervisors and contractors are a rope around workers' necks, constantly threatening layoffs or punishments, to make them work faster and extract more profits for the bosses. Many workers live in real poverty.

In a recent discussion I explained that the bosses need to make maximum profits from our labor to finance their oil wars, and that, like us, the world's workers are dying of hunger, because of this profit drive.

I explained that's why we need to organize a mass revolutionary communist party, like Progressive Labor Party, to fight for our own class interests, for the seizure of power. Little by little our work is taking root, and, with persistence, we'll reap the fruits.

Comrade Red Grasshopper

Bosses Use GI `Appeal' to Derail Their Anger

We were members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society -- a mass organization that opposed the Vietnam War) in the late 1960's and early 1970's. [Ed. Note: See PL History, page 8) We joined the Party as a result of its principled fight in SDS, and its leadership on the campuses for militant anti-imperialism, anti-racism, the worker-student alliance, for its fight against nationalism and most important, its advocacy of revolution to destroy imperialist war at its capitalist source. CHALLENGE didn't call the "Port Huron Statement" (by the social-democratic founders) a "blow to the solar plexus" of the imperialists as CHALLENGE (11/15/06) mistakenly said about the Appeal for Redress.

In fighting for its ideas, PLP'ers criticized the liberal, anti-communist, pro-democracy line of the Social Democrats who started SDS, and the phony leftists and nationalists who later fought the Party for leadership. This kind of leadership by the Party was a guide to many who then decided to join PLP, learning to "struggle with, struggle against."

In SDS, the Party organized the worker-student alliance caucus, which sharpened the ideological struggle, and fought for and led strikes and building takeovers on the campuses against the war and racism, as opposed to liberals' pacifist proposals to "study peace." Tactics matter; they flow from politics.

Currently the soldiers and sailors Appeal for Redress has over 1,000 signers to an internet appeal, including 100 officers, according to the bosses' media. Good people are involved in this Appeal. But the liberal rulers are using it as part of their fight to win the working class to support wider war. We must expose these liberal imperialists (like Brzezinski) who say the U.S. should temporarily reduce troops in Iraq in order to prepare for wider war.

The bosses' media is publicizing the Appeal as part of the attempt to derail soldiers' anger against the ruling class into the arms of the patriotic liberal imperialists. The Washington Post actually carried its report on the Appeal as part of an article on the Congressional Democrats' opposition to Bush's plans.

But anger against the war has the potential to become the basis of building workers' internationalism and the fight for communism. If the Appeals petition becomes a mass movement like SDS, then PLP needs to better play our role of leading the fight against racism, patriotism and imperialism within this movement.

CHALLENGE should lead and reflect the fight for internationalism among youth, including a fight to change the Appeal petition to be anti-racist, internationalist and non patriotic. Working in mass movements is complicated, but it shouldn't weaken our fight to expose liberal imperialism, fight racism, including anti-Arab racism, and for workers' internationalism and communist revolution.

There's great potential to fight for the left and recruit in many mass organizations. A letter in CHALLENGE (1/31) said we should concentrate forces on the Appeals Movement. But there are many rank-and-file, anti-war efforts being organized by groups of people in existing mass organizations which, while not "purely" our line, nonetheless involve aspects of anti-racism and internationalism, growing from struggle in the mass movement. Political battles over patriotism vs. internationalism can lead to building the Party.

Some Comrades

REDEYE

Guantanámo not the only horror show

According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantánamo causes psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of suicide attempts and three inmates killing themselves last year....

...Amnesty International has declared "the gulag of our time." Guantánamo is not the only US torture camp. Bagram in Afghanistan has been dogged by stories of abuse, and there are secret US prisons around the world where it is widely feared new horrors are occurring....

Adorned on the walls of the Guantánmo camp is its mission statement: "Honour-bound to defend freedom".... (GW, 1/25)

Gates affirms: US Is in Gulf to stay

Mr. Gates said the build-up of US forces in the Gulf region, involving the dispatch of an aircraft carrier and Patriot missile defence batteries as well as the deployment of more than 20,000 US reinforcements to Iraq, was intended as a signal that Washington would not be intimidated. "We are simply reaffirming that statement of the importance of the Gulf Region to the United States and our determination to be an ongoing strong presence in that one area for a long time into the future," he said.... (GW, 1/25)

Scratch a Democrat, find an imperialist

...There is a continuing debate about whether military action may some day be necessary to set back Iran's nuclear activities....

Democrats...are positioning themselves to sound tough.

"To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table," former Senator John Edwards recently told an Israeli security conference. "Let me reiterate -- all options." (NYT, 1/28)

Wishful thinking won't stop fascist drift

Of the 80,000 Arabs and Muslim nationals who were required to register after 9/11, the 8,000 brought in for FBI interviews, and the 5,000 locked up in "preventive detention," none have been convicted of a terrorist crime.....

Yet, like "Good Germans," we watch in the hope that the country couldn't possibly get any worse.

...The Democratic Party has been...futile and even worse, complicit, in the face of these war crimes and tyranny....

The Bush White House represents...[an] imperialist empire. The clamping down on the borders, the militarizing of the police and the creation of a spy state, the public-order policies that criminalize the mere presence of groups of youth, minorities, and immigrants, and the repression of legitimate forms of political protest are not designed to prevent terrorism. This rapidly evolving police state is designed primarily to both repress and coerce domestic and international populations who would challenge this American Empire. (MinutemanMedia.org, 1/4)

Wounded vets get government runaround

...Wounded veterans trying to obtain disability checks are being tied up in a bureaucratic nightmare. The Veterans Benefits Adminstration has a backlog of 400,000 pending claims -- and rising. Veterans must wait for six months to two years to begin receiving the money....In the interim, thousands of veterans with disabilities are left to fend for themselves.

Thousands...have crippling disabilities such as brain or spinal injuries....

The VA system has a reputation for high quality care, but waiting lists to see a doctor at some facilities now run as long as several months... (LA Times)

Society is sick in more ways than one

...Health care providers are more aggressively seeking upfront collection of co-pays and deductibles. A component of this strategy is to encourage patients to use third-part lenders such as credit cards to pay for medical expenses they cannot afford....

A society is seriously out of whack when legalized loan sharks are encouraged to close in on those who are broke and desperately ill. (NYT, 1/22)

Poverty, `race' make human guinea pigs

The most notorious medical experiment in American history is surely the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated for 40 years....

Blacks have been forced to undergo painful, risky experimental surgery, dosed with radiation. They have been falsely assumed to feel pain less than whites and to require higher X-ray doses for a readable film...

Reprehensible behavior continued into the 20th century....

"In the South," Ms. Washington writes, "rendering black women infertile without their knowledge during other surgery was so common that the procedure was called a `Mississippi appendectomy.'" But the same was true in the North, as recently as the 1970s, when unnecessary hysterectomies were often done on poor black and Puerto Rican women to give doctors in training a chance to practice their skills. (NYT, 1/23)

Ex-Slaves, Seminoles United to Defeat Racist U.S. Invaders

One of the more well-hidden parts of U.S. history involves the first foreign invasion by the U.S. military: from 1816 to 1836 the U.S. government invaded Florida -- then a Spanish colony -- in an attempt to wipe out the largest station on the Underground Railroad. Since 1728, slaves had been escaping from Southern plantations into Florida. They were among its earliest explorers and pioneer settlers and had welcomed Seminole Indians as fellow escapees from persecution. Together the two groups pooled their wide range of knowledge and agricultural skills and established united, free, self-governing communities that ultimately defeated the attacks of the largest army in the Western Hemisphere. It is still another shining example of anti-racist, multi-racial unity in the fight against the U.S. ruling class.

The slave-owners saw this settlement of escaped slaves as an immediate danger to their slave plantation system -- men and women who did not live under white masters, carried arms, were allied with Native Americans and welcomed runaways to their villages. The South's rulers were determined to wipe them out.

By 1812, President James Madison and General Andrew Jackson, commander of the U.S. Southern District -- both prominent slaveholders themselves -- supported a private force, the "Patriots," later joined by the Tennessee militia and federal troops, that crossed into Florida on slave-hunting forays to seize free people for enslavement, but the ex-slaves and Seminoles united to repel this combined force.

Then, in 1816, Jackson resolved to take Florida and close down "this perpetual harbor for our slaves." He provoked an attack on "Fort Negro" on the Apalachicola River, where an explosion destroyed the fort and killed 270 people. Jackson's army executed its commander and marched the 63 survivors back into slavery.

Hundreds of Africans and Seminoles then retreated to the Suwannee River and built villages extending down the seacoast to Tampa Bay. They reorganized their army, preparing for future attacks.

Jackson, under incoming president James Monroe launched "a campaign of terror, devastation and intimidation" that included burning "sources of food in a calculated effort" to starve the populace into submission. According to historian William Weeks, this "exhibition of murder and plunder known as the First Seminole War" was part of Jackson's goal of "removing or eliminating Native Americans from the Southeast."

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (later to succeed Monroe as President) believed in "Indian removal, slavery and the use of military force," says Weeks, and defended the invasion, "consciously distorted...and lied about the goals....reminding historians not to search for truth in official explanations of events."

In 1819, the U.S. bought Florida from Spain for $5 million and it entered the Union as a slave state. But Washington found itself bogged down in a quagmire that was later to tie up half its army in Florida's swamplands.

The Second Seminole War began full scale in 1836. The then commander of U.S. operations, General Sidney Jesup, warned that the black and Seminole peoples were "identical in interests and feelings" and would "form a rallying point" for runaway slaves from adjacent states.

U.S. troops attacked peaceful villages, destroyed crops, seized women and children as hostages and tried mightily to pit black against Seminole but all divisive attempts failed. U.S. military victory remained elusive. The defenders used classic guerilla tactics, running circles around the Hemisphere's most modern army. On Christmas Eve, 1837, about 400 red and black Seminoles, outnumbered two to one, inflicted the most stunning loss suffered by the U.S. Army in decades of Indian warfare.

In this Second Seminole War, 1,500 U.S. soldiers were killed and thousands were wounded or died of disease. Civilian losses were undoubtedly higher. Congress had spent $40 million (pre-Civil War dollars!) but could not defeat the united black-Seminole forces.

Finally thousands of Seminoles and ex-slaves won assurances they could remain free and united if they agreed to migrate to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Others neither surrendered nor left Florida. These united people had emerged undefeated with their community intact, after nearly 50 years of siege, an accomplishment without equal in domestic U.S. history.

(Sources: "Counterpunch," 12/23/06; William Weeks: "John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire"; Kenneth Porter: "The Negro on the American Frontier" and also "The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People"; and the General Jesup papers, 25th Congress)

PL History: How PLP Fought for Pro-Worker Anti-Racism in SDS

(Last issue chronicled PLP's decision to work within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the escalation of U.S. imperialism's Vietnam genocide in order to move the mushrooming anti-war movement leftward and to build the Party.)

By the fall of 1967, SDS chapters had sprung up on hundreds of U.S. college campuses. Vigorous debate ensued on the tactics of anti-war activity. PLP members advocated the principle that tactics flowed from politics, and that class allegiance held the key to politics.

From the very beginning, PLP stood alone in fighting for a "Worker-Student Alliance." This position had several practical consequences:

* U.S. bosses got their cannon fodder for the Vietnam War through a military draft. However, college students could enjoy a "2-S" student deferment. PLP argued that a principled anti-war position required refusing this class privilege. PLP'ers rejected it individually and as a mass position. As a result, numbers of PLP members were drafted. The military brass deemed some unfit for military service for "political reasons." Others entered the military and organized against the war on the inside. PLP's principled position against the 2-S deferment won widespread respect throughout the movement, including the grudging admiration of the Party's rightwing opponents within SDS.

* From the start, PLP also vigorously opposed the position of the "official" leadership of the anti-war movement, that "Stop the bombing and negotiate" was the only mass line that could mobilize large numbers of people within the U.S. PLP argued that as an imperialist invader, the U.S. ruling class had no right to negotiate a blade of grass in Vietnam; that the only viable demand was "U.S. out NOW!" This struggle around this principle -- correct as far as it went -- was to have significant consequences several years later, when the Vietnamese "communist" leadership began negotiations with the Nixon administration.

* During the late 1960's, spontaneous working-class militancy was mushrooming, with industrial strikes, inner-city uprisings, and rebellion within the imperialist military. PLP took the lead in arguing that students should support these struggles, particularly with concrete action.

* PLP organized summer "Work-in" projects in 1967, '68 and '69, with two main goals: first to educate anti-war students about the true nature of the working class and the need to unite with workers; second, to bring anti-war, anti-imperialist politics to the working class. In a limited way, the "Work-ins" were quite successful. The student participants shed many reactionary illusions about workers, not the least of which was the boss-promoted slander that workers were racist, reactionary "oafs" incapable of understanding their class interests. Workers who met Work-in participants saw the potential for uniting with anti-war students and communists. The bosses went nuts, releasing several official documents revealing their panic at the prospect of workers and students uniting massively to oppose the war. PLP argued that this panic alone indicated we were on the right track.

* Within SDS, increasingly sharp debate began to emerge around this issue. PLP argued for unity with workers in industry, transportation and communications, and to concretize this unity by supporting strikes in auto, other heavy industries, telephone (the computer was still two decades away as a mass item), hospitals, etc. SDS's "right wing" (as we called it) opposed this position, arguing that the "traditional" working class had become obsolete, that it was hopelessly reactionary, and that "the real hope for revolution" lay in the "new working class" of alienated intellectuals and professionals. The main spokesperson for this nonsense was Herbert Marcuse, a former German social-democrat who had emigrated to the U.S. and become a professor in California. The bosses happily anointed him the ideologue of the "New Left." They promoted his ideas and his book "One-Dimensional Man," even featuring him on the cover of Time Magazine. PLP continued to fight for the Worker-Student Alliance and to organize militant action that reflected this class position.

(Next: the 1968 Columbia University strike.)

Bush Steps Up Iraq Slaughter But Liberal Bosses Demand WIDER WAR

• Turmoil Stems Flow Of Crude Oil
• It’s Liberals’, Not Just Bush’s War
• Rulers Need Full Mobilization Spurred By 9/11 Repeat

Hundreds March In Oaxaca

U.S. Gunboat Diplomacy Aims At Iran

Rulers’ Wars Spur Tighter Control of U.S. Schools

Report Reveals Genocide vs. Oakland’s Black Youth

Rulers’ Video Spying Builds Fascist War Society in NYC Schools

PL’ers Campaign Vs. Imperialist Wars in NYC Teachers Union

Katrina Hitting Cook County Healthcare System — The ‘Levees’ are Breaking!

Minimum Wage Produces Maximum Profits

France: The Worm Has Turned

N.J. Workers Need More than ‘Pressure’ to Win

Lesson Learned from Oaxaca Struggle

Cops’ Murder of Salvadoran Youth Exposes FMLN ‘Peace’ Pact

Somalia Another Front in U.S. Racist War for Oil

LETTERS

‘Be a Communist, today and tomorrow . . .’

Link Immigrant Raids to Black Slavery

Halloween Graffiti Gets Anti-War Treatment

Work in ‘Appeal’ Movement to Win GI’s to PLP’s Politics

Fight to Unite Black, Latino, Arab Workers

Red Farmworker Organizing in Projects

Bosses Speed Up, Injure Homeless Worker

Women: Dead in El Salvador as a result of Capitalism

Clinton’s Racist Welfare Reform’s Deepens Poverty

REDEYE on the News

• Saddam: quick kill hid US treachery
• The decider decides for Iraqis
• Falsely labeled terrorist? Court no help
• Bush: It’ll work, because it has to!
• Cops lie to get warrant, kill woman, 90
• ‘Iraq vital,’ so US threatens to leave!

North African Arabs Saved Jews From Nazis

PL’ers Launched Anti-Vietnam War Movement

Bush Steps Up Iraq Slaughter But Liberal Bosses Demand WIDER WAR

The Bush administration shows signs of increasing obedience to the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists. Bush, for example, replaced "cheap hawk" Rumsfeld with Gates, who vows to add 91,000 soldiers and marines. But Bush’s latest attempt to execute the main rulers’ war plans, sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq, is a band-aide that falls far short of a long-range strategy needed by U.S. imperialism.

Liberal spokesmen have pounced on Bush’s plan. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution calls it "the right thing to try—as long as we do not count on it succeeding." (Washington Post, 1/14/07) Zbigniew Brzezinski, advisor to former President Jimmy Carter, condemns it as "a political gimmick of limited tactical significance and of no strategic benefit...insufficient to win the war militarily." (WP, 1/12/07) Democratic war criminal Wesley Clark says "too little, too late." (Independent, 1/7/07) Barack Obama chimes in, "you’re going to need one hundred thousand more, one hundred and fifty thousand more." (New Yorker, 1/15/07) What U.S. imperialism requires of Bush is an Iraq stable enough to pump great quantities of oil and a U.S. mobilized for ever deadlier wars. He isn’t getting either job done.

Turmoil Stems Flow Of Crude Oil

U.S. rulers invaded Iraq with dreams of raising its crude production to six million barrels a day. But fighting keeps the level around two million, well below the pre-war high of 3.5 million. So it’s no accident that Bush’s stabilization surge coincides with the framing of a new Iraqi law that hands the country’s oil wealth on a silver platter to U.S. and British firms that agree to build up wells, pipelines and refineries. "Under a system known as ‘production-sharing agreements’, or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq’s oil....companies will be able to recoup 60 to 70 per cent of revenue; 40 per cent is more usual." (Independent, 1/7/07)

But, with Bush’s scheme doomed to fail, "the majors...won’t start work for years...because of the disastrous war," said one oil executive. The liberal New York Times says Bush "needs to concentrate enough forces in Baghdad to bring some security to streets and neighborhoods." (editorial, 1/9/07) It sweats out the "nightmare" of "millions of Iraq’s people and its oil fields falling under the tightening grip of a more powerful Iran."

It’s Liberals’, Not Just Bush’s War

Amid the surge uproar, some myths deserve busting. One is that the Iraq war sprang solely from the deluded minds of evil "neo-cons," who cooked up the lie that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The push for invasion in fact came from the dominant liberal wing, the chief proponents of the WMD fabrication being the New York Times and the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The Times hammered away at Hussein’s supposed cache in editorials and in articles by its then star reporter Judith Miller. The CFR sponsored Richard Butler’s book, "The Greatest Danger," which claimed that WMD-armed Hussein was worse than Hitler. The CFR published occupation plans months before the invasion. Furthermore, controlling Mid-East oil formed a big part of the rulers’ 1999 Hart-Rudman recommendations for maintaining U.S. supremacy well into the 21st Century. Another illusion portrays Democratic politicians as opposing "Bush’s war." Ted Kennedy promises he will organize to cut off funding for it. Don’t bet the rent. The last Senate war appropriations vote in November was a 98-0 slam dunk.

Rulers Need Full Mobilization Spurred By 9/11 Repeat

Two main factors contribute to the Iraq fiasco. First, Bush opportunistically serves the tax-cutting interests of his voter-donor base instead of getting them to sacrifice for U.S. imperialism. He even passed up 9/11’s golden opportunity for militarization in favor of business as usual. And in 2002/2003, when the CFR was urging a long build-up to a massive onslaught against Iraq, Bush pulled off an initially cheap invasion with "off-the-shelf" troops and equipment. A quagmire ensued with costs now reaching into the trillions, infuriating the liberal rulers.

Second, the Vietnam Syndrome has hampered U.S. rulers’ military recruiting for decades. That war laid bare to millions the murderous essence of U.S. imperialism. Very few people now join the armed forces willingly. It would probably take another Pearl Harbor- or 9/11-style attack, handled by a president more like Roosevelt than Bush, to change this pervasive anti-military attitude.

Given U.S. rulers’ inescapable needs — clashes with Iran soon and China later are clearly in the cards — it would be a mistake to rule out such an event. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman and a host of liberal followers, like Harvard’s Graham Allison and the CFR’s Stephen Flynn, continue to warn of one every chance they get. Without a galvanizing moment, U.S. rulers will have to resort to a draft or its twin — identical in all but name — national service.

It was encouraging that national service proved so unpopular during John Kerry’s 2004 campaign that he was forced to effectively drop it from his platform. Most people, especially the working class, oppose the bosses’ war-making. But passive disagreement is not enough. What remains is to build a mass movement with the only workable solution for profit-driven wars — revolutionary communism.

Hundreds March In Oaxaca

OAXACA, MEXICO, Jan. 13 — Five hundred workers and youth marched from the town of Miahuatián to the nearby jail demanding the release of members of APPO (Organization of the Peoples of Oaxaca) still imprisoned. Local and state cops attacked the marchers, beating and arresting several of the protesters.µ

U.S. Gunboat Diplomacy Aims At Iran

The rulers’ quagmire in Iraq is complicated by the surge of Iran’s influence in the Mid-East, which is probably the reason for what the NY Times (1/14) labels "classic gunboat diplomacy" — Bush has appointed an admiral to oversee the U.S. military in the region for the express purpose of using naval power to threaten Iran. A second aircraft carrier group has been shifted to the Persian Gulf, doubling U.S. air and sea power. Each one contains 14,000 military personnel, 85 aircraft, two guided missile cruisers, two destroyers, a frigate, two submarines and a supply ship. "Naval heft meant to intimidate," says the Times.

Fearing Iran’s reaction to a U.S. attack, involving an Iranian blockage of the narrow Strait of Hormuz through which much of the world’s oil passes, Navy minesweepers are also on call to deal with Iran’s possible use of mines to blow up tankers. But a Council on Foreign Relations Iran specialist thinks this will not cow Iran but rather strengthen its rulers’ anti-U.S. stance within the country. (NYT, 1/14)

A footnote: during the Vietnam War, rebellions by U.S. sailors on six of the seven aircraft carriers in those waters sabotaged the ships, sending them back to San Diego for repairs, effectively putting them out of action and helping to force U.S. rulers to give up their imperialist adventure there.µ

Rulers’ Wars Spur Tighter Control of U.S. Schools

A new proposal to redesign the U.S. educational system was recently introduced by the "New Commissions on the Skills of the American Workforce." In order to remain top dog, and prepare the working class for a future of imperialist war, the ruling class recognizes the vital need to overhaul the U.S. educational system and build nationalism.

The plan proposes national board exams in the 10th grade to track students into preparation for selective colleges or direct placement in community or technical colleges. This would give the ruling class tighter control of what is taught and how it is taught, while still allowing principals some on-site control as a facade of local power. This national centralization of the curriculum is crucial for patriotic indoctrination. If students and workers in the U.S. believe that their enemies are foreign workers, then the bosses can more easily convince them to kill and die for U.S. imperialism. Such nationalism is needed to win masses of young people to actively support imperialist wars and make sacrifices at home like lower wages, pensions and health benefits.

Like statewide exams and the SAT’s today, these new national board exams would be racist and anti-working class in nature. They would essentially produce an apartheid system, forcing mainly working-class blacks and Latinos into technical schools, which would inevitably provide free or cheap labor to profit-hungry corporations. Also, many students who did poorly on the exams would blame themselves, and not this racist system, for not making it into college.

As CHALLENGE has pointed out many times, the U.S. ruling class is fighting to remain the world’s top imperialist. Strategic control of Mid-East oil distribution is primary in achieving this goal. The war in Iraq is a failing attempt to secure its position. There will be many more imperialist wars abroad and tightening control at home as the rulers fight desperately to keep their position. The ruling class needs a few more educated workers who can help U.S. companies compete, and many more technicians and soldiers to produce war materials and fight hi-tech wars to keep the U.S. the number-one imperialist.

This new proposal, "Tough Choices or Tough Times," was written by a bipartisan panel including some major ruling-class figures like the head of the missile producer Lockheed Martin and members of the Brookings Institution, a major U.S. foreign-policy think-tank, along with members of prestigious universities. The composition of the panel demonstrates that the main goal of this proposal is not to make all students critical thinkers for the students’ sake, as it claims. Why would a missile producer be needed for that? Instead this panel reveals the seriousness with which the ruling class views the creation of an educational system that serves their corporate needs, especially the need for war in a time of growing crisis.

The proposal justifies itself with statistics that will surely be used to scare U.S. workers into believing that their standard of living is declining because of other workers in the world. It compares the U.S. unfavorably to China and India, which can produce lots of educated workers willing to work for low wages. The U.S. ruling class wants its workers to believe that this is why they are making lower wages every day. It would be a huge blow to the bosses if workers understood that capitalism’s basic need to maximize profits always forces them to pay workers less and less. Fear is used to win U.S. workers to ally with the U.S. ruling class to beat the world, winning many soldiers in Iraq to kill their Iraqi brothers and sisters.

Just as the rulers have a plan for us, we also have a plan for them. The rulers will try to maintain their control in the world by causing more death and misery for the international working class. We must deepen our own education about the rulers’ capitalist system. We must get involved in class struggle against all their racist, anti-working class plans with the goal of winning our friends to the understanding that only communism, a system run by workers, for workers, can end working-class misery around the world. Teachers must teach their students to use a class analysis to understand the world. Understanding that no matter where workers live, our enemies are the capitalists who oppress us, is the only way to combat nationalism. Students must point out patriotic lies whenever they are taught. Teachers and students must help organize protests and walkouts against military recruiters in schools, racist cop murders, metal detectors and any other attacks on our class. We must also develop and increase CHALLENGE networks among our base until it becomes the paper of the masses. This process will provide a real education where we, the working class, will truly benefit.

