This is a three-week issue of CHALLENGE. We will return to our bi-weekly schedule with the issue going to press Jan, 14, 2009. We wish our readers a new year full of struggles against this racist crisis-prone capitalist system which aim to sink the world’s working class into more misery and wars. We also want to thanks our readers for their response to our call for financial help for CHALLENGE. Please continue supporting your revolutionary communist newspaper.
Bosses’ New Year’s Resolution: Win Workers To War And Make Us Pay
U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a major financial crisis and increasing military rivalry with the rising power of China, Russia and the European Union pose both grave dangers and big opportunities in 2009. U.S. workers — with black and Latino workers hit the hardest because of racism — face massive job losses and pay cuts (as in the Bush/Obama auto "rescue"). All this is worsened by waves of foreclosures, deportations and police terror. The U.S. war machine, with its racist disregard for human life, will expand operations in Afghanistan and continue occupying Iraq.
The entire Middle East, is, in fact, headed for wider conflict as economically-troubled imperialists and regional powers compete more fiercely for its cheap oil. [The low cost of Mid-East oil raises the risk of war. Driven to seek the highest rate of return, capitalists fight fiercely to control the least expensive resources.]
Other, potentially nuclear, tinderboxes range from the Pakistan-India border to Korea to the Taiwan Strait. But our working-class Party can grow by exposing and organizing class struggle against economic misery and imperialist war as inevitable products, goals in fact, of the profit system. (See page 2 on workers’ fight-back in the Great Depression.)
Obama’s New Deal Has Same Aim As Roosevelt’s: Mobilizing For World War...
One focus must be Obama’s deceitful 3-million job, trillion-dollar "stimulus." Like the bank and auto bailouts (supervised by Obama adviser Volcker), under which the rulers are wielding fascistic state power to discipline finance and industry, Obama’s scheme has a political ulterior motive. He seeks to win the masses who elected him to collaborate more closely with the war-bent rulers.
Obama hopes to copy Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), who in the Depression put millions to work in rock-bottom-wage federal projects, which proved to be political rather than economic triumphs. After launching the New Deal in 1933, FDR won 46 states in his 1936 re-election. Portraying the government as savior and protector helped FDR boost U.S. troop strength from 400,000 in 1940 to 14,000,000 at the height of World War II.
Today, Obama wants to restore patriotism, especially among the young. The mass movement against U.S. genocide in Vietnam, with advanced political and organizational leadership from PLP, rightfully discredited mindless flag-waving. Bush blew his 9/11 chance to bring it back. Obama thinks his "rebuild-the-nation" scheme can.
...As U.S. Rulers Plan Their Bloody ‘Big Bailout’
The vast future military undertakings for which Obama must lay ideological groundwork reach far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The National Intelligence Council (NIC), the government’s "center for mid-term and long-term strategic thinking," has just issued a report titled "Global Trends 2025." Referring to rising powers China, Russia, and India, it says any one of them could invade Middle Eastern oil fields:
"Energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case this could lead to interstate conflicts" prompting U.S. response: "the need for the U.S. to act as regional balancer in the Middle East will increase."
Another scenario involves a face-off between vast alliances, "Anti-China antagonism in the U.S. and Europe reaches a crescendo; protectionist trade barriers are put in place. Russia and China enter a marriage of convenience; other countries — India and Iran — rally around them. The lack of any stable bloc — whether in the West or the non-Western world — adds to growing instability and disorder."
Then again say the war planners, it could be that "conflict breaks out between China and India over access to vital resources." "Global conflagration" could result, according to the NIC. And pointing at Pakistan and perhaps Israel, the NIC warns of minor leaguers sparking a nuclear holocaust before a clash of major powers, "Episodes of low-intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict."
We may not be able immediately to keep the rulers from putting millions into federal "stimulus" workfarms or army barracks. But we can organize in Obama’s coming slave-labor infrastructure projects and in the communities, schools, colleges, and industries that provide the Pentagon cannon-fodder, ideas, and material. Doing so is essential to developing the revolutionary communist force that will some day bury the money-grubbing system that impoverishes and slaughters workers.
1930s Depression: Red-Led Working Class Fought Like Hell
Politicians, policy-makers and pundits are calling the current economic crisis the most serious since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The similarities between then and now are remarkable: skyrocketing racist unemployment, massive layoffs and evictions, attacks on immigrants and general police terror. Then as now, the government bailed out banks and corporations while leaving workers to starve. Also, while then and now war and fascism threatened the world, one important difference is that in the 1930s the U.S. was a rising economic power; today U.S. imperialism is in decline and fighting two wars. But the difference between the two periods to be dealt with here is the working-class response to these attacks.
In the 1930’s working-class militancy boiled over. There were strikes, mass marches and battles with the cops and National Guard at nearly every turn. Now, because of the collapse of the old communist movement, class-consciousness has been greatly diminished. Working-class response is at its lowest ebb — and the bosses would love to keep it that way.
PLP aims to revive class-consciousness and working-class militancy, and simultaneously link them to the need for communist revolution. It is useful, therefore, to review how our class, led by communists, fought back against starvation and death.
Anti-Racist Struggle
The capitalist economy crashed in 1929 and every country worldwide, except the Soviet Union, was engulfed in the Great Depression. Over 17 million U.S. workers were unemployed, one-third of a 50-million labor force. Capitalism has always relied on racist terror; the 1930s were no exception. Black workers suffered higher levels of unemployment and were viciously hunted and murdered by racist groups like the KKK.
The U.S. Communist Party (CP) was at ground zero when this crisis struck, having been building a mass base for a decade. Among its most consistent fights was the one against racism. Whether against evictions, wage-cuts or unemployment, the fight against racism was central because communists understood that capitalism required the super-exploitation of black workers and counted on racism to divide and weaken the working class.
Even in the Deep South, the CP organized the Sharecroppers Union, which, in rural Alabama in 1933, successfully blocked evictions and forced plantation owners to cancel sharecroppers’ debts. (1) The CP also famously took on the racist court system in the Scottsboro case (see box).
The CP gained much confidence amongst black workers in these anti-racist battles. Today, PLP also recognizes the central importance of this fight.
Fighting Unemployment, Scabs and Homelessness
During this period, the CP led the way in organizing unemployed workers. The central demand was for unemployment relief and insurance. On March 6, 1930, the CP led an estimated 1,250,000 workers into the streets, from New York to Detroit to Los Angeles, demonstrating against unemployment and for jobs. In NYC, 25,000 cops attacked 110,000 workers in Union Square.
Then on July 4, 1930, the CP helped organize the National Unemployment Council (UC), which grew to branches in 46 states. The CP and UC organized militant actions against evictions and foreclosures. "Squads of neighbors were organized to bar the way to the dispossessing officers. Whole neighborhoods were frequently mobilized to take part in this mutual assistance…"(2) In New York City alone, the UC moved 77,000 evicted families back into their homes."(3) The same tactic was widely used throughout the urban Midwest.
Even before the Depression, in 1929 CP’ers organized rent strikes in Harlem. In 1933, when New York City cops attempted to evict rent-strike movement leaders, as many as 4,000 people took to the streets in pitched battles with the police.(4)
The government estimated there were 1,000 home foreclosures each day in 1933.(5) In the first eight months of 1932, 185,794 families in New York City were served with eviction notices. Millions nationwide became part of the army of homeless that slept on streets, living in "Hoovervilles" (shanty-towns named for Herbert Hoover, president until 1933). Like many liberals blame the current crisis on Bush, Hoover was targeted then. Like the PLP, the CP explained that capitalism creates crises, no matter who is president.
Meanwhile, farm foreclosures and abandonments drove 60% of the population from the Dust Bowl region of the Midwest and Southwest.(6) But here, too, farmers organized. At a bank auction of a foreclosed homestead, area farmers would gather while one farmer would "bid" $1.00; no one else bid and the farm would be "sold" and handed back to the owner.
Fighting For Job Security
"For the first time in history there was virtually no scabbing during a depression, the unemployed instead appearing on the picket line under the banner of the Unemployed Council, helping win the strikes of those still working."(7)
While millions of unemployed workers were fighting for jobs, those still working and in unions were also under attack. Then, as now, the old American Federation of Labor (AFL) union leaders were in bed with the bosses and helped pacify workers, getting them to accept wage-cuts almost without resistance. The communists came up with the answer: organize the unskilled workers in the basic industries — auto, steel, electrical, etc. — into industrial unions (not the old AFL craft type), black and white, men and women.
This sparked a sea change in the U.S. labor movement. The communists led the organization of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). In the winter of 1936-37, workers led by communists and left-wing militants seized GM plants in Flint, Michigan, and "sat in" for 44 days and nights. Thousands of workers supported them from the outside. When Roosevelt had the National Guard aiming their machine guns at the strikers, 40,000 workers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan arrived to surround the plants. They told GM that any attack would mean the destruction of $1 billion worth of machinery. GM surrendered. The workers won union bargaining rights, an 8-hour day and a wage increase.
CIO-organized sit-down strikes swept the country, from electrical factories to Woolworth 5&10-cent stores. Within four years, four million workers were organized into the CIO. Big Steel fell without a fight, the bosses fearing their mills would be held hostage. This was the high-water mark for the U.S. labor movement.
Unfortunately, the militant reformers in the CP omitted one vital ingredient in this struggle: the fight for revolution and state power. So within a decade the ruling class, still holding state power, was able to turn the clock back.
What Went Wrong?
In the U.S. the CP attempted to take up the torch set ablaze by workers in the Soviet Union who had seized state power from the capitalists. While the CP led many heroic battles, it made a critical error avoided by its Soviet counterparts. While leading militant class struggle, the Bolsheviks simultaneously linked it to, and organized for, the final goal — communist revolution. The CPUSA, however, failed to tie the struggles here to the need for a revolution. In essence, the CP became militant reformers.
Indeed, the militancy of U.S. workers so frightened the bosses that it forced them to respond to the upheavals with President Franklin Roosevelt’s "New Deal": the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, the 8-hour day, Social Security, welfare, etc. This was the U.S. ruling class’s attempt to prevent potentially revolutionary communist ideas from becoming mass ideas. While all these reforms were credited to Roosevelt, they resulted from mass, communist-led working-class struggle.
Unfortunately, without much CP opposition, the rulers’ plan worked. The working-class was disarmed and misled into believing that capitalism could be made to work for them.
In a sense, workers now are reaping what the CP sowed then. As always under capitalism, the reforms were either reversed or slowly eaten away. The 8-hour day has been replaced by workers needing two jobs or overtime to get by. Unionization has shrunk from 35% of the private workforce to 7%, abetted by companies’ active union-busting and the betrayals of today’s anti-communist union leaders. States are cutting unemployment insurance, leaving the millions of the newly jobless in dire straits. Less than 40% of the unemployed are even eligible for benefits. The minimum wage is nowhere near enough to support a family.
The PLP applauds the CP’s historic role as a leader of militant working-class actions. We are dedicated to reawakening the mass militancy and class-consciousness seen in the 1930’s. However, we are also dedicated to NOT repeat the CP’s errors. In every strike and soup kitchen, unemployment line and anti-war, and anti-financial crisis demonstration, PLP’s message is clear: the working-class doesn’t need reforms. What we need is to arm our class with revolutionary communist ideas and our newspaper CHALLENGE is our main tool in doing so.J
Footnotes:
1. Winter, Carl, 1969. "Unemployment Struggles of the Thirties", Political Affairs magazine September, as reprinted in Highlights of a Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party USA, Philip Bart, Chief Editor, New York: International Publishers, 1979. Winter, 1969, p. 75
2. Winter, p. 61
3. Boyer & Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 260)
4. Lawson, Ronald, with assistance of Mark Naison. 1986. The Tenant Movement in New York City 1904-1984, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lawson, 1986, pp. 104-5)
5. Fish, Gertrude, editor. 1979. The Story of Housing, New York: Macmillan, sponsored by the Federal National Mortgage Association. Fish, 1979, p. 195
6. Foner, Eric and Garraty, John, 1991. Reader’s Companion to American History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Foner and Garraty, 1991, p. 303
7. Boyer, p. 261
Communists Led Worldwide Fight vs. Scottsboro Legal Lynching
On March 21, 1931, nine black teenagers, the youngest being 13, were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama, falsely charged with raping two white women on a freight train. Legal lynching has historically been part of the racist Jim Crow system that dominated the U.S. since the Civil War, especially in the South. "The Scottsboro Case," the most infamous case of legal lynching, exposed the U.S. ruling class throughout the world. This charge was later repudiated, especially by one of the women, Ruby Bates. But after a few days, a kangaroo trial still sentenced the Scottsboro 9 to the electric chair.
The Communist Party rallied to their defense, sending the veteran communist lawyer Joseph Brodsky to defend the victims. While it was fought back and forth in the courts, the communists launched a national and international campaign to free the nine young men, organizing demonstrations, marches and rallies in cities across the country and abroad. The case became one of the most famous battles against racist frame-ups in U.S. history.
All this was occurring simultaneously with mass movements of the unemployed and among industrial workers for unionization, led by communists, reflecting the great ferment in the working class battling the effects of capitalism’s Great Depression.
Forced by heavy mass pressure, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial, on the grounds that in the original "trial" the accused had inadequate legal counsel. Only after the communists’ campaign had drawn worldwide protests did various reformist organizations — the NAACP, the Urban League and the A.F. of L. — join the international struggle. Great respect for the communists grew among masses of black people.
The fight saved the Scottsboro 9 from the electric chair but the savage Southern courts sentenced them to prison terms up to 99 years. It was only in 1950 that the last of the young men was released.
The case became known around the world, especially among the workers in imperialist colonies. This became a powerful force that somewhat restrained the racist lynchers and exposed U.S. rulers as among the most racist in the world. The Scottsboro fight serves as a telling lesson that anti-racist forces organizing mass militant struggle among all sections of the working class can return blow for blow against the rulers’ racist oppression.
Fight For Working-Class Unity Against Racist Murder
BROOKLYN, December 14 — A multi-racial group of hundreds of workers gathered for a march and vigil in a local park in Bushwick to condemn the racist murder of 31-year-old Latin immigrant, José Sucuzhañay. José and his brother, Ecuadorean immigrants, were brutally attacked with a bottle and bat by a group yelling racist and anti-gay insults (confusing their brotherly embrace as a gay act). This is the second such racist incident in the area in the last month since Marcelo Lucero, another Ecuadorean immigrant, was knifed to death by a racist gang in Suffolk County, Long Island recently.
The multi-racial aspect of the march was an important way of countering the media barrage trying to divide black and Latin workers and youth because supposedly Sucuzhañay’s killers were black. Racism, no matter who carries it out, is an attack against the entire working class.
The march and vigil were called by a coalition of groups, including Make the Road NY, the Ecuadorian Alliance and the Anti-Violence Project. The mood of the marchers was both somber and angry. Only the organizers of the event and politicians were allowed to speak at the rally, trying to calm down the anger of the crowd.
One speaker, politician José Rivera, was the only one to show some anger but his aim is still to channel the masses to the dead-end politics of the Democratic Party. The politicians blamed families for teaching hate, a few bad people and the broken immigration system as the roots of hate crimes. They called on the protesters to "trust" them to get "justice" in our "great democratic system."
Immediately an organizer of the event warned speakers that this event was organized simply as a call to end violence, hate and anti-immigrant, anti-gay insults. In spite of the attempted restrictions, numerous times militant protesters shouted chants of outrage. Members of PLP sold 200 CHALLENGES.
As the march began protesters ended the "vigil" by chanting loudly, showing how workers understand the importance of fighting back. Marchers were met with chants and appreciation as we made our way to the site of the killing.
Immediately after the attack PLP and friends began to talk about the attack in our classes and community organizations. In two classes the students and the teacher talked about the relationship between the racist attacks on immigrants and the growth of the immigrant community in Bushwick, and the division between largely Latin and black workers here.
They spoke about the absolute need to build working-class consciousness and unity as we fight back against skyrocketing rents and gentrification. Bushwick has one of the highest rates of foreclosure in NYC. Our schools and Adult-Ed classes are already feeling the effects of the budget cuts and thousands of workers are losing their jobs. The working class cannot allow racist crimes and divisions to stop us from fighting back.
With our friends and co-workers, we began to call for mass action. Our daily work in our classes and organizations, an expanding network of 50 CHALLENGE readers and a new study group helped us motivate people. However, the community leaders quickly mobilized behind closed doors to limit anger, rank-and-file initiative and working-class consciousness, manipulating protesters to be obedient to the capitalist system.
As PLP continues to organize in Bushwick we are making progress as our friends more fully understand how capitalism works and why communist revolution is necessary.J
Hospital Workers Storm Bosses’ Office Over Pay Cuts, Layoffs
BROOKLYN, December 18 — Ten days ago, workers throughout a Brooklyn hospital stormed the Human Resources department shouting "No Layoffs!" — refusing to forego their 3% wage increase. This hospital’s workers are largely black, Latino and immigrant, who, because of racism, suffer disproportionately from the bosses’ economic meltdown, making their fight an anti-racist one as well.
This militant action was answering the hospital bosses’ "request" that healthcare workers give up the upcoming 3% increase because Governor Paterson is cutting State funding. This would also lay off healthcare workers statewide, in line with the bosses’ financial crisis.
The 1199 SEIU leadership "rejected" this wage-cut "request" because it didn’t include hospital CEO and managers also being cut!
Before this action, workers met to discuss a plan of action. Some wanted to forego the 3% increase in order to save jobs. Others felt giving up the wage increase wouldn’t prevent layoffs. One worker stated, "In 2007, the union leadership re-opened the contract by foregoing the 4% wage increase due that July. The hospital bosses saved one million dollars and then reduced the workforce the following June."
Then the workers voted overwhelmingly for the "walk-in."
While, the 1199 SEIU leadership is always boasting about being a powerful and effective union, it has no plan of action to fight the threatened attacks by the hospital bosses and Governor Paterson.
The union leadership’s close collaboration with the hospital bosses and politicians have encouraged workers to believe that capitalist reform programs can save jobs. But the nature of the capitalist healthcare industry compels the bosses to constantly cut jobs. It drives small institutions to close, creating a huge pool of unemployed workers and reaping greater profits for the bosses.
PLP’ers must bring our communist politics to this battle against-short staffing violations in patient care and to maintain their benefits. In doing that, we can win them to see the real solution to rotten healthcare and racist wage-cuts: communism.
10,000 Hit LA Racist School Cuts, Call for Strike
Los Angeles, December 10 — Over 10,000 teachers and students held a city-wide demonstration protesting cuts in teachers’ health benefits, increase in class size, a hiring freeze and other possible cuts. At one rally in front of the Los Angeles district office over 800 teachers and students heard a Latina high school student speaker ask: "What kind of a system bails out banks but not schools, and puts profits over human life?"
In a school district that has 74% Latino and 11% black students, these cuts are un-deniably racist and we must make fighting racism the central issue in fighting these cuts while uniting teachers, students and parents.
Prelude to a Demonstration
A few weeks before the demonstration high school students produced and distributed over 800 PL flyers for their fellow students, along with over 500 CHALLENGES. While calling for a united strike, the leaflet emphasized the fight against capitalism and racism, pointing out that the crisis wasn’t just the fault of a few greedy speculators, but was the inevitable result of a system based on competition for maximum profit.
In making signs for the demonstration, a student said we should take the word capitalism out of the leaflet, but another student declared, "No, we have to say ‘fight capitalism’ because that’s what we are really fighting against." This led to a deeper discussion of the nature of the cutbacks. "The capitalist system is in crisis and they want us to pay for it — I say no way," a student added. Another said, "This is part of a longer and bigger fight."
Days before the rally several teams of students went to classrooms with flyers and a petition, which stated, "We do not want to pay for the current financial problems of the city, state or county....Why are major banks being bailed out, and not schools?" Students collected about 600 signatures.
On the day of the demonstration students held a banner reading, "Black Brown Unity Fight the Cutbacks" in front of their school. They then marched with teachers to the local district office. High school students led chants and helped distribute over 600 PLP leaflets and CHALLENGES calling for a strike against the cuts and for building PLP. Many people at the demonstration agreed that a system that bails out the banks but not the workers has to go. During the demonstration, a student delegation tried to present the petition to the local school bosses. But the local representative allowed only one student in, together with a teacher.
Meanwhile, several dozen teachers and students stood outside directly in front of the glass door shoving picket signs against the doors and windows. The frightened representative said that students had to evacuate the walkway before he would receive the petition. The protesters moved and the student representative presented the petition.
Support for Strike Grows
In union meetings, PL members and supporters fought for a strike against the cuts and the bailout. We received a lot of support for a strike as rank-and-file anger grew. In the union’s House of Representatives, the "fake lefty" vice-president attacked a call for a strike in a motion against statewide cuts. A PL’er responded that a strike would give the workers a taste of what a united working class can do in the face of the bosses’ crisis. He said that we must not accept attacks on other school workers in exchange for less cuts for teachers.
At the demonstration, union members and students chanted, "Racist budget cuts mean…A war budget means…Capitalism means…fight back!" A union hack yelled "Stop saying those chants and stick to the union chants." Everyone continued with our chants, isolating the union sellout.
No trade union reform or any other kind of reform will help solve the problems of the working class; therefore, we are fighting to turn our CHALLENGE readers into leaders of the class struggle in the fight for communist revolution — the only path to security for our class.
Report from Greece:
Millions of Youth, Workers Rebel Against Killer Kops
It’s HELL over here in Greece! Students and workers have all been putting up a lot with this government, and this dead system. Officially, unemployment is listed as 11%, but more than one in four people are below the "poverty line." The police kick and hit practically every young person they see, especially immigrants, who comprise over 20% of the country’s population. This police shooting in Greece has been world news.
Recently, on one of our holidays a group of 15-year-old young people were celebrating their friends’ birthday at an apartment in downtown Athens. That night, as they were heading home, they encountered two cops. Behind these boys, there was another group of youth who had been throwing empty plastic soda bottles at the police. One cop became angry and pulled his gun.
Someone sent a video of the incident with the cop (recorded on their cell phone) showing there was never any "warning" shot fired into the air. He aimed all three times at the boys. Actually there were about 15 people who witnessed the crime; he just didn’t hit any with the first two shots. When he finally hit the boy, the cop just turned his back and walked away from the innocent 15 year-old child, named Alexander. Murder in cold blood. Without a reason!
Now EVERYONE got angry, especially the students, and immediately shut down every school and university and went to the streets demonstrating against the murderous death of Alex.
But the anger didn’t stop there. The workers called a general strike and came out onto the streets with us by the millions, not just here in Athens but throughout the whole country and then spread all over Europe. Everyone is frustrated with this murder! (Meanwhile, the social-democratic PASOK party and the fake-leftist KKE ["C"P] have joined the rightwing Karamanlis government in denouncing the young rebels, Ed. Note)
Three lawyers quit their jobs because they didn’t want to defend the cop. They say he was lying and even blamed Alex for his own death. Now there is one particular cop-loving lawyer who’s defending the cop. He has always been defending these criminals.
We aren’t making many demands right now. Mostly we’re just pissed off. Our whole system needs to go down! The police sucks, the government sucks…and here we go again! Everything here needs to be changed
Airport Worker from Greece
Sit-in’ers Win Back Pay, Lose Jobs; Dems, Sellouts Claim ‘Victory’
CHICAGO, December 15 — "Isn’t it great when the workers win?" yelled a local Teamster President as Democratic Party politicians and local union reformists staged a "Victory Party," celebrating the end of the 6-day occupation of Republic Windows and Doors. The 240 Latino and black workers, members of the United Electrical Workers union (UE), took over the plant after the owners and Bank of America (BoA) tried to close it on three days notice and beat the workers out of 60 days pay, medical care and vacation pay owed to them. The bosses are building a new non-union plant in Iowa, and BoA just raked in a $25 billion bailout.
While the sit-in drew mass support from workers and youth, the Democratic Party hijacked the struggle. Jesse Jackson delivered a truckload of turkeys. Congressman Luis Gutierrez became their main advocate and the City Council called for an end to doing business with BoA. Even the Governor stopped by on his way to the federal lockup. There was not a racist cop in sight. After six days, the workers won their demands, but lost their jobs. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The Democrats know there will be many more plant closings and layoffs, especially affecting black and Latino workers. They’re trying to rush to the head of the long line of angry workers so they can mislead our struggles.
Of about 250 who showed up to celebrate, less than a third of the Republic workers were there. Many are mad about losing their jobs and have nowhere to go in this failing economy. One who spoke said he felt guilty during the occupation because those inside the plant were eating better than their families at home. Meanwhile, the stage was filled with full-time union leaders and politicians, who haven’t lost a dime, patting themselves on the back.
During the event we distributed 125 CHALLENGES that featured the sit-in on the front page. Comrades who know Republic workers came with them and planned a post-holiday meeting. We’ll fight the politicians and union leaders for the political leadership of the workers, and slowly but surely make communist ideas mass ideas.
TWU Hacks Attack Rank-&-File, Silent on Coming Layoffs
New York City, December 13 — Racist fare increases, service cuts, and pending layoffs are hitting New York City transit riders and workers hard. Meanwhile, Roger Toussaint, President of Transport Worker Union (TWU) Local 100 — New York City’s 30,000 municipal transit workers — is trying to get the workers, who have the power to shut the system down, to rely on the politicians to settle the upcoming contract.
Without mentioning the coming layoffs and job cuts, Toussaint pledged to work on getting the 1.5% worker contribution to medical costs — a concession he helped negotiate during the 2005 strike — reduced or eliminated. Toussaint also mentioned, almost in passing, a possible fifth pension tier. Current fourth-tier workers can collect a pension after 25 years of work and 55 years of age. A fifth tier would mean an increase in years of work or age or both.
Toussaint’s strategy to settle the contract as soon as possible and to lobby politicians to get the best deal, does nothing for the millions of working-class riders, mainly black, Latino, and immigrant, who are looking at a 25% fare increase and reduced service. The main speakers spent three-quarters of the mass meeting talking about Obama and the Democrats, trying to get us to rely on politicians and give up on fighting back.
But transit workers should not be fooled into dumping class struggle and thinking that we should accept anything we get because of tough economic times.
James Little, President of the TWU international, gloated that he is on Obama’s transition team and proclaimed that now workers "have a seat at the table." Somehow both Little and Toussaint forgot to mention that the Democrats voted for the national bailout for banks, NY State bailout of AIG, and now the auto industry bailout. A lot of good that elections and having a seat at the table did!
The real problem is capitalism, not lack of lobbying. Over the past 30 years, competition for maximum profit has led to massive overproduction in the auto industry, the bank’s financial schemes, and more debt for U.S. workers. Both Democrats and Republicans have responded with oil wars and cuts to government services because they serve their capitalist ruling-class interests, not workers.
Thousands at the meeting were cynically led to attack their fellow transit workers by Ed Watt, Local 100’s Treasurer chanting "No Amnesty!" a reference to suggested plans to bring members into "good standing" immediately after paying normal dues and a catch-up amount. The courts took away Local 100’s automatic dues check-off after the 60-hour strike in December of 2005. Currently about half the union is not fully paid up and 5,000 to 6,000 paid no dues without the check-off. Given that the union leadership spent so much time talking about Democrats they’re probably also upset that there wasn’t more money to give to politicians!
At other times the union has collected it’s own dues and workers fought hard to keep the union together. In several incidents during the early 1940’s union members stopped work when a worker dropped out of the union or didn’t pay their dues. Today the story is different. The sellouts by the leadership have demoralized many of the workers, and they question where their dues are going.
Toussaint called members in "bad" standing "traitors and collaborators" but he praises collaboration with politicians that are screwing the workers, both transit and riders!
In these times of widening war and cutbacks, a transit strike like that in 2005 could be the spark all workers need to resist the massive racist attacks by the bosses. But, the only way this can be done is dumping the union sellouts and their politicians and rebuilding a class-concious leadership among the working class. It won’t be easy but it is the only road out of a system that only takes us on the road to more wars and economic meltdowns. Join us in the communist PLP to take the express train to a world without racist bosses: communism!
Warm Welcome for PLP at Int’l Conference in Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, December 20 — An audience of 150 at a recent State University international conference here cheered a PLP speaker who declared, "The 19th century anti-slavery Haitian revolution against French colonialism taught the world how to fight back. In Haiti today I see so many intelligent and powerful people willing to reconstruct society, but jobless, with no opportunity to find work."
The PLP’er added that workers and youth today must learn from the achievements as well as the errors of the old communist movement, and rebuild it internationally. He said its basis must be one worldwide working class requiring one unified communist party whose aim is to destroy, not reform, a rotten capitalism system. The audience was very receptive to this message and to CHALLENGE and other PL literature.
Professors and students organized the conference to examine why the State University had not implemented any of the three principles under which it was to be reformed. The 30 days allotted for developing such a plan has become 11 years. For example, the principle of "research adapted to the needs of the population" has no budget whatsoever.
But in reality it’s an illusion to believe that education under capitalism can serve the masses, particularly in a country ravaged by imperialism like Haiti where the state barely functions. Forty percent of the children never attend school. Most who graduate from high school cannot go to universities because the places are lacking. Most university graduates cannot find jobs.
Most Haitians have no jobs, no potable water and not enough food. Infrastructure — roads, electricity, sewage systems — are in disrepair. Many foreign-owned factories have closed. Local farming has been underpriced by global agribusiness, and millions have moved from rural villages to Port-Au-Prince and the neighboring Dominican Republic seeking work.
Since the 2004 coup — supported by the U.S., France and Canada — which deposed President Aristide, a U.N. military force led by the Brazilian army has occupied Haiti. Significantly, Obama, who made a statement in September on hurricane relief to Haiti, has said nothing about the coup, nor about the racist U.S. immigration policies against Haitian boat people. This contrasts with the favorable treatment for Cuban refugees. Few at the conference had any illusions about Obama.
Haitian students and professors must try to build an alliance with the urban and rural workers here. During the mass uprising in the Spring, when tens of thousands rebelled against the high cost of food, students joined with angry protestors from the shantytown in trying to storm the Presidential Palace. This is the road to follow.
The best lesson to learn from these struggles is the need to rebuild a revolutionary communist movement here to unite with workers and youth worldwide. Some at the conference actually saw how capitalism — especially during this financial meltdown — cannot be reformed to serve workers and youth. It’s up to PLP’ers to follow up with our new friends here, to learn from them and simultaneously provide them with our red politics as a path out of the capitalist hellhole entrapping all of us.
Cops, Politicians, Priest Behind Racist Immigration Raid
EAST CHICAGO, IN, December 15 — Mariachi music filled the air and youth dressed in traditional Aztec costume danced down church aisles. It was supposed to be a day of celebration. But more telling than the warm greetings and hugs were the smiles that never quite reached the eyes. The eyes betrayed the fear, outrage and tremendous suffering that dampened the festivities. As people celebrated the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, their minds and hearts were worried about their friends who had been arrested in an immigration raid the day before at the nearby BP Amoco refinery.
Cleaning workers for a BP subcontractor were called into a meeting "about parking" early Wednesday morning. A manager waited while the workers trickled in. When all were present, she locked the door and made a call. In a flash, immigration police stormed into the room, throwing workers against the wall to handcuff them, yelling that BP had asked them to "take out the garbage." The agents applauded and laughed as 15 immigrant workers, four men and eleven women, were herded into the van.
Some were mothers, forced to sign documents they didn’t understand, with the threat of losing their children. Some were released with ankle bracelets to monitor their location while they await a court hearing. Others remain in custody. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have visited high school students to threaten them with being next.
PLP is working in community groups and churches to obtain legal aid, food and Christmas gifts for workers and their families. More important, we’re trying to organize action against the ICE terror against immigrant families.
At a meeting held at the church, the priest said that "our" main concern should be "being at peace with the Lord." He said the Bible says, "Blessed are they who weep and mourn." From within our local community group we have worked hard to offer workers an alternative to remaining on their knees. A meeting at a community center discussed the needs of the workers and taking action against BP and the ICE raids.
Workers complained of rude treatment by Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s secretary, who suggested they pack their bags and move back to Mexico. This is the same Congressman who made himself the lead negotiator for the Republic workers during their 6-day factory occupation (see page 4). PLP members reminded them that all politicians and government officials, regardless of "race" or nationality, were tools of the bosses and the savage cruelty of the racist profit system. We said that only the workers had the power to transform society and build a new world.
While they are grateful for whatever help we can offer them, they are painfully aware that the capitalist laws are against them. Without a mass movement, there’s little hope for a happy ending.
We must work patiently and diligently to counter the church’s lies that would keep workers helpless victims, offering their suffering to the heavens. It will take time and dedication to convince them their "kingdom" can, in fact, be here on earth — a world without borders and bosses, run by and for the workers. We must show them that the nightmare they’re now living — the prospect of being torn from their children — is as much a part of the profit system as the dollar bill.
Racist super-exploitation of workers is needed for the bosses to reap super profits, and will only increase as the rulers scramble to protect a failing economy. We must drive the message home that the equality for which they pray can only be achieved by building a mass international PLP and fighting for communism.
How Cuba’s Batista Dictatorship Was Overthrown 50 Years Ago
January 1, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the victory of the rebel forces in Cuba, led by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and others. The fictional movie "Godfather 2" depicts well how dictator Fulgencio Batista went to a New Year’s Eve ball filled with rich local and U.S. bosses and Mafiosi and announced he was surrendering power.
The rebel forces had almost been annihilated when they landed in a boat from Mexico in 1956, with only a few making it to the mountains of Sierra Maestra. How could one of the most powerful armies in Latin America be routed by this group of rebels? Actually the small guerrilla army had much active support in all the major cities among workers and peasants who hated the corrupt and repressive Batista regime.
Fidel Castro came from the Orthodox Party, a bourgeois electoral party. The political program of the movement he later founded to fight the Batista regime, the MR26J (July 26 Revolutionary Movement), was basically one of "revolutionary nationalism" to reform capitalism, not replace it with a revolutionary Marxist system. The movement itself had many tendencies — some just wanted to eliminate Batista without changing anything; others, like Fidel, wanted more reforms.
After the small guerrilla band landed from Mexico on November 26, 1956, it was limited to some small clashes with Batista’s military. But in cities like Santiago, strikes, marches and even attacks against government installations were common. Frank País, a 22-year-old student leader, led the movement in the city of Santiago. He was also in charge of supplying the guerrillas in the mountains.
Early in May 1957, the Revolutionary Directorate (DR), that worked with the MR26J movement, attacked the presidential palace in Havana trying to assassinate Batista. The attempt failed. It was opposed by MR26J and Castro who wanted to publicly try Batista for his crimes. The DR commander died in the attempt. The other DR leaders joined the guerrillas in the mountains. Several weeks later, the guerrillas became more active and were able to open a second front led by Che Guevara.
On July 30, 1957, the cops killed Frank País, sparking a five-day general strike shutting down Santiago. The strike spread throughout Oriente province, to the city of Camaguey. País’s funeral was the biggest protest in Santiago’s history.
The MR26J attempted an insurrection, supported by the sailors at the Cayo Loco naval base, who had rebelled against their officers and the regime. On September 5, the sailors, with civilian help, arrested the base commander and handed out weapons to the local population. The mutineers seized the neighboring city of Camaguey. The Batista air force bombed the city for 12 hours, and used tanks and artillery to crush the uprising. The rebellion’s leader surrendered and was shot. Dozens of other sailors and civilians were also executed. But the rebellion demonstrated that the military rank and file did not support the dictatorship.
As the Batista dictatorship began to lose the war in the mountains and the cities, it became more repressive. Meanwhile, the U.S. ruling class was looking for a way to dump Batista while relying on the right-wing capitalist opposition to assure U.S. interests in Cuba. But the masses of workers and students were in no mood just to replace Batista with another U.S. lackey. They wanted radical changes. So the struggle within the anti-Batista opposition sharpened, between those who later ended up in Miami and those wanting radical reforms (the Castro brothers, Che and their allies).
(Next: The end of the Batista regime; how the sellout pro-Soviet "C"P — which earlier had supported Batista — later was able to influence the new Castro government, so that the Cuban revolution was born containing all the errors of the old communist movement and therefore never led to the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.)
Stop Torture: Destroy Capitalism
As Hurricane Katrina exposed the vicious racism of U.S. capitalism, the increasingly open practice of torture has exposed its unspeakable racist brutality.
Our Party and others organized modest protests against the 2005 Abu Ghraib revelations. Since then, a broad religious coalition has launched the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) with a large conference at evangelical Mercer College.
NRCAT’s first big project was to demand that the next U.S. President issue an executive order banning torture. At the same time, Richard Holbrooke, who’s likely to become Obama’s special envoy to South Asia or Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in Foreign Affairs (Oct./Nov. 2008) that the "most compelling" early action that the new president could take "would be issuing a clear official ban on torture and closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba." Says Holbrooke, "restoring respect for American values and leadership is essential … because respect is a precondition for … enduring influence."
This campaign first tapped into widespread disgust, directing it into anger at the Bush administration. Now it’s encouraging the hope many place in Obama, while mainly promoting a new wave of U.S. patriotism. Says NRCAT: "Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our [sic] nation." U.S. rulers will try to use such nationalism to win us to support "good wars" in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere leading to a new surge of racist murder and torture.
This contradiction opens the door to sharp political struggle. College teachers have worked the topic of U.S.-sponsored torture into their curriculum. On one campus, a screening of the film "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" sparked a discussion of why the U.S. military is in Iraq, and of the importance of winning soldiers to an anti-racist and anti-imperialist perspective. We’ve raised that this is not "our" nation — it belongs to the capitalists.
U.S. foreign policy has systematically relied on torture. In the 1950s the CIA paid Cornell University researchers to develop the torture techniques used on a massive scale in Vietnam (Operation Phoenix) and, forty years later, in Guantánamo. Author Darius Rejali says that "Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. …The modern repertoire of torture is mainly a ‘democratic’ innovation."
Making the campaign sharply anti-racist (by bringing up connections with torture in U.S. prisons, for example) will help our friends see that while cosmetic reforms are likely (for example, closing Guantanamo), partial temporary reforms will not lead to lasting, systemic change. As historian H Bruce Franklin put it, "our (sic) prison system has helped make torture a normal, legitimate, even routine part of American culture."
Challenge readers have noted that the UN Convention on Torture says torture includes official acts of inflicting physical or mental suffering on someone for the purpose of "intimidating or coercing him or a third person." The whole racist U.S. system emerged from the massive use of torture to intimidate and coerce slaves and Native Americans.
Wage-slavery (capitalism) relies on torture and the threat of torture inflicted by its army, police and prison system to intimidate workers. Racist unemployment leads to illness and death. Torture is built into the whole system of exploitation and only communist revolution to eliminate capitalism and imperialism can abolish these evils. J
Ford Foundation: Imperialism, Slavery, and Torture
Princeton theologian George Hunsinger started NRCAT in 2005 but it took off in spring 2007 with a grant of $150,000 from the Ford Foundation.
The openly anti-Jewish Henry and Edsel Ford chartered the Ford Foundation in 1936, shortly before Ford’s German subsidiary began racking up enormous profits by manufacturing military vehicles for Hitler using slave labor. After the war, the Ford Foundation switched its allegiance to the CIA, which was already training operatives in torture techniques.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA used the Ford Foundation to funnel money into covert propaganda projects. Today the Ford-CIA relationship is more discreet, but the foundation is openly committed to serve the interests of US imperialism.
Ford Foundation trustee Afsaneh M. Beschloss is a former CEO of the Carlyle Group, which profits hugely from Middle-East investments. Previously she was a top executive of the World Bank, JP Morgan, and Shell.
Trustee Thurgood Marshall Jr. (a staffer for Al Gore and Bill Clinton) is a director of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison operator in the US, which has been charged by Amnesty International with practicing torture in its facilities.
PL’ers Taking Aim at Racism, War, Cutbacks at MLA Convention
The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) — professional organization of teachers of modern languages and literatures, and the country’s largest college teachers’ organization — has its annual meeting in San Francisco in late December. PLP professors and our friends have been involved in struggle in the MLA for almost 15 years.
College teaching in the U.S. faces a deepening crisis every year. State and Federal government support for public higher education is cut continuously. Consequently a decreasing percentage of college classes — now below 50% — are taught by full-time professors. Part-time faculty teach most classes. They literally do not receive a living wage; almost none get any benefits.
While fewer college teachers earn decent pay nor have any job security, still conservatives have attacked us for almost 20 years for "not being conservative enough." Professors — mainly part-timers but some full-timers — have been fired for being "too left" (meaning liberal), and the rest have been intimidated.
The sharpening contradictions revealed by the wars and the current economic crisis have caused many more people to question the ability of the system to provide even for those who’ve supported it until now. Many are ready for more serious discussions of alternatives, especially given the following realities:
• Whatever "liberal" intentions and wishes might be, the economy will speed recruitment to, and implementation of, national service which will feed the war machine (see CHALLENGE, 12/24);
• Obama, perceived initially as "anti-war," has appointed the same old people who promote war to top government positions, and he’s now warning that even in Iraq some combat troops will have to be stationed in the cities (i.e., not just on the bases);
• All these policies have an explicitly racist component — not only via the increased attacks on black, Latino and Asian people in the U.S. but also in the targets of U.S. military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the forces of war, super-exploitation, racism and economic depression create the basis for both economic and ideological attacks on college teaching. Budget cuts force universities to do what corporate sponsors want them to do. Thus, public universities do more and more research for businesses. Tuition rises, making public colleges and universities less and less affordable for the working class that pays for them through taxes. This affects all workers, but especially black and Latino workers.
PLP will work with our friends in the MLA’s Radical Caucus to protest attacks on immigrant workers; oppose the MLA’s invitation to racists and fascists like David Horowitz.
PLP’ers will also stress that good education — for workers and others — cannot exist in an exploitative capitalist society, and that its profit system cannot be reformed away.
We are determined to explicitly make anti-capitalism and anti-racism the "bottom line" of all our public statements in sessions and meetings.
Most of our friends believe that a "humane" capitalism, without imperialism and war, is possible. They think, and want to believe, that U.S. bosses "can be won" to making the U.S. like what they think Denmark or Switzerland are. This is impossible, but most of our colleagues "want it to be true." Obama and the Democrats, along with "Dump Bush!" revisionists — phony "communists" and "socialists" — are building those illusions, leading our class down the path to world war.
We must win more and more teachers to understanding that capitalism offers no hope, that they need to join PLP, to destroy capitalism with revolution for a communist world. We will circulate CHALLENGE among our friends and others and uphold elements of a communist position as best we can.
LETTERS
Hospital Workers Back Republic Sit-in
A PLP healthcare worker from Brooklyn called for fight backs against the banks and bosses at the December delegate assembly of 1199 SEIU Healthcare Workers East. The PLP delegate introduced a resolution to support the Republic strikers (see p. 4) by taking actions at Bank of America (BOA) branches close to our work locations and by sending a $1,000 donation from the local to the strikers. It was seconded by at least a half dozen other delegates and unanimously adopted by the delegate body.