Report Reveals Genocide vs. Oakland’s Black Youth

ALAMEDA COUNTY, CA. — On Dec. 14, the Oakland Tribune ran a startling headline: "Youth’s Number #1 killer: Murder," referring to a report issued from Alameda Public Health director Arnold Perkins. It says the homicide rate for County youth, ages 15 to 24, is 21 per 100,000. California’s rate is 17 per 100,000.

The report only focuses on Alameda County but the World Health Organization’s (WHO) figures reveal U.S. capitalism in a miserable light. WHO says the rate of youth homicide in the world is 9.2 per 100,000. In France, Germany and Britain the rate is .6, .8 and .9 respectively. That means youth in Alameda County get murdered at a rate 35 times higher than these European countries.

However, the most explosive statistic is buried in the middle of the report. Black males between 15 and 24 are murdered at a rate of 186 per 100,000. Genocide, or ethnic cleansing, are the only words that can describe this state of affairs. It means that black males in Alameda County are 310 times more likely to be murdered than youths in France!

Alongside Hurricane Katrina, the latest cop murder in New York City (50 bullets to assassinate Sean Bell, an unarmed black man) and a prison population in which 70% of 2.2 million are black and Latino, this report, in effect, condemns U.S. capitalism as one of the world’s most racist nations.

It’s not that Oakland is some backwater city forgotten by capitalism. Its international seaport generates revenue from $25 to $50 billion per year. The city itself produces some $100 billion annually. A decade ago Walter Shorenstein, major kingmaker in the Democratic Party, invested $100 million in its downtown and ex-California governor Jerry Brown, has just completed two terms as mayor. He has been replaced by another Democratic Party "star," Ron Dellums.

Capitalism has not ignored Oakland. Rather it has created the conditions that cause this genocide against black youth. Decades of racism: double unemployment rates (quadruple among youth), extortionate slum housing, decrepit schools, police terror, imprisonment for non-violent "crimes" (which receive rehab, not jail terms, in most countries), drugs injected into black neighborhoods — all this and more has dumped tens of thousands of black youth onto capitalism’s scrap heap and left them with a future of hopelessness. It is to their credit that so many of them have participated in rebellions against the profit system.

PLP urges everyone to expose this genocidal murder rate in their unions, churches, schools and Army units, and direct workers’ anger against the racist system in order to build a revolutionary new society where the communist ideas of sharing and collectivity replace the capitalist notions of dog-eat-dog competition. Expanding CHALLENGE distribution and deepening our plans for May Day events could be central to such plans.

Rulers’ Video Spying Builds Fascist War Society in NYC Schools

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 13 — "I worked in the court system, so I know what cameras are," said a new teacher at this urban high school campus, shocked at the administration’s plans to install almost 100 cameras in our building and treat students like criminals. In the shell of a previously large school, four mini-schools have become incubators for fascism, enabling the U.S. ruling class to exert ever tighter control on its youth to prepare them for an ever-expanding war economy. Therefore, they need to get teachers to march in step. In our school, this campaign has: (1) increased pressure that manipulates teachers’ dedication to students; (2) harassed teachers who don’t fall in line or fit their plans; and (3) increased surveillance.

Surveillance and Social Control Builds War Society

Increased school security was occurring even before 9/11, but now it’s exploding. Because the great majority of students in big-city schools are black and Latino, and the system’s racism relegates these students to second-class citizenship who the rulers can use for low-paying jobs and cannon fodder in their imperialist wars, this new technology has started here and will be increasingly used nationwide.

It began with metal detectors in predominantly black and Latino schools, which has spread to the suburbs. Now it includes iris (eye) scanning and "non-cooperative" (automatic) tracking systems using radio frequency identification (RFID). The bosses have equipped 75% of new public schools with video surveillance systems (NY Times), costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The U.S. "Justice" Department is even doling out grants for these projects, although school crime has been declining for over a decade. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg trumpets his desire to view — from his headquarters — centralized video data of every school in the city.

Have the bosses suddenly become concerned about students’ well being? Not a chance. If they really cared about students, they’d lower the class sizes from 34 to 20, and lighten the workload of already overburdened teachers. These surveillance measures are part of creating a high-pressure culture where everyone is watched and is a potential suspect.

This culture is decidedly anti-working class and anti-communist. The content of the curriculum teaches loyalty to the bosses’ version of history: patriotism to the bosses’ flag and racism towards "foreigners" against whom the bosses want to go to war; justification for all U.S. rulers’ imperialist wars; pacifism; and omits how workers and oppressed black slaves fought capitalism’s oppression. It also teaches anti-communism with a vengeance. (See a future issue.)

Our latest union contract — which attempts to bribe teachers with chump change while doing absolutely nothing to help students — has led to another administration offensive against teachers. Their new buzzword is "empowerment schools," but they’re all about enslavement. Several teachers in our school have been victims. One veteran teacher was observed three times in a week and given two unsatisfactory observations because he dared tell an administrator that the newest battery of standardized tests was a waste of time. He teaches an advanced math class with 36 students; one-third has failed the state’s basic math exam and another third speak English as a Second Language.

The teacher knows their skills. The problem is teaching them under these conditions! But rather than improving conditions, the administration pressures us to work even harder, and then makes it appear as our "fault" when students cannot perform on the tests.

This is the same manipulation that recruits young people to join the military to "make a difference," the same harassment and terror that criminalizes immigrant workers and "disciplines" black and Latin youth with cops jailing them or killing them in the street. Cameras don’t mean the bosses are paranoid; they’re simply protecting their murderous system!

Communist Leadership Is Essential

PLP has been giving leadership in this struggle. We’re publicizing these cases widely, rallying other teachers to publicly support their besieged colleagues, while linking these attacks to the bosses’ drive toward building a society on a permanent war footing. We’ve begun to expose the issue of cameras and are organizing campus-wide meetings to begin to organize support from teachers as well as students and parents.

One obstacle is the lack of class consciousness. Firstly, teachers are caught up in the day-to-day struggle to prepare their classes and tend to their students as best they can. Many also believe the schools can be reformed, that the answer is "better education." They underestimate the ruthlessness of U.S. imperialism in crisis. Others hope to avoid trouble by keeping their head down and placating the administration. These small schools create more incestuous relationships between teachers and administrators. A group of teachers who read CHALLENGE can be instrumental in struggling with their colleagues over the politics of these school "reforms."

We need to involve students much more directly in this struggle. Our Party and our friends must resolutely build a base opposing these accelerating attacks, exposing the bosses’ plans, challenging them wherever and whenever we can and, in the process, recruiting more members. Capitalism is providing us with plenty of opportunities to grow.

PL’ers Campaign Vs. Imperialist Wars in NYC Teachers Union

NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 10 — Hours before the Bush speech announcing U.S. rulers’ latest 21,500 troop "surge" in Iraq, a resolution opposing the Iraq war as imperialist and the presence of military recruiters in high schools was voted onto the agenda of the next meeting of the thousand-member United Federation of Teachers Delegate Assembly here. The delegates also voted overwhelmingly to fund UFT buses to take teachers and their families to the January 27th national anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C.

Certainly many years of anti-war activity by PLP and other forces at both local and national union meetings have not gone unnoticed by the union leadership. As the political winds against the war turn into a gale UFT president Weingarten is smart enough to jump on the bandwagon.

But let’s not fool ourselves. This is the same Weingarten who seems to kiss NYC billionaire mayor Bloomberg for the cameras every chance she gets. The affection is more than symbolic. Labor "leaders" today play the role not only of negotiating the terms of our exploitation as workers but of actively mobilizing workers in the interests of U.S. imperialism and its expanding wars across the greater Middle East from Somalia to Afghanistan. (See page 4.)

The rulers are trying to take honest anti-war sentiment among the masses, both in and out of uniform, and re-load it into an analysis that justifies this policy.

PLP’ers in the Delegate Assembly refuse to be used by the rulers and their agent Weingarten in this fashion. We organize to fight current escalation in Iraq and Somalia while our understanding of imperialism points to larger wars looming on the horizon. Our resolution declares that "imperialist war is unjustifiable" and we plan to defend this language on February 7th whether we win or lose the vote against recruiters in schools.

We are winning when a thousand teachers must confront the Iraq war as imperialist and find themselves nodding their heads in agreement with an openly communist speaker.

We are winning when we distribute upwards of 300 CHALLENGES to delegates each month and when we bring red students and their friends to the Delegate Assembly to remind these teachers who they really work for.

Reform "victories" smaller than these are quickly turned into their opposite by rulers bent on getting war in the Mid-East "right" the next time. Our communist victories in the mass movement belong to our class alone and bring workers’ revolution that much nearer than it was before.

Katrina Hitting Cook County Healthcare System — The ‘Levees’ are Breaking!

CHICAGO, IL, Jan. 13 — "When I look at my patients in the waiting room, that’s me sitting out there," declared an angry black nurse at the Cook County Ambulatory Screening Clinic. She had just given a moving talk to a room full of about 40 health care workers and professionals, community and church organizers, meeting to build a mass fight-back against the deadly racist cuts in the County Public Health Bureau. She described being homeless herself during her 32 years with the County, living in an abandoned building years ago. She was outraged at racist Dr. Robert Simon, the County bosses’ hatchet man. (See box)

Workers came from many worksites and classifications — doctors, nurses, clerks, patient transportation and more. Some long-time employees of 20 plus years related their individual struggles, being homeless and raising children, and their anger and willingness to fight these cuts, for their patients as well as for themselves.

This capped off a very busy week of struggle, confronting the racist bosses and challenging workers’ passivity. On January 11, over 250 patients were told their prescriptions would not be filled because they lacked proper ID! When workers raised holy hell, this policy was at least temporarily dropped.

To make interest payments to the banks, the County wants to close two-thirds of the clinics and slash 6,500 jobs to close a $100 million hole in federal funding due to the $2 billion-a-week oil war in Iraq. The Chief Medical Officers of the County Health Bureau first responded to proposed budget cuts saying, "the fiscal crisis…is due to the cancellation of the federal Medicaid Intergovernmental Transfer (IGT) amounting to a loss of $100 million annually… Without [these] cuts…the Bureau would be within its budget today." (September 27, 2006)

The union leaders want to be "part of the process." First they ratified a contract that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Then they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars and work-hours to elect black County Board President Todd Stroger and all the other Democrats. They got their contract, raised our dues and got their politicians, while we and our patients face a racist storm more deadly than Katrina, resulting in increases in preventable diseases and deaths.

Not one politician, including Barak Obama, has said one word to stop these cuts. PLP has always said that the Democrats and the liberals will be the main builders of fascism. This is a good example.

Workers are now trying to build momentum and blow past the union leaders. A pledge is being circulated, where County workers vow to serve our patients regardless of cutbacks and fascist policies. We’re planning to attend four budget hearings and build for a mass march on the County bosses on January 29 called by the nurses’ union .

We’ll organize our patients to fight back, targeting the clinics that are on the chopping block. The County serves tens of thousands of uninsured workers, 85% of them black and Latino. This struggle holds great potential for building the Party and the movement for communist revolution, which will guarantee that no worker goes without medical care.

Minimum Wage Produces Maximum Profits

The Democrats are making a big deal about their legislative agenda for the "first 100 hours" of the new Congress, and their centerpiece seems to be "raising" the minimum wage. This is one of the biggest hoaxes being perpetrated by the ruling class.

The current minimum wage ($5.15/hr) in terms of real wages, taking inflation into account, is 33% BELOW what it was in 1968. Since the last "increase," in 1997, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has FALLEN 20%. If the Democrats’ bill becomes law, the nominal minimum will rise 70¢ an hour, to $5.85, still below 1968 in real wages. By the time it "rises" to $7.25 in 2009, inflation will have taken still another bite in this "increase."

So this legislation will not even match the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968! And that’s an "increase"?

Here’s some comparisons:

• If the minimum wage had risen at the same rate as gas prices since 1972, it would now be $13.33 an hour;

• Since 1997, Congress has hiked its own pay EIGHT times, and now stands at $168,500 per year (not counting health and pension coverage);

• Corporate profits have skyrocketed 244% since 1968, as the minimum wage fell 33%;

• In 2005, the highest CEO was raking in as much income as 23,288 minimum-wage workers combined. (McClatchy-Tribune News Service, 12/1/06)

Racist exploitation has made things even worse for black and Latino workers, whose poverty rate is 20%; that is, one in five fall below what the government says is the poverty line. A minimum-wage worker earns $10,712 per year, BELOW that poverty line, which itself is nowhere near what could be called a living wage.

No matter what the minimum wage rate becomes, under capitalism it is impossible for any worker to earn a "fair wage" because that would mean workers would receive the full value of what they produce — leaving NO PROFITS for the bosses. Capitalism functions on the bases of wage slavery: pay workers as little as the bosses can get away with so they can maximize profits. They are driven to this goal by the foundation stone of capitalism: competition. Every boss must strive to outdo his/her competitor or face going out of business. The most exploitative survive. The rest go under. This competition on a global scale leads to imperialist wars as the ruling classes of each country fight their rivals to control the resources and cheap labor necessary to their survival — with U.S. bosses trying to maintain their position as top dog.

It is the workers who suffer the evils created by such a system — poverty wages, job insecurity and mass unemployment, all intensified by racism for black and Latino workers in the U.S. and other such victims of racism in the rest of the capitalist world. And, of course, it’s the workers who make up the armies and sustain the casualties that result from the rapacious bosses’ battles for the biggest share of profits internationally.

The working class will only gain its "fair share" when we abolish the bosses’ wage system through communist revolution, eliminating the bosses altogether, enabling workers to collectively share what we produce according to our needs. That’s PLP’s goal. Join us.

France: The Worm Has Turned

"As France sensed and feared, the war in Iraq has triggered upheavals whose effects have not yet ceased to unfold. This adventure has exacerbated the divisions between communities and undermined the very integrity of Iraq. It has compromised the stability of the entire region, where every country is now concerned for its security and its independence. It has given terrorism a new field into which to expand."

That’s French president Jacques Chirac’s January 5th condemnation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Is Chirac now a "dove" and friend of the anti-war movement? Don’t bet on it.

Chirac is motivated by (1) his own self-interest, and (2) the interests of the French ruling class. Chirac is accused of corruption and abuse of power from his time as mayor of Paris (1977-1995). Only his presidential immunity (which will end in four months) is keeping him out of court.

Chirac’s arch-rival, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, is the conservative candidate for president. Sarkozy needs Chirac’s support and it’s easy to guess that the price of that support will be keeping Chirac out of jail if Sarkozy is elected president. To ensure that Sarkozy agrees to pay that price, Chirac has been demonstrating his capacity to damage Sarkozy’s campaign.

One particularity of France’s government system is that foreign policy is reserved to the president. Since Sarkozy is known for his pro-Bush positions, Chirac can sting Sarkozy by walloping Bush. Thus, staying out of jail — not opposition to imperialist war-making — is a major reason for Chirac’s attack on Bush.

Secondly, the French ruling class is probably reevaluating its position. According to the satirical weekly "Le Canard enchaîné" (1/10/07), French diplomats and spies in the U.S. have been sending alarming messages home for months. A high-ranking officer in the French embassy in Washington writes that, "The Iraqi police and military are unable to hold the country," necessitating a surge in U.S. troop numbers. Selecting Admiral J. Michael McConnell as Director of National Intelligence and General Michael Hayden to head the CIA appears to be part of the big bosses’ growing militarization of society in preparation for endless future wars. A military, one might add, that is frustrated at pursuing the fantasy of victory in Iraq. Chirac, and presumably the French ruling class, have decided it’s time to distance themselves from the Bush team.

An additional concern of French bosses is the threat to France’s Total Oil Co. which "is ready to join a $2 billion Iranian energy project…to develop part of the giant Azadehan oilfield," (London Times, 5/9/06) that could be wiped out by a U.S. attack on Iran. In December 2002, four months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a French general told the Pentagon that 15,000 French troops and 100 warplanes would be available in the event of war. And on January 7, 2003, speaking at the Ecole Militaire, President Chirac told his troops to prepare for action in Iraq. So what happened? Chirac wanted a piece of Iraqi oil wealth in exchange for his support, but Bush said no. The U.S.-UK occupation of Iraq basically nullified French energy investments previously signed with Saddam Hussein.

As CHALLENGE predicted (8/16/06): "If the French bosses think it’s in their interest, they will again break with U.S. imperialism, and again pose as ‘friends’ of the anti-war movement. No imperialist is truly against spilling workers’ blood in endless wars for control of the oil that fuels their profit machines. Wars can’t be fought by allying with one imperialist gang against another. It can only be done by ending its causes — capitalism and imperialism — and by building a mass revolutionary communist movement."

N.J. Workers Need More than ‘Pressure’ to Win

TRENTON, NJ, Dec. 11 — Over 25,000 state workers demonstrated at the State capitol building opposing proposed pension and benefit cuts. This is the second time members of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), Communication Workers of America (CWA), and other unions united to fight the proposed cutbacks. This large demonstration reflects workers’ determination to fight. But these union misleaders are trying their best to convince the thousands of angry workers that lobbying and voting will change the minds of these government officials, that the government will look out for workers’ interests if given enough pressure.

According to a recent report, New Jersey is approximately $30 billion in debt. It also has the nation’s highest property taxes, averaging $6,000 per year, along with a sales tax that Democrat Gov. Jon Corzine increased to 7%. Many lawmakers are blaming State workers’ pensions and health benefits for the high taxes and debt, while ignoring hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on "Homeland Security," plus the tens of millions in tax cuts over the last decade to various NJ companies, from Alta Pharmaceuticals to Verizon.

Corzine initially told the legislature to "solve" the high property taxes and growing debt, knowing that would include cutting pensions and creating a two-tier system that would force new employees to pay into a retirement fund. After seeing that thousands of workers would descend on Trenton, Corzine then forced the legislature to delete such provisions, insisting that he will "work it out" with the unions at the bargaining table.

This exposes the true relationship between the Democratic Party and the pro-capitalist unions, which many workers believe are defending them. NJEA President Joyce Powell told the thousands of demonstrators that, "We will fight until the Legislature does the right thing." No doubt, but the "right thing" for them is to help secure and increase their profits and imperialist power worldwide by cutting workers’ pensions and health benefits. And, just like the United Auto Workers (UAW), the NJEA and CWA will be working with the bosses behind closed doors.

PLP distributed leaflets and CHALLENGE at the rally, urging workers to see the class nature of this battle. The leaflet described the shortfalls of reforms, and how, throughout the 20th century, workers have given their lives to improve their conditions, only to see these reforms taken away later. PL also linked the attack on NJ State workers to the major cuts and layoffs suffered by workers at Boeing, Delphi, Ford and Northwest Airlines.

We also raised the battle in Oaxaca between workers and the state. One teacher, while talking to a crowd of Communication workers, pointed out that the state has always taken the bosses’ side against the workers, and Oaxaca is a perfect example of how they will use violence against the workers to hold onto their power — that only a government run by and for the working class will provide for workers’ needs worldwide.

This struggle in NJ is part of the global attack on workers, stemming from the sharpening contradictions between the imperialist powers. Believing that any capitalist government will give in to peaceful protests blinds workers to the nature of state power and who currently holds it. Through patience and perseverance, workers can be won to communist ideas and the true nature of the bosses’ politicians and unions will become clearer to our class worldwide.

Lesson Learned from Oaxaca Struggle

OAXACA, MEXICO — In the final six months of 2006, the Oaxacan workers’ and youth’s struggle inspired the international working class. Yet, the main lesson for PLP’ers and workers in general is the need to build a mass revolutionary communist party whose goal is the long-range fight for communist revolution. We must sharpen the ideological struggle with fellow workers and their allies who have illusions about "lesser-evil" politicians and a "reformed capitalism" that could somehow serve workers. CHALLENGE must be used massively in waging that political struggle to forever break the capitalist chains of racist super-exploitation, police repression, imperialist rivalry and wars and fascist bosses/politicians.

In any reform battle — even monumental ones like Oaxaca — workers and their allies must measure winning or losing in terms of building a mass PLP and creating communist class consciousness among the masses.

In the heat of the street battles, and taking advantage of the great discontent of the masses and their lack of revolutionary leadership, the bosses’ liberal press, electoral parties and opportunists of all political stripes built as leaders opportunists like Flavio Sosa, leader of APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca), Rueda Pacheco, head of Local 22 of the Teachers’ Union, and many others in APPO’s leadership.

Sosa was the founder of the PRD, (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica). He worked on the electoral campaign of ex-President Fox and received financial aid from the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled for 60 years) Governors of Oaxaca, including the fascist Ulises Ruiz. He recently allied with the capitalists of the PRD, led by ex-PRI member Lopez Obrador. Opportunists like Sosa and populist politicians like Obrador inject their poisonous capitalist political line into the mass movement to prevent workers from breaking the capitalists’ chains.

Popular Power and Commune?

Some aspects of the struggle — like expelling the cops from the city, seizing public buildings, erecting barricades and electing new public officials in some towns — were seen as proof of popular power. But the truth is capitalism kept operating as usual, with very minor interruptions. Businesses, banks and factories continued their exploitation. APPO pushed respect for the bosses’ constitution, while begging the federal government (Fox and his gang) to intervene in Oaxaca to restore social peace.

Many pseudo-revolutionaries called it the Oaxaca Commune. But the Commune that Marx speaks of in his book, "The Civil War in France," was completely different. The Paris Commune destroyed the French bosses’ state apparatus in the city and built their own government.

From the experience of the Parisian proletariat, Marx concluded that the working class needs its own party to lead it: the Communist Party. Today that lesson is more valid than ever. The experiences of the spontaneous struggles of workers, no matter how massive or heroic, show that without the leadership of a revolutionary communist party our class cannot liberate itself from its racist oppressors.

Therefore, winning for the working class means joining and building its Party, increasing its network of CHALLENGE readers, multiplying the Party’s study groups and massively spreading its communist ideas. Only this can guarantee a truly massive communist leadership — composed of workers, teachers, farm workers and students — capable of leading the exploited and oppressed masses to the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But PLP understands that the political line to which the masses are won is crucial to attaining this goal. Therefore, the Party has the very important and essential role of exposing and defeating the ideas of the class enemy within the mass movements and of guaranteeing that revolutionary communist ideas will be primary.

We need a Party that will hoist the Red Flag of the proletariat, not the bosses’ nationalist rags. Such a Party will need to be politically active to win members and sympathizers among all the oppressed and exploited sectors of society, especially within the working class, among farm workers, and in the military (composed of working-class youth). Building such a Party, the PLP, should be the number one priority. It is also the best answer to the bosses’ fascist attacks.

The lessons of the struggle of our Oaxaca class brothers and sisters will help the international working class to better fight to defeat capitalism. Communism, not socialism, is our goal because we are confident that the world’s workers can learn from the past and fight directly for a society without wages, exploitation, borders or bosses.

Cops’ Murder of Salvadoran Youth Exposes FMLN ‘Peace’ Pact

SAN SALVADOR — This month there was a celebration of "15 years of the peace agreement" between the government and the FMLN, following 12 years of civil war and more than 150,000 deaths. Apart from supposedly creating jobs and well-being, one of the main achievements was allegedly to create professionalism in the PNC (National Civil Police), composed of ex-soldiers and ex-guerillas.

Today, 15 years later, we have unemployment rates, criminality and poverty never before seen. ARENA (the Party in power) and the FMLN agree the police must be an apparatus of repression against the working class so they want to expand the PNC budget, to buy more weapons and equipment for the police to carry out their job — oppressing the working class.

Recently the police from the Tenancingo station, in the department of Cuscatlán, beat up 22-year-old mason Oscar Vanegas, who died days later. This police station has been accused of more than 82 acts of mistreatment and abuse. These killer cops were cleared of any charges, since, said the judge, it wasn’t possible to determine whether all or some of the killer cops had administered the blows that killed young Vanegas!

PNC police chief Rodrigo Avila said, "It could be that the person didn’t die from the blows, but the fact that they mistreated him has been shown in evidence." This declaration only caused more indignation and anger among many workers. The family and many friends confronted the cops, yelling "Killers! Murderous dogs!" against the Tactical Unity Police (UTO) who guarded their partners in crime. The UTO fascists were armed with UZI submachine guns and M-16 assault rifles and threatened the family of the youth, telling them, "He deserved it and if you don’t be quiet, you’ll be next."

The young Vanegas is one more in the long list of these cop murders. But the working class won’t forget. Both these jackals (PNC) and their superiors, the big bosses, will get the justice of the international working class.

This is capitalist "democracy" and its "peace" in full view. We can’t wait for justice from the same hangman who beats us. The bosses and their social fascist government (ARENA-FMLN) cannot create decent jobs or improve workers’ living conditions. Therefore, they keep the masses oppressed through police terror and death squads.