The action by the delegates and the Republic workers stands in stark contrast to the 1199 SEIU leadership. New York State is facing a $15 billion deficit for the coming fiscal year. These sellouts are proposing $5 billion in budget cuts, $5 billion in tax hikes on the well-to-do, and $5 billion in federal aid to meet the deficit. Since half the state budget is used for Medicaid, over $2 billion in cuts to nursing homes, hospitals, and healthcare workers will mean closing some institutions and huge layoffs in others.
This is the bosses’ plan being imposed on the workers. We should be inspired by the example of the Republic workers’ sit-in — the largely Latino immigrant workforce, victims of blatant racism — and organize to join workers in militant struggle against all the bosses’ attempts to make us pay for their financial crisis. Healthcare workers need the communist leadership of Progressive Labor Party as found in Challenge. This means not only reading our paper, donating to sustain it, but joining study-action groups to learn and practice the science of communism and joining the PLP.
A Hospital Comrade
Recipe for Red Ideas: DESAFIO and Fish Soup
Every day, social and political activities are occurring here in Morazan, El Salvador. As PLP members dedicated to spreading communist education to the masses of workers, we do it through DESAFIO.
One day, we made fish soup, from fresh fish from our community. As a group of ten comrades — including some who’ve been Party members for many years — we invited and gave three DESAFIOS to two teachers for the first time. One teacher said, "We have to be consistent with the workers’ political line so that people don’t get confused by the electoral parties." The other teacher made the soup. As he was cooking, he said, "I feel happy being close to you comrades. I feel I’m doing political work united with students, teachers and farmworkers."
This activity lasted over four hours in an open field where we served the delicious fish soup with piñicos, a local vegetable. Such activities help us learn the workers’ ideas and the experiences of each one and how we can unite the working class.
The farmworkers’ club affirmed that PLP is the maximum expression of communist education for our class.
A Salvadoran PL’er
Capitalist Crisis: The Worst Tsunami
Capitalist crises are real tsunamis, as destructive and murderous as natural cataclysms. It would be too simplistic to hold responsible only speculators guilty of an ordinary slip-up in the system. The capitalist system today is in complete collapse, neither manageable nor reformable. Its anarchy stems from the fact that capitalists never produce to satisfy the needs of populations but to realize a profit.
But contrary to the rulers hopes, the working classes are not dead. The left in Haiti is an example. We have been able to resist despite efforts on all sides by open and hidden forces (including some from the international "left," such as Brazil), which have done all in their power to reduce our potential and our resources and indeed to wipe out the left.
Today, the international working class has an enormous responsibility in the face of this global capitalist crisis, an obligation to find solutions to avoid wage-earners becoming its victims yet again. The international left will make proposals to that end [our proposal is to build an international communist party, the PLP, to make an international revolution that ends capitalism once and for all — Ed.]. This crisis must be the last one in the history of an unjust economic and political regime, neither regulable nor reformable, whose death pangs have lasted too long.
Ti Karl, A Haitian Communist
REDEYE ON THEW NEWS
Wall Street Robbery and A World Gone Madoff
"How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?....[It] has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income,…making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet,…it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it.
"So how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair?....The end result was the same (except for the house arrest)….
"We’re talking about a lot of money here….$400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse….
"What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff." (Paul Krugman,. NY Times, Dec. 19, 2008)
U.S. ‘liberation’ brings atrocities
NYT 12/14- -— The archive, housed at the University of Michigan, holds documents… that reveal widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam…. The crimes are similar to those committed at Mai Lai in 1968. Yet …most Americans still think the violence was the work of "a few rogue units," when in fact "every major division that served in Vietnam was represented,"… When troops fight among a civilian population, in conflicts that extend for years, atrocities are almost bound to happen. …we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we’re doing with Abu Ghraib.
‘Law’= 11-year delay for union
NYT 12/13 — After an expensive and emotinal 15-year organizing battle, workers at the world’s largest hog-killing plant, the Smithfield Packing slaugherhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., have voted to unionize….The United Food and Commercial Workers lost the 1997 election because Smithfield broke the law by intimidating and firing union supporters…alter years of litigation,…The court ordered Smithfield to reinstale four union suppporters it found were iillegally fired.…The court also said Smithfield had engaged in other illegal activities.
Foreclosed? Who do we shoot?
NYT 12/21 — About old movies…I’ve been confronted with a disconcerting jolt of reality. Those silvery images don’t seem to belong to the past, but to the scary here and now….Consider "The Grapes of Wrath," which I’d come to think of ... as a slightly corny artifact. Early on in the film, a flashbacks shows Muley Graves, an Oklahoma dirt farmer, being dispossed by a well-fed gentleman with a fine car and a big cigar who disavows any personal responsibility. He’s just doing the bidding of the bank and the land company which is doing the bidding of the bank, and on the chain goes — all the way up to the fat cats back East. That no one is to blame puzzles poor Muley. "Well, who do we shoot?" he asks. A similar question may be forming in the minds of more than a few Americans in 2008.
‘Free Choice’ to sail vs. pirates
NYT 12/21 –– One-third of the world’s merchant sailors are from the Philippines....…
More than 100 Filipinos are being held by the Somali pirates who have made the Gulf of Aden a terrifying place to sail....…The added dangers did little to faze the men who showed up at the recruitment market...economic considerations almost always trump concerns for personal safety…with many familes here relying on remittances that émigrés send home, there has been no public outcry about the sailors.
a href="#Workers Occupy Factory; Politicians Run To Bosses’ Rescue">"orkers Occupy Factory; Politicians Run To Bosses’ Rescue
a href="#National Service: Obama’s Scheme To Draft Youth For Bosses’ Wars">Na"ional Service: Obama’s Scheme To Draft Youth For Bosses’ Wars
a href="#Rulers Turn Workers’ Collectivity On Its Head For Their Needs">"ulers Turn Workers’ Collectivity On Its Head For Their Needs
600 March vs. Racist Cross-Burning
NO MELTDOWN FOR CHALLENGE-DESAFIO!
D.C. Rally Blasts Pols Over Housing for AIDS Victims
Red Ideas, Worker-Student Unity Can Boost Contract Fight
a href="#PL Youth Activity Spurs Exposé of Obama, Builds PLP""PL Youth Activity Spurs Exposé of Obama, Builds PLP
Auto Bailout Means More Racist Attacks
Bankers Hold the Bonds; Workers, Riders Left Holding the Bag
Calif. Dems Pass Budget Cuts; Workers, Students Must Hit Back
Mumbai Massacre Heats Up India-Pakistan Dogfight
a href="#Imperialists’ Battle Over Oil Pipelines Will Widen War">"mperialists’ Battle Over Oil Pipelines Will Widen War
a href="#If You Can’t Beat Them, Have Them Join You">"f You Can’t Beat Them, Have Them Join You
LETTERS
Fighting Memories of Republic Window Workers
a href="#‘So, What’s the Plan?’">‘So,"What’s the Plan?’
a href="#Student Strikes Sweep Europe; Bosses’ Bailout Bills Workers">"tudent Strikes Sweep Europe; Bosses’ Bailout Bills Workers
Killer Cops Spark Youth Rebellion, Strikes Across Greece
REDEYE
- Money pulls their food away
- They use us for war, but then…
- Katrina kids’ health ‘alarming’
- Russian regard for Stalin rising
Obama Drafts War And Fascism Cabinet
Newark Port Jobs Plan Elates Bosses, Exploits Workers
a name="Workers Occupy Factory; Politicians Run To Bosses’ Rescue">">"orkers Occupy Factory; Politicians Run To Bosses’ Rescue
CHICAGO, IL December 6 – "We are not going anywhere!" That’s what one worker said, speaking for his brothers and sisters who are occupying the Republic Windows & Doors factory. He was speaking to more than 200 workers, youth, union activists and local union officials who rallied in support of the occupation that turned the bone- chilling cold, wind and snow into a breath of fresh air.
On December 2, Republic gave about 250 black and Latino workers, members of the United Electrical Workers union (UE), three days notice that it was closing for good. Bank of America (BOA), their main creditor, cut off a line of credit to Republic causing the plant closing and canceling workers’ health benefits. According to the federal WARN Act, workers must get 60 days notice, and in Illinois they must get 75 days notice. Workers are demanding their 75 days pay and health benefits, plus vacation pay owed to them.
The total bill of about $1.5 million is a drop in BoA’s $25 billion bailout bucket. Bank of America received $15 billion as part of the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), raised $9 billion in government guaranteed loans and will get another $10 billion in TARP funds in the next two weeks. (As we go to press Bank of America has tentatively agreed to loan Republic some funds. But it is not clear how much if any will eventually be given to workers.)
Workers picketed BoA on December 3, and the bankers agreed to meet with Republic and the UE on December 5. The meeting was arranged by Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez, but Republic failed to show up. They are busy trying to sneak away to a new plant in Iowa with a non-union workforce. Some workers think Republic is planning to move out of state because the union rejected major concessions in the last contract and "won" pay increases. But as we’ve seen in the auto industry, when the bosses are in crisis our contracts aren’t worth anything.
The Democratic Party has taken over the struggle of the Republic workers. Obama publicly supports them. Jesse Jackson delivered a truckload of turkeys. Congressman Gutierrez has become their main advocate, the City Council has called for an end to doing business with BoA, the Governor has called for the factory to stay open, and the Attorney General is investigating Republic’s closing and possible move to Iowa. Workers come and go on 8-hour shifts, about 50 to a shift, without a racist cop in sight.
The Democrats know what’s in store for workers with many more plant closings and layoffs, especially affecting black and Latino workers. These politicians who have bailed out the bankers and industry bosses, as well as sending us to war and building fascism, want to mis-lead the workers‘ struggle. They are fearful that with massive layoffs looming there could be more plant takeovers. The opportunists, reformers and union full-timers who spoke at the rally are thrilled with the politicians trying to take over the strike and eager to be their foot soldiers.
By fighting back, Republic workers are setting an example to all workers facing layoffs and plant closures. PLP is mobilizing on our jobs and our campuses to collect food and money and to bring groups of people to the plant. Even more important, we will bring our revolutionary communist politics to show the Republic workers and those supporting them that the only way we can secure a future for the international working class is to build a mass PLP and fight for communist revolution.
One comrade went to the plant with coffee and donuts and ran into a friend and his wife coming out. His friend has worked there for about 10 years. They all went onto the occupied shop floor, where no guests are allowed, and the worker and his wife took our comrade on a tour of the plant. He dropped off the coffee and donuts at the lunch tables and got introduced to a group of Republic workers. He told the couple, "Fighting for what they owe you is good, but it won’t find you another job or give your son a secure future. It’s the whole system that’s no good and we have to get rid of it." He showed the couple CHALLENGE and told them we wanted to do an article about their struggle.
As they toured the plant the comrade pointed out, "See all these windows piled up here? It doesn’t make sense. People need these windows to stay warm. The workers build them, but people can’t get them because the bosses can’t sell them." He explained that we want a world where people get what we need because we need it, not because some factory owner or banker will profit off of it. We hope to have many more of these experiences in the coming days, and deepen the base of PLP among those fighting back, and those who support them.
Republic workers need your support. Send checks to UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Send messages of support to
a name="National Service: Obama’s Scheme To Draft Youth For Bosses’ Wars"></">Na"ional Service: Obama’s Scheme To Draft Youth For Bosses’ Wars
Last June at Columbia University, President-Elect Barack Obama said that he would make plans for the American people to recognize an "obligation" for military service. "If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some." The ruling class has never forgiven the Bush administration’s failure to successfully use the 9/11 attacks to recruit more young workers, especially black and Latin, to be patriotic Americans willing to fight in its military.
The Obama administration has promised not to make the same mistake. With wars in Afghanistan and Iraq burning, the economic meltdown and rising unemployment and the rise of new imperialist rivals, time is running out for the U.S. ruling class to try to maintain its position as top imperialist power. As future White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel has stated: "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste . . . They are opportunities to do big things." (Boston Globe, 11.30.08)
One "big thing" they’re attempting is to recruit young workers and students to National Service. This includes plans to expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 and double the size of the Peace Corps. These programs under the guise of promoting community service domestically and internationally have been used as a way to stop rebellions and support U.S. imperialist attacks on workers around the world.
They are also proposing that all middle and high school students do at least 50 hours of community service a year, giving a tax incentive of up $4,000 a year in "exchange for 100 hours of public service." College students would do 100 hours of public service in exchange for tuition decreases, making "a college education affordable." (Obama’s website).
This service would help meet dire needs of the ruling class:
1. In order to rebuild a rapidly disintegrating infrastructure, it will create low-wage jobs –– many of them non-union –– thereby lowering the wages of the entire working class
2. More bodies in military uniform. (See CHALLENGE, 12/10)
3. Win workers and youth to U.S. nationalism
4. Clean up the image of the U.S. around the world as the country that spreads "democracy."
a name="Rulers Turn Workers’ Collectivity On Its Head For Their Needs">">"ulers Turn Workers’ Collectivity On Its Head For Their Needs
In the absence of a mass communist movement capable of winning thousands of workers to revolutionary ideas, the bosses can twist working-class collectivity into support for capitalism. Many people volunteered during events like 9/11, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, proving that workers have a willingness to help others and oppose, at some level, the "everyone-for-themselves" mentality of capitalism. A 2006 UCLA study found that 86% of incoming college freshmen — most of whom are now presumably college juniors thinking about post-college employment –– volunteered at least occasionally during high school and 70% did so at least once a week (Washington Post, 11/24/08). The communist PLP aims to take this collective feeling and use it as part of organizing a society based on production for the good of the whole of society.
On the other hand, the bosses’ intentions with community and national service is similar to the Nazis’ call for National Socialism by recruiting young and old to "do what they can" for the sake of the country (i.e., the ruling class). The Obama administration wants to acclimate the U.S. population to the idea of "service" and "sacrifice." These ideas will be used to convince workers and students to make the deadly error of allying with their class enemies and fighting for U.S. imperialism.
Work Within, Not on the Outside
We can turn Obama and the Democrats’ idea of community and national service on its head by buildng communist ideas within their various "Corps." That means distributing CHALLENGE and always fighting for service for the working class — organizing against the bosses and for the real interests of the workers. We need to fight against workers getting laid off from their jobs, getting their pensions and homes ripped away from them by the greed of capitalism. We need to fight every attack against immigrant workers, like the murder of Marcelo Lucero in Long Island, by capitalist-inspired racism. We need to fight for communism to get rid of racism, sexism, nationalism and imperialist war. These are our working-class’ calls to service.
The mass unemployment hitting the U.S. and the world will draw many workers to the option of national service. Sooner rather than later this option will become mandatory as inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens and the eventuality of war is clearer. Members and friends of the communist Progressive Labor Party must organize with workers to build class struggle against the bosses — taking the lead in strikes, marches and rallies. We need to build a base of rank-and-file workers to recruit for communist revolution.
600 March vs. Racist Cross-Burning
HARDWICK, NJ., November 15 — Over 600 anti-racists marched here protesting the November 5th burning of a KKK-like cross on the lawn of a local family who had erected an Obama-for-President banner in front of their house. The protest was attacking racism, not necessarily supporting Obama. The multi-racial demonstrators came from towns throughout Warren County and the adjacent Pennsylvania area.
After Gary and Alina Grewal and their 8-year-old daughter Arianna realized the banner was missing, the next morning they discovered it had been tied to a 4 X 6 foot wooden cross and had been set afire during the night. The Grewal family spread the word of this racist act and today hundreds of local supporters met at the Town Hall here to begin a half-mile-long "Unity March" ending at the Grewal home. Mr. Grewal is of Native American descent and Mrs. Grewal is Cuban.
Their neighbors were determined to spread the message that racism will not be tolerated in their midst. Mr. Grewal said, "The Grewal family will not be intimidated by this racist act." (North Warren News, 11/19) The multi-racial marchers were of all ages, with an especially large youth turnout.
The demonstration was particularly noteworthy because this rural area of New Jersey has a strong right-wing reputation. It showed that rank-and-file people can organize against the racism being spread nation-wide, such as the anti-immigrant provocations of Suffolk County Long Island Executive Steve Levy over the murder of an Ecuadoran worker in Patchogue, L.I. and the murder of a Mexican worker by a racist gang in Shenandoah, Pa., as well as this Klan-type cross-burning.
D.C. Rally Blasts Pols Over Housing for AIDS Victims
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 1, –– Progressive Labor Party members celebrated World AIDS Day today at a rally demanding housing for people living with AIDS. Our central objective was to help our friends understand that capitalist politicians cannot give us what we need, that racism like that of the AIDS epidemic is inherent in capitalism, and that only developing a revolutionary party to destroy capitalism and racism can get us off the treadmill of begging our rulers for crumbs as our friends die.
We joined with 60 people from DC Fights Back, the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association, American Medical Students Association, Student Global Aids, Empower DC (a D.C. housing advocacy NGO) and the National AIDS Housing Coalition. We demanded immediate housing for the 278 people on the D.C. waiting list for the Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) Program. This program is pitifully under-funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The noon rally outside the field office of HUD included a picket line around tents and cardboard houses with brightly-painted signs calling AIDS housing a life-or-death issue. We demanded that the HUD director speak to us. We chanted "Racism means, FIGHT BACK" and "AIDS housing is the name of the game, HUD and HOPWA, Shame, Shame, Shame." One speaker declared that stable housing for people living with AIDS is an absolute necessity so that complex AIDS medical treatments can actually be implemented and maintained. After initially refusing to meet, housing officials finally responded by offering to schedule a meeting on the issue.
The strength of this event was its multiracial composition and its confrontational nature. The coalition challenged the power structure by demanding housing, the critical missing link in AIDS treatment, going beyond education and outreach efforts in the community. As supposedly "progressive" D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty cozies up to developers and closes homeless shelters like the downtown Franklin Shelter, the battle for housing will become fiercer. In fact, when real estate developers threw Fenty a lavish birthday party on December 6, over 100 furious housing advocates and union members confronted Fenty and his billionaire buddies, carrying a big angry sign saying, "Kill the Homeless—Vote Fenty".
Recruiting our friends to the PLP’s revolutionary strategy remains challenging. PLPers working in the community and with students brought a contingent of 15 people to the World AIDS Day protest and its four planning meetings, but many still harbor illusions about pressuring politicians and hoping for good results. One friend told us, "I really felt more comfortable with this rally than at May Day. May Day was good but this is my struggle." We have to win him and others to seeing that the real struggle is against the capitalist system even as we fight day to day for the working class.
CHALLENGE was distributed at the rally and several participants in this work read it regularly. As the battle with the city and federal government heats up, and as the economic crisis intensifies, the need for revolutionary action will become clearer to our readers. Today’s study groups and regular reading of CHALLENGE will help many see and join the road to revolution.
Red Ideas, Worker-Student Unity Can Boost Contract Fight
Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 26 – "Whatever the changes are, they’re not going to benefit workers like us," said a long-time CHALLENGE reader at my school. "Obama represents the rich in this country, just like the other guys [Bush and McCain]," he told his co-worker. I went to distribute CHALLENGE to this group of campus workers who are in the middle of a union contract fight for higher wages and to safeguard pensions. Many are now regular CHALLENGE readers, which has helped show the connections between their contract fight, the budget cuts, and the wars for oil profits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking at the post-election headline in CHALLENGE ("Obama to Workers: Sacrifice to Save Racist Capitalism") a group of us began to talk about Obama’s victory.
One worker echoed a very common idea on campus that, at least now with Obama, we could expect some things to change for the better. Another worker who has been reading CHALLENGE for a year pointed out we could expect "change," but it wouldn’t benefit the working class. Some others agreed, saying that Obama’s policy on immigration, for example, isn’t any better than Bush’s. (Obama supports further militarizing of the border, a slave-labor guest worker program, and fascist control of the immigrant workforce known as "Comprehensive Immigration Reform.") I asked the worker, "Do you think Obama is going to change the fact that you and others have to work two or three jobs to survive?" The worker agreed that the problems most important to him probably wouldn’t "change for the better" because of Obama’s win. He decided to take CHALLENGE, and we agreed to talk more after he’d read the paper.
Some workers are sharing CHALLENGE with co workers. One reads CHALLENGE articles out loud during lunch and the workers then discuss what they mean. This has helped strengthen the worker student alliance around PLP’s politics.
Student CHALLENGE readers on campus led the struggle to expose Obama’s pro-war, pro-Wall Street stance before and after the election. They organized a post-election panel of different student groups to discuss what the election really means for workers and students, with the Muslim, Republican, African-American, and Labor Rights student organizations participating on the panel. The turn-out was modest, but the discussion was sharp. One long-time CHALLENGE reader on the panel argued that the financial crisis and the Iraq war are the products of imperialism, a system rooted in racism, war and exploitation. The speaker also showed all the ways that Obama supports the agenda of the U.S. capitalist class, from national service to expanding the military to more wars in Pakistan and possibly with Iran.
Surprisingly the Republican speaker argued that now "the nation" needed to unite behind Obama. "The U.S. is fighting it out right now with other countries…We need to make sure we stay on top in the world, because if China or Russia get the top spot, then we all lose. But if the U.S. stays the main power in the world, then we all benefit," said the young Republican.
Obama and the ruling class want to win students and workers to believe that if the U.S. is strong, then all "Americans" will be better off, to get the working class to sacrifice for "our nation." One PLP member pointed out that all workers always stay at the bottom under capitalism, no matter which group of bosses is on top. So, workers and students should fight for internationalism and solidarity across borders. We should fight against the racist nationalism and patriotism that Obama, McCain, and other politicians are promoting. Others on the panel and in the audience agreed.