This murderous capitalist exploitative system cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed. But that can’t happen through elections or reforms, but with a real communist revolution. CHALLENGE must be spread to more workers and create communist consciousness among thousands of urban workers, farmworkers and students to build a mass revolutionary movement that will end this capitalist hell once and for all.

Somalia Another Front in U.S. Racist War for Oil

Somalia has become still another U.S. bosses’ imperialist and racist war operation. U.S. rulers are now at war against Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Pushtan Muslims in Afghanistan, black Muslims in Somalia and soon possibly against Persian Muslims in Iran.

An AC-130 U.S. plane flew from the Pentagon Central Command base in Djibouti south to the Somalian town of Ras Kamboni, near the Kenya border to attack alleged Al Qaeda targets. First it was reported the "terrorist leading the bombing" of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzaniai in 1998" had been killed. Later, it appeared the dead were all Somali civilians, including children.

So 14 years after 18 U.S. Army Rangers were killed in Mogadishu when their two Black Hawk choppers were shot down, the U.S. is back at war in Somalia. U.S and British Special Forces were actively helping the Ethiopian troops which invaded Somalia to topple the Union of Islamic Courts government.

Somalia is not only a key country because oil tankers pass its coastline (see CHALLENGE, 1/17), but Somalia itself has a huge oil potential. Before Bush, Sr.’s "humanitarian invasion" of Somalia in the early 1990’s, four major U.S. oil companies (Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips) were allocated an area comprising nearly two-thirds of the country for oil exploration. This occurred just before Somalia’s pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions were hoping that the Bush, Sr. Administration’s decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia would also protect their multimillion-dollar investments there. (See raceand history.com forum, Dec. 2001)

Besides serving the U.S. bosses’ interests, Ethiopian rulers also need a seaport since Ethiopia became a landlocked country after Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia in 1991. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is a vicious ruler; his troops slaughtered hundreds protesting electoral fraud in 2005. But the White House is not calling him "the butcher of Addis Ababa." No, now he’s an "ally in the war against terror."

Workers and youth from Addis Ababa to Mogadishu to Nairobi need to unite and break with their local bosses, warlords and the imperialists, and build a mass revolutionary fight to end the hell of wars and hunger. The communist ideas of PLP must be brought to these workers.

LETTERS

‘Be a Communist, today and tomorrow . . .’

A young friend visited me recently and we talked about things in general. He listened attentively and learned about my sad view of life. I believe we carry a garbage dump on our backs because of the insensitivity and hunger for power of the big international capitalist monopolies. My friend was wise enough to give me a copy of CHALLENGE. Later he introduced me to his father, "an old member of PLP."

Through his constant political activity and the many long hours we spent in ideological debate, plus the literature he gave me, I began to acquire class consciousness. Now I have the responsibility of fighting alongside my brothers and sisters to destroy this damn capitalist-imperialist society.

Today, I am a PLP member. I hope many of you CHALLENGE readers who are not do the same, so we can finally win a bright future for our entire human race. Be a communist today and tomorrow.

We live in a very depressed and poor area near Bogotá, Colombia, where unemployment and poverty are part of daily life for thousands of families displaced by violence of the state. Year after year, the bosses’ government and its goons — paramilitaries, stoolpigeons and military death squads — murder hundreds of workers and youth, accusing them of being "subversives."

Despite all this repression, our groups distribute CHALLENGE hand to hand here. We struggle with some readers to consolidate a study group, helping to build our revolutionary party in this area.

A PLP’er, Colombia

Link Immigrant Raids to Black Slavery

Recently I was teaching "The Narrative of Frederick Douglass" to my freshman high school literature class and discussing the abolitionist movement.

When the climax of the Narrative occurs and Douglass escapes, he’s ecstatic about how free he is. He also says he had to do a lot of hard work that nobody else wanted to do — shoveling coal, rolling oil barrels and chimney-sweeping.

I remarked that these were dirty jobs and required a large amount of labor, but that escaped slaves had no recourse; they were in constant danger of being "deported" back to the Southern slave-masters. The escaped slaves had to work at whatever jobs they could get and be "happy" to get that job. I reminded my students that the federal government protected private property, and that slaves were private property.

Many students had the misconception that the U.S. government was anti-slavery, when in fact — according to the recent NY Historical Society slavery exhibition — 38 cents on every dollar from the cotton industry flowed through New York City banks. I said that Karl Marx showed how cotton fueled the industrial revolution by feeding the textile mills of England with raw resources as part of the primitive acquisition of capital. I explained that the abolitionist movement was composed of working-class people who risked harm in order to fight a system they knew to be unjust.

Several students connected this to undocumented workers having to work at whatever jobs that they can get while constantly fearing immigration raids, much like the slaves had to fear the slave-catcher. The class began to understand the link between the exploitation of undocumented workers and the need of the ruling class to use fear and terror to force workers to do undesirable jobs, but more importantly, to drive down the wages of the entire working class.

I concluded with a discussion of how the bosses use racism to get the workers to blame "immigrants for taking their jobs" instead of blaming the bosses or the systemic racism necessary to capitalism. Several students said we need "a new abolitionist movement." I’ll be making sure they get CHALLENGE.

Red Teacher

Halloween Graffiti Gets Anti-War Treatment

My nephew and his friends organized a Halloween graffiti painting, reading "STOP THE WAR." I supported them but cautioned them to be careful.

Our brothers and sisters are confronting the cops and fascist goons worldwide, just as our youth face them here in the U.S. They’re learning that this fascist capitalist system leads to more oil profit wars. The bosses don’t care if soldiers on both sides and civilians are dying.

The anti-war painting was a great step forward for my nephew and his friends since they now understand what war is and about the aims of the bosses who are killing youth like them. They know we must stop the war by organizing ourselves to fight for a communist system. We’ll soon invite them to meetings to talk more about politics and to get them to help us organize and celebrate May Day, 2007.

A Red Uncle

Work in ‘Appeal’ Movement to Win GI’s to PLP’s Politics

The letter entitled "Sharpen Political Struggle in GI Appeal Movement" (CHALLENGE, 1/17) makes some good points about the pro-capitalist politics of David Cortright, the person who the writer says is behind the GI Appeal for Redress movement. We definitely must sharpen the struggle against the patriotic, pro-imperialist politics of the GI Appeal and other reformist movements, all of which are led by the ruling class, and/or its agents.

But the writer then adds, "… it would be wrong to conclude that the main, or only, way to work with GI’s or to build an alliance between GI’s, students and workers, is by using Cortright’s appeal for redress or tailing his politics." None of the recent letters in CHALLENGE about this movement have been uncritical of it.

Secondly, right now this Appeal movement seems to be the largest one involving active-duty soldiers opposing the war (albeit with bad politics). NY Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote (1/4): "In a devastating critique of the war, the newsweekly Army Times led its current edition with the headline: ‘About-Face on the War — After 3 years of support, troops sour on Iraq.’ The article detailed a Military Times poll that found, for the first time, "‘more troops disapprove of the president’s handling of the war than approve of it.’"

This shows that the "all-volunteer military" has not totally gotten past the Vietnam Syndrome: there’s still lots of anti-war feeling among soldiers. It also shows that the main voice of the U.S. ruling class (the Times) is trying to turn the growing number of anti-war GI’s into a weapon to fight for the rulers’ own endless war agenda. We’d be making a major mistake if we didn’t concentrate our modest forces on working in what seems to be the biggest anti-war movement involving active-duty soldiers, even if it is led by imperialists who disagree with Bush’s conduct of the war. Not to concentrate on this one just leaves thousands of GI’s without any real anti-imperialist alternative to liberal patriotism. And that would be a major political error on our part.

An Unpatriotic Red

Fight to Unite Black, Latino, Arab Workers

On November 11, over 250 students, educators and members of the South Side community participated in a Conference Against Racism and War at Chicago State University. PLP members participated in this conference to help make clear the connections between imperialist war, racism and the need for communist revolution.

The keynote speaker addressed the need to win black and Latin workers and youth to take the lead in any anti-war movement by fighting racism and linking the two struggles. He pointed out that immigrant workers and youth who participated in the mass immigration rights movement, and the mostly black striking teachers in the Detroit and Gary public schools, and their students, overwhelmingly oppose the war.

An Iraqi speaker described the devastation that has resulted from the U.S. invasion. There was also a panel of male and female, black, white, and Latino military vets against the war. Workshops ranged from racism in the public schools, the racist prison system, Oaxaca, and racism and healthcare disparities.

Students who had never before been involved in political activity, took leading roles in organizing these events. There was a great deal of participation between students and faculty both in the planning of the conference and during the actual event. Others who were not able to attend donated money for food. One of the best things to develop out of the conference is that more faculty members want to heighten the political consciousness of the students. Even students who came mainly for extra credit said they would like to participate in future actions.

At the end of the conference, an Arab participant commented on the racism he has experienced since the 9/11 attacks. A black man commented, "Now you know how we feel." A PLP member talked about the difficulty that she and others had in organizing residents in her mostly black neighborhood to fight against attacks on Muslim businesses and residents in the area in recent years. This reflects the contradiction faced throughout the conference: nationalism vs. internationalism and multi-racial unity to combat racism.

A comrade passionately reminded the group that we must not allow ourselves to be divided by the racist and nationalist ideas that only serve the ruling class.

We distributed hundreds of CHALLENGES and PLP leaflets and made contacts with those who were interested in fighting against racism and the war, on and off campus. Building a mass PLP among college students and their professors is crucial to moving ever closer to communist revolution.

CSU Red

Red Farmworker Organizing in Projects

Holiday Greetings! The revolutionary political activity from PLP is spurring us to gather many more workers to our side. I'm trying to build the Party in government projects, where the authorities have threatened tenants with eviction if they take our communist newspaper CHALLENGE. These attacks are similar to those in Escondido, CA, where they want to refuse apartments to undocumented workers.

Conditions are clear and brazen under this disgusting profit system. That's why workers of the world must sweep away the rulers' politicians and their racist trash that affects our class. From every struggle should come one more nail in the coffin of each exploiter. Our consciousness must grow with revolutionary ideas.

I'm a farmworker comrade who wants to see more struggles in every corner of the earth where PLP exists, including organizing our brothers and sisters in the armed forces not to die in the wars for the rich oil bosses. I'm sending $27 for the CHALLENGES I've just received. I continue to make copies of the leaflets to distribute.

A problem with my foot hurts when I walk but soon I hope to be well and continue distributing the latest CHALLENGES. Thank you for the understanding you have brought me.

A Comrade Farmworker, San Joaquin Valley, California

Bosses Speed Up, Injure Homeless Worker

I met a family here in California's San Joaquin Valley in which the daughter injured an arm on a job where she suffered speed-up on long shifts, working for Quebercor World (USA) Inc. in Merced. It's been more than four years that she's been unable to work and she's pursuing her case legally. She's seen several doctors, but there's no hope for recovery.

The Social Security Office told her she had to wait six months just to see if they could help her. The only thing the bosses have for this young woman is harassment. This is capitalism's answer worldwide, because the bosses are driven by their thirst for super-profits, not caring how many workers die of hunger, cold or illnesses the bosses cause, or in wars for oil.

This worker is jobless, homeless and with little food or medicine, still one more reason why workers must unite to fight for a society without racism, without borders, without capitalism, without rich or poor, for a communist society to sweep away once and for all this hell called racist capitalism. Long Live Communism!

Thank you CHALLENGE for your literature which is so realistic, representing the interests of the workers of the world.

A Reader

Women: Dead in El Salvador as a result of Capitalism

I read the article in Challenge about the death of women in Latin America. In El Salvador, day after day, violence increases for the entire working class due to the mounting poverty. Fewer are getting richer, without a thought that some workers are dying of hunger. The deaths rise when the unemployment goes up which adds to more crime and prostitution.

In El Salvador, women, historically, have always been thought of or used as a reproducing machine, and not as a person with the same rights as a man. The Salvadoran woman is in a battle, a very fierce one without guns or tanks.

The fact is that today 90% of the people who work in factories are women and single parents. The Salvadoran woman is tired of living in the shadows; today she is opening her eyes to the evolving world. They are on strike, fighting for higher salaries, but also for their rights, as human beings.

Even most churches and religions prohibit women from participating in any activity of the service. Also, they don’t let them have any opinions. They only serve by the orders of men. Meanwhile, some women are killed in domestic confrontations with their male life-companions.

It is clear that for women to get out of this situation where this exploitative and racist system condemns them, it is necessary to fight alongside men for a communist system. To continue to try to reform capitalism, where they are discriminated and not recognized with the same credibility as a man, neither serves women nor the working-class men of El Salvador.

A Comrade

Clinton’s Racist Welfare Reform’s Deepens Poverty

The media portray conservative Bush as a Republican Party failure and the liberal Clintons as our saviors, representing the better days when the federal budget was balanced, for example. In truth there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans who both serve the bosses first, last and always. The Clintons "reformed" welfare under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 which a wealth of statistics ten years later shows to be nothing more than an attack on poor families.

The US ruler’s racism against blacks and Latinos (two to three times the unemployment rate, lousy housing and medical care, lower wages all around) have caused them to need public assistance way out of line with their percentage of the US population. The US ruler’s sexism has made women (and the children they must care for) the vast majority of those in the direst need. Women are forced into minimum and below minimum wage jobs (in addition to the unpaid labor of raising their children with almost no child care facilities being available) and black and Latino women face the worst of both worlds. Then the ruler’s media blames the "welfare crisis" on blacks, Latinos and women in order to deflect attention from the capitalist profit making system which has forced millions of white workers into poverty, needing public assistance to survive. Racism and sexism hurt the whole working class, even as they hurt those directly affected the most.

Under Clinton, automatic eligibility for Medicaid was separated from cash assistance and food stamps. Requiring more paperwork (sometimes exceeding thirty pages) for Welfare employees and recipients has discouraged many from even applying for Medicaid. Families who are denied welfare are often left unaware that they still qualify for Medicaid.

The policy changes have resulted in national declines in all public assistance programs. Children under age 19 make up the majority of people who became uninsured as a result of welfare reform. Of the 1.25 million people who lost Medicaid between 1995 and 1997, almost two-thirds were children (Families USA, 1999).

In New York City, the welfare caseload has achieved a 42-year low. Medicaid enrollment is at its lowest level since the 70s (Kronebusch, 2001). But, these decreases in welfare and Medicaid enrollment are not the result of increases in decent paying jobs, as politicians and the media would have us believe. Many people moved from welfare to jobs (often temporary) that don’t offer any health benefits. Others are forced into "workfare jobs" that pay less than the minimum wage, replacing workers who then face the same cycle of poverty and lost medical benefits.

With the new Deficit Reduction Act copayments of up to 20% for the cost of a service or drug can be imposed. States now model Medicaid to look and act as an HMO. There are tighter restrictions for the many elderly who use both Medicaid and Medicare. Lower reimbursements have led many doctors to limit the number of Medicaid recipients they see, or to refuse to take Medicaid at all.

More than half of the people that would have been enrolled in Medicaid had Clinton not "reformed" it, became uninsured in 1997.

Working people pay more and more for their healthcare, while Democrat and Republican politicians lavish 4.5 billion $s a month for imperialist oil war in Iraq. Capitalist rulers will never be satisfied until every dollar possible is squeezed out of the working class. We will only be satisfied when workers take power and squeeze the bosses right out of existence.

REDEYE

Saddam: quick kill hid US treachery

What was the executioners hurry? Why was Saddam condemned for one of his lesser crimes, ignoring the far larger ones….

…It was…essential to stop him revealing secrets about the West’s past enthusiasm in supporting and arming his regime. Hence he was tried on the relatively minor charge of killing 148 people in the village of Dujail after a plot to assassinate him. Far better to put him away safely for that than risk his exposing western hypocrisy, treachery and double-dealing. (GW, 1/18)

The decider decides for Iraqis

To the Editor

Executive summary of President Bush’s speech to the nation on Wednesday: we’re going to do what Iraq wants, whether the Iraqis want it or not. (NYT, 1/13)

Falsely labeled terrorist? Court no help

The Supreme Court refused on Monday to intervene in the federal prosecution of seven Iranian refugees for providing financial support to an opposition group in Iran that the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization.

…The court said, "it does not matter whether the designation is correct or not." The crime occurs, it explained, when someone gives support to such an organization, whether or not properly designated as a terrorist group. (NYT, 1/9)

Bush: It’ll work, because it has to!

"I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out," the president told the Congressional leaders, according to two officials who were in the room. Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: "Because it has to."

Somalia another US phony war on terror

Undeterred by the horrors and disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, the Bush administration has opened another battlefront in the Muslim world. With US backing, Ethiopian troops have invaded Somalia in an illegal war of aggression….

As with Iraq in 2003, the US has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism. The real goal of course is to gain a direct foothold in another highly strategic and oil-rich region by installing a client regime in Somalia….

The Islamists are not angels. But their collective pool of terror acts is dwarfed by the terrorism of the warlords that the US has been supporting… (GW, 1/11)

Cops lie to get warrant, kill woman, 90

A narcotics team that shot and killed an elderly woman while raiding her home lied to obtain the search warrant, one team member has told federal investigators….

The officers falsely claimed that a confidential informant had bought $50 worth of crack at the house….

Kathryn Johnson, whose age has been reported as both 88 and 92,.…quickly became Exhibit A for complaints of excessive force by the police, prompting packed, angry town-hall-style meetings, accusations of systematic civil rights violations and calls for civilian review of police shootings in Atlanta….

Ms.Johnson’s relatives…have maintained that she had nothing to do with illegal drugs….No cocaine was found… (NYT, 1/12)

‘Iraq vital,’ so US threatens to leave!

To the Editor

The president’s speech included an internal inconsistency that rendered it impossible to believe that he was serious in his reason for sending additional troops to Iraq.

If one truly believes that Iraq is critical to the safety of the United States, as he said, how can the United States set standards for the Iraqis to meet, and if they don’t meet those standards, our troops will leave the Iraqis on their own?

If one believes the president, Iraqi failure to meet those standards should mandate our keeping our troops in Iraq, forever if necessary… (NYT, 1/12)

North African Arabs Saved Jews From Nazis

The ruling classes in Israel and across Arab lands are constantly trying to separate Jewish and Arab workers, spreading the lie that they have nothing in common and "hate each other" — are mortal enemies. For this reason for 60 years these rulers have kept the fact well hidden that at the time in history when millions of Jews faced fascist extermination, Arab workers came to their aid in the middle of the Holocaust.

From the fall of 1940, when Hitler conquered France, to 1943 when North Africa was liberated by Allied forces, the Nazis, Mussolini and the fascist collaborators of Vichy France erected 104 concentration and labor camps in North Africa to which they shipped Jews from Europe as well as the persecuted half million Jewish citizens from the former French and Italian colonies of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. (Aside from an off-hand remark about a concentration camp near Casablanca in the famous film of the same name — starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman — there’s been virtually no mention of their existence in North Africa, much less about Arab-Jewish unity.)

The Nazis had seized these colonies and put the French fascists in charge, under Marshal Petain. He had made anti-Semitism state policy. The Jews became slave laborers, building weapons, roads and airports, working in broiling heat until they dropped. The fascists then employed Arabs as guards at these camps, with French commanders in charge who tried to get the Arabs to torment the prisoners.

According to a well-researched book, "Among the Righteous — Lost stories from the Holocaust’s long reach into Arab lands," by Robert Satloff, in a chapter entitled. "The Arabs Watched Over the Jews,":

"At every stage of the Nazi, Vichy and Fascist persecution of Jews in Arab lands, and in every place that it occurred, Arabs helped Jews. Some Arabs spoke out against the persecution of Jews and took public stands of unity with them…. Some Arabs shared the fate of Jews and, through that experience, forged a unique bond of comradeship…. They bravely saved Jewish lives, at times risking their own in the process. These Arabs were true heroes." And further:

"…Unusual expressions of comradeship between Jewish and Arab internees at Vichy labor camps buoyed the spirits of imprisoned Jews. At Cheregas-Meridja, in the Algerian desert, Vichy banished thousands of Jews who had enlisted in the French army to fight Germans…. The camp also housed Arab prisoners, interned for their opposition to French colonial rule. There, a Captain Suchet, the commandant,…tried to incite tensions between Jews and Arabs. He failed, however, when the bond of their common Fascist enemy proved stronger…."

When the fascists tried to incite Arab pogroms against the Jews, Muslim religious leaders like Shaykh el-Okbi issued "a formal prohibition on Muslims from attacking Jews." When Vichy officials tried to enlist Arabs to become conservators to seize Jewish property, and reap windfall profits, "Despite the economic difficulties faced by Arabs during the war, they refused to take advantage of Jewish suffering for personal gain…. not a single Arab in Algiers…accepted Vichy’s offer."

The author points out that, "These Arabs never received public recognition for opening their hearts to Jews facing persecution…." His painstaking research into archives and memoirs found the names of "Arabs who helped save Jews from pain, injury and…death." One farm owner, Si Ali Sakkit, took in 60 Jews who had escaped from a nearby concentration camp during the battle for Tunis and sheltered them until Allied troops captured the area.

There is much more to this story, but it certainly challenges the tales spread in the bosses’ media about the inability for Arabs and Jews to work together. This is the product of the nationalist and religious divisions fostered by the rulers to prevent the working-class unity that ultimately will overthrow capitalism/imperialism.

The fact that this book, and one by Jimmy Carter attacking Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, are being publicized in the media may very well represent an effort by a section of the U.S. ruling class to push Israeli bosses to reach a compromise with some Palestinian bosses — especially since the Iraq quagmire has weakened the U.S. position in the region.

Even "two states" — one ruled by Israeli bosses and one ruled by Palestinian bosses — will not free Jewish and Arab workers from capitalist exploitation. Only communist revolution can do that.

One of the achievements of the old international communist movement was to unite Jewish, Sunni, Christian, Shiite and other Middle East-North African workers. Today, a new communist leadership must be forged, learning from that unity and overcoming that movement’s errors. That’s the only road to liberate workers from Baghdad to Tel Aviv to Morocco.

PL’ers Launched Anti-Vietnam War Movement

While you won’t find it in the bosses’ media, it was the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — forerunner of the PLP — that initiated the anti-Vietnam War movement as a mass phenomenon. At a conference at Yale University in the spring of 1964, which discussed ways of opposing the war, the PLM’s chairperson called for mass anti-war marches on May 2 of that year. The Conference approved the resolution and on that date, thousands marched against the war in New York City, while smaller gatherings were held in San Francisco, Seattle, Madison, Miami, San Juan, Puerto Rico and other cities.

The outdoor protest rally at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan that kicked off the day was the largest single demonstration against the U.S. invasion held in the U.S. up to that point. Five hundred then marched five miles down to Times Square and over to the UN. Soon May 2nd Committees were springing up on many campuses throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the Student League for Industrial Democracy — the youth section of a right-wing social democratic group, the League for Industrial Democracy — had drawn up a manifesto in Michigan putting forward ideas on "democratizing" capitalism while denouncing the Soviet Union. From this, the SDS (Students for A Democratic Society) was born. Soon it called for a mass march on Washington opposing the Vietnam War. To everyone’s surprise, on April 17, 1965, 25,000 protesters descended on the nation’s capital. It was the beginning of a series of mass protests that eventually were to reach a million students and workers rallying in Washington.

As PLM and later PLP saw this growing response, it called on its members to leave the May 2nd Movement and join and build SDS, despite the fact that the organization’s leadership was, in effect, pro-capitalist. Some of the leaders of M2M opposed that idea, saying that SDS was not as "pure" as M2M. But PL felt there were thousands of students that could be influenced in a leftward direction over the issue of the war. PL helped organize chapters on scores of campuses across the country and became part of the leadership in many. As the movement grew, hundreds of students joined PL to fight for revolution, not just against this particular war.

While much of the movement advocated slogans like, "Stop the War in Vietnam" and "Bring the Troops Home" — and later, "Stop the Bombing" — PL’ers fought for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, pro-working class program, calling for "U.S. Imperialism to Get Out of Vietnam Now!" Gradually PL’ers began to win over a majority of the SDS membership to a Worker-Student Alliance outlook, based on fighting racism and imperialism. PL’s anti-racist platform enabled it to play a role in many of the black rebellions that occurred in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.

It was out of these activities that PL grew and eventually began recruiting workers as well as students. Very little of this would have occurred had PL’ers stayed within the narrow confines of the May 2nd Movement. (Future articles will discuss PL’s activities in SDS, including organizing a Worker-Student Alliance and opposing student draft deferments in order to work within the military.)

1. Saddam Hussein: Born In the CIA
   And Then They Left Him Hanging
2. Another Fiasco -- Execution Backfires
3. WORKERS REJECT PLEA FOR SILENCE
   50,000 MARCH AGAINST RACIST KILLER COPS
4. 2006: Workers Fight Back Against Bosses' Attack
5. PL Teachers Lead Fight vs. Bosses' School 'Reform' for War
6. Welcome CHALLENGE at Rally Opposing Anti-Immigrant Raids
7. Winning Young Workers to Turn Bosses' Recruiting Upside Down
8. Cop's Vietnam Torture Tactics Used on Chicago's Black Men
9. Students Tie War in Iraq to War on New Orleans Workers
10. Youth Spread Internationalist, Anti-Racist Pledge Among Marines
11. U.S. Oily Fingers Behind War in Somalia
12. U.S. Imperialists Follow Nazi Footsteps...Again
13. 'Social Programs' Aim to Win Workers' to Capitalism á la Chávez
14. CHAVEZ'S SHOPS FOR LOYALTY FOR WAR
15. LETTERS
    1. Collectivity, Not Capitalism, Worked in Seattle Storm
    2. EU Bosses Extend Beyond Western Europe
    3. Sharpen Political Struggle in GI Appeal Movement
    4. Israeli Kibbutz: Socialism or Fascism?
    5. Airport Workers Fight Anti-Muslim Racism
    6. Use the Internet to Spread PLP's Ideas
    7. GI `Appeal' Fails to Indict Imperialists
    8. Paraguay: Electing Reformist Bishop No Solution for Workers
16. REDEYE REDEYE
    1. `New' Iraq Plan: Stay in and grab oil
    2. Killer cops given every chance to fix a story
    3. The Real Global Threat is Profit System
    4. Gov't wants a whiter, richer New Orleans
    5. (No headline needed)
    6. Many Chinese remain proud of revolutionary surges
    7. SAVAGERY IN ABU GHRAIB AND FALLUJAH: OFFICIAL U.S. POLICY, NOT `BAD APPLE' ABERRATION
    8. INSTEAD OF DESERTING, GI's SHOULD ORGANIZE TO SMASH IMPERIALIST WARMAKERS
17. PLP History: Harlem Rebellion Grand Jury and Reform vs. Revolution on the Railroad

Saddam Hussein: Born In the CIA
And Then They Left Him Hanging

Amid all the thousands of words spewing forth from the U.S. press and TV about the life and times of the executed butcher Saddam Hussein, there's one little item missing: before Saddam became a threat to U.S. oil profits and to their Saudi-Kuwait lackeys, he was the virtual creation of U.S. rulers and its CIA (just like the CIA-sponsored Osama bin Laden later became a U.S. enemy).

The story begins in 1958 when Abdul Karim Qasim led a coup that year to overthrow the British-installed monarchy. U.S. rulers viewed him as a threat to reliable oil exports, because he was pro-Soviet and would upset the U.S.-organized anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact -- an alliance of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Britain and the U.S.

In 1959, the UPI reported that Saddam, then in his early twenties, became part of a U.S.-directed plot to assassinate Qasim. The killing failed and Saddam was wounded in the attempt. Middle East expert Adel Darwish said the move was done "with the full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for the CIA and Egyptian intelligence. Saddam then fled to Cairo, and was put on a stipend by the agency.

In February, 1963, the military wing of the Baath Party (which Saddam had joined) overthrew and killed Qasim. Roger Morris, a former U.S. National Security Council staffer, said that the U.S. (during the Kennedy administration) played a significant role in this coup and that it was mostly funded "with American money." Historian Hanna Batatu reported that the CIA cooperated in this coup and gave the Baathists lists of Iraqi communists. The Iraqi CP had organized one million May Day marchers in 1959 and was the largest communist party in the Mid-East, but made the mistake of allying with a "progressive" nationalist (Qasim), which helped lead to its downfall. Saddam was brought back from Cairo as an "interrogator" and soon rose to the head of Baath Intelligence. Thousands of communists named by the CIA were killed.

Then, after that government was overthrown by Qasim officers, the Baathists came to power again in another coup, orchestrated by the CIA (during the Johnson administration). Reuters reporter David Morgan wrote: "In 1968, Morris says, the CIA encouraged a palace revolt...led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé in 1979. `It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary,' Morris says."

The U.S. specifically promoted the Tikritis to dominance among the coup-makers, which included al-Bakr and his cousin, Saddam Hussein, who quickly became the power behind the throne. When the Khomeini forces overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran in 1979, the CIA and U.S. rulers had one more reason to turn to Saddam to counter this new "enemy."

Saddam invaded Iran in 1980. In December 1983, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet with Saddam and his foreign minister Tariq Aziz. A U.S. State Department summary of that meeting stated that, "The two agreed the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests: peace in the Gulf, keeping Syria and Iran off balance and less influential, and promoting Egypt's reintegration into the Arab world."

This meeting had come after Saddam had used chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds, which obviously was no bar to the developing U.S.-Iraqi relationship. In fact, the Reagan administration worked to prevent the UN from censuring Saddam for his use of these WMDs.

It was during the Iraq-Iran war that U.S. rulers went all out to help Saddam. Former National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher affirmed that, in a secret National Security Directive, "The United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice...and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required." This included cluster bombs.

UPI reported that, "During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACs surveillance aircraft to aid...Iraq's armed forces....According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Feo peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days."

This is not even the complete story but there would have been no Butcher of Baghdad without the three decades of nurturing by U.S. rulers and the CIA. (For more see http://www.plp.org/comm03/1saddamncia.html)

Another Fiasco -- Execution Backfires

Everything the U.S. bosses do in Iraq is turning into its opposite. While Saddam's execution was timed for the beginning of a Muslim holiday to exacerbate the growing chasm between Shiites and Sunnis (Saddam was a Sunni), it has mainly transformed Saddam into a martyr in the Arab world. The execution has caused so much repulsion worldwide that the Bush administration is now trying to blame its Iraqi puppet government for hurrying the hanging -- as if the U.S. occupation forces don't control that regime. Meanwhile, while many in the U.S. thought they "voted for troop withdrawal" from Iraq, the opposite is looming. Bush is planning to send 30,000 more troops. And the Democrats will surely vote for the extra billions the Bush gang is asking for the fiasco there.

WORKERS REJECT PLEA FOR SILENCE
50,000 MARCH AGAINST RACIST KILLER COPS

NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 16 -- A PLP contingent of 40 members and friends turned a liberal misleaders' "silent march" protesting the NYPD's recent racist murder of a young black man, Sean Bell, into a militant, chanting outcry by thousands against police brutality.

Tens of thousands of workers and students disrupted the usual holiday shopping as demonstrators filled Fifth Avenue from 58th to 34th Streets. The march was organized by former FBI informer Al Sharpton and endorsed by dozens of other liberal misleaders. It was part of the Democratic Party's long-standing effort to pacify the working class. This time they tried to muzzle the demonstrators' anger with a silent protest labeled, "Shopping for Justice." But workers and students weren't buying this strategy. While the liberals at the front of the march tried moving the demonstration down a slippery slope of pacifism, the Progressive Labor Party steered it in a militant direction from the inside.

The PLP contingent distributed over 1,200 CHALLENGES and over 2,000 leaflets to workers hungry for revolutionary ideas. We boldly put forward a communist analysis of the cops' racist murder, linking it to the millions of others slaughtered by the very system that produces these KKKiller cops, from Queens, NY to South Africa. One demonstrator agreed, "You're right, getting rid of Kelly [NYPD Police Commissioner] isn't gonna' stop these racist cops! The whole system's gotta' go!" (See Red Eye on the News, page 7, item 2) He then took eight CHALLENGES and distributed them to all his friends waiting to march.

After passing out most of our literature, we began to lead chants: "Black cop! White cop! All the same! Racist murder is the name of the game!"; and, "Asian, Latin, black and white! To smash police terror we must unite!" Soon one of the liberal demonstration's organizers tried to silence our bullhorn by accusing us of "disrespecting" the leadership's request for a silent protest. Just then another demonstrator, 20 feet ahead of us, began yelling, "No more silence! We've been silent for too long!" PLP'ers and other demonstrators then began to join our chanting, "No more silence! No more silence!"

This was a pivotal point in the demonstration and there was no turning back! From beginning to end, thousands of demonstrators began to chant all the way down Fifth Avenue. PLP'ers had changed the nature of the demonstration for the rest of the day. These liberals weren't going to silence the anger of the working class!

Our ability to influence thousands of demonstrators with the idea of fighting back inspired both us and our friends. Other groups took up our chants and a high school student in our contingent realized this and enthusiastically yelled, "Hey, that's our chant!" Another student declared, "People are really feeling what we have to say!" Towards the end of the march we were surrounded by approximately 200 people marching and chanting with their fists in the air.

This was exactly what Sharpton and the Democrats didn't want. They want to silence working-class anger, hoping to win thousands of young workers and students to die for the U.S. oil empire in the Middle East. These liberals know that racist terror at home will make young black men even less willing to fight and die in the rulers' endless wars, so they use "safe" methods of "civil disobedience" and blame some "bad cops" instead of the entire racist system. We must counter this with the message of a fight for workers' power!

Although many marchers thought disrupting the profits of these multi-million-dollar Fifth Avenue shops was a good idea, the premise of seeking justice under capitalism and pacifying workers' anger only perpetuates fear and a cynical attitude towards the only true fight for justice -- the struggle for communism.

We should not underestimate the power of the working class. We can draw important lessons from history. A racist cop's murder of a 15-year-old unarmed black high school student led to the 1964 Harlem Rebellion (See CHALLENGE, 1/3/07). Thousands took to the streets in a militant fight-back, not only against cops and their brutality, but also against racist living conditions and rampant unemployment. Thousands of workers and youth have the same anger today, but it's constantly misdirected by the liberal Democrats and Sharpton-like sellouts.

We must expand our efforts to win workers and students in mass organizations away from the liberal message that capitalism can be changed by supporting and voting for the "right" politicians. With this long-term perspective, such efforts can lead thousands of workers to embrace communist ideas and take leadership in future struggles opposing racist outrages against our class.

If we patiently develop that kind of leadership, these thousands of workers on Fifth Avenue could not only shut down all the stores in mid-Manhattan, but also paralyze the entire city with a massive anti-racist strike, sending a message to masses of workers worldwide that the idea of workers' power is alive and well! Towards that goal, PLP will continue to call on workers and youth to channel their anger against the very system -- capitalism -- that breeds these racist killer cops and spills the blood of workers like Sean Bell. March with us under the red flag in the struggle for a better world, the fight for communism!

2006: Workers Fight Back Against Bosses' Attack

Last year began with the tragic deaths of 11 miners in Sago, West Virginia, victims of their bosses' criminal negligence. The year ended with the racist assassination of Sean Bell by the New York City police, who serve to protect capitalist property and terrorize workers. Between the bookends of these murders, the year was filled with evidence of the system putting its rulers' needs above workers' lives. But we also witnessed a glimpse of the fact that not only do workers fight back but that they can be won to run the world for the good of those who produce all value.

U.S. rulers' problems mounted to new heights in 2006: outright civil war in the Iraq quagmire, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, a defeat for U.S. ally Israel against Lebanon's Hezbollah, a defiant Iran gaining strength and now an emerging war in Somalia. Wars like these, with their ever-growing death tolls for workers -- over 650,000 Iraqis and over 3,000 GI's killed and tens of thousands wounded and maimed -- are always part of capitalism, but this level of instability in the Mid-East also indicates a major challenge to continued U.S. control of oil profits. The U.S. position as the top imperialist power in the world is being threatened by expansionary rivals like China and Russia who are making alliances that could endanger U.S. dominance.

Amid looming threats to their worldwide supremacy, U.S. rulers have been retooling tactics at home as well as abroad. Democratic Party politicians have taken office with the hope of being able to win workers' loyalty and better enable the rulers to control the growing chaos in Iraq and prepare for increasing inter-imperialist rivalry. Workers are being asked to accept more police-state conditions governing our daily lives. Bags are searched on subways, surveillance cameras have been installed on street corners and "universal service" is being proposed to solve the crisis of the all-volunteer military.

Inside the U.S., rulers attempted to "reform" immigration. As blatantly racist organizing by anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen spread nation-wide, some politicians favored keeping immigrants out of the U.S. But the more dangerous reformers were the ruling-class liberals who plan to "legalize" undocumented immigrants by putting their youth into the military to fight and die for imperialism. The danger of the liberal bosses comes from their ability to win workers to "work with the system," and in this case they did. Millions of workers in every major city marched for immigrant rights behind the red, white and blue.

Progressive Labor Party brought CHALLENGE and its internationalist, revolutionary ideas to these liberal politician-churchled events, just as we took on the disgusting racism of the Minutemen and their kind from the West Coast to the East Coast. In Farmingville, Long Island, we openly fought our battle against anti-immigrant racism in the courtroom after arrests at a street rally in defense of migrant workers harassed by racists.

Mass participation in immigrant rights rallies is one among several examples of the anger of workers fighting back against the injustices of the system this year and of what communists can learn and accomplish within those struggles. This year's May Day celebration took place inside massive anti-war marches in U.S. cities, bringing a revolutionary communist message to those protests. Some GI's in Iraq have refused to simply accept their roles as killers, petitioning Congress with a statement against the Iraq war. However, we must struggle sharply with these anti-war soldiers over the petition's call for patriotism -- allegiance to the bosses' government -- and apparent readiness to fight in other imperialist wars.

While the rallies, marches and petitions all put forth liberal, patriotic politics in general, PL'ers were still able to join with workers in struggle to build a base for internationalist, anti-imperialist politics and at the same time expose the pro-capitalist politics of the leadership of these movements. In a positive indication that this kind of struggle for communist ideas moves our class forward, several Metro transit workers in Washington D.C. joined our Party amid a comrade's re-election campaign for the union presidency.

We have seen inspiring evidence of how workers and students will fight back against capitalist oppression. In the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, sparked by a teachers' strike, workers and their allies rebelled and took over the city of Oaxaca for six months, and fought local and federal cops. But the reformism of the struggle's leadership misled it, calling for a "lesser-evil" governor to replace the hated repressive governor Ulises Ruíz. Many also have illusions that the social-democratic opposition party of  the "legitimate President" of Mexico, López Obrador, is the answer to the pro-U.S. National Action Party which succeeded (and is now allied with) the PRI, rulers of Mexico for 60 years.. PLP brought ideas about turning the battle into a school for communism and forging a mass revolutionary party to eliminate all the bosses.

We also learned a great deal from the struggle of our class brothers and sisters in New Orleans this year. Comrades traveled from all over the U.S. to the hurricane-devastated city. We saw first hand the destruction caused by the historical and on-going racism of the capitalist system. We learned about serving our class by collectively helping in the gutting and rebuilding process. And we gained experience fighting for communist ideas in the middle of reform movements. PLP is continuing to send members and friends to work with these embattled workers.

The events of this year have shown us the deadly logic of a system driven by profit, the danger of the liberals' false promises and the potential of our class when roused by anger. As communists, we know that while anger is necessary, it is even more important that we bring communist ideas of collectivity and anti-racist internationalism to every struggle. Capitalism cannot be reformed, but must be destroyed by communist revolution that will build a new future where workers control their own labor for the benefit of their class. We call on all our readers to join our fight to change the world.

PL Teachers Lead Fight vs. Bosses' School 'Reform' for War

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13 -- "What! Take away our right to vote on schedules? I'm walking out now. I'm not even waiting for a strike vote!" declared a teacher at an area-wide union meeting about the district's give-back demands. "And they want to eliminate shared decision-making if our test scores are too low!" said another. "This is part of what I would call growing fascism," a comrade explained later to colleagues, "consolidating control in the hands of the state as the capitalist class prepares for war."

After five years of No Child Left Behind, inner-city schools like ours are in dismal condition, with vast numbers of kids not learning basic skills because of years of racist mis-education. PL teachers are dedicated to the principled struggle for all kids to learn. But the ruling class is reforming education to meet their need for patriotic soldiers and workers with the bare minimum math and English skills.

While teachers still have the right to vote on schedules, we've been fighting against the bosses' school "reforms" and their attempt to impose a schedule forcing students to take four classes at a time over four eight-week "semesters." This means more classes in every school year but fewer hours in each class.

We told the union's city-wide House of Reps that this will restructure instruction to serve the ruling-class agenda, sacrificing the study of science and history, shifting resources so any student below grade level takes double blocks of English and math. Bill Gates' "Second-to-None" grants require this "4x4" schedule. Two schools' teachers here have fought this corporate take-over, rejecting this new schedule. It's been forced on other schools.

Teachers at our school have battled 4x4, but the principal pushes it, winning many teachers to feel this is the only way to teach reading and math. But if the bosses mainly wanted to improve basic skills, they would fund smaller classes. Teachers have fought for decades to get 15-student maximum class size for remedial students. The district, however, increased average class size to 38.5 students.

A social studies teacher remarked, "What all these unsavory forces want is to eliminate a broad-based, well-rounded education. They want basic skills, and nothing more.... Encouraging students to think about history...will be out the window." Even when the ruling class allows the teaching of more social studies and science, their curricula pushes their ideology, not critical thinking.

In the union, we explained that focusing on remedial reading and math while shortchanging science and history was part of the rulers' plans for war. We argued for standing firm on teachers having schedule choice in local schools. Teachers nodded as we showed that the same ruling class which has been fast-tracking kids from schools to prisons now wants to give them just enough skills to function in the military or war production. An elementary school teacher said, "This is what scripted instruction has done to elementary. They don't care if kids know history or can analyze problems scientifically -- they just want them to read well enough to follow instructions and know enough math to operate the machines."

The bosses' agenda means reorganizing society for the long-range fight to maintain U.S. supremacy over their capitalist rivals. PLP teachers' victories come when we show our colleagues that inter-imperialist rivalry is driving these changes. Without this perspective, workers can believe that the bosses really want to improve education. Our sharper political discussions lay the basis for more CHALLENGE sales and recruitment.

Even more important is the political preparation of our students. The bosses need young industrial workers and soldiers for their war machine. The working class needs young comrades in those exact strategic locations to organize to take state power. As we expose the bosses' use of school reform to prepare for wider imperialist war, we're preparing our young comrades to play the historic role of turning imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle for a communist society.

Welcome CHALLENGE at Rally Opposing Anti-Immigrant Raids

WASHINGTON, D.C., Dec. 19 -- Over 30 spirited demonstrators organized by the new D.C. Committee for Immigrants' Rights picketed Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office here. On December 12, ICE agents raided Swift Company sites in six states and arrested 1,286 workers, claiming they "stole people's identities." Workers were arrested and detained; many face deportation. These raids resemble those in the 1930's Nazi Germany when the fascists criminalized entire groups, rounding them up at their homes and jobs and blaming them for Germany's problems.

Demonstrators chanted, "Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!" and, "Deportaciones, No! Amnistia, Si!" Workers gave speeches in English and Spanish.

Despite some hesitation, many ICE workers took fliers and agreed with the need for workers from all countries to unite for common goals. Latino construction workers from a site across the street, inspired by the rally, joined the picket line, welcomed CHALLENGE and the Committee's fliers and spoke out.

We should all be in the streets demanding an end to these raids and the profit-driven system that benefits from exploiting immigrant workers.

Winning Young Workers to Turn Bosses' Recruiting Upside Down

"Only twelve more hours to go Tony."
"Yeah I know, tomorrow and Friday too." Tony replies.
"I wonder what the hours are like for the workers in the factories in China," Joe asks.
Walter interrupts, "Hey you guys know all that work that is going to China is coming back don't you?"
"Oh yeah, how come?" asks Joe.
"Because, man, the U.S. isn't stupid," Walter answers. "Believe me, we're the middle class and they can't survive without the middle class."

Of course that's what the ruling class would like us to believe. However, it's the manufacturing industries that are vital for a capitalist nation bent on war. The old model of high concentrations of workers in a few giant factories is declining. The new trend for war production here is smaller sub-contracted shops. So when the liberal press talks about Boeing's plant closings, those jobs aren't disappearing; they're simply being moved to a cheaper production site. In fact "7 out of 10 outsourced production jobs stay in the U.S." (L.A. Times) and 96% of military production remains in the U.S. Right now the ruling class can't expand production fast enough because these sub-contracted shops can't keep up. The bosses' increasing dependence on these shops makes them key areas in which PLP can plant the seed of revolution. These workers have the most power to affect the ruling class's profits, since they can halt the production that is the source of capitalist wealth and imperialist wars.

A pamphlet -- "Surge" -- published by the International Association of Machinists, a major war industry union, presents the U.S. rulers' assessment of their "War Production Capacity and Military Power." One of its main points is recruitment of young workers and students to "loyally serve their country" by working in these factories.

A front-page article entitled, "Factory Shift: Manufacturers struggle to fill highly paid jobs," describes how a university student rejects a scholarship and instead attends a community college's "two- year technical training program" sponsored by the company to which he applied. The big carrot? The article says he will earn $58,000 annually upon completing his training, "more than his college-educated brother..." In reality, most production workers usually make around $9 to $10 per hour -- $20,000 per year -- and that's with some schooling. This article is a clear recruiting call from U.S. bosses for high school and college students to re-think their future and join the industrial workforce.

The ruling class has also begun its recruitment campaign for immigrants to join the military and/or work in factories. Its call for "immigration reform" actually signals increased exploitation and use as cannon fodder.

A PL club of young industrial workers has taken an aggressive approach to winning young workers to use this rulers' campaign as a vehicle to win workers and youth to the Party's ideas, including a Weekend Workshop on getting these types of jobs. With continued effort and leadership, these young workers can learn how to turn the factory reform struggles into schools for communism. Join us!

Cop's Vietnam Torture Tactics Used on Chicago's Black Men

CHICAGO, IL, Dec. 16 -- As the war in Iraq spins more violently out of control, the racist police here at home are on a killing spree. Two weeks after the Chicago police killed 22-year-old Michael Smith, the NYPD executed 23-year-old Sean Bell in a barrage of 50 shots. Both men were unarmed, but capitalism treats the unprovoked murder of young black men as "collateral damage" in the war against the poor and black section of our class. Capitalism in crisis has to resort to more fascistic brutality to keep our class in line. So the "first black President," Bill Clinton put 100,000 more cops on the streets while the prison population doubled, 70% of whom are black and Latino.

The police murder of Michael Smith comes just months after four Chicago cops were indicted on charges of home invasion, drug dealing, kidnapping and a long list of other charges. They were part of an elite police unit, similar to those involved in the killings of Smith and Bell, who shake down drug dealers for money, tip them off when a bust is coming and take out rival dealers. These racist terrorists are being charged for their attacks on black working-class youth only because their out-of-control corruption doesn't serve the ruling-class's police-state agenda. Growing fascism must discipline all ranks of society, including sections of the ruling class and their police death squads who don't toe the line.

This is nothing new. From the 1970's to the 1990's, Jon Burge terrorized the black South Side community. Electrical shocks to the genitals with home-made torture devices, being shocked with cattle prods, burnings, mock executions, pistol whippings and beatings with flashlights were just some of the ways that Burge and his cops tortured black men in police custody. Long before Abu Grahib, Burge learned his torture tactics while serving U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, torturing information out of Vietnamese workers and peasants. Burge and his Gestapo tortured "confessions" out of over 100 black men and a 13-year-old boy, also a victim of electric shock to his genitals, during this twenty-year terror spree.

Jon Burge will not be prosecuted for his crimes. He continues to live comfortably on his police pension. Former state's attorney and current mayor Richard Daley prosecuted many of the torture victims, to build his reputation and lay claim to City Hall. Burge's racist outrages were "justified" because he did his job to control and terrorize the working class.

As fascism increases in the U.S. and the inter-imperialist rivalry shifts into high gear, we will see more Jon Burges in Chicago, more Ramparts in L.A., and more 50-shot killings in NYC. But if we do our job, the new Nazis will end up like the old ones. However, this time we must make sure they never come back.

Students Tie War in Iraq to War on New Orleans Workers

Recently, a group of students on a Southern California college campus held a forum commemorating Katrina's first anniversary. Both students and faculty attended this student-led event. Some speakers were students who helped with the reconstruction for working-class families in New Orleans last summer.

The students offered a sharp class analysis of the situation in New Orleans. They contrasted the government's utter neglect of the working class's attempt to recover their houses with the immediate reconstruction and improvement of the profit-producing hotel and tourist industries, among others. The students stressed that one reason why the workers in New Orleans (and just about any city) are unable to meet their basic needs is because the ruling class must invest in controlling the vast Middle-Eastern oil reserves through imperialist wars in competition with their rivals.

The students exposed the capitalist drive for profits in Baghdad and in New Orleans. They also condemned the government for sending Blackwater mercenaries and the National Guard into New Orleans to terrorize working-class youth, beating back righteous class anger.

An impressive presentation was a "virtual levee tour," a slide show taking the audience through the city's two different levee systems. The audience was horrified to see the working class being "protected" by short and weak brick walls while the rich neighborhoods are surrounded by levees larger than football fields consisting of steep slopes and remote-controlled flood gates. Students emphasized that the levees are only a painful and shocking symbol of the gross racist inequalities existing between the workers who produce wealth and the bosses who for centuries have exploited the labor of our class to fill their own pockets.

A black student from Louisiana participated actively in the discussion, expressing his respect for the group for holding such a sharp event. He said that everything presented was accurate, and reiterated that although most people affected by Katrina are black, there are white, brown and Asian workers who are still suffering. "You're right," he said. "This is an attack on the working class by the government." He took leaflets to share with his friends in both California and Louisiana.