By building CHALLENGE networks and fighting for a worker-soldier-student alliance, we can expose these fascist lies that promote patriotic sacrifice and racism among workers and students. This will help in creating a base for our ideas and for the struggles in the future. As the capitalist crisis deepens, the struggle to expand CHALLENGE networks will politically prepare our members and friends to take greater leadership with PLP in the fight for revolution.
a name="PL Youth Activity Spurs Exposé of Obama, Builds PLP""PL Youth Activity Spurs Exposé of Obama, Builds PLP
NEWARK, NJ, November 29 — "I really need to know how I can become a member of this group," exclaimed a young high school student at a recent study group organized by a high school PLP club. We have recently seen an upsurge of interest among students and parents.
Many students who attended the study group later joined PL members at the polls on election night to distribute our election pamphlet to workers going in to vote. Afterwards they returned to a teacher’s house to watch the returns and further debate whether or not to support Obama.
Later, three of those students joined us in Brooklyn to demonstrate against the racist bosses at Agriprocessors (see CHALLENGE, 12/10). Those who couldn’t come eagerly asked how it went.
These responses were born in the club’s bi-weekly study groups, analyzing PLP’s election pamphlet. High school students, teachers and interested parents — Asian, Latin, black and white — discussed the then upcoming election and its meaning for the working class. We’ve had over 15 participants, the most since the club was formed. We covered many topics — from who holds the real power to what life would be like under a communist world led by PLP.
Obama’s "Change" was without a doubt the hottest topic. Many students and parents are convinced Obama will create the change workers need. One teacher responded by saying, "Yes, there will be change, there will always be change, but who will it benefit? Wall Street doesn’t put millions of dollars behind a candidate so he can turn around and give power to the working class. The only change that we need will come from the workers who run this world."
One parent, a NJ Transit bus driver, agreed, but also said Obama is what we need right now because the working class isn’t organized well enough. While he disagreed with our position not to vote, he still remains friends with, and continues to support, PLP.
We still meet regularly with these students. Many are still excited and want to know more about communism. The newest club member now leads the sessions, currently reading "Marx for Beginners" by Rius.
We’re trying to use the momentum gained from our activity during the bosses’ election to build the Party among students and parents in our area. Although many people around us have dangerous illusions about the Obama presidency, that he will solve workers’ problems, we know our lives will worsen. Capitalism’s contradictions are becoming clearer to workers everywhere. This offers opportunities for PLP’ers to expose him and his capitalist system, particularly as imperialist wars and fascist exploitation come down even harder on our class.
While the rulers may win workers to believe in their representative, this honeymoon can’t last forever. That’s why it’s more important than ever to maintain personal as well as political ties to those around us. Through consistent struggle, we can expose Obama and other misleaders for what they really represent –– ruling-class interests.
While many of our friends are planning to attend Obama’s inauguration, we are struggling with them to begin building for our most important event — May Day. Although nearly five months away, we’re planning events from now until then for students, parents, and teachers to help organize for, and participate in, May Day, to enable them to see themselves not only as Party friends and member, but eventually as leaders.
Auto Bailout Means More Racist Attacks
DETROIT, MI, December 8 — It appears GM, Ford and Chrysler will get about half the $34 billion bailout they went begging for, enough to ensure they don’t collapse over the next 90 days. They presented their "business plans" to Congress on the same day the Labor Dept. reported a loss of 533,000 jobs in November, the largest monthly loss in 34 years.
The money may come attached to a new federal "Car Czar" who will oversee the industry’s restructuring. This would be another step in the development of fascism as the bankers use their state power to protect their investments.
It also appears that the full weight of the crisis will be placed on the backs of auto workers. GM will eliminate up to 30,000 white and blue collar jobs in North America and close 11 more factories by 2012. GM will start 2009 with layoffs at three plants in Michigan, Ohio and Ontario. They will be idled throughout January and will resume production each with one less shift and a total of 4,400 fewer workers.
The "new General Motors" will have sold or closed Hummer, Saab or Saturn. Pontiac will be greatly reduced. GM CEO Wagoner should have no trouble getting by on his $1 salary for 2009. He stole $24 million in 2006 and again in 2007, and squeezed by with $2.2 million in 2008.
Auto workers won’t be so lucky. Our contracts will be reopened and gutted. We will face severe wage and benefit cuts, and many workers could lose homes as a result. No one will be spared, including retirees.
In the 2007 contract, the auto companies and the UAW set up the Voluntary Employee Benefit Association (VEBA) that was supposed to "guarantee" retirees’ healthcare, even if the industry went bankrupt. The Big Three were to contribute the bulk of the $60 billion fund. Also, a 3% wage increase for current UAW workers is being deferred to VEBA. But the global credit and financial crises plunged domestic auto sales to their lowest rate in 25 years. GM already failed to make a $1.7 billion payment in July, and canceled healthcare for all white-collar GM retirees. This may be the beginning of the end for retiree health care.
These layoffs and plant closings have a deadly racist character. According to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, black males, ages 16 to 64, have an unemployment rate over 50% in the industrial cities of Buffalo (51.4%), Milwaukee (51.1%) and Detroit (50.6%). Marc Levine, the Center’s founding director, said, "And given perilous economic conditions on the horizon, we have every reason to fear that conditions may get even worse." The bailout of the auto bosses will only mean more racist poverty, terror and homelessness for the working class.
Currently, the entire working class is taking it on the chin. The attacks are coming so fast that the situation appears to be overwhelming. We must do everything possible where we are to launch a fight-back that ultimately can challenge the bosses for power. We should try to set up unemployment committees in our factories and unions to ensure those laid off remain part of the struggle. In local unions, we should fight all-out to strike against any more concessions to current, future or retired workers. We can take the fight against racist unemployment to our community and immigrant organizations, schools and churches, uniting black, Latin and white workers.
Where there is a mass base of CHALLENGE readers and distributors, we should move them into action and into PLP, and work to establish more such bases. This economic crisis and auto bailout plays a big part in the inter-imperialist rivalry that is pushing the bosses towards world war. A PLP-led fight back can lead us towards communist revolution.
Bankers Hold the Bonds; Workers, Riders Left Holding the Bag
San Francisco, CA – In mass transit, the issue of schedules is where "the rubber hits the road" for workers. This is a life-and-death issue for transit drivers. The long-term effects of speed-up, more riders with less equipment, tighter schedules and no rest breaks are stress-related illnesses such as high blood pressure and bodily injury. Transit agencies are all talking about more cuts in service and higher fares to pay loans and deal with the financial crisis.
The mass transit budget is where the biggest conflict comes up between the needs of Big Finance Capital and the needs of both drivers and working-class riders. Maximization of profit in the financial sector is the root of killer schedules and service cuts. In addition, the "Oil-War Budget" has cut federal transit funds. Better and more inclusive transit schedules would require more transit workers, more equipment and more money in the budget. That won’t happen without the organized power of the drivers and riders.
Deficit Financing: Working Conditions Worsen and Passengers Lose Service
In the ‘90s, San Francisco MUNI sold $467.9 million worth of equipment (such as trains) to investors and banks under "Sell & Lease-Back Agreements" – then leased this equipment back. MUNI got a lump sum up-front from the sale (to meet deficit budgets), bought insurance from AIG and guaranteed the life of the equipment so the investors got the depreciation. Thirty-one transit agencies in the U.S. sold equipment, a total value of $9.3 trillion.
This debt financing is a sour deal for transit workers who continue to lose "real wages" due to part-timing, increasing health expenses, etc. but have longer hours and more passenger boardings per shift to increase "productivity."
Where’s the Money?
When Willie Sutton (a famous bank robber) was asked "why do you rob banks?" he replied, "that’s where the money is." This makes perfect sense to most working-class people. Let the banks and finance institutions pay all those "lump sum payments" back into the transit system. Make them pay higher transit assessment fees which reflect the enormous value that transit infrastructure adds to their business (brings the workers to work) and their property (increases property values).
But that won’t happen — like the current eviction/foreclosure crisis and tax bailout, the working-class will pay. It’s the inevitable working-out of finance capitals’ control of taxes, credit, markets, and the political process. The working class’s needs are in direct conflict with "free" markets, profits and wars for control of resources. Transit workers and passengers need safe, decent and free transit. This requires the development of a mass revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism.
Like the bailout, Obama’s plan for rebuilding infrastructure, including transit, and 2.5 million jobs, will make millions for the banks and investors who control the "Infrastructure Fund." Obama’s advisors and cabinet members set up similar deals under Clinton and Bush. Millions of working-class people are opposed to this, many who support Obama believing they can "hold his feet to the fire." But working-class people are the source of such change, not union leadership or the president.
Mass Transit is the life-blood of big cities, which puts tremendous power in our hands if we are organized to use it. At MUNI, at AC Transit and around the country, we must work on uniting community groups who are hurt by the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), riders whose service is being cut back, and transit workers who are hurt with nightmare schedules. We have plenty of and powerful allies if we get out there and organize them.
Societal change and revolution may sound overwhelming and far-off. PLP presents the alternative of a communist society to our coworkers and friends with every struggle for improvement in our lives. As these battles continue, many will see a relationship between "schedules," capitalism, and the need for revolution.J
Calif. Dems Pass Budget Cuts; Workers, Students Must Hit Back
The longest budget stalemate in California history ended in September with a budget "balanced" on the backs of workers and students. The budget, which stands to be cut further, is a racist attack on the working class that:
• Cut $3.3 billion from base K-12 funding and from community colleges, libraries and adult education
• Cut billions more from low-income seniors and people with disabilities, from the CalWorks job training program, and other social services.
• Cut MediCal benefits, public health, the discount drug program, and payments to MediCal providers
• Will make mid-year cuts to the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) systems, but not to "debt service" (interest flowing from workers’ taxes to banks)
• Diverted money for public transit to fund $1 billion in transit-related debt service
• Kicked in $250 million extra for COPS, Sheriffs, and more fascist law-enforcement
California’s Racist Cuts
Democratic politicians took advantage of the huge Obama turnout to pass an initiative raising LA County’s sales tax to 8.75%. Now they’re planning more racist mid-year budget cuts which will hurt all workers. For example, the bosses closed King Hospital in South LA, patients were shunted to public health clinics; now the County Board of Supervisors threatens to cut the clinics.
Like 18 other states, California is running out of unemployment insurance funds. The official unemployment is over 7.7%, up from 5.5% last year. The San Francisco Chronicle reported (9/11/08) that California hoped to borrow from the Federal Government for the first time since the 1930s.
Meanwhile, workers here are losing their homes at 2½ times the rate a year ago. Tuition is likely to increase in the UC system, and in the CSU system with proportionally more black and latin students. At community colleges (with even more black and Latin students) fees could rise by 30% or 50%. These fees don’t go to the colleges, but into the general fund where they help pay for bond interest and prisons.
Our Fight
College students protested budget cuts last spring, and are planning statewide rallies for the coming weeks. Students and workers still have illusions about capitalism, but as discussion leads to action, opportunities for communist work expand. CHALLENGE sales on campuses are increasing, more students are looking to the Progressive Labor Party for leadership. It will be up to us to take this opportunity to show that capitalism is not a viable system for the working class. Join Us.
Mumbai Massacre Heats Up India-Pakistan Dogfight
The Mumbai terrorist attack is being played as a religious holy war between Moslem and Hindu fundamentalism. But behind that lies what is killing millions of workers worldwide today: the dogfight among the world’s imperialists and their lackeys for control of the energy resources, pipelines (see below article) and the right to super-exploit workers.
In South Asia, this deadly mixture has brought two regional nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, to the brink of another war, and exposed the weaknesses of U.S. imperialism’s policy towards Afghanistan-Pakistan. "The crisis…fallout may… [expand] to include the United States, NATO, Afghanistan and Iran," reports the NY Times (Week In Review, 12/7)
The U.S.-NATO Afghan war has had a devastating destabilizing effect on Pakistan (see CHALLENGE, 12/10). A fractured Pakistani ruling class is so divided that it cannot help U.S. imperialism’s design for the region. "A collapsing Pakistan, and with it the loss of any real border separating India from Pakistan, is India’s worst nightmare," says Robert Kaplan, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "Making matters worse, every time the United States launches an air attack into Pakistan from Afghanistan, it further destabilizes the Pakistani state." NY Times, 12/8)
Any of the many factions of the Pakistani ruling class could had been behind the Mumbai massacre — which killed 192 people and injured hundreds more — as well as the recent bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Many in the ISI (Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service) see India as the main enemy of Pakistan. Killing innocent people is business as usual for imperialism’s big bosses and their goons.
The Mumbai massacre has shaken India’s growing alliance with the U.S., enabling India’s old ally, Russia, to re-emerge. Following the Mumbai massacre, Russian president Medvedev visited India and not only made a deal to sell India 80 M1-17 helicopters but also got an extra $2.2 billion from India for an aircraft carrier.
Mumbai has not only led to Russian weapons’ sales to India but has now brought India’s bosses closer to the Russian position in Afghanistan.
During Medvedev’s visit, in a Joint Declaration, India and Russia shared their concern over the "deteriorating security situation" in Afghanistan and called for a "coherent and a united international commitment" to deal with the threats emanating from that country.
The implied criticism of the U.S.-led war is obvious as is the rejection of the U.S. strategy to retain the war as its exclusive domain. The Joint Declaration then says, "Both sides welcome Russia’s initiative to organize an international conference in the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, involving its Member states and Observers."
Both India and Russia are derailing the U.S.-Saudi plan to make a deal with some Taliban leaders at the expense of the former’s interests in energy-rich Central Asia.
This mixture of imperialist-capitalist rivalries and their use of religious fundamentalism is deadly for the region’s workers and their allies. The urban and rural workers and youth, from Kabul to Karachi to Mumbai, have a long history of fighting capitalism and imperialism. What’s needed is a revolutionary communist outlook to unite and destroy all the bosses and their various ideologies.
a name="Imperialists’ Battle Over Oil Pipelines Will Widen War">">"mperialists’ Battle Over Oil Pipelines Will Widen War
The Mumbai massacre (see above) highlights the rapid, blood-letting pace of the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry for control of the Caspian region’s vast oil and gas resources and its strategic pipeline routes to world markets. This rivalry, intensified by the worldwide, deepening capitalist economic crisis, is leading eventually to World War III.
U.S. imperialism’s seven years of indescribable carnage in Afghanistan was originally intended as a quick military operation to secure pipeline routes for transporting Caspian region resources to the Indian Ocean Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, by-passing Russia and Iran.
Now, with the U.S. bosses bogged down in two wars — and major ones with Iran, Russia and/or China looming — while facing one of the worst economic crises in their history, they’re desperately trying to stem their rapid decline and remain the number one imperialist power. Oil, despite its sharply lower price, is still crucial to this endeavor, as it is to Russia’s and China’s rise as rival super-powers.
a name="If You Can’t Beat Them, Have Them Join You">">"f You Can’t Beat Them, Have Them Join You
With the Russian victory in Georgia making it unfeasible to build new U.S. trans-Caspian pipelines, Afghanistan is again (short of invading Iran) the most realistic, practical route to transport Caspian energy to market, by-passing Russia and Iran. That’s why the "U.S. is actively considering [peace] talks with elements of the Taliban….in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago." (Wall Street Journal, 10/28/08)
The objective is to "pacify and stabilize" Afghanistan enough to guarantee safe transport of these resources, while occupying the country indefinitely. At a recent NATO meeting, "the alliance visualized a long haul in Afghanistan." (Asia Times on-Line, 10/15/08)
U.S. bosses hope to have everything in place by 2013 when Kazakhstan oil, being developed by U.S. oil companies, will start flowing. With this outlet, U.S. imperialists hope to reverse Russia’s gains in the energy-rich ex-Soviet republics.
Russia, China, Iran And The Northern Alliance
These plans directly threaten the geopolitical interests of Russia, China and Iran, so they’re pushing back. This fight will only lead to wider, and eventually global war.
Russian President Medvedev criticized the U.S. for creating chaos in Afghanistan. He called for a new pan-European security pact, saying NATO can’t ensure the continent’s security. He said the "United States’ desire to consolidate its global role" is unrealizable in a multi-polar world.
Defying Russia’s warning, U.S. imperialists arrogantly think they can unilaterally expel Russia and Iran from Afghanistan. But the Northern Alliance, Afghan President Karzai’s main base of support, is very dependent economically and militarily on Russia and China.
Iran also has close ties with former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the anti-Taliban coalition (Northern Alliance) in the 1990s. Kabul is courting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a holy warrior who fought for the CIA against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. He leads the fastest-growing insurgent group in Afghanistan.
China, a major player in the region, opposes the U.S.-NATO permanent military presence in the area. Afghanistan is being courted by the SCO to become a member. The SCO is a regional organization created by Russia and China to stop U.S.-NATO expansion in the Caucuses-Caspian regions. Since 2004, Karzai has been a guest of honor at all the SCO’s summit meetings.
U.S. bosses are also supporting the Balochistan secessionist movement, which could eventually break up Pakistan if it degenerates into a failed state or becomes too independent. This would both deny China access to alternative energy resources and transport routes, and provide U.S. bases to further encircle Russia and China militarily.
PLP condemns the terrorists behind the Mumbai attack, along with all the capitalists-imperialists and their religious fanatics terrorizing workers worldwide. Workers need the ideas in CHALLENGE to fight all the bosses and build a mass international revolutionary PLP to fight for a communist world, without any bosses and their mass terror.
Pakistan and China in U.S. Bosses’ Sights
U.S. actions in Afghanistan and the region are also aimed at preventing China from importing 80% of its oil by skirting the Strait of Malacca, a narrow passage-way which the U.S. can block in case of war.
For China, the closest and safest sources of energy are Iran and the Caspian region, by-passing the Malacca Strait. Thus, China has signed mega energy contracts with Turkmenistan and Iran, a country the U.S. strives to isolate.
China’s other alternate routes are Pakistan’s Gwadar port in Balochistan with prospective pipelines from there to China’s remote western regions; and the Myanmar’s Sittwe port from which it will build two 900-mile pipelines to its Yunnan province.
Other possible routes for China to bypass the Malacca Strait are in the Indian Ocean. Thus, the U.S., using pirates in the area as pretext, has sent warships to "patrol" it. The U.S. is also negotiating bases there to gain full control of the Indian Ocean and adjacent seas, and temporarily thwart all Chinese solutions to their Malacca dilemma.
LETTERS
Fighting Memories of Republic Window Workers
I want to thank the workers at Republic Windows for sitting in. I worked there for a short time about ten years ago.
Many of the jobs there involve cutting plastic pieces. This produces large amounts of plastic dust. We had several confrontations both with the union (at the time the mobbed-up Novelty workers union) and the company over getting ventilator masks, as opposed to the cheap paper masks the company gave out. People had coughing bouts from the dust. I would get so pissed off about the coughing, look over at my friend who was welding the pieces I cut, and we would both slow down.
The occasional union meetings were sometimes raucus. I remember one ending with a couple of workers standing on chairs screaming at the business agent. The room erupted and people walked out. It made a big impression on me.
I gave 10 or 12 coworkers CHALLENGE each issue. We formed a May Day committee — a study group that tried to build for the march in Washington. We also organized around issues in the plant. We had discussions about communism, which some people liked. On the Saturday of the May Day march the bosses offered overtime, which some people took. Still, a couple of people went to D.C.
We did force a meeting with the owner. He told us how much the machines cost him, and how much extra we had to produce before he could see a return on the investment. This was a millionaire explaining his "problems" to people starting at minimum wage.
One day the supervisor on the line next to mine yelled at a worker. People got mad and stopped working. I went over there, but when they told people to go back, that line didn’t go, so I stayed. Four of us were fired. Our spirits were pretty good, considering. We stuck together fighting until people got other jobs. I eventually moved, but I have good memories from there. Don’t let the politicians fool you.
Ex-Republic Worker
a name="‘So, What’s the Plan?’"></a>"So, What’s the Plan?’
"I just want to see a world based on equality," my friend said as we discussed a CHALLENGE article on Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Every Thursday afternoon my friend and I participate in the Stockton, California’s Peace and Justice Center’s demonstration against the Iraq-Afghanistan Wars.
Emanuel has written a book called, "The Plan." In the book, Emanuel puts forth a plan of "social fascism," similar to what led to fascism in Nazi Germany. One of his suggestions for the U.S. capitalists is "all-class unity" with national service for all youth.
My friend said, "Yes, the bosses have their plan, so, what’s our plan?" I replied, "Workers need a revolution and then a society based on communist equality."
"So, how do we get there?" my friend asked.
"Discussing the plans of Lenin and Stalin — and Mao — could be a step in the right direction," I said.
"Let’s talk more about this next week," my friend replied.
"See you then!" I said.
California Comrade
Government is FOR the Bosses
In the U.S., private household debt stands at $12 trillion. Some 850 million people around the world go to bed hungry every night. Neither situation is considered a crisis by the world’s rulers. Lehman International goes belly up, and it’s nothing but crisis. The government immediately offered to bail out the banks. A $700 billion loan, but the world’s 850 million who are haunted by hunger and the millions who carry the $12 trillion private household debt will see none of it.
In just one week it could be seen that capitalist government (Democrat or Republican) is for the capitalists. Profits are privatized (meaning they are the private property of the millionaires) but losses are socialized (working-class taxpayers will pay them). Government is not a neutral arbitrator that rules on the conflicting needs of capitalist and worker, but a biased and ruthless defender of capitalist wealth and power.
Capitalism serves the needs of the ruling class, keeping workers in debt and unemployed. It will take a revolution for workers’ power and communism to end hunger, debt and exploitation. It is that revolution that PLP and CHALLENGE is building. Join us!