The working class is hungry for a class analysis. However, if such events do not make communist politics primary -- both in the process and ultimately -- it's impossible to sustain a winning long-term plan for our class. With expansion of CHALLENGE networks and a commitment to building relationships based on communist politics, it is possible to win workers to the long-term fight to destroy capitalism once and for all and create a communist society that fulfills workers' needs.

Youth Spread Internationalist, Anti-Racist Pledge Among Marines

"The war is wrong. That's why I got out. I believed the recruiter that I would be a cook--I ended up as a combat escort in a Humvee. Nobody should be over there," a black ex-marine told visiting students.

The response to our revolutionary ideas was better than a year-and-a-half ago. We students went to a town near a Marine base to talk to over 50 young marines about the imperialist war. We brought a pledge that called on soldiers to act in anti-racist, international solidarity against the imperialist war in Iraq. Although nervous at first, we quickly got into serious conversations.

There were two groups of marines. Those who had been in longer and had experienced Iraq were more open to conversation and agreement. The newer recruits agreed less, still believing the patriotic indoctrination they undergo. However, they listened to us with interest.

One marine said, "Do I feel like being over there is worth it? No!? [The Iraqis] have been living this way for a long time. [We] don't have the authority to go over there and tell them their way of life is wrong."

Another said, "We are there to protect the freedom of people." We responded, "There are many regions from Africa to Asia lacking freedom. A lot of that misery is caused by U.S. rulers. The only reason the U.S. has troops in Iraq is to control its oil." We compared this war to Vietnam, adding that politicians are talking about needing a draft to win this seemingly endless war for oil profits. "The draft will never happen," answered the young marine, "because they don't want people that don't want to fight."

A Latino marine, walking hand-in-hand with his five-year-old son, stopped to talk: "I have been in the Marines for many years, but I'm not going to reenlist because I have been treated in a racist way by my superiors."

Another showed us his bandage-covered arm, saying, "I was injured by a bomb in Iraq. I'm ambivalent: I think we should be there, but I also think we shouldn't because of all the deaths and everything that has happened."

Not everybody thinks the same. One marine said, "If you want to know what it's like, you should go over there. The Iraqis killed my friends. They should all die." He was in the minority, but we saw how the bosses use racism to misdirect soldiers' anger. When your friends are dying, you're going to be angry either at the Iraqis or at the U.S. bosses who put you in harm's way for their bloody oil profits. Class-conscious soldiers, influenced by PLP, can play a crucial role in exposing the dangers of patriotism, the lie that U.S. Marines have more in common with U.S. bosses and their politicians than with Iraqi soldiers and workers. We told everyone that the oil companies' profits were not worth a drop of their blood, their lives or the lives of Iraqi workers.

The students on this trip saw that they can talk to young soldiers and Marines. One student noted about a Marine, "He just graduated from high school; he's only 19 years old." After overcoming shyness and some feelings of intimidation, the students had many conversations with marines. We included many points, always trying to approach the idea that the soldiers, if organized, have the power to help lead a movement to end imperialist war with revolution for workers' power.

Every one (except the guy who wanted to kill `em all) took the pledge and promised to think about it. The students plan to continue these visits, bringing communist ideas and building relationships with individual marines, in order to have a real impact on the long-term fight for communist revolution.

U.S. Oily Fingers Behind War in Somalia

Thousands of Ethiopian troops using MIGs(fighter planes), tanks, artillery and helicopters invaded Somalia, routing the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) from Mogadishu, the capital city. Thousands have died in the fighting. One of the Ethiopian troops' first acts was to secure the compound of the former U.S. embassy -- the biggest in Sub-Saharan Africa before 1993 when the U.S. was forced to leave Somalia. They were preparing the ground for the U.S. return here. The U.S.-backed Ethiopian invaders have now returned to power the weak warlord-supported interim government which had only controlled the city of Baidoa after the UIC routed it last June10.

The UIC is aided by Eritrea, which from 1998-2000 waged a bitter war with Ethiopia over a still-disputed border. Thousands of Eritrean troops are in Somalia helping the UIC. Saudi Arabia (a "staunch" U.S. ally financing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq), Sudan and Yemen are helping the UIC, along with Jihadists from across the Middle East who see the struggle here as part of their "holy war" against the U.S. and its allies (in this case, Ethiopia).

The UIC is also allied with Ethiopian insurgents of the Ogaden National Liberation Front -- from the ethnically Somali Ogaden region -- and the Oromo Liberation Front, which represents Ethiopia's largest ethnic group and is fighting for independence. As CHALLENGE (11/29) reported: "The Ogaden region bordering Somalia sits on an unexploited gas field. The Malaysian oil giant Petronas has bought three concession blocks there. Ethiopa's rulers fear a resurgent Somalia will seek to annex Ogaden. The area's likely coming war is, in part, gas-powered."

But this is much more than a holy war or a proxy war among local ruling classes; it's mainly part of the inter-imperialist dogfight shaping world events. In the past this area has been ruled by France, Britain and Italy. When U.S. rulers tried to take control in 1993, under the guise of sending "humanitarian" aid to hungry Somalians, they were routed, following the famous "Blackhawks down" incident when two U.S. copters were shot down during a fierce battle in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. Their captors paraded the chopper's 18 U.S. Army Rangers through the city's streets.

The strong imperialist interest in Somalia involves its coastline, which lies along the maritime routes taken by oil tankers crossing the Horn of Africa; 15% of the world's maritime traffic passes along that coastline. NATO had sent boats in the recent past to protect oil tankers from pirates based in Somalia.

As this series on Africa has stated, all this continent's conflicts are shaped by inter-imperialist rivalry. China is now becoming a major player there, investing heavily in all areas, particularly in the key energy industries. The U.S. is exploiting human rights violations in Darfur to counter China's big investments in Sudan's lucrative oil fields. Ethiopia's Prime minister Meles Zenawi also has his sights set on attacking Sudan. When Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia, it left the country landlocked. Eritrea now has a strategic port on the Red Sea. That port's closing would affect Libya, Egypt, Germany and France, Eritrea's leading commercial traders.

The current battles in Somalia might become a protracted war as the UIC and Jihadists turn to guerrilla warfare. Again, the U.S. and its allies -- in this case, Ethiopia's rulers -- might descend into a quagmire á la Iraq.

Even thought the Islamists are in retreat, contradictions in the region are now worsening. The Ethiopian army wants to leave Somalia as soon as possible to avoid a guerrilla-type quagmire, but Ali Mohamed Ghedi, the Prime Minister of the weak interim Somalia government, "says that heavily-armed soldiers from Ethiopia would be needed for months." (BBC World News, 1/2/07)

The fact remains it's Ethiopian soldiers and the youth of Somalia who are dying. (The UIC shut Mogadishu's schools to recruit young fighters.) Many Ethiopian workers and youth hate their rulers, who have imprisoned and killed anti-government protestors. The potential exists to turn the war into a massive revolutionary struggle to oust imperialism and the local bosses, but only if there is communist leadership to carry that out.

U.S. Imperialists Follow Nazi Footsteps...Again

CHALLENGE has reported how U.S. rulers have used Nazi personal and organizational models to staff and organize their government after World War II. Now faced with preparing for a "long war," U.S. rulers are again looking to Nazis for lessons. In the Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ), a magazine published by the Department of Defense for the Joint Chiefs, U.S. rulers examined the battle for Stalingrad to find its enduring lessons. However, they failed to study the political will and military organization of the Red Army. Instead they turned their attention to the Nazis and how they would have been victorious if only they followed U.S. rulers' strategies.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley argues, "The Germans could have succeeded at Stalingrad if they had some of our ideas of joint operations and, of equal importance, our high standards in regard to professional integrity." In particular, the article notes the collection of battle-tested divisions of the Nazi army and asks, "Where did this collection go wrong? How could talented leaders blunder on such a massive scale?" Lt. Col. Hanley makes it clear that U.S. rulers need to heed the lessons of the Nazis' defeat so as to ensure the U.S. will not make the same mistakes. "We study the battle for Stalingrad from the German point of view so that 50 years hence, students of military campaigns will not be asking similar questions about U.S. performance in whatever major clash of arms awaits us."

In the same issue of JFQ, Army Lieutenant Colonel Stephen R. Dazell helps guide U.S. rulers' preparations for future combat operations. The colonel emphasizes that, as in Iraq, future U.S. conflicts will likely be in cities, especially shantytowns and urban slums in developing countries, where the military will have to learn how to fight "three-block wars" similar to the battle of Stalingrad. The author explains, "It will no longer be possible to think of cities as obstacles to be by-passed or key terrain to be seized in a single move. In the course of a conflict, a series of three-block wars will extend incrementally over the region, with low-level conflict flaring up repeatedly in areas behind the `front line' on our tactical maps."

The military will have to handle civilian and reconstruction operations. The chain of command will have to rely more on working-class troops to think strategically in combat while making tactical decisions. While still wielding a powerful grip on U.S. troops' minds, they will never learn lessons to defeat communist movements. The bosses are seeking Nazi-like commitment from vast numbers of troops. The longer the Iraq fiasco continues, the more problematic such commitment becomes.

The ruling class has been forced to turn to "new liberal" arguments to shore up soldiers' patriotism, even couching it in anti-Iraq war rhetoric, masking their fascist intentions. Exposing their plans and winning soldiers to fight for their class interests is crucial, now more than ever. As rulers depend more on the working class, PLP's ability to influence events on the battleground can have a greater impact in building a red army for a class war. What we do counts.

'Social Programs' Aim to Win Workers' to Capitalism á la Chávez

As pointed out in CHALLENGE (1/3), the inter-imperialist struggle over South America is sharpening. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a creature of this rivalry. He has tremendous popularity among the world's oppressed masses because he spits in the eyes of U.S. bosses.

Many view his Bolivarian revolution as an answer to the hell imposed by free-market capitalism, pushed mainly by the U.S. and its junior partners. They believe the alternative is the "new ideology" of Chavez and the local anti-U.S. rulers. Phony leftists, who never fought for communism, have embraced this ideology and wind up allying with anti-neoliberalism politicians like Chavez, Brazil's Lula, Mexico's Obrador and their imperialist backers. This strategy is lethal for the working class. For workers to smash all our enemies -- local bosses, all the imperialists and their pseudo-left agents -- communist politics must become primary.

Chavez also understands that politics is essential to motivate Venezuelan workers because opposing the U.S. and allying with other imperialists eventually means war. He knows that his "window of opportunity" is based on the U.S. disaster in Iraq/Afghanistan and on the fact that, as Elliot Engel, the high-ranking Democrat on the subcommittee of Western Hemisphere affairs, says "...it is counterproductive to try to punish countries with populist leaders, especially with China and other countries making inroads in the region." ("Latin American Advisor," 12/04/06).

But these conditions won't last forever, so Chavez is arming. Also, Brazilian bosses want MERCOSUR members (the South American common market) to form an "anti-imperialist" shield -- a NATO-like group -- in 2007 to defend the region's natural resources and prevent foreign military intervention.

CHAVEZ'S SHOPS FOR LOYALTY FOR WAR

Using part of Venezuela's oil profits, Chavez has created social programs in health care and education and Mision Mercal provides food at a discount of 20% to 70% to nearly half the population. Primary-care clinics and 30,000 Cuban doctors attend to the poor. Some also have access to all levels of education. Venezuela's poverty rates have declined from 49% to 37% under Chavez. This still leaves over ten million poor, while many bosses and hacks in his movement have become fabulously rich -- the stock market gained 129% in 2006, one of the world's highest.

Nevertheless, with these crumbs and a revolutionary-sounding program for construction of "socialism in the 21st century," Chavez hopes to win the loyalty of the Venezuelan workers, similar to Castro in Cuba. But Chavez also wants to assure the bosses and imperialists who support him that this is just rhetoric to fool the masses.

Shortly after his re-election he declared, "There is no space in Venezuela for any other project that is not the Bolivarian Revolution," and, "We don't want the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx spoke of." During his last visit to Russia he stated, "We need to bring the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state together in an economic system where there is as much of the market as possible and as much of the state as necessary."

His hero is Simon Bolivar -- a rich Venezuelan slave-owner who, in the early 19th century, fought Spain on behalf of South American bosses' independence and dreamt of Latin America's unity. On this ideological basis, plus phony anti-racism, Chavez is building a 300,000-soldier army and a two-million citizen militia.

No capitalists or imperialists will ever serve workers' needs. Neither will patriotism/nationalism in any form. Mountains of workers' corpses have been piled high under these banners. Our class must reject patriotism, nationalism and any type of socialism.

Communism must be our goal. Masses of Venezuelan workers desiring and even fighting for change will not in and of itself make such a revolution. Communists who see the need to build such a red-led party must introduce these ideas as their primary duty to their class. Venezuelan workers need to join and build the PLP!

LETTERS

Collectivity, Not Capitalism, Worked in Seattle Storm

After midnight December 15th a windstorm in Seattle knocked down an estimated 1,000 trees and took out power for nearly half the 3.5 million residents. At least 13 died mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to keep warm with propane or generators during the twenty-degree nights. A 28-year-old and a family of four with two small children were among the casualties, while over a hundred were treated in emergency rooms for inhalation of toxic fumes. What a condemnation of capitalism's anti-collective nature! There was no need for anybody to die like this in a crowded city.

When a falling tree brought down our electric lines, we were forced to spend 8 nights at friends and comrades. We became unexpected guests at extended family birthdays and other social occasions, where everybody talked about the storm.

It wasn't long before people began to complain and their anger grew when they thought about Katrina or Iraq. The utility companies were arguing over who was going to pay for repair work while thousands remained without power or phones. "Imagine going through this for years in Iraq while bombs were dropping," said a bakery worker.

Some reminisced about the tighter neighborhoods of their youth. Others pointed to workers who spontaneously helped out. We saw some of this collective potential in our neighborhood. Our neighbors drove us around and lent us cars (ours were crushed by the tree). They warmed us and ran extension cords from their houses so we could dry our flooded basement since their power was restored before ours. We met even more of our neighbors during the first days as it was warmer in the street -- where small multi-racial groups congregated -- than in our individual homes.

A young comrade got more to the heart of things when he criticized the ideology of the "me generation." It's really a question of communist political leadership.

When the technological infrastructure collapsed, what was true all along became crystal clear. The organization and politics of the working class is key. This holds true be it the imperialist army in Iraq or Seattle's freezing citizens.

The spontaneous outpouring of help from workers, past and present, shows the potential for communist motivation, but not the actual fact. We need a "political general staff" for our class to reach its potential. We need a Party to lead a communist revolution.

Once the question was presented in this way, the electrical maintenance workers at my job designed life-saving, reasonably-priced solutions. "Why not have neighborhood centers that are wired underground with well-ventilated backup generators," they proposed. "Under communism, the Party would organize neighborhood and worksite political committees that could check on everybody and get them to these shelters if necessary," I added. The storm showed once again that fighting for communism is a life and death question.

Shivering in Seattle

EU Bosses Extend Beyond Western Europe

The CHALLENGE article (1/3/07), "Iraq Study Group Shows ..." says, "These nations are part of growing anti-U.S. energy and arms alliances, including China, Russia and French-led Western Europe."

Europe hasn't been split into East and West since around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 -- 17 years ago.

With the European Union already including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and planning to gobble up Romania, the reference to "Western Europe" is not just an anachronism but underestimates the threat European bosses represent for U.S. bosses.

A reader in Europe

Sharpen Political Struggle in GI Appeal Movement

A letter -- Link GI Petition Campaign To Red Ideas -- in the last issue of CHALLENGE characterizes Cortright's solutions as "reformist" and asserts that, while the line in the Campaign to Appeal for Redress is "weak," we must work in this movement. This characterization of the appeal for redress and of Cortright's politics significantly understates the danger of both.

In this period of expanding war leading to World War III, any appeal to soldiers based on patriotism and reliance on the U.S. government is a serious danger to the working class. Such patriotism sets soldiers and the working class up for more wars, and blinds both to its potential as one international working class able to fight for their own interests. The Appeal is based on nationalism, with not a word of anti-racism or internationalism.

The Ford and Rockefeller foundations have funded Cortright because they fear an anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement in the military, especially at this time when the Iraq invasion has been labeled a failure. He is a paid analyst for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Communicators' Task Force on U.S. Global Leadership. He cannot be dismissed as a run-of-the-mill reformist.

Communists should work in the movements the bosses are using to win our class to the imperialists' side. But we must be sharply critical of the danger of patriotism in these movements. Reformist movements built and publicized by the bosses historically are meant to tie the working class to the imperialists. Struggle is primary over unity. The most important challenge we face is sharpening the struggle against the enemy ideas in the mass movement. We should not critically support their leaders or line.

Also, it would be wrong to conclude that the main, or only, way to work with GI's or to build an alliance between GI's, students and workers, is by using Cortright's appeal for redress or tailing his politics. Every avenue has to be aggressively pursued to build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist alliance between workers, students and soldiers that can lead to turning the bosses' wars into a war for workers' power. There are many ways to do this.

Those working in Cortright's movement have the job of winning their friends away from the dangerous politics of the imperialists and the brass, some of whom -- for example, Ohio Democrat Congressman Kucinich -- support this petition. During the last presidential campaign, this "anti-war" politician urged his supporters to back Democrat John Kerry, who argued for national service and patriotism in the interests of the U.S. imperialists.

Our tactics in the reform movement do matter. However, they must be consistent with, not contradictory to our strategy to build the fight for internationalism and communism. Underestimating the dangers of nationalist reformists undermines the fight for communism and gives a longer life to the deadly imperialism we seek to destroy.

A comrade

Israeli Kibbutz: Socialism or Fascism?

Much has been made for almost 100 years of the alleged socialist experiment in Israel -- the Kibbutz. This has been an idealist experiment, without private property on a given farm and where the children are raised collectively by Kibbutz members, not just by their own individual parents. Sounds good? In some ways, it could be. However, this system has two major flaws.

(1) However economically progressive it appears, those Kibbutzin that have had collective farmland could only sell their products in the capitalist system, characterizing Israel's economy, and, of course, Israel is part of world capitalism.

(2) The Kibbutz movement has always been a major contributor to the Israeli Army (IDF). Of course, Jews worldwide have viewed the IDF as bastion of defense for themselves, especially in Israel as well as the world over.

"Never Again!" certainly has been the voice of reassurance for Jews that the Holocaust will never happen again. But in reality, Israel is so closely allied with U.S. economic and political interests, that it has become a violent military state vis-à-vis its neighbors, especially toward the Palestinians. The story of David (a Jew, according to the Bible) and Goliath (a Palestinian), has been reversed, with David now the pitiless aggressor, and Goliath, the intended victim. Gaza, one of the Palestinian territories, has become a giant prison, and the West Bank constantly suffers one Israeli military incursion after another.

There's nothing rational about Israel's fear for its own survival. The children of the Kibbutz, who leave home to first join the Army and then afterwards pursue their careers, have unwittingly been manipulated by historical events into oppressing all working people in the Western part of the Middle East.

Red Ex-Kibbutz member

Airport Workers Fight Anti-Muslim Racism

On November 21, six Muslim clerics were profiled as possible terrorists and thrown off a US Airways flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. They were handcuffed and interrogated for five hours by Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service and other police agencies, all for the "crime" of speaking Arabic and looking like they were from the Middle East!

This incident sparked outrage among anti-racists. At the airport where we work, union members wrote, distributed and supported a union resolution condemning US Airways' racism, and sent them a copy.

At the same time, over the Thanksgiving weekend, Northwest Airlines ramp workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul participated in job actions against the threatened outsourcing of their jobs. Daily work stoppages lasted for a few hours with workers rallying on the tarmac. Again, workers at our airport endorsed a resolution supporting the Northwest workers, the immigrant Modelux workers at DeGaulle International Airport in Paris, and the ongoing battle in Oaxaca, Mexico. The resolution was distributed to the workers and copies are being sent to the Northwest and Modelux workers. A PLP leaflet linking all these struggles to the attacks against African immigrant workers at our airport was circulated by CHALLENGE readers and distributors. It said that from Paris to Oaxaca to Minneapolis-St. Paul, the international working class needs communist revolution.

Airport Red

Use the Internet to Spread PLP's Ideas

CHALLENGE seems to be embracing the internet. In addition to citing the PLP website (www.plp.org) in the masthead, more articles refer readers to other websites. In the November 29 issue, the article on Metro transit from D.C. ends with a reference to the Local 689 website. The letter on medical fascism under the Nazis cites an online version of a museum exhibition. In the November 15 issue the editorial page refers readers to PLP's analysis of the 1956 anti-communist Hungarian revolt.

The editors are to be commended for linking the print version of CHALLENGE with the internet, which is increasingly used by many younger workers, students, professionals and soldiers worldwide to get all or most of their news these days. In addition, many periodicals and professional journals now have a section that summarizes online articles that might be of interest to readers.

CHALLENGE should consider a regular section or box that contains internet references to websites, blogs, You-Tube videos and other online material that can help communicate the Party's ideas and spread the truth about capitalism and workers' struggles around the world. Also, we should consider posting articles as they come in, especially around timely events like strikes, upheavals, AIDS Day, etc., rather than waiting until they appear in the print version.

A Reader

GI `Appeal' Fails to Indict Imperialists

The Washington D.C. Peace Center -- a Quaker-led pacifist anti-war and anti-racist organization -- decided to honor the GI's who started the Campaign to Appeal for Redress from the Iraq War. A co-worker of mine who is heavily involved in the Veterans for Peace Organization suggested the name of one of the Appeal's organizers (also a friend of mine) to attend to get an award. But he couldn't go, so he sent a Marine buddy, Marcus, instead. I organized some co-workers to attend to show him support.

I also prepared a flyer explaining the Appeal, to encourage discussion and to remind workers and GI's that the U.S. government is the enemy of both of them and the Iraqi people, while outlining things people attending the event could do to help. Marcus knew no one there other than me and didn't know what to expect. He was very touched that we organized the flyer and the support.

I was disappointed in the affair itself. The Peace Center gave awards to about 24 groups and individuals. Few could speak and they were quickly shuffled on and off the stage. In fact, a group of awardees (including Marcus) were not even given their certificates on stage, being told, "OK, now get off the stage, we're running behind schedule."

I was pleased that a group of my co-workers felt it important enough to give up their Saturday night to attend. One read the Appeal and was disappointed to see how reformist it was. (The Appeal stated that its signatories were "patriotic Americans" who were proud to serve their country, and, while calling for the troops to be brought home, offered no insight into the cause of the war, such as U.S. imperialism, control over the oil, etc.).

I agreed that sharpening the political struggle among these anti-war GI's was needed, along the lines suggested in the flyer. Marcus enjoyed the conversation with my co-workers; all received CHALLENGE.

Our next step is to get a resolution passed at the next union meeting calling for participation in the Jan. 27th Anti-War March in Washington, D.C. and assembling a contingent of my local to attend.

D.C. Red

Paraguay: Electing Reformist Bishop No Solution for Workers

Paraguay is the center of many struggles and of a growing U.S. military presence to counter its rivals in South America. Some of us are struggling to win people to the idea of one international working class, fighting for the needs of our class under one Progressive Labor Party. We distribute some CHALLENGES, have a PLP study group and engage in some struggles.

Paraguay is South America's second poorest country and one of the most corrupt in the world. But there is a lot of fight-back against the bosses. Recently nurses and doctors struck; the National Farmers Front (Frente Campesino Nacional) frequently occupy land and block major highways in demanding more land; and retired teachers are fighting for their well-deserved retirement pay.

Last November, the owners of supermarket Ycua Bolanos were tried for the August 2004 deaths of 400 people. These workers were burned to death when the owners locked supermarket doors during a fire. Their only defense? Preventing looting!

These vicious capitalists received sentences of only five years, about 4_ days for each murder. Workers rebelled against this injustice and for an entire day clashed with police, liberating the entire inventory of two other supermarkets owned by the murderers. The battle was so intense that police were left throwing rocks at the protestors. 

Electoral struggles are intensifying contradictions within the reform movement. Voter fraud was widespread in recent elections for mayors and city councils, enabling the right-wing Colorado Party to triumph nation-wide. This party has ruled Paraguay for 70 years, led by dictator Alfredo Stroessner from 1954-1989, who gave asylum to Nazi war criminals, like Joseph "The Angel of Death" Mengele, after the Red Army crushed the Nazis. Stroessner was supported by the U.S. bosses because he was a staunch anti-communist.

Continuing this fascist tradition, Paraguay has begun military exercises with U.S. help to counter Venezuela's agreement to support Bolivia militarily on its border with Paraguay, should Bolivia need assistance. U.S. troops are stationed in the Chaco Desert, site of the Mariscal Estigarribia Airport.

Those opposed to the current rulers have mounted an "anything-but-Colorado" campaign against current President Nicanor Duarte Frutos for the 2008 presidential election. The main opposition candidate is former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, who has launched a social-democratic movement (Tekojoja in Guaraní, the language spoken by most people, along with Spanish ). Workers are already organizing protests and fight-backs against Frutos and the Colorado Party.