A Comrade
a name="Student Strikes Sweep Europe; Bosses’ Bailout Bills Workers">">"tudent Strikes Sweep Europe; Bosses’ Bailout Bills Workers
Students and working class youth are not only fighting back in Greece. Students in Germany and Italy took to the streets, took over schools and universities and demonstrated against the bosses’ "reforms." These reforms will mean more cutbacks for students and teachers, to make them pay for the bosses’ economic crisis.
Over 100,000 German high school students struck on November 13 against standardized tests and a teacher shortage resulting in overcrowded classrooms. The next day over 300,000 workers, professors, college, high school and middle school students in Italy protested the bosses’ paying to rescue banks while cutting funding for education and research. They chanted the slogan "We will not pay for this crisis!"
The budget cuts are affecting working class students all over the world. The bosses are offering tests instead of teachers, and the bosses will not trade their profits for our well being. They are more concerned with preserving their precious capital so that they can go on maximizing their profit than they are with preserving our lives as they cut into healthcare, education, scientific research, and all of the needs of the working class.
Students everywhere can be inspired by the anger and militancy of the student strikers in Greece, Germany and Italy as well as from their unity with workers. Students do not have to accept the poor conditions they face in schools or the second-rate education they receive in the bosses’ schools. The bosses need students to become the workers and soldiers of the future. The mass fightback of students today is the best lesson they can learn, which will never be taught in the capitalist schools.
When students take to the streets or take over their schools, when students refuse to take their exams, show up to teachers’ union meetings to protest budget cuts, create mass petitions about school conditions, walk out or sit in, protest against imperialist war or fight the racist cops like in Greece, they are beginning to fight back against the system. It is the role of communist youth and teachers to turn these mass struggles into school for communism and build a massive worker-student alliance to smash capitalism.
Killer Cops Spark Youth Rebellion, Strikes Across Greece
ATHENS, GREECE, December 11 — Several days of anti-cop rebellion was followed by a general strike on Dec. 10 attacking the economic policies of the government. For several consecutive days, police and protesters have clashed nationwide following a Special Forces cop’s fatal shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6 in this city’s central district. The cops claimed Alexandros and other youths were throwing rocks at police cars. But the youth were just shouting anti-police slogans.
The arrest of two cops for this murder has not calmed the masses’ anger. Hundreds of students battled police in Thessaloniki, while protests also turned violent in Trikala, the port of Piraeus, and on the island of Corfu. Major mass marches were planned for today.
The rebellion and mass anger against this police murder reflect the hatred of many workers and youth for the cops. During the "colonels’ dictatorship" of 1967-74, cops were particularly brutal against those opposing the military junta. And in recent years under the right-wing government, police brutality has intensified. The cops have especially brutalized immigrant workers, particularly in Athens’ police stations. The national government has been trying to divert the anger of workers and youth by attacking immigrant workers and refugees here.
The protests are not just the actions of a "few hothead vandals" as right-wing Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said on national television. After the killing, students have occupied a majority of schools nationwide. The High School Teachers’ Union has already called a 3-day strike and the Primary School teachers were set to walk out tomorrow.
Meanwhile, in Germany a dozen demonstrators occupied the Greek consulate in Berlin, replacing the Greek flag with a banner proclaiming Greece "a murderer state."
There have been recent mass strikes opposing the government plan attacking pensions and job security, under orders from the European Union to cut the budget deficit. The government also gave billions in bailouts to local banks growing out of the current worldwide financial meltdown.
While workers were being attacked, a scandal erupted involving a land swap between an Orthodox monastery and government officials in Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis’ New Democracy Party. A land scandal had further tarnished the government’s political standing. Even recent wildfires have been linked to speculators who want to build hotels in protected forest land.
The opposition Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and the reformist "Communist" Party, both with lots of influence in the union movement, are using the rebellions — the biggest since World War II here — to push for an electoral defeat of the right-wing New Democracy government, but without changing the capitalist essence of Greek society.
Amid the growing capitalist economic crisis and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leading to wider wars, reformist electoral politics won’t extricate workers and youth from the hole into which capitalism has driven us. The lesson from these rebellions and strikes is to fight for a revolutionary communist leadership, capable of uniting workers Europe-wide and globally, to transform society into a world without any bosses, police terror or economic crises in which workers pay for the bankers’ bailouts.
REDEYE
Money pulls their food away
GW, 11/28
Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies…. Land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism," with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.
They use us for war, but then…
LAT, 11/20
Neglect of the Gulf War vets [is]… all of a piece with this country’s historic maltreatment of its returning service men and women….
Shay’s Rebellion, the new American nation’s first exercise in popular unrest… involved unpaid Revolutionary War conscripts who returned home to find their farms seized for back taxes. Some were thrown into debtors’ prisons.
Some 75 years later… Irish immigrants [were] lured into New York’s famous "Fighting 69th" during the Civil War, then left disabled and without their promised pensions….
In 1932, the use of federal troops to attack and disperse the so-called Bonus Marchers — 17,000 World War 1 veterans and their families who converged on Washington to demand early payment of promised federal benefits — remains a national disgrace.
The protracted struggle of many Vietnam vets to win decent treatment for both post-traumatic stress disorder and exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange remains a fresh and painful memory.
Katrina kids’ health ‘alarming’
NYT, 12/5
After more than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked….
Forty-one percent under age 4 had iron-deficiency anemia — twice the rate for children in New York City’s homeless shelters. Anemia, often attributable to poor nutrition, is associated with developmental problems and academic underachievement….
More than half of those ages 6 to 11 had a behavior or learning problem…. "Not only has their health not improved since the storm," the study said, "over time it has declined to an alarming level."
Russian regard for Stalin rising
NYT, 11/30
And how should Russians today regard the darkest chapters of Soviet history? Russian bloggers debated those questions….
"The feeling of Stalinism and its perception in Russia is much different from the artificial, absolutely negative image created by journalists in the West. The problem is that former Soviet citizens cannot clearly identify themselves as supporters or as enemies of Stalinism…. On the other hand the number of people who are grateful to Stalin for what he did for the country increases by many times [more than] the number of opponents."
Obama Drafts War And Fascism Cabinet
Will Barack Obama’s choice of black, Latin, Asian and female cabinet members and advisors finally represent the interests of long-oppressed segments of the U.S. working class? We think not. Class analysis shatters Obama & Co.’s egalitarian facade. Each and every appointee serves the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists. Every last one has a bloody record of attacking workers by aiding the rulers’ war machine or their growing police state.
Class Politics Primary
Identity politics is a dead end. What matters most is class. Warmakers Obama, Eric Holder, and Susan Rice won’t help the black working-class youth they seek as cannon fodder for the rulers’ wars. Family-splitting deportation honcho Janet Napolitano won’t help poor immigrant women. Thinking that the Obama administration signals positive change would be a grave political error. Politicians and their subordinates all serve the capitalist class.
What follows is an incomplete rogues’ gallery of the anti-worker criminals — many Clinton administration veterans — Obama has assembled so far. U.S. imperialism faces sharpening military and economic challenges. The rulers hope Team Obama’s ruling-class diversity will divert workers from our need for mass, multi-racial working-class unity and help them implement the widening wars and domestic crackdown they require to restore their profits.
The communist Progressive Labor Party is the only political movement that has workers’ needs at heart. Functioning outside — and opposed to — the bosses’ electoral system, we stand for mass, multi-racial struggle against racist unemployment amid the deepening Depression; unity of the employed and unemployed; and work towards ultimately destroying the deadly profit system, replacing it with workers’ rule.
ERIC HOLDER, African-American, future attorney-general, is who Obama promises will "clean up" Guantanamo. Don’t count on it. Working as a lawyer at Washington’s Covington and Burling firm in 2004, Holder defended Chiquita Banana’s gun-running to Colombia’s right-wing death squads. "Defending" Chiquita’s plantations, they slaughtered over 4,000 peasants. Now Holder joins the deadliest death squad in history.
ROBERT GATES, returning "defense" chief, constitutes a different facet of Obama’s inclusiveness, revealing the new regime’s main purpose. An author of the "surge" in Iraq and U.S. troop expansion in Afghanistan, Bush alumnus Gates, like Jones (see below), is meant to win over Republican conservatives to the imperialists’ ever-expanding war agenda. Pointing to the next U.S. theaters of operations, Gates’ Pentagon just announced a program to hire translators skilled in "35 languages including Arabic, Hindi [spoken in India], Farsi [spoken in Iran], and Somali." (Boston Globe, 12/6/08)
Janet Napalotano, Obama’s Homeland Security czar, has a "rational approach" to immigration policy which boils down to Gestapo-style terror. As Arizona governor, she turned state and local cops — through a joint training program — into agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Thus, "Arizona led the nation in deportations — comprising about a fifth of the total 349,041 [undocumented] immigrants deported nationwide." (AP, 11/7/08). Napolitano’s state is home to three major ICE pre-deportation concentration camps. Obama wants this proponent of "immigration reform" as a mask to "federalize" individual states’ attacks on immigrants.
JAMES JONES Retired Marine general and now National Security Advisor, was a major architect of both Iraq genocidal wars and Clinton’s civilian-wide bombing of Serbia. Like Holder, Jones promotes the killing of civilians for corporate profit. He’s a Director of Boeing and Chevron, which make billions off imperialism, one by selling the Pentagon weapons of mass destruction, the other from access to Mid-East oil.
SUSAN RICE, African-American, the next U.S. Ambassador to the UN, strives to cover U.S. war-making with a humanitarian fig leaf. As a Stanford professor and Clinton aide, she has written extensively urging U.S.-led UN military intervention in places like Darfur, citing a "responsibility to protect." Inevitably, it is resources, such as Sudanese oil, that demand U.S. protection from Chinese control.
BILL RICHARDSON, Obama’s Commerce Secretary, claims "man-of-the-people" status despite a ruling-class pedigree. His father ran Citigroup’s vast imperialist operations in Mexico (which it may have to sell) from the 1930s to the 1950s. Bill and his late distant cousin Elliott Richardson, who held a record four cabinet posts, descend from merchant brothers who settled near Boston in the 1630s.
A young Bill Richardson toiled for arch-imperialist Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He served as energy secretary to Clinton, whose energy policy amounted to air war against pro-Russian forces in the former Yugoslavia involving Caspian oil routes and preparation (with sanctions and missiles) for the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields.
HILLARY CLINTON, for Secretary of State. Obama deceitfully courted anti-war voters in the primaries. He had attacked Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote for invading Iraq. Firmly under the bosses’ control, president-elect Obama makes warmaker Hillary a major agent of U.S. foreign policy.
ERIC SHINSEKI, Obama’s Asian-American pick to head Veterans’ Affairs, embodies Colin Powell’s doctrine of using overwhelmingly lethal force against a military foe. Shinseki, as Army Chief of Staff, incurred the wrath of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld when he told Congress in 2003 that it would take "several hundred thousand soldiers" to secure Iraq and its oil. Today Obama says, "He was right." (NY Times, 12/6/08) Like Jones, Shinseki drips with the blood of millions of Iraqis and Serbs.
Newark Port Jobs Plan Elates Bosses, Exploits Workers
On September 16, 2008, Newark Mayor Cory Booker unveiled a port development program supposedly aimed at "fighting poverty." "OpportunityNewark" (ON) is an 18 month project led by Harvard business prof Michael Porter (Newark Star Ledger 9/16/08). One of the recommendations in the ON report was to clear land that’s not being used for functions compatible with development of airport and seaport-based industry. "Clear land" means to take the land and give it to the port bosses. The city says the businesses dislocated by the land grab will need help, but is not specific. Like Newark’s 20-year tax abatements to Prudential and others, this amounts to using workers’ tax money to subsidize rich corporations.
Due to "globalization" and rising imports from off-shore manufacturing, the port had already been growing for years before Booker became mayor. Port Newark/Elizabeth is the largest container port in the eastern U.S. and the third largest in the country. Since 1998, the Port has seen a 65% increase in traffic volume. In 2003, the Port moved over $100 billion in goods. Plans are underway for billions of dollars in improvement –– larger cranes, bigger rail facilities, deeper channels, and expanded wharves. Booker’s giveaways are on top of huge profits already made.
Booker’s program is supposed to help workers with prior convictions. In class society, hundreds of thousands of youth, many of them unemployed black and Latin youth, are locked up for drug possession and non-violent offenses. When released from jail, they can’t find jobs because of their records. Most of the port jobs pay between $12 and $18 per hour. But many of these jobs will pay below the median Newark income of $34,452, which is half the state median! Forty percent of the jobs pay below $25,000 per year. With little wage progression, these are racist dead-end jobs meant for black and immigrant workers. In other words, one more bosses’ scheme to bring down the wages of the working class in order to meet their needs, not ours.
The biggest capitalists and bankers are now in hot water from the financial mess. They are looking for new ways to exploit workers and make us pay for their crisis, especially now that off-shore manufacturing is about maxed out. They would like to funnel immigrant workers and those with prison records into the lowest-wage jobs, since those groups have fewer options and may be less willing to fight back. This also means those who make a little more at the port will be in an unstable situation. With no protection, what is to prevent port bosses from replacing the worker who makes $18 or more an hour with a $12- per-hour worker just released from jail?
As workers, we need to begin to take responsibility for ourselves as a class. A big step in that direction would be organizing around communist ideas from PLP. This could lead to port workers as a group fighting back against the bosses’ attempts to destroy the wages and benefits of one more group of industrial workers. Organizing in the midst of the port expansion could mean more industrial workers being won to communism, free of exploitation. Communism would put workers first and allow everyone a say in working conditions. The benefits and burdens of society would be shared by all workers.
Obama to Workers: Sacrifice To Save Racist Capitalism
- Imperialist War Still On The Agenda
- Communist Analysis Crucial
- Patience, Urgency, Action On The Road Ahead
- How ‘Unpopular’ Becomes ‘Popular’
- Exposed The Truth About Vietnam War
- Election Heightens Rulers’ Assault On Workers
- Promoting Unity With The Enemy
- Workers Can Build A Movement Based On Our Class Interests
a href="#LA, Brooklyn PL’ers Attack Obamamania">"A, Brooklyn PL’ers Attack Obamamania
- Without Red Alternative Volunteers Could Become Network for Fascism
a href="#Don’t Be a Sucker for Racism">"nti-Immigrant Hysteria Pushed by Bosses, ICE and Politicians Murdered Marcelo Lucero
a href="#Boeing Strike Sold Out But PLP’s Politics Spread">"oeing Strike Sold Out But PLP’s Politics Spread
- The Struggle Continues
a href="#APHA Marchers:‘Down With Borders, Up With Health!’">AP"A Marchers:‘Down With Borders, Up With Health!’
a href="#Strikers, Indigenous People Battle Colombia’s Army, Cops">"trikers, Indigenous People Battle Colombia’s Army, Cops
Gaza: One Vast Israeli Concentration Camp
a href="#‘Wall-E’: Its ‘Anti-Consumerism’ Opens Door to Fascist ‘Solution’">‘Wall-E’: "ts ‘Anti-Consumerism’ Opens Door to Fascist ‘Solution’
LETTERS
Haiti: Kids Buried Alive by Capitalist Greed
Boeing Strike Brings Solidarity and Communist Class Consciousness
High Schoolers Backed Boeing Strikers
- FDR’s capitalism needed war
- U.S. finances right-wing terror
- Peru workers in violent demos
- Rulers solution: screw workers
- Non-Marxist economics is bull
- Imperialism needs Obama
Obama to Workers:
Sacrifice to Save Racist Capitalism
Upon the election of Barack Obama, the bosses’ mass media has flooded us with the idea that his victory will somehow alleviate 400 years of racism in the U.S. But ever since the anti-racist rebellions of the 1960s and early ’70s, the bosses have learned how to use black politicians like Obama to push the same myth of "the end of racism." Yet, since then mass racist unemployment, police terror, imperialist wars, wage-cuts and plant closings have continued, and they won’t stop with Obama.
Yes, there was "dancing in the streets" when Harold Washington was elected the first black mayor of Chicago. The cheering had barely died down when his first official act was laying off 3,000 city workers, 80% of them black. Within 48 hours of the Obama election, NYC Mayor Bloomberg (he of the $20 billion fortune) announced plans to lay off 5,000 city workers (a large number black and Latino), close scores of poor children’s dental clinics, raise the 8.375% sales tax another 3% (highest in history), cancel the scheduled $400 rebate to working-class homeowners while raising their property taxes 7%, hike personal income taxes 15% and put a six cents tax on every plastic bag used in every store!
These objective conditions of capitalism — "solving" the bosses’ economic crisis on the backs of the working class — cannot be wished away and will result in intensified attacks.
OBAMA’S CAPITALISM WILL WIPE OUT JOBS, HOMES, PENSIONS
Obama will not prevent those tens of thousands of GM and Chrysler workers, victims of a probable merger, from losing their jobs.
Millions of homeowners will still suffer foreclosures.
The stock market plunge will still wipe out billions of dollars in workers’ 401(k) pensions.
Obama will not alleviate the super-exploitation of millions of subcontractor workers all across the South and California.
His promise to accelerate Clinton’s placing of 100,000 cops on the streets will continue the racist and strike-breaking role that the police play for the bosses.
Obama — as all presidents before him, Democrat and Republican — will still carry out the Carter Doctrine: to use military force wherever in the world U.S. rulers’ control of oil is threatened (U.S. "vital interests").
IMPERIALIST WAR STILL ON THE AGENDA
Obama will still maintain the hundreds of U.S. military bases worldwide, ready to start up new wars (assuming he can get the troops to fight them) which will continue to kill millions of people as has already occurred under Clinton and Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama has advocated 20,000 more troops for Afghanistan (and an invasion of Pakistan?) to guarantee an oil pipeline from Kazakhstan through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
While no doubt the rulers will orchestrate an Obama trip to Africa before "cheering crowds," it will not stop the profit-driven war for vital minerals in the Congo which has already killed 5,000,000 people.(see page 5)
And whenever some troops may be withdrawn from Iraq, Obama still has championed holding them "at the ready" in bases around the Mid-East and South Asia, to "guard against terrorists" — meaning anyone threatening the U.S. bosses’ oil empire. The NY Times (11/3) revealed that Obama and McCain advisors, along with ruling-class "think-tankers," have been jointly discussing the military option for Iran.
All this will be part of Obama’s "program" because his job — and the job of any U.S. president — is to defend the capitalist system that creates these problems, which is precisely why the ruling class put him in position to take the White House. This was no accident. (See box, page 5 on Obama’s "Dream Team".)
Already, in his acceptance speech, Obama was pushing "sacrifice" and "service" — which will soon become "national service," a back door to a military draft. This first black president is being touted as the "culmination of the civil rights movement" of the 1960s (even Bush referred to that the morning after the election!), conveniently omitting the nation-wide black rebellions and then the racism that followed over the last 40 years, in unemployment, health, housing, education and police brutality.
COMMUNIST ANALYSIS CRUCIAL
In the face of the ruling-class media onslaught, Progressive Labor Party has Marxism and its analysis of capitalist exploitation: how workers’ labor power that produces all value is turned into bosses’ profits; how the contradictions that are built into capitalism lead inevitably to periodic recessions, depressions, mass unemployment and imperialist wars between rivals competing for super-profits, resources and control of energy. Marxism is still as valid as ever.
Interestingly enough, in this presidential campaign, when Obama was nonsensically attacked as a "socialist" or "communist" it was linked to the idea of "sharing" and "equalizing wealth." While they were rebuffing this "accusation," no doubt millions think "sharing" is a pretty good idea, one cornerstone of communist ideas.
The rulers are already flooding us with the "demockracy" garbage, about the U.S. as "the beacon to the world." It’s PLP’s job to answer this, as we have all along, in exposing the real U.S. role in the world — all the mass murder in the wars the rulers have launched: Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan. And all the fascist dictatorships U.S. rulers have generated or sustained: the Shah’s Iran, Guatemala, Chile, the Congo — under Johnson and Nixon, Carter and Clinton as well as Reagan and the Bushes. We cannot allow people to forget the nature of this "beacon."
In the long run, and many times in the short run, PLP’s analysis of the contradictions of capitalism/imperialism is the only thing that makes sense to the working class. We should never underestimate this. Over the past 47 years, it is what has enabled us to make it through many tough times and come out stronger.
PATIENCE, URGENCY, ACTION ON THE ROAD AHEAD
All this will not be easy, as workers and others get sucked into the rulers’ billion-dollar propaganda machine. Facing off against "the-first-black-president" business may very well put us into some unpopular positions initially (see box on right). But PLP’s Marxist analysis and communist ideas, combined with the understanding of objective conditions, will present us with untold opportunities to convert any "unpopular" position into a mass understanding among the working class that capitalism — white, black or whatever — is our enemy.
Patience and urgency must be the guide. Patience with our friends and within mass organizations as the objective conditions unfold, and the urgency to advance PLP’s ideas at every turn.
We should organize to take action against the ruling-class onslaught, to figure out ways to answer their attacks. Fighting evictions and foreclosures; organizing rank-and-file unity of the employed and unemployed. There will be increasing millions thrown on the street. We must raise the issue in our unions and fight the misleadership tooth and nail. This can become a mass issue and unite workers all across our class, union and non-union, employed and unemployed, black, white and Latino. Working-class unity is a prerequisite for revolution. Class war is our answer to the rulers’ "all-class unity."
This class struggle must be linked to the only solution to capitalism’s horrors: communist revolution. The absolute precondition for that goal is building the Party needed to lead it, the PLP.
It will not be easy. But as has been said, "Revolution is no tea party."J
HOW ‘UNPOPULAR’ BECOMES ‘POPULAR’
Exposing and opposing Obama and the ruling class he serves may not be "popular" at first. But in our 47-year history, PLP has never shrunk from upholding principled positions that may be "unpopular." And we not only have been proven correct eventually but emerged stronger for it.