Is this reformist movement the answer to the Colorado fascists? Our revolutionary communist politics have stimulated debate. Some progressive youth and some workers have bought CHALLENGE. A PLP Study-Action Group has begun, focusing on the need to build a mass communist movement.

However, Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) has recently expanded to Paraguay (PMAS), and claims that Bolivian-Venezuelan socialism, not communist revolution, is the solution. Several PMAS members have become frustrated with this socialist reform strategy and like PLP's revolutionary communist message.

Paraguay has a rich history of struggle under the leadership of the old communist movement in the 1960's under Oscar Creydt and the famous guerilla leader Agapito Valiente, as well as the armed struggle of the M14 Movement and FULN. Marxist ideas are not new to Paraguayans. We hope to add a new chapter by putting the fundamental principle of Marxism -- revolution for communism -- into every struggle we enter. The working class in Paraguay is ready for change.

Red Guarani

REDEYE REDEYE

`New' Iraq Plan: Stay in and grab oil

The Iraq Study Group report....was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq.... James Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out....that the report "makes clear we're going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time...."

And...it said: "The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise."

In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fall-back position for U.S. military intervention -- and for using American firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies ... (Norman Solomon, Creators Syndicate, 12/18)

Killer cops given every chance to fix a story

In a typical shooting incident where the police know who was involved but not how the shooting happened, investigators are trained to immediately separate and question suspects and participants, preventing those involved from getting together and devising a shared story....

In the 1997 Abner Louima case, preferential treatment bought time for the few bad officers to meet in the basement of the precinct and concoct a story.... In 1999, immediately after Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times, instead of isolating the four officers, their union delegates accompanied them -- as a group -- to the hospital so they could be treated for ringing in their ears. They spent the next several hours together.

Eventually a narrative emerged....

Of course, we don't know yet what narrative will be offered by the officers who fired their guns in the Bell case. But we do know that before they utter a single word on the record, they will have had the opportunity to...review every finding of the crime scene unit.... (NYT, 12/24)

The Real Global Threat is Profit System

To the Editor:

....Faced with the prospect of environmental catastrophe,...

There is no point in throwing money at the symptoms while the disease goes unchecked.... And the problem, the disease...is...an economic system whose one yardstick is profit. (GW, 12/21)

Gov't wants a whiter, richer New Orleans

Sixteen months have passed since the apocalyptic flood that followed Hurricane Katrina. More than 13,000 residents who were displaced by the storm are still living in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Another 100,000 to 200,000 evacuees -- most of whom want to return home -- are scattered throughout the United States.

The undeniable neglect of this population fuels the suspicion among the poor and the black, who constitute a majority of the evacuees, that the city is being handed over to the well-to-do and the white....

The federal government has not come close to meeting the challenge of this overwhelming humanitarian crisis. (NYT, 1/1/07)

(No headline needed)

A top strategist at the Pentagon says the war on terror could take 100 years.Today, President Bush warned against setting these time-tables. (Jay Leno)

Many Chinese remain proud of revolutionary surges

During the Cultural Revolution, many, many citizens rushed to join in voluntarily. Indeed, many Chinese today can still recall the initial sense of euphoria, liberation, and exhilaration that accompanied their participation in the movement....

It is, in the sense, their event -- not something they simply suffered through, but rather something they own....

As outsiders,...it becomes very easy for us at once to view contemporary China as a repudiation of the past and to wait expectantly for the citizenry to cast off the government that victimized them in the past and still lionize Mao Zedong in the present. Yet for Chinese citizens, just as the Cultural Revolution is their own, so, too, is Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution more broadly. Their revolution's track record is undoubtedly ambivalent, encompassing the full gamut from exhilarating liberation to grotesque calamity, but -- still in the process of unfolding.... (Harvard Magazine, January)

DESERTER'S BOOK EXPOSES BRUTAL RACIST U.S. WARMAKERS BUT MISLEADS ANTI-WAR SOLDIERS

U.S. Army private Joshua Key, who fled to Canada rather than return to Iraq, has written a moving and politically instructive account of his experiences. Key's memoir, "The Deserter's Tale" (as told to Canadian journalist Lawrence Hill), shows a poor, white, working-class young man from Oklahoma practicing anti-racism and internationalism while defying the brass in the midst of war.

Unfortunately, however, Key's admirable conscience and courage wind up down the drain. Blaming the war on Bush & Co. and not on the profit system, he mistakenly thinks he can hide out in Ontario until things blow over. History shows that individual desertions do nothing to limit capitalism's endless parade of wars. However, organized armed mutinies, rebellions, and mass fraternizations between "enemy" armies can prove tremendous advances towards communist revolution.

Key destroys the liberals' "white privilege" myth as he starkly describes growing up destitute in a two-room trailer. The homes he later raids in Iraq are "far more attractive, spacious, and comfortable." He manages to hold off "a string of Army recruiters" until after high school. But when Key and his wife, working as pizza deliveryman and waitress, can't feed their children, he finally falls prey to the "poverty draft." The lying recruiting sergeant assures Key that the Army will assign him to a "non-deployable" unit that builds bridges at bases in the U.S. Shortly after enlisting, however, Key finds himself in Colorado preparing for combat in Iraq.

SAVAGERY IN ABU GHRAIB AND FALLUJAH: OFFICIAL U.S. POLICY, NOT `BAD APPLE' ABERRATION

Before shipping out, Key receives a thoroughly racist indoctrination: "Our commanders taught us to demonize and hate Iraqis and Muslims." Key's training shows that racist brutality is the official policy of U.S. military officers and the politicians directing them. While GI's should have refused orders to murder and torture in Fallujah, Haditha, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, nevertheless those orders came from the top.

Says Key: "Our commanders told us that Americans were the only decent people on the planet and that Muslims and terrorists all deserved to die. One day, all three hundred of us lined up within the bayonet range, each facing a life-sized dummy that we were told to imagine was a Muslim man. As we stabbed the dummies with our bayonets...one of our commanders shouted into a microphone: `Kill. Kill. Kill the sand n-----s.'"

Key recalls a favorite marching chant of the drill instructors, "One shot. One kill. One Arab. One Asian." It reveals U.S. rulers' early attempts at motivating troops for racist slaughter beyond the Middle East.

When Key arrives in Iraq, he sees that racist terror is indeed the Army's standard operating procedure. The brass tell GI's to treat every Iraqi as an enemy. Key's squad has the job of raiding houses in search of terrorists and rounding up every male over five feet tall for detention and likely torture. Key does his best to avoid the worst abuses. Under orders, he beats some Iraqis but kills none himself. He even makes friends and shares his rations with a few locals. Officers reprimand Key for "fraternizing with the enemy." But other GI's fall for their commanders' racism. Two outrages stand out. They disgust Key and help him decide to run. A U.S. soldier decapitates four innocent Iraqis with machine-gun fire and then kicks the heads around like soccer balls. Later, a soldier shoots to death a seven-year-old girl whom Key has been providing with food.

INSTEAD OF DESERTING, GI's SHOULD ORGANIZE TO SMASH IMPERIALIST WARMAKERS

Granted a brief leave back to the U.S., Key makes up his mind to move with his family to Canada. At this point, the story sours politically. Although Key bravely faces the risk of prison as he eludes the Army officers tracking him, his individualistic solution offers no help to the Iraqis he once befriended. The Pentagon reports over 8,000 desertions since the war began. But the killing only accelerates.

Key also errs in counting on Canada to take him in. It may yet return the Key family to the U.S. Long gone are the days when Canada's Trudeau government, cozying up to Western European and Soviet bosses, welcomed thousands of deserters from the Vietnam War. The imperialist tide has since turned. Today, Canadian Navy destroyers police the Persian Gulf for the benefit of Exxon Mobil and Chevron, while Canadian troops fight under U.S. command in Afghanistan.

Sad to say, Key's tale does not serve the working class, despite its sincere anti-racist, anti-officer views. In fact, it aids the ruling class in several ways. Key never indicts imperialism -- that is, the need of U.S. rulers to control the Mid-East and its oil at all costs -- as the root cause of the Iraq war. By portraying Key as a sympathetic hero, it steers others down his dead-end road. Key examines but one side of the all-important question of ideology. He knows that the bosses use racism to get GIs to do their dirty work. But he ignores the opposite: The Vietnam Syndrome still haunts the U.S. bosses. There are reports that Robert Gates' recent visit to Iraq included dealing with a military mutiny by the U.S. Army VI Battalion in Anbar province, where they refused to obey orders, preferring not to leave their base in Ramadi, the provincial capital * (see webpage below for more info). There is great potential for PLP'ers to win many black, white, Latin and Asian GI's to anti-racist, internationalist and anti-imperialist ideas through our communist politics.

(NOTE: "The Deserter's Tale" is due to be published by Atlantic Monthly Press next month. CHALLENGE obtained an advance copy, on which this article is based.)

*http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061225&aricleId=4261

PLP History: Harlem Rebellion Grand Jury and Reform vs. Revolution on the Railroad

The PLP history column on the Harlem Rebellion (CHALLENGE, 1/7) reminded me of my own participation in that struggle, especially its reference to "daily picket lines" of the Grand Jury that had been convened to conduct a witch-hunt against the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM).

Whenever a PLM member was subpoenaed, he or she would ask friends and co-workers to join the picket line on the day we were to appear. I had worked on a railroad for ten years before our entire roster was laid off when our jobs were subcontracted out. Many found work elsewhere. When the Grand Jury subpoenaed me, I contacted many of my ex-coworkers, explained the circumstances to them (including being a communist in PLM) and asked them to join the picket line.

These workers had known me as an organizer of militant, anti-racist rank-and-file actions, for which they had elected me Local president. But throughout those ten years they had not known (so I thought) that I was also a member of the "Communist" Party ("C"P). That Party had instructed us not to tell anyone we were members or discuss communist politics with them because it would "isolate" us. This was the era of the Cold War and McCarthyite witch-hunts. (This, of course, was one of the reasons many of us left the "C"P and formed PLM and then PLP.)

The day of my appearance arrived and I was shocked to see about 20 of my former co-workers had responded to my calls. They had taken the day off from their new jobs to join a communist picket line for the first time in their lives. It was then that I realized the enormity of my mistake in not trying to raise communist ideas with my co-workers. Had I done so, over a ten-year period, there's a good chance I would have been able to recruit some number of them. And now, after we had all been laid off, and many had found other jobs, we would have had "ready-made" communists at GM, the Transit Authority, Ford and other places where many of them now worked.

In fact, this is the way the bosses help us spread communist politics: bring us together into one work situation, give us the basis to recruit, then lay us off and force us to go elsewhere where we can repeat the process. Thus, if we do our job as communists, the bosses help our Party grow! This is part of what Karl Marx referred to when saying that "the capitalists create their own gravediggers."

But there is also the other side to this process. We must immerse ourselves in these workers' day-to-day reform struggles, fighting for many demands which we know capitalism will either deny us or, if we manage to win them, will eventually take away. After all, they have state power. But if we don't, as Lenin said, get down in "the muck and mire" of the class struggle, then we will not have laid the basis for them to listen to us and our ideas and eventually become communists themselves.

So we must do both -- spread our red ideas amid participation in the daily struggle, even if we disagree with the reform road the workers may have chosen. In my case, it meant, for instance, warning the workers that going to the Labor Board for a "neutral" decision in our fight is an illusion, but still going with them when we couldn't convince them. (Of course, there are limits, such as refusing to scab to help break other workers' strikes.) But when workers take actions which contradict their class interests, we will not be in position to wage a struggle with them against such actions -- they are less likely to listen to us -- if we haven't been involved in those daily reform fights.

If we don't stick with them and participate in the struggle they have chosen -- even though we disagree and express those disagreements -- we will end up "in glorious isolation." And if we take part in the daily reform struggle, even very militantly, but do not spread our communist ideas and attempt to recruit them, we will end up without a Party.

Old-time Comrade

1. GI's, Iraqi Workers Have Same Enemy
   Imperialism, Nationalism Massacring Tens of Thousands
   1. BUSH ERRORS SPARKED INSURGENT BACKLASH
   2. BUSH GANG: WIPE OUT THE NATIONALISTS, LIBERALS: PREPARE FOR BIGGER WARS
   3. LIBERALS SEEK UNIVERSAL `SERVICE,' WAR DECLARATION
2. RACISTS NYPD MURDERS AGAIN:
   50 MORE REASONS
3. History Shows GI's Can Be Won To Fight Warmakers
   1. ANTI-IMPERIALIST SOLDIERS
   2. IRAQ
4. Red-Led Russian Soldiers, Sailors Turned Their Guns on Bosses
5. Fight the Bosses, Not Each Other -- Students Lead Anti-Racist Struggle
6. ORGANIZING AGAINST IMPERIALIST WARS INSIDE THE MILITARY
7. NYC Teachers Must Sharpen Class Struggle, Reject Contract Bribes
8. Don't Be A Sucker for Bosses' Schemes
9. Transit Union Election Scheming Shows Need For Red Leadership
10. Protest Police-State Attack on UCLA Iranian Student
11. U.S. Pols, Profits Behind Africa's First `World War'
12. Racism Killing Immigrant Construction Workers
13. Savage Fascist Assault on Oaxaca Rebels Shows Capitalism Can't be Reformed
14. LETTERS
    1. Racial Injustice and Ecological Survival
    2. GI Families Got Folded Flags; Bosses Get Billions
    3. U.S. Ambassador, FMLN in Bed Together
    4. ESL'ers Link Profits To Global Warming
15. Auto Bosses Invade Old Socialist Bloc
    --At 1/5 The Wages
16. Sammy Scheer
    1954- 2006
17. REDEYE REDEYE
    1. Capitalism, not culture, is black oppressor
    2. US aims to overthrow elected gov't
    3. US needed rubber, bought Brazilian slaves
    4. `Anti-terror' database logs war protests
    5. `9/11 terror' swung jury against detainee
18. DVD Review:
    `World Trade Center' Movie Promotes Selfless Service for U.S. Fascism
19. Bosses' Culture Root of Worldwide Mass Murder of Women
20. PLP HISTORY: Anti-Vietnam War PL'ers Whack HUAC

GI's, Iraqi Workers Have Same Enemy
Imperialism, Nationalism Massacring Tens of Thousands

Is it "sectarian violence" or "civil war?" The politicians' and pundits' debate deliberately obscures the class nature of Iraq's spiraling bloodshed. But a communist analysis indicts the profit system for mass murder there. Nationalist strife led by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish bosses over political power and oil is joining U.S. imperialism as a major killer of Iraqi workers. Trapped by dead-end nationalist "identity politics," many are committing atrocities in the name of their own religious or ethnic group. But by slaughtering their fellow workers, they're only helping to install a Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish ruling class that will continue their oppression and ally with one imperialist gang or another.

These militia leaders are all dyed-in-the-wool capitalists. Moqtada al-Sadr, Mahdi Army chief, draws his base from Baghdad's Shiite slums. But his wealth comes from oil. His faction controls the transport ministry, which runs pipelines and ports. After the recent Sunni assault on Sadr City, Sadr flexed his economic muscles by shutting down the key oil terminal at Basra. Earlier this year, Sadr sent two companies of working-class fighters to Kirkuk, many to their deaths, to wrest that oil-rich region from Kurdish bosses' hands. Warlords from Saddam Hussein's Sunni sect resent being stripped of state power and the oil profits that flowed from it. Kurdish chiefs, in turn, view the petroleum and population of the North as theirs alone to exploit.

BUSH ERRORS SPARKED INSURGENT BACKLASH

U.S. rulers had planned to control Iraq after the invasion by tripling crude production to six million barrels a day (mbd) and installing leaders of the three main factions as junior partners of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell. But Bush & Co. bungled the job by sending too few troops to secure the oilfields. They disbanded the Iraqi army and police who might have been better able to force the would-be oil barons to comply with the U.S. deal. A vicious cycle has developed instead. With an insufficient U.S.-led coercive apparatus, rival warlords have stepped up their attempts to seize oil facilities. Western oil companies, out of safety fears, refuse to send the engineers and equipment needed to increase production, which has, at times, fallen below the pre-invasion level of two mbd. Greedy Iraqi bosses then fight more bitterly for pieces of a shrinking profit pie and waste the lives of tens of thousands of the people they pretend to serve. Exxon's reluctance grows still further.

An article in the Times of India (10/1/06) offers insights into Iraq's oil-fired infighting; "The biggest oilfields in the country are in the Shia south, and the rest are in the northern Kurdish region. There is no oil in the Sunni triangle in the middle of the country....The new Constitution of Iraq was long delayed because of heated debates on sharing oil revenue. One constitutional provision says that oil belongs to the people of Iraq in all regions. Yet, the Constitution also gives autonomy to the three regions Shia, Sunni and Kurd. This fuels Sunni fears that the other two regions will ultimately hog all the oil."

BUSH GANG: WIPE OUT THE NATIONALISTS, LIBERALS: PREPARE FOR BIGGER WARS

As the mounting carnage chokes Iraq's oil pump, hamstrung U.S. imperialists are momentarily pursuing a deadly three-pronged policy: use U.S. troops to kill the nationalist insurgents; have the so-called Iraqi government do the job; and then watch the competing nationalists kill one another. On Nov. 25, U.S. forces killed 22 insurgents, and a few civilians at a bomb factory. Iraqi security killed 47 Sunni gunmen the same day. Recently Sunnis and Shiites have been trading car bombs, grenades, kidnappings, and lynchings at a record pace. The New Yorker magazine (11/27/06) quotes a senior U.S. intelligence official as saying, "The White House believes that if American troops stay in Iraq long enough -- with enough troops -- the bad guys will wind up killing each other."

Establishment liberals think they have a better plan than the Bush gang. Despite the phony talk among Democrats and James Baker's Iraq Study Group of withdrawal and of dealing with Iran, a consensus is emerging for a "big push, " a reinforcement of U.S. troop strength to wipe out both Sunni and Shia nationalists in Baghdad and elsewhere. Abandoning Iraq is simply not an option for U.S. rulers. And Iran's ayatollahs have no interest in yielding to U.S. demands. Anthony Cordesman, strategy chairman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major Establishment policy-shaper, says, "The worst solution is still an `exit strategy.' If Iraq can be made to work at any level, it will be worth...making a long-term commitment.... An Iraq divided or in a power vacuum affects a region with 60 per cent of the world's proven conventional oil reserves and 37 per cent of its natural gas. A de facto victory for Sunni Islamist extremists will challenge every moderate regime and political movement in the Middle East." (Financial Times, 5/3/06)

Shiite nationalism poses just as big a threat. Seventy percent of Saudi Arabia's vast oil reserves, the cornerstone of U.S. imperialism, lie in the Shia-dominated Gulf shore. Both the Saudi royal family and its U.S. backers are paranoid about the possibility that these Shias, abetted by Iran (and now Iraq), will secede and take the oilfields with them.

LIBERALS SEEK UNIVERSAL `SERVICE,' WAR DECLARATION

A U.S. failure to counter Mid-East nationalism today will set back its efforts to combat imperialist rivals down the road. Recent editorials in the liberal Establishment's New York Times has alluded to the general military mobilization U.S. rulers need to reverse their downslide. The Nov. 26 piece gave the Pentagon the task of "figuring out why the Bush administration's military plans worked out so badly and drawing lessons for future conflicts." While rejecting the word "draft," the Times (11/21) praised politicians who said "the United States should require all young people to devote a year or two to service after high school or college." The bosses' "newspaper of record" had earlier (11/19) called for "a Congress willing to resume its proper constitutional role in debating and deciding essential questions of war and peace." The Times thus appealed to newly-elected Democrats to help win the public to the imperialist agenda and seriously consider legitimizing it with a declaration of war.

U.S. rulers and their nationalist opponents must resort to racism and phony- anti-imperialism to recruit the foot soldiers they require to protect their profits. The class interests of GIs and al-Sadr's militiamen, however, are identical. They lie in rebelling against their "leaders" and building a party that can replace imperialist and nationalist bloodshed with communist revolution.

RACISTS NYPD MURDERS AGAIN:
50 MORE REASONS

QUEENS, NY, Nov. 28 -- Once again, NYC KKKops have murdered execution style. Police fired 50 bullets at a car carrying three unarmed men -- two black and one Puerto Rican -- who had just left a bachelor party in Jamaica, Queens. Twenty-one shots hit the car, killing Sean Bell, and injuring the other two. Bell was to be married to the mother of his child later that day. Adding insult to this racist action, cops handcuffed the injured men while they received emergency care at the hospital. The bullets sprayed through the street hit windows, other cars and even a lamp in one man's living room.

The brutality of this murderous attack recalls the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by cops while reaching for his wallet. As with Diallo, the police are now searching for "evidence" to justify their murder.

Many more workers and children have been brutalized and killed since then and, as this latest killing shows, will continue. The cops have proven once again to be hired goons of the rulers who rely on racist terror to try to prevent workers and youth from fighting back. Racism is used by the bosses to divide all workers and to make billions in extra profits from the lower wages paid to black, Latino and immigrant workers.

On Nov. 26, a vigil organized by Democratic Party "activist" and FBI informer Al Sharpton to cool community outrage turned into an angry protest when demonstrators demanded the heads of the killer cops and of Police Commissioner Kelly. But the aim of Sharpton and other politicians is to divert it into demanding an "independent investigation" of the NYPD. Now, even NYC Mayor Bloomberg is "deploring" the incident, taking the liberal road in contrast to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's more Nazi-like tactics. This is the same Bloomberg who says he can't pay municipal workers enough to keep food on their table (30% must resort to food pantries and food stamps).

But history has shown that essentially nothing will be done to punish the killers. "It is extraordinarily hard to criminally prosecute officers who were on duty," according to CUNY Professor of police science Eugene O'Donnell (NY Daily News, 11/29). Cops will continue to be racist goons because that's the role they serve for the bosses. The entire judicial system is racist to the core. Over two million people are imprisoned in the U.S., 70% of them black and Latino workers, two-thirds for non-violent crimes. Ironically, the black and Latino youth victims of these murders are the very same people who the racist rulers want to recruit to fight and die in Iraq, killing other workers who the oil bosses exploit for billions in profits.

PLP members and friends were on the streets distributing leaflets at City University of NY campuses, on jobs in hospitals and schools and in the Flatbush, Brooklyn neighborhood. The 25,000 member retirees association of D.C. 37 voted to send a letter of condolences to the families of the victims and criticize the unnecessary use of force by the NYPD. Our message is that workers and youth will get no justice under this system. Just like the KKKops walked free after their brutal beating and/or murders of Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo and thousands of others, they will probably walk free again. The only way to end these racist murders is to arm our class with communist practice and ideas for revolution. Only then will we, the working class, have a world free from murderous cops and the bloody system that they serve.

History Shows GI's Can Be Won To Fight Warmakers

GENERAL,
your tank is a mighty vehicle.
It shatters the forest and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect; it needs a driver.

GENERAL,
your bomber is awesome.
It flies faster than a hurricane and bears more than
a hundred elephants.
But it has one defect; It needs a mechanic.

GENERAL,
a man is quite expendable.
He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect;
He can think.

--Bertolt Brecht

Imperialist rivalries always lead to war, whether direct attacks against each other or smaller ones between their clients. These rivalries will eventually lead to World War. Bosses on all sides need to turn millions of workers into soldiers. Communist revolution needs these soldiers and sailors to fight the bosses. PLP members and friends must win soldiers to "turn imperialist war into class war" for workers power.

One of capitalism's weakest links is its difficulty in fielding a reliable army. Since World War 1 to the present, working-class soldiers inside the ranks have rebelled against their wars.

ANTI-IMPERIALIST SOLDIERS

While millions were being killed in World War I to protect bosses' profits, during Christmas, 1914, British and German troops declared their own battlefield truce, cementing their comradeship with a soccer game. Russia saw masses of soldiers and sailors help turn that imperialist war into history's first successful working-class revolution (see box). In 1919, West Coast longshoremen refused to load munitions being sent to the U.S. military in Siberia trying to crush the Russian Revolution.

In 1945, when World War II ended, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, led by left-wing GI's, organized mass protest demonstrations when ordered to stay in the Philippines to fight a communist-led resistance movement there, forcing the brass to send them home.

During the Vietnam War, thousands organized an anti-war movement inside Vietnam and aboard aircraft carriers, publishing 144 underground newspapers and posting bounties on officers marked for execution and fragging many. At one point, sailors' sabotage put six aircraft carriers out of commission, to be returned to San Diego for repairs; 503,000 soldiers deserted.

In June 1971, Marine historian Colonel Robert Heinl wrote an assessment in the Armed Forces Journal entitled, "The Collapse of the U.S. Army": "The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the US armed forces are, with few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States."

In Oct. 1971, black sailors led a major rebellion on the USS Kitty Hawk against orders to return to Vietnam -- including hand-to-hand battle with Marines trying to smash their shipboard meeting. They had published an anti-war newspaper, "Kitty Litter." The carrier was essentially removed from war duty.

Vietnamese workers and peasants, lightly armed, with no air support, but greatly inspired by anti-imperialist and red ideas, took on helicopter gunships, tanks, heavy weapons, napalm and horrific bombing attacks, and endured tremendous hardships to wage a successful guerilla war. They demonstrated the triumph of political commitment over technology. Unfortunately, the nationalist leadership of Vietnam has turned that victory around, making the country currently a haven for imperialist investments.

IRAQ

During current imperialist oil wars, the soldiers' role will be crucial. So far, they have mostly followed orders to kill other workers in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, there have also been small signs of resistance. In 2004, the Army's 343rd Quartermaster Company refused its orders. Many GI's with anti-war feelings have refused redeployment. However, most resistance has been individual acts without anti-imperialist class-consciousness that would threaten the rulers' plans.

The liberal Democrats have long condemned Rumsfeld's refusal to field an army capable of securing Mid-East oil. Now that they control Congress, they're already calling for "more representative" armed forces to fight future wars. Their main difference with the Bushites is how to wage profit wars more "efficiently."

Without a committed military, the bosses cannot hold and expand power. Conversely, a revolutionary-led armed working class and a red army is essential to winning state power, as the Russian and Chinese revolutions demonstrated (see box).

War cannot be waged merely by a handful of politicians sitting in offices pushing buttons that release devastation. Imperialists need millions of patriotic soldiers and workers in war factories to fight for the bosses' interests instead of their own. Rebellions by these workers and soldiers would inspire workers everywhere to sharpen the class struggle to destroy capitalism.

Only communist ideas will give soldiers the ability to liberate themselves and the working class from the rulers and their endless profit wars. In the past, communist ideas have inspired soldiers to side with the working class and refuse orders to kill for imperialism. We in PLP are fighting to make this happen again. Join us.

Red-Led Russian Soldiers, Sailors Turned Their Guns on Bosses

In 1917, rebellion among hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and sailors (who literally turned their guns on the bosses) helped establish working-class power. The Bolsheviks (Russian communists) had been organizing inside the military since 1903. They led rebellions in the Navy during the 1905 war with Japan, including the famous insurrection on the battleship Potemkin. Sailors seized the ship to support workers in Odessa rebelling against the Czar.

By 1917, Bolsheviks had developed a pro-communist class base in large sections of the army and navy. Virtually the entire Black Sea fleet, the largest section of the Russian Navy, took the side of the working class. Large units of the Russian Army led the march on St. Petersburg that toppled the old ruling class.

In World War II, while Europe's capitalist armies rolled over with barely a fight, the Soviet Red Army, committed to defending workers' power, smashed the Nazis. In Asia, the Chinese Red Army led the fight against fascist Japanese aggression and crushed the old rulers of China to build a workers' state.

Fight the Bosses, Not Each Other -- Students Lead Anti-Racist Struggle

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, Nov. 24 -- The layoff of 4,000 Volkswagen workers here and threatened closing of the 5,400-worker plant contains the potential of a general strike.

Since Nov. 17, VW workers -- many of them immigrants -- have been on strike and have occupied the Forest plant around the clock to prevent the company from shipping out finished cars and dismantling machinery. Workers used burning barricades to block the major highway leading out of the city to the Veret suburb while picketing workers from other industries were surrounding the plant.

Thousands of jobs in subsidiary and supplier plants will be wiped out, a catastrophe in a region already suffering from an official 21% unemployment rate. "For each job at the plant," declared Nico Cue, a metal workers union leader, "you have to reckon two jobs outside the plant. So 12,000 jobs are at stake." (In the U.S., with 30 times Belgium's ten million population, this would mean a loss of 360,000 U.S. jobs.)

Strikers have been sharply critical and political. One said, "The European trade unions are nothing more than puppets....doing nothing about social issues." Another referred to the war in Iraq, declaring, it's "a war...[for] big business. Generations will suffer because of it....This is one reason I am standing here,....for them, not just for myself."

Ibisi Ramadam, an Arab workers and a five-year veteran of the assembly lines, referring to the huge joblessness, said, "Now there will be 4,000 more.... I don't know if one can trust them [the unions]....The problem is the capitalist system."

VW bosses say they must shift the entire production of the Golf model to Germany as a cost-cutting maneuver to compete against global competition. Their lieutenants in Germany's largest union, IG Metall, are cooperating to the hilt. They've already agreed to a 4-hour increase in the VW work-week without full compensation in the plant to which Golf production is being shifted, while VW is in the process of cutting 20,000 jobs throughout Germany.

VW bosses have literally bought off union representatives on the Works Council in Germany. The Council's former head raked in an annual "bonus" of 693,000 euros [over $800,000] over and above his regular salary. Works Council members also received luxury trips, including visits to brothels. These union "leaders" collusion knows no shame.

Workers at all VW plants across Europe are being affected, but the European Works Council refuses to organize a united struggle against the company offensive, seeking rather to pit one plant or location against the other. Belgian unionists are accusing the German auto union of betraying themselves and other auto workers throughout Europe. VW's attempt to appease the Belgian workers by promising to shift production of the Polo model from Pamplona, Spain to this Golf plant was rejected by the workers here, one saying, "They are trying to play off one workforce against another."

While the Belgian government has been acting "concerned" about the layoffs, when receiving advance notification from VW about the cuts, VW said the government "promised us their support." (Frankfurter Rundschau, 11/21)

VW strikers have been marching to company headquarters, to a company garage and to subcontractors. The local union leader has promised new demonstrations every day, building up to a major national demonstration on December 2. Rank and filers have been criticizing the leadership for not sharpening the struggle.

Meanwhile, labor action in Belgium continues to grow. Railway workers protesting new work schedules, struck Antwerp's main station, halting two-thirds of all rail traffic; 1,500 government workers (hospital and social services) demonstrated outside the Treasury here, demanding a [[currency]]20 monthly increase -- most now earn less than [[currency]]1,000 a month; and air controllers and technicians held a one-hour strike in two cities against lousy working conditions.

At the root of the attacks on the VW workers is capitalism's worldwide auto company rivalry, all bosses trying to capture as big a share of the market as possible, leading to overproduction and then cuts in labor costs. GM and Ford workers in the U.S. are suffering the consequences of the system's anarchy of production. And all these trade wars are helping to stoke military wars, the ultimate "solution" to inter-imperialist rivalry.

Right now, auto workers must unite internationally against this onslaught which pits one company's workers against all the others. The key is to turn these struggles into one pointing to the real solution -- destroying a system based on profits which takes out its losses on workers' backs, and erecting a working-class-run system without profits and bosses, based on serving workers' needs: communism. That's PLP's goal.

ORGANIZING AGAINST IMPERIALIST WARS INSIDE THE MILITARY

Recently, a forum on anti-war organizing within the military took place in our area. For those who see themselves as revolutionary or anti-imperialist, the forum raised issues such as: What should soldiers organize for? And, who should soldiers ally with in the movement against imperialist war? Related to these was how soldiers should organize in the military.

After opening comments from the organizers, two petitions were read to the approximately 100 people in the audience. The first was the "Appeal for Redress" being circulated among soldiers in Iraq and at military bases elsewhere. That petition identifies each signer as a "patriotic" American who "respectfully" urges politicians to bring the troops home.

The other petition, being circulated within the National Guard and Reserves, calls on Congress to guarantee that when these soldiers are called to active duty they not suffer any loss of job income as a result of the deployment. Neither petition indicates politicians from both parties supported the war. Neither party supports pulling U.S. soldiers out of the Middle East. That's because the main concern is controlling the region's oil.

After the petitions were distributed to the audience, three soldiers spoke about having opposed the war to many of their fellow soldiers while in Iraq, using the internet as well as person-to-person contact. They communicated with each other during their time in Iraq. At least one was brought up on charges for his anti-war organizing. Their comments showed they were sincere, resourceful and courageous.

Two of the three soldiers said that they were fighting for the principles established in the U.S. Constitution. One referred to the "Founding Fathers" in positive terms, although the third soldier commented that slavery and voting restrictions were their legacy. All three soldiers appeared to favorably view the fight to "restore democracy" both inside and outside the military.

After that, members of the audience spoke. All praised the soldiers for their boldness and fighting spirit. Two people sharply attacked the U.S. Constitution. One said the main thing the Constitution protects is the property of the ruling class, not "human rights." He called on soldiers to identify their interests with those of the working class, and said that imperialist wars will never end until the system that causes them is brought down. He was strongly applauded by the audience.

In response, one of the forum organizers said that if a mass movement of soldiers was ready to go to Washington to restore the Constitution, he would be there. His comments implied uncritical support. This "leftist" also promoted the movement for "democracy" within the military.

The bosses' Constitution and their whole legal system are designed to maintain their power and keep all challenges within their ground rules. Organizing within the military against imperialist wars is against those rules. PLP believes that soldiers will eventually reject misleaders who have no confidence that soldiers, like workers, can, as the German communist playwright Brecht said, realize their revolutionary potential. Soldiers can and will opt for armed struggle against capitalism, both inside the military and out. That's the only way to stop the sacrificing of workers' blood on the altars of the profit system.

NYC Teachers Must Sharpen Class Struggle, Reject Contract Bribes

Educators in New York City witness crimes on a daily basis: racist patterns in illiteracy and innumeracy; a testing regime designed to reproduce capitalist social inequality; overcrowding, resulting in frustration and student fights; graduates forced into uniform by an economic draft and sent to fight and die for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

The U.S. ruling class needs to prevent teachers and students from fighting back against these crimes and instead to win them to willingly fill their places in the system as it prepares for continuous war.

New York's teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), recently made a deal with the City for a new contract that includes a 7% pay raise, a $750 signing bonus and no give-backs on benefits. For the first time in many years an agreement was reached before the contract deadline and without major concessions by the union. Many teachers hailed this settlement as a victory. But this contract is not designed to benefit teachers and students at all; it does not recover any concessions given away in previous contracts nor does it address the real needs of working-class students.

No amount of money put into the schools can change their role under capitalism, but the rulers hope that by spending a limited amount they can divert workers from the inherent inequalities of the system while more efficiently winning students to capitalist ideas. This contract bribes teachers in an attempt to win their loyalty to the system, not to the students and parents who are their class brothers and sisters.

Throughout many years of patient work at the UFT Delegate Assembly and at annual nationwide conventions, PLP teachers have exposed the liberals, including the union leadership, as the main danger to the working class. They try to deceive us into ignoring or even supporting imperialist war and growing fascism. CHALLENGE is known by a good chunk of the thousand-plus delegates who attend the monthly meetings of NYC union reps.

So, when at the November 8 Delegate Assembly a PLP teacher took UFT president Randi Weingarten to task for suggesting that the Democratic sweep of Congress meant "we are going to bring our troops home from Iraq," silence fell on the hall; she was forced to eat her words. Two subsequent PLP speakers took the floor exposing the union's "Safe Secure Schools" initiative as a thinly-veiled racist attack on students. They declared a contract which does not put students first should be rejected.

This struggle is being built in individual schools as well. In one high school a chapter chairperson returned energized by the anti-war and pro-student speeches and made a point of reporting them to the rank and file. He is urging teachers to reject the contract. At that school the "Safe Secure School" initiative is on the agenda for the next union meeting. At another school, where a communist delegate was elected last spring, CHALLENGE distribution among teachers has spiked moderately in the wake of this fight.

These struggles in individual schools can lead to a more profound fight against the ruling class's goals. Teacher strikes in Detroit and Oaxaca point the direction for teachers, one of intensifying class struggle and rejecting class collaboration. We must cultivate the revolutionary seeds we plant with strong collectivity, planning and leadership. When teachers, parents and students are won to communist politics on various levels amid these struggles, the workers of the world are winning. The Progressive Labor Party is working toward that goal. Join us!

Don't Be A Sucker for Bosses' Schemes

The recent teachers' union contract represents a different ruling-class plan for teachers than for other workers. The current fiasco in Iraq exposes a serious long-term weakness: U.S. workers are not committed to sacrificing for the "greater good" of U.S. capitalism. They need teachers to shape loyal subjects for U.S. imperialism. This may require paying us off with raises and even the appearance of "improved" working conditions in which to indoctrinate the youth with patriotism.

U.S. rulers answer this crisis with both force and deception. Racist attacks on black and Latino students will continue apace and form the backdrop to every educational "reform"; yet it's easy to be deceived. New York courts have just ordered the state to pay an extra $2 billion (down from $4bn) into the school system. The news media is peppered with reports on falling science and math scores. But these reports invariably place competition between the next generations of U.S. and particularly Asian students front and center. Cynical whining about an "achievement gap" between black and white youth in the land of chattel slavery, Jim Crow and worsening segregation today hides a reality -- black workers are still crucial to every major industrial and military operation of U.S. imperialism and cannot be totally written out of the economy, driven toward rebellion by a school system that targets them for educational destruction. This is true for Latino workers and youth as well.

PLP calls on teachers to undermine the bosses' project. In a "teacher's fight" we must remember that the main group under attack in the schools is always the youth. Based on this understanding, unbreakable unity between teachers and students can be built. In unity with revolutionary industrial workers and soldiers, teachers can play a key role in the fight to destroy world imperialism.

Transit Union Election Scheming Shows Need For Red Leadership

NEW YORK CITY, Nov. 22 -- A host of candidates are challenging Roger Toussaint, head of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 in the union's current presidential election. All the phonies vying for that post were either opposed to last year's strike or propose appealing to the newly-elected Democratic politicians for a "fair shake." None propose to organize the rank and file for mass struggle against the capitalist class that depends on mass transit to keep its profits rolling in.

Toussaint himself is not even a "lesser evil" among this motley crew. A militant rank and file forced a massive illegal strike which shut the transit system, showed the potential strength of the working class and enjoyed enormous support from the worker-riders. Yet Toussaint agreed to a contract that included a payroll-deduction for health benefits, a wage "increase" lower than the inflation rate -- amounting to a wage CUT -- surrendering of the important December contract expiration date, and a secret deal during the 3-day strike that wasn't revealed to the membership until this past November. The rank-and-file rejected this contract because it attacked all workers health and pension benefits nationwide. They are still without a contract a year later.

Neither Toussaint nor his presidential opponents will organize transit workers for anti-capitalist class struggle. None will expose the role of the Wall Street banks which reap hundreds of millions in profits from the interest collected in loans to keep the transit system afloat. And none of these labor fakers do very much, if anything, to unite the workers who ride the subways and buses with those who operate them.

Compare that with the communist leadership given the transit workers in Washington, D.C.'s Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 by the slate led by its PLP president. Not only do they advocate striking and other militant actions to fight for demands and defend against give-backs but they organize and prepare the rank and file for just such struggles. During such a strike, they would expose the role of the bosses' state in using the cops, National Guard and Army to try to smash workers' militant actions -- there's no such thing as a "neutral" government under capitalism.

Communist leadership tries to build anti-racist unity and solidarity within the working class -- among black, Latin, Asian and white workers; young and old; men and women; city-wide and throughout the transit industry. Red leadership shows how the bosses squeeze the workers' lives to pay for imperialist wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Communist leadership thus helps workers learn that their struggles can only be won by destroying the profit system of capitalism. Through this process of struggle and education, transit workers are recruited to PLP, the organization that can lead the working class towards that goal.

Communist leadership cannot guarantee victory in reform demands since the capitalists run the government and armed forces, but it can lead a vigorous fight against racism as the most urgent need of the working class to cement its solidarity as a class.

For example, under red leadership Local 689 forced the transit bosses to reduce the number of years it takes young, mainly black workers to reach the top wage rate, thus beginning to reverse the racist, cost-cutting, divisive attack on Metro's labor force to which the previous leadership had agreed.

Contrary to the communist approach of mobilizing the rank and file for struggle, the TWU hacks lead the workers into the arms of the bosses by depending on liberal politicians who represent those same bosses. All NYC mayors, whether Democrat or Republican, have always enforced the strike-busting Taylor Law against municipal workers. Thus, the reformist Toussaint leadership, rejected political lessons of the 1965 transit strike when the workers broke the anti-strike law.

New York transit workers need red leadership and communist ideas to wage a fight for their class interests, to see that no matter what gains they can wrest from the bosses, the latter with its state power, laws and system based on profits will always be able to take them away, just as they're attempting to do now with their hard-won health benefits. To guarantee permanent victory, PLP must win transit workers to the anti-capitalist struggle for communism so that our class can conquer political power through revolution and rule in its own interests.

Protest Police-State Attack on UCLA Iranian Student

LOS ANGELES -- On Nov. 14, Mostafa Tabatabainejad -- a student of Iranian descent -- was studying at UCLA's main library when he was attacked by the racist campus police with a taser gun. Outraged at this racist police brutality, several days later hundreds of UCLA students and faculty -- organized by Muslim student groups and others -- marched across campus protesting the attack.

Security personnel had approached Mostafa asking for his school ID, since it was past 11 PM. Initially he refused to cooperate, maintaining they were singling him out based on his Middle Eastern appearance. Eventually, Mostafa agreed to leave the library, but as he did so, campus cop Terrence Duren arrived and attacked him with a taser gun. (LA Times, 11/17) Since 2001, Duren has been the subject of two other use-of-force complaints. (LA Times, 11/21)

This assault on a student of Middle Eastern descent by racist university police exposes the cops' role under capitalism to be to enforce racist oppression and maintain the racist status quo, whether at school, work, or in our neighborhoods. That this incident occurred at UCLA in particular is especially significant in light of black students' recent protests of the school's racist admissions policy. Since Afirmative Action ended, the black student population has plummeted across the University of California system, but especially at UCLA where the 2006 incoming freshmen class of nearly 5,000 students includes only 96 black students. (www.newsroom.ucla.edu)

This incident also betrays the universities' role under capitalism. Despite claiming to be "a place of learning" and of "freedom of speech," it is, in fact, where much of the racist ideology that justifies fascist oppression and imperialist wars abroad is created. UCLA is home to professor emeritus James Q. Wilson who, at Harvard in the early 1980's, co-authored the "Broken Windows" theory with George Kelling which called for zero tolerance strategies for dealing with crime in the inner cities. (Atlantic Monthly, March 1982)

In other words, this theory would intensify the level of racist oppression already experienced by Latino and black workers in urban centers. NYC's Mayor Giuliani put it into practice in the 1990's with his chief of police Bratton, who's now using it in L.A.

Additionally, these strategies have played well into the development of a police state since 9/11. The attack on this UCLA student is but one example. More recently was the brutal slaying of Sean Bell (his minivan shot 51 times) by undercover cops in Queens, NY (see front page).

The increased anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern racism generated in the U.S. is the same kind used to justify the genocide being committed by U.S. imperialism against our working-class brothers and sisters in the Middle East. From there to L.A., workers and students need to unite against racist terror and the capitalist system that spawns it.

U.S. Pols, Profits Behind Africa's First `World War'

Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, labeled the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Africa's "first world war." She should know. Her government and U.S. companies were deeply involved in this war which has killed more people than any other conflict since World War II. Tied to this war are such ruling-class figures as Presidents Bush, Sr. and Clinton, black politicians like Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan, and corporations like Chevron-Texaco, Royal Dutch-Shell and Coca-Cola.

It began a decade ago when forces led by pro-U.S. Uganda and Rwanda overthrew former dictator Mobutu. At the end of the Cold War, the CIA dropped Mobutu (just like it dropped Osama bin Laden), so he became a French imperialist agent. According to Lancet, the British Medical Journal, over three million have died in this war (some estimate nearly 10 million).

Despite a ceasefire reached two years ago, the killings continue between supporters of former rebel Jean-Pierre Bemba and President Kabila's government troops. Bemba is disputing Kabila's electoral victory in the second round of the presidential elections.

As reported last issue (11/29), conflicts in Africa are called "tribal" and "ethnic," but they really involve control of the continent's mineral wealth. The Congo is three-fourths the size of Western Europe.

The plundering by imperialist companies and their regional warlords of diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite (coltan), niobium, cobalt, copper, uranium and petroleum has taken a giant step forward. Some $6 million in raw cobalt alone -- an element of super-alloys essential for nuclear, chemical, aerospace and arms industries -- exits the DRC daily.

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) 2005 report, "The Curse of Gold," exposed Ugandan officials' and multi-national corporations' smuggling of gold through local rebel militias. The western companies targeted by HRW were Anglo-Ashanti Gold, a company headquartered in South Africa, and Metalor, a Swedish firm. But HRW didn't report that Anglo-Ashanti is partnered with Anglo-American, owned by the Oppenheimer family, and with Canada-based Barrick Gold (described below). London-based Anglo-American Plc. owns a 45% share in DeBeers, another Oppenheimer company, infamous for its near monopoly of the international diamond industry. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a director of Anglo-American, is a director of Royal Dutch/Shell and a member of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's Advisory Board. The report also suppressed the most damning evidence discovered by HRW researchers -- that Anglo-Ashanti sent its top lawyers into eastern DRC to aid arrested rebel militia leaders.

Bush, Sr. served as a paid advisor for Barrick Gold. Vernon Jordan, a Clinton lawyer, also served on Barrick's Board, a client of the lobbying group of another black politician, Andrew Young, former Mayor of Atlanta and Clinton's U.S. UN ambassador. Young was a key organizer of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. In October 1994 Clinton picked him to lead the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund. Young's lobbying group has among its clients Chevron-Texaco, Coke, Monsanto and the governments of Angola and Nigeria.

In Congo's Katanga (Shaba) province, militias and racketeering are linked to criminal networks of businessmen, including Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Billy Rautenbach, John Bredenkamp, and Marc Rich. U.S. diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman has profited from Katanga concessions since the Kennedy era. Lawrence Devlin, the old CIA station chief of Lubumbashi under Eisenhower, maintained Tempelsman's criminal rackets with direct ties to Zaire's former President Mobutu, and was subsequently employed by Tempelsman.

The Congo is also rich in coltan ore, whose refined product is tantalum. The U.S. is entirely dependent on foreign sources for tantalum, an enabling technology for capacitors essential to aerospace weaponry and every pager, cell phone, computer, VCR, CD player, P.D.A. and TV. U.S. import records show a dramatic jump in purchases from Rwanda and Uganda during the time they were smuggling tantalum and cobalt out of the Congo.

So while U.S. rulers make a big deal about the situation in Darfur (where China is extracting oil), they keep a low profile on the Congo. (Information from an article in Znet magazine by Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski.) More in a future issue.

Racism Killing Immigrant Construction Workers

NEW YORK CITY, Nov. 21 -- "His dream was to save money and go back home," said construction worker Julio Jara. But that dream was shattered forever when his brother, 25-year-old Clever Jara, fell 17 stories to his death near Union Square in Manhattan. The Ecuadorian immigrant was putting up netting to prevent bricks from falling during repair work on the building's façade. Witnesses said wind gusts may have caused him to slip from the building's ledge.

Twenty-four construction workers died in the city last year, "making it New York's most deadly profession, according to a federal Labor Department report." (NY Daily News. 11/2) "At least 98 construction workers in the city have been killed since October 2001, most of them in mishaps involving safety regulations or building codes." (Daily News, 11/5)

A good many of the construction workers repairing building facades here are Latino and other immigrants, forced to work under hazardous conditions in order to support their families, both here and in their home countries. Amid a building boom, scofflaw developers are allowed to "self-certify" themselves, so they simply ignore safety and pursue profits. When 27-year-old Arturo Gonzalez was struck and killed last year by an 800-pound steel girder, the Buildings Department "fined" the realtor and owner the grand sum of $1,400!

The racism of building contractors like Town Restoration -- the company fixing the above façade -- was evident in their ignoring safety precautions for these predominantly Latino immigrant workers. The company didn't have the proper permit for the project, maintained no on-site supervision and apparently had not provided Clever with the proper training for the job, given the absence of such certification. Workers trained for the rigs were not on the site.

According to the latest OSHA "report card" on construction-site deaths, 86% occur on non-union jobs. And the vast majority of these jobs involve immigrant laborers and therefore many cases are unreported. "When a union guy is injured, reports are filed," according to immigrant lawyer David Perecman, but when it involves undocumented workers, "the boss tells them if it still hurts in the morning go to the hospital and tell them you tripped and fell."

Alongside this is the racism of the construction unions which historically have refused to admit or organize black and Latino workers, so now the chickens come home to roost -- thousands of construction workers are unorganized and prey to the bosses lowering wages and conditions for all workers.

While anti-immigrant hysteria is whipped up against workers like Clever Jara, they end up sacrificing their lives for profiteering bosses who figure they can get away with it because such workers are "expendable" -- more evidence that a system that produces such needless deaths must be destroyed.

Savage Fascist Assault on Oaxaca Rebels Shows Capitalism Can't be Reformed

OAXACA, MEXICO, Nov. 28 -- Supported by thousands of federal troops, soldiers, judges, courts, jails and the Mexican bosses' Constitution, the fascist murderous governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz, declared: "There will be no pardon" for the striking teachers and their working-class supporters who fought the bosses for six months. Immediately he launched a witch-hunt against thousands of leaders and members of APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca).

Hundreds of houses were raided, APPO offices were burned down and hundreds were arrested. beaten and tortured. Hundreds more were arrested after Ruiz goons and federal troops occupying Oaxaca viciously attacked a November 25 APPO march.

Many of those arrested are in federal prisons outside Oaxaca. The entire capitalist state apparatus has been used to smash the Oaxaca rebels.