Before even being a Party, in 1964, two years into the Progressive Labor Movement, when the Harlem Rebellion erupted, we were the only group supporting and encouraging that uprising. While now such support might be viewed as "automatic," we were opposed by all the reformist organizations, the preachers, the "Communist" Party, the press and TV and the full power of the State.
All those forces were calling for the rebels to "cool it." The rulers banned our demonstrations with injunctions (which we broke), sent us to jail, invoked a Grand Jury witch-hunt, tailed us, bugged our phones and so on. But our "unpopular" position mushroomed into huge rebellions throughout the country over the next four years. The masses ratified our position.
EXPOSED THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM WAR
Not only were we the first to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, but we took the lead against the liberal, "Negotiate, stop-the-bombing" crowd, labeling it an imperialist war with nothing to "negotiate." We dared criticize the Ho Chi Minh leadership for not fighting for communist workers’ power but rather for "national liberation" and alliance with the sellout Soviet Union.
We were lambasted — "who are you to criticize the leadership of workers and peasants fighting in the jungles of Vietnam." But we stuck to our guns while organizing in the military for class war against the brass and solidarity with those Vietnamese workers and peasants. Our "unpopular" position exposed that mis-leadership which has now welcomed Ford and Nike into Vietnam to exploit workers on $2 a day.
PLP was one of very few to take the "unpopular" position of indicting the Soviet and Chinese Party leaderships for selling out the revolutions. Again, we were proven correct as these two fake "communist" parties sank into the swamp of full-blown capitalism. We exposed this in 1966 in the Soviet case (23 years before its so-called "demise") and in the early 1970s in China’s case, long before they were welcomed into the capitalist camp.
None of these positions came easily, although they may appear so now. But the Party emerged stronger, advancing communist ideology against the socialist return to capitalism, against the maintenance of the capitalist wage system, against the bosses’ nationalism, against the cult of the individual. PLP produced the ideas of one Party/one class, of fighting directly for communism. That is the only solution for the working class.
a name="Election Heightens Rulers’ Assault on Workers">">"lection Heightens Rulers’ Assault on Workers
President-elect Barack Obama has emerged as a propaganda machine for the U.S. ruling class, calling on the working class to "sacrifice" for the survival of capitalism while doling out nearly a trillion dollars to the banks, insurance companies and failing corporations. Thus, U.S. rulers scored a significant, but temporary, win over class consciousness on November 4th.
Barack Obama moved 63 million workers, students and professionals, including record numbers of black and young voters, towards capitalist "solutions" for the economic crises and imperialist wars that capitalism itself creates. Booms and busts are part and parcel of an inherently unstable profit system. Self-interested financiers constantly tout worthless "good-as-gold" instruments, like subprime mortgage bundles, credit default swaps and other "securities," to cheat one another and the public. Houses of cards inevitably collapse. And ceaseless worldwide competition among national ruling classes for markets, labor, and resources, especially oil, sparks ever-intensifying military conflict, that ultimately goes global.
As Obama’s choice of advisors shows (see "Dream Team", page 5), he intends, as every U.S. president since Washington has, to make workers pay for rulers’ problems. With his supposed all-class mandate, Obama hopes to enact anti-worker policies more freely than Bush, an obvious enemy of labor.
PROMOTING UNITY WITH THE ENEMY
Stealing a line from Nazi Germany, Obama promotes the notion, fatal to our class, that we’re all in this mess together. Nazis at Hitler’s 1930s’ rallies shouted "one people, one nation, one leader." At his election night media event in Chicago, banker-backed Obama spouted a similar ruling-class credo: "We rise or fall as one nation, as one people." So we must "sacrifice" to save the bosses’ nation. A multi-racial, largely working-class crowd cheered repeatedly, enthusiastically and illogically, "Yes we can."
The U.S. rulers, whom Obama serves, seek to restore profits at home through racist layoffs and across-the-board pay-cuts, modeled after Big Auto’s halving of younger, mainly black and Latin, workers’ pay packages last year. Replacing outright foreclosure with forcible renegotiation of mortgages on terms favorable to the banks forms another part of liberal Obama’s domestic assault on workers. He also seeks to lure or compel working-class youth into the expanded military that U.S. rulers need for their widening wars. Pakistan and Syria are the newest battlegrounds. Iran, Russia and China loom on the horizon.
The president-elect promises young, increasingly unemployed workers a college education if they live through a stint in the armed forces. But joblessness alone may not provide the 91,000 new troops Obama demands or the millions that war with China or Russia will require. That’s why a second tier of New Deal-style liberals like Robert Reich stands behind the bankers in Obama’s camp. Reich & Co. propose a large-scale program of federal jobs at rock-bottom wages to rebuild infrastructure and the military. If that doesn’t work, there’s always the draft.
WORKERS CAN BUILD A MOVEMENT BASED ON OUR CLASS INTERESTS
Obama’s victory, amid recession and war and the anti-worker onslaught it accompanies, constitutes a real setback for our class. But history shows that red-led workers can turn just such developments into their opposite and build a mass movement against capitalism. In the depths of the 1930s depression, the old Communist Party led militant sit-down strikes, as at GM in Flint, Michigan, in 1936-37, that fought layoffs and pay-cuts. It also organized thousands to physically block foreclosures and evictions. Unfortunately, that party failed to link these struggles to the need for communist revolution as the only solution.
The anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, in which PLP played a leading role, mobilized millions. The Party exposed virtually every major university’s and company’s role in the U.S. war machine and organized strikes, sit-ins, walkouts, teach-ins and other aggressive actions against it. Learning from the old CP’s errors, it recruited many to a revolutionary outlook.
We can reinvigorate our working-class, communist Party today by reviving struggles like these while correcting the mistaken class politics that robbed them of revolutionary promise. The "C"P’s World War II era "United Front Against Fascism" encouraged allying with "good" anti-Hitler imperialists, like U.S. and British rulers.
Nationalism, which boosted local, usually non-white, capitalist bosses, turned sincere anti-war 1960s’ activists into a cheering section for capitalist misleaders like Nelson Mandela. Under the latter’s presidency, unions were told not to strike while his maintenance of capitalist exploitation under black bosses increased unemployment and poverty.
Within the U.S., nationalism enables workers’ enemy Obama and war criminals Colin Powell and Condi Rice to help preserve the profit system. Powell defended the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and directed the slaughter in the first Gulf War. (See CHALLENGE, 11/12)
Progressive Labor Party categorically rejects a united front with bosses, nationalism and all other forms of class collaboration. But correct ideology is only one prerequisite for a successful revolutionary communist party. Another is leading effective, inspiring, sharp class struggles — schools for revolutionary communist practice. The plunging economy, escalating imperialist warfare and the new Obama regime present our Party with opportunities to grow qualitatively.
a name="Barack’s Capitalist Dream Team: Workers’ Nightmare"></">Ba"ack’s Capitalist Dream Team: Workers’ Nightmare
The emerging "Team Obama" boasts many of U.S. capitalism’s most vicious racist job-, wage- and benefit-cutters and imperialist warmakers. Economic hit-men like former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Clinton’s Treasury-Secy. Robert Rubin and his assistant Larry Summers, and Clinton’s NY Fed chairman Timothy Geithner comprise Obama’s money trust.
Their policies directly raised unemployment to levels unseen since the 1930s, dismantled Welfare and helped engineer Wall Street’s "restructuring," which this year alone has cost 1.2 million workers’ jobs. Government figures show 21.2 million workers out of work or unable to find full-time jobs. (NY Times, 10/8) Meanwhile, executives of failed firms haggle over the size of their multi-million-dollar "golden parachutes."
John Podesta heads Obama’s transition team. The lobbying firm he founded fronts for BP, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon, and other cogs in the Pentagon war machine. Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff, served in the neo-Nazi Israeli Defense Force during the genocide of the first Gulf War.
The Rockefeller wing of the ruling class, expecting potential opposition to capitalism’s putting the screws on the working class, has been planning Obama’s rise for some time. As CHALLENGE has reported, Rockefeller money sent Obama to Harvard and then to a professorship at the U. of Chicago and then to the "electric" speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention which gave him the national spotlight. It was then that he started pushing the rulers’ "all-class unity" ("We’re not blue states or red states; we’re the United States"), now his watchword. In Obama the rulers have the perfect guy to champion this.
According to the NY Times (10/5), Obama’s forces began organizing this campaign the day after he was elected to the Senate from Illinois two years ago. They figured out how to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, outspending McCain four to one.
a name="Students Open to LA PL’ers’ Exposé of Obama, Capitalism, Draft"></a"Students Open to LA PL’ers’ Exposé of Obama, Capitalism, Draft
LOS ANGELES, CA., November 4 — Today, election day, several black and Latino high school students delivered a Power Point presentation to over 300 of their peers, about half black and half Latino. They gave an historical, economic and political context to the U.S. election, particularly related to oil wars, and revealed the "hidden agenda" of the two candidates.
The presenters narrated and led discussions in four different sessions, getting better each time. Students were filled with anger and a thirst for answers when informed about Obama’s plan for youth to enlist for "National Service"; about old Clinton and Bush advisors now working for Obama and McCain; and about the inter-imperialist wars that will continue with either candidate.
Discussion and debate followed the presentation, also involving several teachers. Students then understood what’s behind the rising cost-of-living and how the war is causing school budget cuts, tax hikes and a collapsing economy.
One student raised eyebrows, saying, "Well if Obama is not fit, if McCain is not fit, then who is?" One presenter replied that, "No one is fit because it’s a question of the system and we know for a fact that capitalism is not a system fit for working-class people."
In another session a teacher declared, "I respectfully disagree with many of the points of the presenters. I think that Obama will bring positive change, especially after so many heads of states from other countries have expressed their support." Then another teacher commented that she understood the presentation as, "No matter who wins the election, the next President will have to mobilize the country for a bigger war. The danger is that Obama will try to convince an entire generation to commit to patriotism, to defend the U.S. government’s interests and to sacrifice for the American empire." Many students hissed, saying "not me."
It was clear from the discussions that after hearing a class analysis, an explanation of the nature of capitalism and imperialism’s need to wage war, youth and workers will not be easily swayed by patriotism, no matter which ruling-class spokesperson tries. As one black presenter put it, "Obama is just a shirt that they have put on because it is in style."
With this event we’ve not only developed our leadership but also will be able to increase our CHALLENGE networks. We realized that many young people are open to the anti-racist, revolutionary communist ideas and struggles found in our newspaper. Through political, ideological and class struggle and the fight to secure CHALLENGE networks, we can alert the working class to the rulers’ plans for wider war, leading to World War III, as well as help prepare our class for the long fight for revolution, and working-class state power.
a name="LA, Brooklyn PL’ers Attack Obamamania">">"A, Brooklyn PL’ers Attack Obamamania
LOS ANGELES, CA, Nov. 4 — PLP’ers and friends went to three colleges with CHALLENGES, leaflets and the PL election pamphlets to offer students an alternative to capitalist elections — communism. The elections were on everyone’s mind and most seemed open to hearing that the source of our problems is capitalism and that Obama won’t solve them.
One comrade talked to a group of students about how Obama has positioned himself to appeal to the best sentiments of people. But the reality of who he is and who he represents is quite different. We mentioned that Goldman Sachs, etc., supports Obama and that both he and McCain are supported by capitalists and carry out their interests, not those of the workers.
The spirit of service and sacrifice which Obama is calling for really means that the young people who supported him will be the ones called on to fight imperialist wars. Obama has pledged to increase the army by 92,000 troops and send 20,000 to Afghanistan.
A young man gestured to his friend and said, "That’s just what we were talking about." His friend said he didn’t trust either the Democrats or the Republicans and he would rather vote for a Freedom and Peace candidate. Our comrade said that elections wouldn’t bring the change we needed, that it would take a communist revolution. He said it was worth thinking about and everyone there took our literature.
In several other conversations, mostly young black people said they had been thinking along the same lines, or that they agreed with what we said. They were particularly worried about Obama instituting the draft in order to field the troops needed for the war in Afghanistan, and saw the call to sacrifice and service as a code word for the draft.
We saw only one group of students who were sort of cheerleaders for Obama and didn’t want to talk to us. "You have to believe," said one older woman. We told her that we believe in the working class, that history has taught us not to believe in the Democratic Party. Despite being unconvinced, she took a copy of the election pamphlet.
One black student said, "My grandmother and I have been talking about that same thing (how Obama and McCain both support wider wars and bailing out the banks). Yes, I’d like to get together with you guys."
The overwhelming majority of young people we talked to were open to our ideas. Three people gave us their contact information to come to a study group and future activities. We distributed about 600 leaflets, 200 CHALLENGES and about 150 PLP election pamphlets.
BROOKLYN, N.Y., Nov. 4 –– PLP maintained a constant presence in the lives of our close friends and the broader working-class community today, warning of a future of more war and more fascism amid the euphoria that surrounded the election of Barack Obama. The highlight of the day was a paper sale at a main transportation hub in central Brooklyn where we distributed 300 CHALLENGES and over 500 leaflets about the election and the economic crisis.
The energy our group brought to Crown Heights flowed from a day when all our forces, including several high school youth who have grown much closer to the Party over the last year, talked politics with our peers all day long; in classes, on break and at home.
Our membership, new and experienced, fought for the line that Barack Obama’s popularity represents a greater danger for the working class than any movement the Bush/McCain crowd of open fascists could ever build. As the day wore on into the evening, several of our comrades hosted socials or were invited out to watch the election returns.
Even amid the hype, and among friends with whom we share deep agreement around anti-racist politics, we were able to win them to recognize that the "change" this election will bring will prove to be insignificant. The harder part is convincing them that things will get worse, but we are working on it!
We reminded our friends and ourselves that war in the Mid-East will widen, that workers will pay the price for this economic crisis, and that racist police attacks like the killing of Sean Bell will occur again and again as long as we live under this brutal capitalist system.
The enthusiasm for Obama, while rooted for many in an honest belief that racism took a defeat in this election, is bound to fade as war, depression and fascism intensify. It remains our task, wherever we have influence and on as many levels as possible, to offer careful analysis of the developing world situation and present our Party and the fight for communism as the only solution.
Without Red Alternative Volunteers Could Become Network for Fascism
Barack Obama’s loyalty to his capitalist paymasters on the "bailout for billionaires" and his call for wider war in Afghanistan/Pakistan reveal his true colors.
But by far the most dangerous aspect of this election is Obama’s bringing to the White House the biggest, best organized, fastest-acting grass-roots army in the history of presidential campaigning. In a text message sent out minutes before his election-night acceptance speech, Obama told followers, "We have a lot to do to get our country back on track and I’ll be in touch about what comes next."
The new president’s minions include 3.1 million Internet-linked donors and volunteers. The most active of the volunteers include the million registered on mybarackobama.com, a social network that the campaign established to communicate needs, events and assignments to volunteers. Participation and fund-raising totals were calculated and there’s a numeric score for each volunteer’s success.
This volunteer network will be asked to exert pressure on Congressmen who oppose Obama’s legislation, among other tasks. This mass support for concentrated power in the hands of the president, if it takes hold, will make Bush’s fascist executive power grab look inept and tame. We will "love our dictator."
The campaign maintained extensive and precise digital records, allowing the new president a zip-code by zip-code map of "loyal soldiers." No matter their individual intentions, they will be used to build a base for a program of more war and more fascism.
No doubt thousands of Obama-ites think they’ll push the president in a more "progressive" direction. We must be among those masses to offer them an alternative. We must go to the January 20th inauguration in D.C. with CHALLENGE. We must step up the fight against racist unemployment, police terror, foreclosures, imperialist war, cutbacks, and bring workers, soldiers and students our communist politics. This is the only way to turn the dangerous illusions many people have in Obama into opportunities to build a communist alternative.
a name="Don’t Be a Sucker for Racism">">"on’t Be a Sucker for Racism
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria Pushed by Bosses, ICE and Politicians Murdered Marcelo Lucero
A racist gang’s murder of Marcelo Lucero, a 38-year old Ecuadorian immigrant, in Suffolk County, Long Island, is the logical extension of the anti-immigrant racism pushed by politicians, ICE (the immigration police) constant deportation raids, the media (such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs) and the government’s construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border.
Mr. Lucero was walking with a friend near a Long Island Railroad station, when a gang of 16 to 17-year-olds, jumped from a car and attacked the two men. Jeffrey Conroy, 17, the leader of the racist gang, plunged a knife into Marcelo, killing him. The gang, all from the same H.S., told the cops they "went out to hunt for Mexicans."
This racist crime occurred just a few days after Barack Obama’s election, which many claim marks "the end of racism" in the U.S. Racism won’t end no matter what the color of the politicians who run the country. Racism is an integral part of this capitalist society, which was born with slavery, the massacre of the Native Americans and the Manifest Destiny policy which launched a war that stole a good chunk of land from Mexico (California and the entire Southwest).
Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups targeting Latinos and immigrants has increased. They’re inspired by the Gestapo-type raids carried out by ICE, arresting thousands of workers in plants like the Iowa meat-processor and others nation-wide. These raids separate children from their parents. Undocumented immigrants are forced to carry tags resembling the yellow stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear in Hitler’s Germany. Mr. Conroy, the killer of Mr. Lucero, even has a tattoo of a small swastika.
As the economic crisis increasingly hits U.S. capitalism, the politicians and ICE target undocumented immigrants as scapegoats, while ALL workers are forced to suffer mass unemployment, wage- and benefit- cutbacks, home foreclosures, etc. This is an old divide-and-rule tactics rulers have used since the beginning of time.
In Long Island itself, racism against immigrants has intensified over the last few years. Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy has empowered racist mobs. Last year, Levy asked County cops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to raid homes where undocumented immigrants were believed to reside. Many people were routed from their homes and ordered to disperse without regard for where they could go.
The case of Orlan Enrique Moreno-Zavala, 22, a Honduran man found dead in February 2007 in the woods near Huntington Station, became a symbol of Levy’s abusive policies.
Lucero’s killers come from an area close to Farmingville, L.I., where attacks on immigrants is nothing new. In 2000, two Mexican day-laborers were kidnapped and brutally beaten, and in 2003 five teenagers set fire to a Mexican family’s home in Farmingville, destroying it.
On January 21, 2009, the day after Obama’s coronation, immigrant rights groups are calling for a march in Washington. D.C., to demand real immigration reform. But relying on Obama or on a Democratic Party-run Congress to do anything different than the racist hysteria built by the Bush administration is a deadly mistake. Now more than ever, the bosses need racism to super-exploit all workers to make us pay for their financial crisis and expanding wars. They aim to divide us so we don’t unite and fight back against their massive economic attacks.
We in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) call on all workers — black, Latino, white and Asian — to unite to fight mass unemployment, foreclosures, racist terror and social service cutbacks. Democratic Governor Paterson, Republican Mayor Bloomberg and all NY State politicians are united in imposing massive cutbacks and hikes in everything from tolls to subway fares. As communists, we in PLP believe that a system that promotes racist killings, war and mass unemployment, while bailing out bankers with trillions, must be smashed.
a name="Boeing Strike Sold Out But PLP’s Politics Spread">">"oeing Strike Sold Out But PLP’s Politics Spread
SEATTLE, WA., Nov. 1 — "That paper better say reject it," said a Machinist to CHALLENGE sellers on his way to the final Boeing contract vote. He was happy to see our headline calling the sellout contract an attack on all workers. He expected our Party to take the side of the working class no matter what the popular sentiment at the time. Most agreed it was a sellout, but didn’t see any alternative after striking more than eight weeks. In the end the contract was accepted, ending the strike of 27,000 machinists.
This action began two months ago with a two-day rebellion against the gang-up of the company, the government and their union lackeys. The union leadership proved that they have the bosses’ interests in mind by asking everyone to go to work, despite an 87% strike-vote. Angry, militant workers responded by chasing them from the union meeting. Leading up to the rebellion and beginning of the strike, "Rolling Thunder," a campaign of disruption where workers bang their tools against the factory machines, could be heard throughout the plant.
The pro-capitalist union leaders set us up from the beginning. The union’s contract slogan, "It’s our time, this time" fed the illusion that those of us left in the traditional union plants could force significant concessions from the bosses on our own. To add insult to injury, the misleaders said they were blindsided by the worldwide economic meltdown that undercut their "bargaining power." Thousands of CHALLENGE readers were not so blindsided.
Their written pitch to sell the contract bragged, "We made significant gains with respect to…the ability to help guide this Company into the future." They continue to argue that the way out of periodic capitalist crises is to give more concessions to [union] workers. In essence, they say the unions (and their endorsed politicians) can save capitalism from the greedy politicians.
Years ago, Karl Marx proved that capitalism would always suffer periodic crises of overproduction, no matter what the wages of workers. Worldwide depression is built into a profit system that can’t pay workers the value of what they produce. The only way for the capitalists to resolve this contradiction is to destroy the productive capacity of their international rivals: in other words, war and world war.
Boeing CEO Jim McNerney made this perfectly clear in his now infamous memo during the fifth week of the strike. Citing foreign competitors and the "global financial meltdown," he admitted U.S. imperialism could not sustain decent wages, benefits and job security. He called for an end to these "repeated work stoppages." Within days of the contract acceptance, he vowed never to "go through this [a strike] again." This is a clear indication that the bosses are going to intensify their attacks on the working class.
Building CHALLENGE Networks Throughout the Strike
As the bosses’ system is shocked by internal contractions and threatened by imperialist competitors, we must turn every strike, big or small, into a school for communism, by intensifying the class struggle, promoting anti-racist, international working class solidarity. A highlight of building working-class solidarity, was when a pair of Boeing strikers traveled to Los Angeles to present a "thank you" (signed by fellow strikers) to non-union subcontractors for their support.