Workers and their allies are learning from these experiences about the fascist nature of the bosses' "democratic" mask to curb any mass fight-back.

Unfortunately, the APPO leadership (some of whom had illusions that the federal troops would control Ruiz's local goons) is just fighting to reform capitalism -- to get rid of Ruiz, for "more democracy," etc. Many workers and others also have illusions that Lopez Obrador and the opposition PRD are their friends. Obrador declared himself the "legitimate President" following the fraudulent "election" that made Calderón of the ruling PAN party the new President. All these politicians represent different versions of which capitalist and imperialist faction best to serve and how to best exploit workers.

The struggle in Oaxaca has revealed much about the class struggle; the need to fight racism against indigenous people; the militancy of teachers, urban and city workers and students; and the importance of international solidarity. But the main lesson is that capitalism cannot be reformed.

The only liberation for workers and their allies will grow from fighting for revolutionary power to build a communist society without any bosses and their racism. We need a mass PLP rooted in the working class to step up this struggle, from Oaxaca to L.A. to Karachi. And then workers and their allies won't "pardon" any bosses and their goons.

LETTERS

Racial Injustice and Ecological Survival

This fall our church, along with our interfaith coalition, sponsored a conference about sharpening the struggle against racism and imperialism by exposing how the rulers are destroying the world eco-system, leaving working people totally vulnerable to the resulting devastation. The participants were an interesting multi-racial mix of over 70 workers and students. The event grew from political discussions of our production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" last winter as a fund-raiser for Katrina victims.

For almost 40 years, the ruling class's ecology movement has focused on separating mainly white, "middle class" workers and students from the most exploited of our sisters and brothers with the line "Love the Earth; Ignore (or Screw) the Workers." In sharp contrast, the scholar-activist who keynoted our morning gatherings, showed how the essential nature of capitalism is to exploit both workers and the resources of the environment to the MAXIMUM in order to extract the highest possible profits from every economic activity.

Because this brutal system is now universally dominant worldwide, he explained that both increasingly deadly wars for resources and markets, AND the worst predictions of ecological collapse are inevitable under capitalism. While the speaker was very knowledgeable, it was clear from his presentations and discussions that he's been very active with workers and students most of his life, in Central America, South Africa and the U.S.

Students and teachers led a workshop about their experiences as volunteers in New Orleans this summer. They explained how the nationalist and reformist orientations of the sponsoring organizations divided and demoralized workers and students, exposed how volunteer work was being co-opted for bosses' profits, and described how the capitalists' roadblocks to rebuilding the entire city, excluding many life-long residents, proves that communist revolution is the only answer.

Parents made an inspiring presentation of their ongoing struggle to ensure that black and Latino children had every opportunity for admission to the city's few more effective schools. They were very open to linking their work to the larger movement (of which PLP is a part) to expose capitalist education as racist and imperialist, and to broaden the struggle to include more parents, teachers and students. We will apply these lessons in a meeting to fight the local city college's move to destroy a multi-racial educational complex that is already meeting kids' needs in a better way. Our PLP club is discussing how to make revolution primary in our presentation.

In two sharp workshops on immigrant-citizen solidarity, one minister movingly told about her church's courageous work to provide sanctuary for immigrant day-laborers and to support their efforts to organize against the worst forms of exploitation. A teacher-comrade then explained how the rulers' movement to attack immigrants is part of a larger ruling-class effort to build a mass base for much more repressive fascism to control ALL workers and to militarize the country for vastly expanded imperialist war. She made a well-received proposal that we push our mass organizations to organize a solidarity demonstration spanning the Mexico-U.S. borders.

Finally, one of our leading comrades, a black worker, gave an inspiring speech about the racist health crisis facing our community and how the city health department admits this but will not ask for funds to reopen our health center, despite RECORD corporate profits in the city.

We recruited several more workers to this struggle. Most important of all, ten more workers and students have become regular CHALLENGE readers, and we expanded our Party study group. This is the most vital work: convincing our friends and ourselves that none of these extreme difficulties can be resolved without communist revolution, and more concretely, what that will mean for our families, our friends and the thousands more friends we plan to make.

Red Churchmouse

GI Families Got Folded Flags; Bosses Get Billions

I've been in the active-duty army for four years and spent a year in Iraq. The problem is not just the way the military is run. More body armor, more troops, or pulling out from the cities is not going to make imperialist war safer for the working class. Civilians suffer the most deaths and injuries and they're not issued any protection by anyone. Pulling out of the cities would only make it easier for commanders to rain artillery down on innocent workers.

"Better" commanders would not improve the occupation for our class. As long as we're fighting wars for the profit and power of a capitalist class, our lives will be on the line in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the next stop in the "war on terror" - all for the imperialists' benefit, not ours.

Some troops pay the ultimate price and are given extraordinary honors, medals, and some receive citizenship posthumously. Those of us who survive gather to grieve and pay our respects. Military ceremonies make people think that troops die for something, like serving our country or our brothers and sisters in the combat zone. While the fallen did die for something, it's not freedom or something like that. It's for the U.S. bosses' money and power. Soldiers' loved ones receive folded flags and the bosses receive billions.

Knowing that our comrades died for no good reason is hard to swallow. While our feelings for the people who've passed are overwhelming, military funerals are just there to make people feel better about the war. The truth is they can replace any of us. All they need is more troops. To the capitalists, we're just bodies -- we're useful when alive to fight their wars, and a quick write-off when we expire.

If you survive, they tell you the VA is there for you. But they cut the budget for the VA, close down hospitals, and second-guess your injuries. Nightmares, flashbacks, anger, guilt and inability to function may haunt you the rest of your life but VA services don't live up to the hype. The capitalist rulers need our tax dollars from the VA to pay for their wars. They question your claims and make getting expensive treatments difficult. It's cheaper to get fresh young bodies to fill your place than to fix broken troops.

Ads and recruiters say join the army to have a career but machine gunners, tank mechanics, and Nuclear Biological Chemical specialists are only useful to the military. Civilian employers are looking for civilian experience. Uncle Sam will not help you find a job. Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the homeless are veterans, but the recruiter didn't tell you that. Unemployment is high today but it's even higher among veterans, especially blacks, Latinos, immigrants and the poor. Did you see any recruiting commercials mention that one? You might not have joined if you did. Then again, you may not have had a real choice.

Capitalism is behind all these things. Solving capitalist-created problems for good -- a war we and our class don't benefit from; harassment by the leadership; injuries caused by the profit wars; getting everyone decent employment; re-uniting all troops with our loved ones back home -- solving all this depends on ending class society, sweeping away imperialism with communist revolution. Nothing less can honor and avenge the deaths of our class brothers and sisters.

Red Vet

U.S. Ambassador, FMLN in Bed Together

The U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Douglas Barclay, surprised many with a speech openly ordering President Tony Saca to fight corruption throughout his government.

Barclay stated that Salvadorans "have the right to feel secure in their home and public places, not only those who can pay private security guards." This representative of U.S. imperialism mainly wants to "take the criminals off the streets and put them in the jails," meaning an upgrade in their police force, with better-paid agents, bigger jails, special courts and emergency taxes. He also reiterated that business owners must pay the taxes they owe.

This urgent need for national unity and political will among the rulers forced businessmen, politicians and the government to propose a series of new repressive laws against the entire working class, including an "anti-terrorist" statute, Barclay's fascist aim.

And those happiest with this call were none other than the former guerrillas now-turned-electoral-party FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front). Ironically, FMLN spokesperson Sigfrido Reyes said the ambassador's speech must have been written by a member of his party! FMLN leaders were satisfied with the ambassador's statement, adding, "We share in the urgent call for unity to resolve this problem...what the ambassador has stated is what we've been proposing in the matter of security."

Clearly the FMLN, ARENA and all the other electoral parties are defenders of capitalism and its profiteers, both the imperialists and the Salvadoran bosses. This exposes the dangerous illusion that the FMLN is the option for the working class. PLP understands that a party of the working class never would advocate a fascist state to fight social injustice, poverty and unemployment. Neither executioner, Barclay or Saca, will solve our problems. The solution is to uproot capitalism, this oppressive and exploitative system, organizing and fighting for a real communist revolution.

PLP'er, El Salvador

ESL'ers Link Profits To Global Warming

My ESL classes recently participated in a project about global warming. Three hundred students from 20 different classes prepared 30-minute presentations for the 4-hour event. These classes are part of the Education Program of Local 1199, Homecare Division, in New York City.

The project reflected the union's emphasis on Democratic Party candidates and issues, specifically Al Gore and his book. Most of the ideas about solutions to global warming from the union and the classrooms dealt with individual responsibility in limiting the use of fuels, hair sprays, air conditioners and other pollutants.

I presented a number of questions to my class: "Are we all the same in creating global warming?" "Who are the biggest users of coal, oil and natural gas?" "Why do they use so much fossil fuel?" "Why do big corporations turn a blind eye to global warming?" "Remember New Orleans. The consequences of global warming have been and will be catastrophic. What are governments doing, or not doing, to protect people?"

My students debated the answers to these questions, in English and Spanish. One student responded that, "we are people at the bottom. The people at the top are guilty of the greatest pollution, as they seek profits and exploit us. As long as capitalism exists, we can try to make the situation better, but we won't be able to solve the problem." "I agree with you, Jasmin," I responded. Many students applauded.

On the day of the project after my class finished their presentations in English, four of my students spoke in Spanish about solutions, Jasmin included. A teacher in the audience said, "I guess we need a revolution."

"That's right," I said. After the presentation several students in the audience came up to speak to my students. "What they don't say" said one student, "is the U.S., the richest country in the world, is the biggest polluter." "That's capitalism," said Jasmin.

Jasmin has become a CHALLENGE reader and will attend her first PLP study group Saturday. Yes, communist leadership makes a difference.

A comrade

Auto Bosses Invade Old Socialist Bloc
--At 1/5 The Wages

The fall of the Berlin Wall has proven to be deadly for millions of well-paid jobs in Western Europe and the U.S. The entry of countries in the former Soviet bloc into the European Union is proving a bonanza for Western and Asian auto companies. As tens of thousands of auto workers are laid off in the U.S., Britain, Germany, Italy and France, thousands of workers are being hired in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic -- at one-third to one-fifth the wages in Western Europe and the U.S.The French automaker Peugeot Citroen has just opened an $890 million factory in Trnava, Slovakia, while closing its plant near Coventry in Britain. The Czech Republic could nearly double its production to over a million cars in the next four years. "Carmakers from Europe, Asia and the U.S." are "pouring billions of dollars of fresh investment into local factories" in Eastern Europe. (NY Times, 11/25) Even further eastward, GM just opened a plant near St. Petersburg, Russia to assemble the Chevrolet Captiva, a mid-size SUV. Hyundai is building a huge new assembly plant in the Czech Republic and Ford is moving production of its subcompact Ka from Spain to southern Poland, where Fiat is also setting up shop.

So capitalism is marching full tilt into the old socialist bloc. Meanwhile, it pits these low-wage workers against the higher-paid ones in Western Europe and the U.S. Capitalism's bottom line, searching for ever-higher profits, always trumps workers' lives. All the more reason for auto workers to unite across all borders against their common enemies among these companies.

Sammy Scheer
1954- 2006

"It's O.K. to mess up, but never to give up."

That lesson is what one of Sammy Scheer's teenage nieces said she learned from knowing her uncle. That's how all who knew and loved him would sum up his life -- no matter what circumstances you find yourself in, no matter what problems might beset you, no matter what mistakes you might make, never give up.

Sammy tragically died of a heart attack recently at the age of 52. He had the good fortune to be born into a family that was filled with love and communist ideas. His father, Morty, was one of the founders and his mother Phyllis was a member of the Progressive Labor Party. It is a testimony to Sammy that no matter what situation he faced, he never forgot what he learned from those two wonderful parents and from his Party.

In the early seventies, Sammy attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and became known as a great anti-racist fighter. He joined the Challenge Corps, PLP's youth group, and helped organize anti-Vietnam war marches and demonstrations. He became a leader of high school students and inspired many throughout the city.

On weekends, Sammy loved to take friends to Wo-Hop, a favorite local Chinese restaurant where people could sit for hours and talk and laugh. Sammy had tons of friends.

As a teenager, he began singing and playing the guitar with friends and at various political events. He was an accomplished guitarist with a melodic voice. He loved to sing songs about class struggle, love, about people fighting back, as well as about the beauty he saw around him. His favorites were Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan as well as coal mining songs and those on the PLP record. He did a mean rendition of "Clifford Glover," describing the murder of a black youth in Brooklyn and how the cops got off.

Sammy was a long-time member of the PLP. As a young man in New York, Sammy was the comrade you could count on. He organized on construction sites, facing threats to his life by right-wing goons. He strongly defended comrades under attack and defended many youth in Brooklyn in demonstrations against police brutality. He would fly from Houston to Washington to march in our annual May Day celebration.

Even as he helped raise his own two children, Rebecca and Matthew, he looked on all the other children that crossed his path as deserving of the same attention.

He continued to impart his ideas to his extended family, friends and co-workers. His wife Cyd told us that one of the things she most appreciated in Sammy was his ability to turn many of her family members in an anti-racist direction, overcoming the racist ideas that surrounded them from having grown up in the South.

One of his co-workers, a black man, spoke at his memorial service in Houston with great reverence. He said that Sammy's "world outlook" treated him in a way that he hadn't experienced with other white people in the South. Another co-worker, of Iranian descent, said much the same thing, relative to being treated as a human being with similar aspirations, not as someone "different" or "foreign."

Sammy became a hospital worker in New York and continued in that job after he moved to Houston, organizing throughout. All those who spoke at the memorial service in Houston kept returning to one universal description of Sammy: he was a "good guy." Often this comes across as a cliché, but in Sammy's case he truly was a "good guy," in the deepest sense of those words.

Sammy will be very much missed, but in the manner in which he lived his life he has bequeathed to us an understanding we all should treasure: yes, it's O.K. to mess up, but we must never give up.

REDEYE REDEYE

Capitalism, not culture, is black oppressor

For, decades, scholars and opinion-makers have been seduced by cultural explanations for economic problems. Recently, comedian Bill Cosby has caught the bug, leading him to inveigh against aspects of black culture he views as intimately linked to problems among African-Americans, from poverty to crime and incarceration.

Cosby is merely the latest and most visible in a long chain of cultural critics. Researchers Charles Murray (before turning to genetic explanations) and columnist Thomas Sowell have been making the "bad culture" argument about African-Americans for decades....but....

Black poverty fell 10.6 percentage points from 1993 to 2000 (from 33.1 to 22.5 percent) to reach its lowest level on record. Black child poverty fell an unprecedented 10.7 percentage points in five years (from 41.9 percent in 1995 to 31.2 percent in 2000).

The "culture of poverty" argument cannot explain these trends. Poor black people did not develop a "culture of success" in 1993 and then abandon it for a "culture of failure" in 2001.

What really happened was that in the 1990s, the job market finally tightened up to the point where less-advantaged workers had a bit of bargaining clout....

The record is clear: When economic opportunities are available to black Americans, they take them. When opportunities are scarce they fall behind, and culture has very little to do with it. (Washington Post, 11/13)

US aims to overthrow elected gov't

The US is arming Mahmoud Abba's Fatah organization for a confrontation with Hamas that risks plunging Gaza into all-out civil war. It wants thousands of rifles to be sent to Fatah from Egypt and Jordan and is seeking to persuade Israel to permit the Badr brigade, a pro-Fatah militia stationed in Jordan, to cross into Gaza. (GW, 11/23)

US needed rubber, bought Brazilian slaves

Men were needed in the Amazon, 3,000 miles away, to harvest rubber for the Allied war effort, he was told, and it was his patriotic duty to serve.

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, Mr. Dos Santos and hundreds of other poor Brazilians who were dragooned into service as rubber soldiers are still in the Amazon....

"We were duped, and then abandoned and forgotten,".....

The program originated in an agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut the United States off from its main source of rubber, in Malaya, and President Roosevelt persuaded Brazil's dictator, Getúilo Vargas, to fill that strategic gap in return for millions of dollars in loans, credits and equipment....

More than 55,000 people, almost all of them from the drought-ridden and poverty-stricken northeast, were sent to the Amazon.....

The work was exhausting, dangerous and unhealthy:...nearly half perished before Japan surrendered in September 1945.

"...Guys died of malaria, yellow fever, beriberi and hepatitis..." (NYT,11/23)

`Anti-terror' database logs war protests

An anti-terrorist database used by the Defense Department...included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations, newly disclosed documents show.

One tip in the database in February 2005, for instance, noted that "a church service for peace" would be held in the New York City area the next-month. Another entry noted that antiwar protesters would be holding "nonviolence training" sessions at unidentified churches in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

"Veterans for Peace is a peaceful organizations,"...[one] entry said, but added there was potential that future protests "could become violent." (NYT, 11/21)

`9/11 terror' swung jury against detainee

A California man whose arrest, detention and prosecution raised questions about the limits of government antiterror powers after Sept. 11, 2001...was detained 10 days after the attacks...

Federal prosecutors said he had lied about his association with...hijacker, Khalid al-Midhar....the judge removed on claims of bias.

When the case finally reached trial this year, the jury spent six days in heated deliberations but remained deadlocked, with a single juror voting not guilty.

But in a shark reversal of sentiment, a new jury of nine women and three men took less than seven hours over two days before finding Mr. Awadallah guilty....

One major difference between the two trials was the emotional response to the Sept. 11 attacks....

This time, jury said they kept those feelings out of the jury room. (NYT, 11/18)

DVD Review:
`World Trade Center' Movie Promotes Selfless Service for U.S. Fascism

On the surface "World Trade Center" ("WTC") is a beautifully produced movie that tugs on your heart strings. Beneath the surface "WTC" pushes pro-cop, super patriotism, pro-war messages along with healthy doses of religious mysticism and sexism, each of which the U.S. ruling class needs to pave the way for increased fascism.

"WTC" follows two NYC Port Authority policemen who respond to the 9/11 attacks and get caught under the rubble of the World Trade towers. Much of the movie focuses on rookie officer Jimeno and Sergeant McLoughlin talking while trapped.

Like many films and TV shows about police, "WTC" tries to show that these thugs are really "just workers" too. The movie wants viewers to sympathize with cops who it claims are underpaid, insufficiently trained and lied to by the bosses. While everyone who works under capitalism struggles, workers should not feel bad for class traitors, like cops and scabs, who survive by making the rest of our lives worse. "WTC" obscures the role of police under capitalism. It is their job to carry out racist attacks against black and Latino youth as well as attack and jail workers who fight back.

Even if you don't like cops, there are times the movie forces you to root for the cops to return safely. The movie often cuts to scenes with Jimeno's pregnant wife and both officers' small children. Seeing these scenes makes you want to feel bad for two cops who were harassing homeless people and racially profiling teens in the first few scenes.

"WTC" also attempts to inspire the working class to serve U.S. bosses and fight in imperialist wars. People in various countries are shown saddened and horrified by the 9/11 attacks seen on their TVs. "WTC" gives the impression that people worldwide empathize with the U.S. government and support whatever actions it takes in response to 9/11 (and that they will even throw flowers at U.S. invaders!)

The whole movie follows Jimeno and McLoughlin because they are multi-racial poster people for national service. The U.S. ruling class has failed so far to use 9/11 to mobilize the working class to join the military, police or perform other types of national service.

One hero in "WTC" is a U.S. Marine who only refers to himself by his rank, never giving his first name. The movie emphasizes "the mission" over the character's own self-preservation. As the Marine is walking around the rubble of the towers, he tells someone over his cell phone, "A lot of good men will have to avenge this." At the end of the movie you learn that the Marine re-enlisted and served two tours of duty in Iraq. "WTC" constantly tries to rehash feelings and anger about 9/11, using examples of selfless service, to inspire patriotic fervor and allegiance to the U.S. government.

Throughout "WTC," different people talk about avenging "them," "those bastards" and "the evildoers." But the movie never mentions who "they" are and doesn't discuss the root causes of 9/11, leaving viewers no alternative but to believe that the "war on terror" is justified.

"WTC" uses religion as an ideological prop for its pro-war message. The Marine is supposedly called to NYC by god. When he reaches the rubble he looks at the smoke from the ruins and proclaims that god put up a curtain to shield everyone from what they're not prepared to see. However the anti-scientific director omits the smoke's most significant effect -- hazardous pollution that is still killing 9/11 rescuers and lower Manhattan residents -- and instead emphasizes religion. The message is: don't question things because god works in mysterious ways.

"WTC" also aims to win the U.S. working class to sexism. "WTC" focuses on the cops' wives falling apart. "WTC" didn't spend time showing how hard these women worked to raise their children and keep their households together. Instead, "WTC" shows other male relatives comforting the wives while they're hysterical.

Many things happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Many of them showed the potential for a communist society -- working-class people helping each other and addressing each other based on need, not money, "race" or gender. But the U.S. ruling class wants to channel workers' instinct to help each other into supporting war and fascism. "WTC" helps them do just that.

Bosses' Culture Root of Worldwide Mass Murder of Women

On Nov. 25, activities and marches in many cities worldwide celebrated the International Day of Non-Violence Against Women. The day memorializes the 1960 murder of the three Mirabal sisters by goons of Dominican dictator Trujillo.

In El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, Central America, there were mass marches and other public actions protesting the countless murder of women in the last few years. Marchers in El Salvador also protested discrimination against, and sexual harassment of, women workers.

Violence against women is an international epidemic which has worsened in this period of endless wars, fascist terror and drug gangs:

* Recently, four prostitutes were brutally murdered and thrown in a ditch near Atlantic City, NJ.'s glittering casinos. A serial killer is suspected.
* In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, hundreds of women have been killed and raped in the last few years and the killers have never been brought to justice.
* In El Salvador, 314 women have been murdered from January to August this year, compared to 305 for the entire 2005. Most have gone unsolved.
* In Honduras, some 500 women have been killed in the last three years -- 11% by their husbands or boyfriends and 23% killed by criminal drug gangs. The number of women murdered in Guatemala is even higher.

The sex slavery trade is another major cause of worldwide violence against women. It's a $12 billion-a-year business, second only to the drug trade, involving over one million women and young girls, mainly from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe. It is estimated brothels make $15,000-a-year profit from each one of those women.

Many of the November 25 activities against these "feminicides" called on the authorities to do something about them. This is like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop. The only measures the rulers will take are more police-state attacks against workers in general (see letter from El Salvador, p. 6). Others tend to blame men in general for these crimes, instead of the culture of capitalism which depicts women as sexual objects and creates the basis for this onslaught.

Communists must redouble our efforts to fight this anti-women culture and the male supremacist attitudes it builds, showing how the rulers turn men and women workers against each other, weakening our entire class, while reaping huge profits from the super-exploitation of women workers.

CAPTION FOR PAKISTAN PICTURE

In Pakistan, women had to fight against sexist Hudood laws that restricted them from confronting men who had raped them. These laws required a woman to have 4 male Muslim witnesses to prove she was raped or face adultery charges herself for making such a claim. Women activists won a law that would allow them to bring these charges to secular courts instead. These crumbs to the struggle against sexism won't outlaw the extreme oppression of women.

PLP HISTORY: Anti-Vietnam War PL'ers Whack HUAC

Cries of "U.S. get out of Vietnam!" resounded through the halls of Congress on August 16, 1966 when members of the year-old Progressive Labor Party challenged the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) attempt to crush the expanding anti-Vietnam War movement. Police dragged anti-war witnesses kicking and screaming from the hearing room while their constant shouting interrupted the HUAC session (see above photo).

The witchhunt coincided with President Lyndon Johnson's and the U.S. ruling class's escalation of the imperialist war against the workers and peasants of Vietnam. The rulers subpoenaed a half dozen PLP members, figuring they could split the movement through a red-baiting attack on its most advanced section. But HUAC only succeeded in exposing itself, helping PLP to spread our communist ideas. The mass media was forced to report our activities and photograph our militancy.

As HUAC announced it would sponsor legislation that "would make it a crime to aid anyone engaged in hostilities against the United States," (NY Times, 8/17/66), hundreds of demonstrators streamed into Washington on a mid-summer work-day to protest the witch-hunt.

When the first "friendly" witness, Philip Luce -- a stoolpigeon and former member of PL -- took the stand, a PLP member stood up and yelled, "Let's stop this fink testimony and get the U.S. out of Vietnam!" The cops immediately dragged him from the hearing room as he continued to scream, "U.S. get out of Vietnam!" to much applause. A photo depicting the PL'er with his mouth wide open shouting that anti-imperialist slogan appeared on the front page of every major newspaper in the country.

With signs painted in the halls proclaiming, "Whack HUAC!" the committee was made to look like Keystone Kops in newspaper cartoons and soon lost its effectiveness, eventually being disbanded. The PLP-led action helped spur the anti-war movement to greater and more advanced heights, influencing many to drop the liberal "Stop the bombing" slogan and adopt PLP's answer: "U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Vietnam Now!" It also put the nail in HUAC's coffin, which the ruling class abandoned as causing more trouble than it was worth to them.