The trip was made possible because a Party-led group of strikers met every week during the strike. We struggled with each other at these meetings to leave behind the illusions spread by the hacks. Communist revolution was offered as the only answer to capitalism’s inevitable crises, the attacks on our economic well-being and the inevitability of racism and war.
As the strike progressed, we produced flyers, solidarity letters and blog posts. We argued in this literature for mass pickets and solidarity rallies. In addition, we visited thirty-five other strikers to discuss how our communist politics related to this strike and beyond.
The mass sales of the paper — and the network sales that have been going on for many years — laid the basis for these meetings. They also encouraged another comrade — who spent many hours distributing PLP literature to strikers — to organize for worker-student unity in his campus organization. Prior to and during the strike, over 40,000 PLP flyers and 18,000 CHALLENGEs were distributed and sold to strikers in the Seattle area, L. A. subcontractors and UAW members at Boeing’s Long Beach, CA. plant.
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES
The struggle to consolidate and expand the modest revolutionary gains made during the strike is our next task. Although the strike is over, Boeing workers are incredibly angry with the sellout contract and there exists the potential for more action. We will continue to build our network of CHALLENGE readers, as well as building unity with sub-contractor workers in Seattle and L.A. Very importantly, we will push for unity between the commercial workers who went on strike and those in war production, who continued to work. By doing so, we can expand the class struggle and win more workers to the idea that revolution is the only solution!
a name="Profs Go To ‘Strike School’ on Stella D’Oro Picket Line"></a>"rofs Go To ‘Strike School’ on Stella D’Oro Picket Line
Communists know industrial workers’ labor is the major source of bosses’ profits and, with red ideas, the natural leaders of workers’ fight-backs and revolutions. Education workers like myself need to link up with more strategically placed industrial workers to fight part-timers’ exploitation, anti-strike laws, racist tuition hikes or imperialist war recruiters.
So I and other professors in my union went to support the striking bakers at the union-busting Stella D’Oro, to bring them PLP’s ideas, and introduce other profs to workers in struggle. The Stella D’Oro strikers taught me plenty.
Lesson 1: Unlike many of my professional colleagues, workers stick together when the chips are down. The 135 strikers are solid — in nine weeks not a single scab from their ranks, workers of many backgrounds, senior and junior, women and men. One older South Asian worker was deeply moved by the solidarity of the young, mostly Latino/a workers, who refused to scab despite being there only one year. It made him determined to stay out, not so much for himself as for the next generation of workers. Those are feelings that help make everyone here a potential revolutionary.
Lesson 2: Class consciousness is alive. Though weaker now, workers feel it when things get tough. Members of their sister Local 3 brought a big cake they had baked for the strikers. A Verizon worker who refused to cross the line returned with ten pizzas and drinks for the picketers’ lunch. (My friend also brought two pizzas. And the picketers gave us food and drink, too, as we leafleted and talked with them.) A Local 3 electrician also refused to cross the line; the boss’s problem went unfixed. My own union’s members gave $450.
Lesson 3: Workers are open to communist thinking. As communists we tried to heighten class consciousness. The strikers agreed with our suggestion to leaflet nearby industrial sites to win those workers to their coming rally. In two hours we had MTA bus drivers, Time-Warner Cable electricians and Montefiore hospital workers coming to the rally!
The other side of class consciousness is hatred of the cops — who harass the pickets and chase motorists for their day’s ticket quota — and, of course, hatred of scabs. Professors were impressed hearing workers giving scabs hell. I asked my friend to relate how miners he worked with had fought scabs and also won some to stop.
Lesson 4: Many New York workers have family ties to the CUNY colleges, the basis of a real worker-student-teacher alliance. At Stella D’Oro almost every worker I asked had a nephew, a daughter, a friend, among the 400,000 CUNY students. It’s important to be there alongside our students’ families in struggle. We need to fight harder for the worker-student-professional alliance — a PLP idea — in the CUNY union.
On the line we learn it’s not as hard as some claim. There are many ways to broaden friendships made with strikers. We can’t build a revolutionary movement or recruit many intellectuals to PLP without this direct alliance with industrial workers.
Lesson 5: Workers think straight, figure things out, and know what has to be done. A strike is a great "school for revolution" (Bolshevik leader Lenin’s phrase). Many bakers have good political ideas far beyond the immediate strike issues — war, the elections and of course the bailout. And they’re open to the Left. One striker said the bosses actually did nothing in the plant; he saw that we don’t need the bosses at all, that workers can run everything.
Two leaders on the line were curious about our thoughts on the elections. They had little faith in the bosses’ two parties. One said war expenditures were part of the economic crisis (try to find that on CNN). He related a detail we hadn’t heard about, Iceland’s borrowing from Russia.
As a communist teacher, I was eager right then to start a "sidewalk seminar" to hear more of their ideas. It would have been one of my best classes, as both learner and teacher! The next step is discussing CHALLENGE.
One creep in my union said we shouldn’t do much to support this strike, since these little struggles were "a dime a dozen." Hogwash! Every worker in struggle is a valued part of that age-old tradition that ultimately leads to communist revolution. The Stella D’Oro line is full of such lessons. If you live in New York, go to 237th and Broadway, lend your support and bring CHALLENGE. They’re there 24/7, and for all of us.
Still Learning
a name="APHA Marchers:‘Down With Borders, Up With Health!’"></">AP"A Marchers:‘Down With Borders, Up With Health!’
SAN DIEGO, Oct. 30 — In the midst of a capitalist financial meltdown and days before the presidential elections, some 13,000 people attended the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual conference. In line with its theme of "Public Health Without Borders." The conference was held in this city near the U.S./Mexico border with Tijuana, the most populated border crossing in the world.
And yet, aside from slogans and location, there was little mention of the racist attacks on immigrant workers on this side of the border or the wage-slave conditions of workers in the Maquiladoras on the other. At least that was the case until a contingent of PLP health workers started raising the political issues more sharply.
It was clear when an anti-racist resolution advanced by activists was quickly rejected by the APHA leadership that they had no plans of even acknowledging the racist attacks on immigrant workers. Not unlike the decline of the anti-war movement or immigrant rights movement, or struggle around the Jena 6, what prior struggles that existed in APHA were virtually replaced with the movement to get Barack Obama into the White House. However, our Party contingent, consisting of veteran and younger comrades, was able to organize a couple of events that culminated in a march and demonstration from the convention center to the Federal Building.
Just in the past year, racist attacks on immigrant workers have intensified with increased raids and deportations by the ICE (the Immigration Gestapo). There are now over 300,000 immigrant workers held in detention centers throughout the U.S. which is already more than double the number of Japanese interned in concentration camps during WWII. Immigrant workers are dying in these detention centers as health care is being delayed and/or denied. Our resolution highlighted these racist public health attacks on our immigrant brothers and sisters and called on APHA to make a public statement opposing this racist injustice.
One APHA caucus had originally planned a bus tour of the Maquiladoras in Tijuana but was forced to change plans due to the increasing gang violence. Instead they held a small forum at a community college in the area. At that gathering we passed out copies of our resolution and called on the group to organize a protest at the border wall. The leadership of the group dismissed our suggestion but others supported it. With the leadership of a young comrade and a young doctor we met there, we were able to use the next few days to organize in our various workshops to build for our "radicals breakfast" as well as the march on the Federal Building.
At the opening plenary, California comrades helped us distribute a PLP flier stating that, "as public health people, we are right in the middle of a crossfire. In our clinics and hospitals we can see how capitalism’s inequality spreads sickness and death. Today’s keynote speaker, Michael Marmot, has written a great deal about the ‘social determinants of health.’ The ‘Unnatural Causes’ PBS series makes the point clearly that inequality is making us sick. Yet none of the critics of this savage inequality will name the real cause. Much is said about the web of causation, but nobody will name the spider. The spider is capitalism. It cannot be tamed. It must be destroyed!" CHALLENGE was sold outside the plenary and distributed to our friends hand to hand. Another flier exposed Obama’s connections with Wall Street bankers and warmongers like Colin Powell.
At our "radical breakfast" one young black woman we met the day before exemplified the younger public health activists we need to attract in larger numbers. Her impassioned account of fighting for the health needs of her Mexican immigrant clients in a small southern city was inspiring to hear. Other friends, including colleagues and CHALLENGE readers met at earlier conferences, joined in the discussion about how to build a more activist group in APHA.
At our demo, we organized over 20 people, multiracial, young and old, that marched and chanted "Public Health Means, We Got to Fight Back" and "Down with Borders, Up with Health!" We met two young hotel union organizers that joined and brought their bullhorns to amplify our message. Overall, it was a small and yet spirited group, which wants to continue these actions in the upcoming conferences. We also met many others before and after the march, exchanged contact information and forged new relationships that we hope to develop over the year. More importantly, it also energized our veteran comrades and we’ll be planning more events to strengthen our work in our locations, like the fight against 500 new layoffs in the Cook County Health System. This work needs to intensify as the deepening economic crisis and expanding wars intensify the attacks on public health and safety-net hospitals where many of us work.
a name="Bosses’ Dogfight Over Congo Wealth Threatens New Genocide">">"osses’ Dogfight Over Congo Wealth Threatens New Genocide
On Nov. 7, African leaders held a summit meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, demanding an immediate cease-fire to the latest fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hundreds of thousands have fled the Eastern Congo due to the fight between government soldiers, UN forces and General Nkunda, who’s supported by Rwanda’s rulers and bosses. The fighting is much more than an extension of the Hutu-Tutsi clashes that led to the massacre in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
Francois Grignon of the International Crisis Group explains, "Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now are beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit."
Congo’s President Joseph Kabila has used the army to support Hutu militias who fled to Eastern Congo from Rwanda. They perpetrated the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s and now also control lucrative mines there. Thus, the fight is for control of the region’s mineral wealth.
However, there’s also an imperialist dogfight over Congo’s cobalt and other key minerals for weapons and in modern technology. In the Walikale region, the Rwandan army forced local communities to mine coltan, a mineral vital to mobile phones and laptop computers. In 2000, coltan was earning Rwanda $20 million a month.
The fight over Congo’s wealth already killed over 5.2 million people during the 1997-2003 civil war following the overthrow of long-time CIA puppet dictator Mobutu. Then Angola and Zimbabwe sent forces to fight alongside the new Congolese government against the armies of Rwanda and Uganda in what became known as "Africa’s world war."
Today, China is heavily involved in the Congo and the rest of Africa, including oil-rich Sudan, at the expense of U.S., British and French imperialist interests.
Two years ago, President Kabila announced plans to rebuild Congo’s infrastructure. Denied loans or aid for this from the U.S. or British governments, Kabila turned to China. (Washington is mainly taken up with costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Chinese rulers, needing Congo’s minerals and other raw materials, have given the Kabila government $8 billion for infrastructure projects. Its import-export bank has pledged money for Congolese road and rail construction. A new Chinese-built railway is proposed to link Katanga (another mineral-rich province) to the coast. (In the 1960s, the CIA financed Col. Tshombe’s Katanga secessionist movement, opposing the then Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who the CIA eventually assassinated.) Major hydro-electric projects are in their initial stages.
Capitalism’s global economic meltdown will surely sharpen all the contradictions in the Congo. The commodity price drop might have the same effect as the collapse of world prices for coffee (Rwanda’s main export) which impoverished much of the population and sharpened ethnic rivalry. This led to the Rwanda genocide in the 1990s as local bosses and politicians fought to control the shrinking economic pie. Today a similar mixture is bound to lead to more "ethnic cleansing" and a wider civil war.
Local bosses are fighting for control of the region’s mineral wealth to compensate for any losses in the world market. U.S. rulers have established Africom, a Pentagon command center for Africa, aimed mainly at China, in an attempt to re-gain control on the continent using the military.
For African workers and their allies, the only way out of this hellhole is to unite along class lines, breaking with all the ethnic-based warlords and bosses, and forging a revolutionary communist leadership. It’s a long hard task, but is the only road for real liberation.
a name="Strikers, Indigenous People Battle Colombia’s Army, Cops">">"trikers, Indigenous People Battle Colombia’s Army, Cops
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA, November 6 — More than 19,000 sugar cane cutters, subcontracted by co-ops in the Cauca Valley, have been striking since September 15 in eight sugar mills. The workers, represented by several unions, are demanding decent wages and working conditions, permanent jobs (ending subcontracting), the right to unionize and elimination of the ecological and social harm caused by the production of agrofuel (ethanol).
The bosses have rejected the workers’ demands and are supported by the government, which has militarized the mills. Cops and paramilitary forces have attacked the strikers with tear gas and rubber bullets, using military tanks armed with water cannons. Several strike leaders have had their lives threatened. The bosses’ government and media have labeled the strikers "subversive," a death sentence in Colombia.
Boss Carlos Ardila Lülle, who controls 80% of the sugar and ethanol business, is also connected with Coca Cola, Nestle, Postobonm Bavaria Brewery and RCN Radio-TV network. These corporations are heavily involved in using death squads to kill militant unionists and other activist workers.
A national march by 22,000 Indigenous people (see CHALLENGE, 11/12) opposed the fascist repression and land seized from Indigenous communities by landlords using death squads. These landlords raise cash crops on stolen land — African palm, sugar cane and poppy plants for cocaine. The army and cops attacked the march, killing several people and injuring dozens more, but the struggle continues.
Initially, President Uribe — the U.S.’s most loyal ally in South America — denied the attack, but then admitted it and accused the marchers of being "infiltrated by guerrillas." He aims to bust this struggle as was done with the 43-day judicial workers’ strike, who were also threatened by death squads and mass firings.
The Uribe government is so discredited that, after claiming several youths recently killed were guerrillas who died in clashes with the army and cops, finally admitted the truth: these youths were executed in cold blood so the government could claim it was "killing guerrillas." The scandal has forced several high-ranking military officers, including Colombian army chief General Montoya, to resign. This is the kind of "democratic" governments U.S. bosses are backing in Latin America.
We in PLP have been modestly participating in some of these struggles, discussing our communist politics with workers and youth. But we must do more. While such struggles are good, they’re not enough. Capitalism cannot be reformed or changed, even if electing "progressive anti-Uribe politicians," as some reformists and fake leftists claim. The main lesson for workers and youth is that a revolutionary communist leadership must be forged to fight for a society without any bosses, their racism, fascist death squads and imperialist warmakers.
Gaza: One Vast Israeli Concentration Camp
Visiting Israel/Palestine gives a glimpse of the reality of fascism, racism and nationalism in full force. Recently I was one of a delegation of 120 health professionals from around the world invited to a long-planned World Health Organization conference on mental health in Gaza. The conference was organized by the renowned Gaza Community Mental Health Project. Just days before the meeting, Israel announced that no foreigners would be allowed in as they would be "supporting the Hamas agenda."
We went anyway to protest at the gate, along with Israeli activists and the international press. A hundred strong, we marched and chanted in front of the high wall with gun turrets and under the spy blimps that surround Gaza, a virtual concentration camp. We then had the conference by video from Ramallah, but there were many technical hitches, and the Gazans remained as isolated as ever. However, many progressive contacts were made, some interested in our communist analysis and in getting our literature.
Before and after the conference our group of anti-occupation doctors traveled around the West Bank (WB) and witnessed the devastation wrought by poverty and occupation. Since Palestinians’ travel within the WB is hindered by military check points everywhere, and there are very few health facilities, they receive spotty medical care.
Preventive care, diagnostic tests, medical records, and even blood work is hard to come by. Patients with chronic diseases like diabetes or cancer get only haphazard and inconsistent services. Life expectancy is in the early 60s, while a few miles away the Israelis have the most modern facilities.
In severe emergencies, like a heart attack, local hospitals are not equipped to handle the situation and transport to Israel or East Jerusalem is hampered by lack of permits. A doctor I worked with in Tulkarem for a morning told me he sees about five patients a year die from lack of emergency care.
In Nablus we met a 17-year-old boy who was paralyzed from the waist down from a bullet. Israeli soldiers surround this city, which has a history of resistance, and make frequent nighttime incursions. This boy had been walking with friends when he was wounded by their gunfire at age 15. He now lies in a room up two flights of steep steps and has two deep bedsores, from which he will probably die in time. Leaving Nablus, we drove on the narrow winding roads that Palestinians have to use, because they’re banned from the Israeli highways. We came upon a severe car accident in which a woman died and four others were badly hurt – a very common occurrence.
We visited a village where Israeli volunteer doctors go once a month and bring their own medicines. The examining table was a mattress laid across four school desks. All we could do was a quick blood pressure, breast exam, prick the finger of diabetics and give a month’s worth of pills. The villagers were so grateful they prepared us a huge feast. No matter how poor the people, we were feted wherever we went.
Despite the primitive and shocking conditions in most of Palestine, Israelis are largely unaware and/or unsympathetic. There is extremely potent racism against Arabs, who many Israelis see as sub-human, and a conviction that Jews are the victims in their own apartheid state. Most Israelis are taught a very distorted view of history. Many have failed to understand that anti-Semitism was used historically to divide workers and shift blame from the ruling classes of Western and Eastern Europe, just as racism against all groups is used and is still used today. Racist Israeli workers and students fail to understand that not only are they building up hatred against themselves around the world, but that they are poisoning their own society with the pathology that militarism and racism breed and cutting themselves off from allies to fight for a better society.
(Next: short history of situation in Palestine/Israel.)
a name="‘Wall-E’: Its ‘Anti-Consumerism’ Opens Door to Fascist ‘Solution’"></a>‘Wall-"’: Its ‘Anti-Consumerism’ Opens Door to Fascist ‘Solution’
I took my 13-year-old daughter to see the new Walt Disney film, Wall-E (now just out in DVD). We were both disappointed. The film seeks to condemn pollution, blind consumerism, passivity and obesity, but the message is muddled.
On pollution, human beings have been forced to leave the earth because it’s too polluted. They take refuge on a spaceship while robots clean up the planet. Which, after all sorts of incidents, is what finally happens. No explanation of the source of pollution — capitalism — is given. Ultimately, the slogan is simply to sow seeds. Does this mean a return to nature, the theme of Thoreau’s Walden? As if it was possible to return to a pre-industrial Golden Age.
Meanwhile, humans have become the happy slaves of a totalitarian consumer society, where no one works (except the ship’s captain). They do nothing but blindly consume, obeying the exhortations of commercials projected on the screens that they watch continually. They remain sitting all day long in motorized armchairs, no longer able to walk or even stand. They do nothing but clap their hands to give orders to an army of robots that do all the work. This is a denunciation of the consumer society, and of the obesity crisis in the U.S.
But once again, there’s nothing about where this consumer society comes from, a society in which sterile consumption replaces the creativity of production. And this is where the film’s message becomes really muddled. First, because the heroes of the film are the robots Wall-E and Eve, and not human beings. They are the ones who lead the rebellion against this situation, and who act. And these robots were conceived with spin-off products in view, in particular video games the filmmakers hope kids will passively consume. Moreover, entire sequences in the film are drawn from video games, which the theater audience consumes passively.
The film projects an ambiguous image of feminism. Debatable: Eve is a violent robot equipped with an energy cannon, and — as the bosses want U.S. soldiers to do — she shoots first and asks questions later. She makes her partner, Wall-E, tremble. But also positive, when Mary, another robot, initiates the action to save the children during a crisis aboard the spaceship.
The treatment of race relations is also ambiguous: there are white couples and black couples who help one another but there aren’t any inter-racial couples.
The favorite film that Wall-E watches continually — and which represents the lost Golden Age — is one from the 1950s. A Golden Age for pollution — and anti-communism…
All this makes for a neutral film that offends nobody. But because the film doesn’t denounce the capitalist system which engenders pollution, blind consumption, passivity and obesity, it opens the door to the "solution" that capitalism also offers: fascism, which can very well accept a spirit of sacrifice [renunciation of personal consumption in favor of government (military) consumption], the glorification of physical fitness [developed for (military) service for the fascist order], and the abandoning of passivity in favor of (military) action directed by heroes (führers) — who are to be followed as sheep follow a shepherd — as the masses of human beings in the film follow Wall-E and Eve.
LETTERS
Haiti: Kids Buried Alive by Capitalist Greed
On November 9, an angry crowd went to the site of the collapsed La Promesse school building in the town of Petionville, Haiti, where 92 children and adults were buried alive. They were demanding that the rescue operation be stepped up. The three-floor building had crumbled two days earlier. Fortin Augustin, the evangelical pastor who built and ran the school, was arrested, accused of shady construction.
The thousands in the crowd were angry over rumors that some rescue workers, including a group from Fairfax, Virginia and another from the islands of Martinique and Guadalupe, were working slowly in order to make more money. The crowd shouted: "We don’t need money to work in the rescue operations!"
This tragedy was somewhat different from the many in which hurricanes, floods and mudslides have killed thousands in Latin America’s poorest country. It occurred in a relatively well-off part of Port-Au-Prince.
It’s estimated that two million people of the nine million living in this Caribbean nation reside in rotten houses. Hills across the country are full of huts, churches and schools that could crumble just like this school.
President Preval and the UN forces occupying Haiti are making big noises about how bad this tragedy was. But not much will change since the government doesn’t enforce its own construction codes. (Two days after the rescue operation ended at La Promesse, another school, Divine Grace, partially crumbled, injuring several students). And the UN military occupation force is too busy shooting at civilians in its so-called war against drug gangs.
This is another capitalist/imperialist-caused murder of innocent children and workers. A system that, in order to make a few bucks, cannot even guarantee the lives of school children must be smashed.
Toussaint Rouge
Boeing Strike Brings Solidarity and Communist Class Consciousness
Two solidarity dinners were held here in Los Angeles, gathering a multi-racial crowd of 85 workers, students, teachers, parents, children, men and women. Subcontractor workers introduced striking workers from Boeing, who spoke to the group about their recent strike in Seattle. Over $700 was raised at the dinners to help sustain our Party’s effort to build communist class-consciousness among strikers and subcontractor workers.
Many of the attendees expressed how inspired they were to hear about workers at one of the primary manufacturers of defense products in the U.S. striking, and not only for better wages and benefits. They were also fighting for future generations of workers and to build anti-racist international unity with subcontractor workers.
The Boeing strikers told of lunches, visits, CHALLENGES, and communist leaflets that helped build class struggle and revolutionary consciousness among many of the 24,000 strikers in the Seattle area. Strikers presented subcontractor workers with a letter thanking them for their support and calling for unity against the aerospace bosses. Over 30 Boeing strikers signed the letter.
"The speech was good because I learned a lot about what the workers are doing while on strike and what they are striking for. Also it became very clear to me how the union leaders really try to screw the workers instead of help them get what they need," said a Party friend who attended.
After the strikers’ presentation, the group discussed how people can understand communist ideas, whether they make $30/hr at Boeing, $12/hr at a subcontracted aerospace plant or 7 cents per piece in a garment factory. Consistent and clear explanation of the current situation facing workers shows that only communist revolution can solve our problems.
Like a good number of strikers, many students and workers had questions about how we assure that communism will succeed this time around. "Why only one Party?" "What about human nature?" "How can we get high school students more interested in CHALLENGE?" Revolutionary history, a dialectical materialist explanation of society’s development, and requests to write more for the paper were discussed.
Recently this strike was also discussed with workers in Mexico City and teachers in Oaxaca who sent congratulations and support to the strikers. The political work we did during this strike can affect workers, students and soldiers everywhere.
This strike has given us a glimpse at the opportunity we have as PLP to build and grow internationally during this period of economic crisis and strikes. Students and teachers pledged to step up the visits to Boeing and the subcontractors with CHALLENGE. We will continue raising communist ideas on the job, in the classroom and outside those walls to build a movement capable of destroying capitalism with a revolution for communism led by the PLP.
A Comrade
High Schoolers Backed Boeing Strikers
Dear Boeing Strikers,
We are a group of students in Los Angeles who read about your strike in CHALLENGE. The following are statements from some of us:
* A strike can make a difference. As the daughter of a working-class family, I know the struggles and hardship the working class goes through on a day to day basis. I know that the strike will be successful due to the fact that workers are the ones who make this world. All the wealth that the bosses have comes from the working class; we create their profits. If the workers go on strike, the bosses aren’t making any money.
* It is important that this article talked about unity. Our class, the working class, is strongest when all of us — union and non-union alike — are lined up together against our common enemies.
* I learned about the important role of workers who make airplanes; especially war planes. It’s good that we have the power to stop making airplanes. If we want to stop the war, you guys are really important.
* Unity among workers — citizens and non citizens, students, and every single person who belongs to the working class — is important. We are all struggling to get what we need, but if we don’t unite, there’s no point. We want to end the bosses’ rule because in one way or another, workers are being exploited. Here in California we have a lot of immigrant workers who get paid less than many others.
* It’s an inspiration to me as a working class comrade to see all of you out there on the front line everyday in unity, side by side, fighting back. I just want to say on behalf of the youth of LA, you have all of our support. Tough times are ahead. I just hope you all can keep your chins up and fists in the air. We all can win this fight and will, sooner or later. Many of the bosses will try to put you down and divide the workers, but if you all keep the unity, you are a strong force. Keep up the struggle.
High School Students
REDEYE ON THE NEWS
FDR’s capitalism needed war
NYT, 11/10
FDR did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. And the reason was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious. FDR was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits. What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II. This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.
U.S. finances right-wing terror
NYT, 10/30
The wave of killings has increasingly opened the United States to criticism because it is required to make sure Colombian military units have not violated human rights before giving them aid. Almost half of the reports of civilian killings in 2007 involved units that received American aid.
Peru workers in violent demos
NYT, 10/30
Thousands of people demonstrated in five provinces on Wednesday, threatening politicians in one, setting a police station on fire in another and demanding a larger share of the taxes generated by local mines in several others. Three police officers were taken hostage in Moquegua.
Rulers solution: screw workers
NYT, 10/28
If G.M or Chrysler were to go under, tens of thousands of people would be thrown out of work. But if General Motors and Chrysler were to merge, with some sort of government assistance, the story might end pretty much the same. To make a combined General Motors-Chrysler work—let alone flourish—the company would need to win big concessions from the U.A.W., cut salaries and benefits, and lay off a lot of people, fast.
Non-Marxist economics is bull
NYT, 11/2
Questions For James K. Galbraith
Q: There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis?
A: Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.
Q: What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?
A: It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.
Imperialism needs Obama
NYT, 11/5
A new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. "It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen" This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service.
- RULERS TO OBAMA: SELL WAR expand WAR Recruit for war
- Fight vs. Bosses’ Racist Unemployment
- CAPITALISM: THE UN-SAFETY NET
- Unite vs. Racist Murders of Immigrant Workers
- TWU Hacks Attack Rank-&-File, Help Rulers Squeeze ALL Workers
- Organize School Strike; Don’t Pay for Bosses’ Crisis
- Marchers Slam Racist Anti-Immigrant Raids
- PL’er Spurs Union Backing of Stella D’Oro Strikers
- Boeing Welcomes Back Workers With Layoffs
- Jewish, Palestinian Workers Must Unite Against Israeli Fascists
- U.S. Bombs Pakistan, Escalating U.S. Afghan War for Oil
- ‘Big 3’ Would Solve Auto Crisis on Workers’ Backs
- UAW-GM’s VEBA SCHEME ON THE BRINK
- Barcelona Nissan. Argentinian GM Worker Fight Back Against Mass Layoffs
- November 24, 2008 No Financial Meltdown for Challenge-Desafío
- Political Economy: FALLING RATE OF PROFIT HITS WORKERS IN THE HEAD
- LETTERS
- REDEYE ON THE NEWS
RULERS TO OBAMA: SELL WAR expand WAR Recruit for war
U.S. RULERS COUNT ON OBAMA
TO EXPAND ARMY AND NAVY
WARMAKING RULERS ALWAYS
EMPLOY BIG LIE
Each of these “noble” U.S. efforts claimed over a million lives, mainly civilian.
Fight vs. Bosses’ Racist Unemployment
Smash Racist Unemployment
With Communist Revolution
CAPITALISM: THE UN-SAFETY NET
Unite vs. Racist Murders of Immigrant Workers
TWU Hacks Attack Rank-&-File, Help Rulers Squeeze ALL Workers
Organize School Strike; Don’t Pay for Bosses’ Crisis
Marchers Slam Racist Anti-Immigrant Raids
(See article in this issue).
PL’er Spurs Union Backing of Stella D’Oro Strikers
Boeing Welcomes Back Workers With Layoffs
Jewish, Palestinian Workers Must Unite Against Israeli Fascists
U.S. Bombs Pakistan, Escalating U.S. Afghan War for Oil
‘Big 3’ Would Solve Auto Crisis on Workers’ Backs
UAW-GM’s VEBA SCHEME ON THE BRINK
Barcelona Nissan. Argentinian GM Worker Fight Back Against Mass Layoffs
November 24, 2008
No Financial Meltdown for Challenge-Desafío
- (1) Checks can be made payable to Challenge Periodicals. If not in position to send personal checks, then:
- (2) Money orders can be made out to Challenge Periodicals and we will fill in a “sender’s” name (not yours).
- (3) Cash can be given to a Party member who will forward it to us immediately via check or money order or cash directly in person.
Political Economy:
FALLING RATE OF PROFIT HITS WORKERS IN THE HEAD
SNAKE OIL
Grand Theft Capitalism
LETTERS
Racist Cops Frame Airport Skycap
Sunday School Lesson: Obama,
No! Organize, Yes!
Thanksgiving: ‘New World’ Genocide
REDEYE ON THE NEWS
Capitalism killing our globe
Obama an ambidextrous
virtuoso
Long Afghan war still ahead
The ‘Big Steel’ is GM plan
Agencies rob the most vulnerable
Influential docs take drug co. $
a href="#Communism Is Only Solution Bosses’ Election: Capitalism Wins">"ommunism Is Only Solution Bosses’ Election: Capitalism Wins
Team Obama: Imperialists One And All
Bosses Use Elections To Settle Their Own Conflicts
From Iran to Guatemala to Chile, U.S. Foreign Policy Pushes Fascist Dictatorships
Company-Union Gang-Up Dampens Class Struggle
The Revolutionary Communist PLP: Indispensable Organization Of The Working Class
Stella Strikers Face Phony Pols, Cops, Scabs
Howard U. Students Demand Halt to Racist Execution
a href="#PL’ers Foil Mis-Leaders, Win UFT Backing for Stella D’Oro Strikers">PL"ers Foil Mis-Leaders, Win UFT Backing for Stella D’Oro Strikers
a href="#Cops Trample Iraq Vets; Pacifism Won’t Work">"ops Trample Iraq Vets; Pacifism Won’t Work
a href="#East Coast PLP Youth Back Strikers, Expose Bosses’ Elections">"ast Coast PLP Youth Back Strikers, Expose Bosses’ Elections
a href="#Do-Nothing ‘Leaders,’ Scabs Undercut Vought Strikers">Do"Nothing ‘Leaders,’ Scabs Undercut Vought Strikers
a href="#Mass Strikes Hit EU Bosses’ Bailout Attacks on Workers">"ass Strikes Hit EU Bosses’ Bailout Attacks on Workers
- Greece Paralyzed
- Thousands March In Italy
- Teachers, Parents Protest in France
Auto Workers Must Strike Against Racist Unemployment
a href="#Colombia Fascists Can’t Stop Raging Class Struggle">"olombia Fascists Can’t Stop Raging Class Struggle
Union Leaders Show How Not To Organize Support for Boeing Strikers
CHALLENGE Binds Striker and Red Transit Worker
Retirees Back Boeing Strikers; Hacks Balk
H.S. Students Support Boeing Strikers
a href="#Capitalism’s Mass Unemployment Spreading Worldwide">"apitalism’s Mass Unemployment Spreading Worldwide
- Let’s make up for lost time
- Bush-speak proves Marx right!
- Quick relief, but not for hungry
- Age + foreclosure = catastrophe
a name="Communism Is Only Solution Bosses’ Election: Capitalism Wins">">"ommunism Is Only Solution Bosses’ Election: Capitalism Wins
One of two events, both disasters for the working class, will occur on November 4. Either Barack Obama, spouting his phony "end-of-racism" message, will prevail (as polls predict), or a sudden upsurge in overt racism (always a possibility in the U.S.) might propel John McCain into office. We in Progressive Labor Party do not believe in voting in the bosses’ election system. They completely control this electoral circus and only those who swear allegiance to them are even allowed access to it.
Although important tactical differences exist between Democrats and Republicans, both are committed to capitalism and U.S. "democracy." The rich and powerful who own and rule the U.S. clearly will never give up their power peacefully. They will also spill the blood of millions of workers and soldiers to protect their imperialist interests overseas from their capitalist rivals, waging wider wars which will lead to another world war.
They offer us the chance to vote for "our representatives" when both parties are actually financed by the richest of the rich, who they serve in all important matters. For instance, in the current financial crisis, polls showed that voters opposed the government bailout plan. But even mere weeks before an "historic" election, the politicians of both parties approved rescuing the banks. The richest bosses feared that panic would undermine their ability to pocket their profits as usual and that imperialist rivals would be able to take advantage of their weakness. After a momentary show of reluctance, the "representatives" fell into line with the rulers’ program.
How Electoral System Serves Rulers’ Needs
All politicians work for the ruling class. However, if the parties and politicians were completely alike, the electoral system wouldn’t serve all the rulers’ needs. First they want workers, students and professionals to believe we can elect someone who represents their "interests." Anti-racists have black and Latin candidates, anti-sexists can vote for women and those concerned about the environment are given candidates who talk about fighting global warming as long as business profits aren’t affected.
The presidential primaries had someone for everyone, an attempt to win workers to see the electoral system as the only option for change.
A secondary effect of drawing workers into the election circus is to build the illusion that voters determine government policy. Workers are encouraged to feel they’re responsible for the government’s actions. If something goes wrong, then just vote for a replacement. But in reality, the candidates and parties will do the opposite of what they campaigned for if important interests of the rulers are involved.
With his broad appeal, probable victor Obama poses the graver danger. Many workers and youth see him as a "solution" to the catastrophe of the Bush years. Obama & Co. seek to lure masses of workers to the rulers’ agenda of ever-expanding wars paid for by workers.
The ‘Carrot And The Stick’
Rulers also use the electoral system to co-opt mass protests against capitalism and its racism, sexism and wars. When millions took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War, liberal Senator Eugene McCarthy was trotted out to entice them back into the fold of dead-end campaigning and voting that changed nothing.
In the 1960s, millions of students and workers rebelling against the harsh racism and segregation, north and south, were given black mayors and "anti-poverty" programs that bought off a few and left masses of black workers still facing police brutality and the lower wages of a racist system.
However, while the rulers can use the "carrot" of an "anti-war" Eugene McCarthy or black legislators and "anti-poverty" programs, they simultaneously will use the "stick:" the cops, National Guard and the Army to kill anti-war demonstrators (Kent State and Jackson State); repress black uprisings (sending the 82nd Airborne to put down the 1967 Detroit black rebellion); covert state terror (the FBI’s COINTELPRO); and imprison 2.4 million people, 70% black and Latino.
When the rulers worry that our struggles may threaten their profits, they may give us a crumb: a dollar more on the minimum wage, OSHA laws (governmental on-the-job safety regulations) with one inspector for every 10,000 workplaces, laws against discrimination that are rarely enforced. Later, those crumbs are taken away when they see that we’ve bought into the election shell game instead of militant working-class struggle.
Relying on elections to improve our conditions is a treadmill to oblivion.
Freeing ourselves from the passive pull-the-voting-lever mentality starts with militant struggle like the Boeing machinists’ strike in Seattle, or the teachers’ strike in Morelos, Mexico. Mass marches, demonstrations and standing up to the boss may help teach us to fight back instead of accepting the "democratic" program. But to really overcome capitalism’s exploitation and wars, we also need to struggle for more profound change — a new system where workers will be in control.
U.S. rulers are desperate to maintain their system of wealth and profits. They killed 3,000,000 Vietnamese and 58,000 U.S. soldiers trying to control a small country’s workers and resources. They’ve killed over a million Iraqi workers with eight years of Clinton bombing surrounded by eight years of Bush aggression trying to maintain control of the world’s oil supply.
Raw Deal For Workers
But now, to marshal the forces U.S. imperialism requires, Obama may try an end run around blatant militarism and the draft. With the crippled U.S. economy shedding 200,000 jobs a month, he may opt for a Roosevelt New Deal-style employment program to rally workers around the flag. The Times (10/26/08) reports that Obama "proposes increases for education, infrastructure, research, foreign aid, and the military."
For workers, voting for warmaker Obama is no better than backing McCain. Viewing Obama’s election as a triumph over racism would be a serious political error. By every measure imaginable — from wages to health to education to imprisonment to jobs and home foreclosures — racist disparity rages in the U.S. Because capitalism breeds racism and imperialist oil wars, Obama can’t and won’t end or even alleviate either. Only the working class can.
U.S. rulers claim to be "democratic," but they really preside over a capitalist dictatorship. They own the wealth, control the mass culture and media and use their government and its military and police forces to maintain their power. Communists in PLP believe the working class must overthrow their dictatorship and replace it with a workers’ dictatorship where the vast majority will be armed to prevent the capitalists from ever returning to power.
To achieve this, millions of workers must join PLP to embrace communist ideas of sharing the wealth we produce according to everyone’s needs, along with anti-racist, anti-sexist and internationalist ideas which are necessary to unite the working class in its struggle for power.
Team Obama: Imperialists One And All
Before Obama was given the resources to campaign for the presidency, he had to meet with, be vetted by and swear his allegiance to the bosses’ flag of profits before a committee of Wall Street financial tycoons and then they donated $7.9 million to Obama’s campaign (Reuters, 6/5.08).
Obama’s economic advisor is the ruling class’s top economic assassin Paul Volcker, who has frequently met with the candidate since the financial crisis broke. As Federal Reserve chief, Volcker "solved" the bankers’ inflation crisis of the early 1980s by jacking up interest rates and causing unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression.
Today, Volcker and Obama push for a fascistic concentration of finance under tightened state control. Volcker was chief economist at Chase Manhattan bank when David Rockefeller ran it. With Rockefeller, he co-founded the imperialist Trilateral Commission.
On October 25, The New York Times published a list of "Possible Presidential Appointments." As Obama’s treasury secretary, the Times pointed to Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers. Geithner, head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, has toiled for Rockefeller’s Council On Foreign Relations and Kissinger Associates, which advises Exxon Mobil and other firms that depend on the U.S war machine. Geithner was a leading engineer of J.P. Morgan Chase’s takeover of Bear Stearns and the $250-billion federal buy-in to major banks.
Summers, who as Clinton’s treasury boss helped dismantle Welfare, tried mightily to restore officer training at Harvard when he was its president. The Times says Richard Lugar may run the State Department. In 1997 and 1998, Lugar sponsored a little-known terrorist attack drill that put local police under Pentagon control in cities from coast to coast.
Bosses Use Elections To Settle Their Own Conflicts
In addition to countering any worker protests against the system, elections are also used to provide a peaceful way to deal with conflicts among different sections of the ruling class. Various capitalists who are united in pursuing profits can sometimes have different economic and political needs. Those who are deeply invested in oil production internationally (tracing back to the Rockefeller and Morgan fortunes) are sometimes in conflict with those whose fortunes are tied to domestic oil production.
The government is used to mediate these differences. For instance, the "liberal" internationalists use environmental regulations to hamstring domestic oil producers. As a side effect, the liberals can appear to be pursuing the environmental goals of their supporters.
Health care "reform" is an issue where mediating conflicts between the rulers is combined with attempts to con us into believing that the government represents our interests. The older established section of the rulers, whose fortunes are centered in large industrial and financial institutions, provides most of the health care insurance available to U.S. workers. For decades they’ve been trying to reduce that expense by creating a system where more bosses (and also workers in general) will share that burden by increasing the number of workers who are insured but making the coverage considerably poorer and less expensive than the largest bosses pay now.
Small and medium-sized bosses, who rarely provide insurance coverage, fight these plans by having "their" politicians argue that they will lower the quality of health care available to workers (true). But they downplay the reality that tens of millions of uninsured workers must often choose between paying for food or for medical care.
Resolving this debate may solve problems for some set of bosses, but whether workers support one side or the other, all of us will wind up with the short end of the stick.
From Iran to Guatemala to Chile, U.S. Foreign Policy Pushes Fascist Dictatorships
U.S. rulers have constantly shown that their professed love of "democracy" is just a sham. In 1953, the CIA organized the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Iranian government led by Mossadegh, whose fatal flaw was believing that the world’s major capitalist powers would sit by and allow him to nationalize Iran’s oil resources. Thousands of his supporters were massacred in order to put the autocratic Shah in power so U.S. companies could gain control over Iran’s oil.
In 1954, the CIA overthrew Guatemala’s democratically-elected Arbenz government — which had nationalized 70% of the country’s land previously owned by United Fruit — causing the murder of hundreds of thousands, many of them indigenous peasants,.
In 1973, the CIA joined with local capitalist and military forces to overthrow the Allende government in Chile. Allende described himself as a Socialist and believed that after he won the presidential election, industries could be nationalized and workers would benefit. He believed in "democracy" and refused to organize and arm workers to defend their gains.
This "belief" left workers defenseless against the U.S.-supported forces of the newly-installed brutal dictator Pinochet, leading to the murder of thousands of workers and leftists.
Today, Iraq and Afghanistan look more like U.S.-occupied colonies than like independent democracies. If the U.S. ruling class shows such hypocrisy defending its interests from imperialist rivals and their lackeys abroad, we have to assume that their concern for the electoral process at home serves their own interests, not ours.
Boeing Sellout: An Attack on All Workers; Reject It!
As we go to press, the company and the union have hashed out a new sellout offer. This is not just betraying Boeing workers. The International Association of Machinists (IAM) and pro-capitalist AFL-CIO misleaders are helping the bosses attack all workers’ wages and conditions.
We need to vote "NO!" and surround the plants with mass picketing to really shut the company down. Today, one worker at our weekly luncheon meeting said, "I’m voting "No" because it will screw the next generation." All agreed. We must expand our modest Party-led efforts to build striker-subcontractor worker anti-racist, international unity and organize solidarity rallies among our supporters locally and nationally.
Boeing CEO Jim McNerney has attacked our "repeated work stoppages," inviting the pro-capitalist union mis-leaders to help him "change this dynamic." They’ve obliged in this sellout. It’s similar to the one we rejected, which sparked this strike initially — except it’s a four-year contract, not the traditional three. (We’ve struck three of the last four contracts.)
Essentially this means a lower wage in the 4th year: normally the biggest increase is up front in the first year, but now what would have been a bigger increase in the first year of the next 3-year contract becomes a smaller one as the 4th year of this contract. For example, pensions increase a scant 2% in the 4th year, not even enough to keep pace with inflation.
New younger workers are attacked the hardest. Starting wages have been frozen for 15 years. Now the offer of a $2.28/hr increase is less than the $3.82/hr advance in the state’s minimum wage over the last 15 years! This contract preserves the same wage increase but over four years, not three. New hires will still make an average of $15/hour in 2012 — if they can get a job at Boeing! The subcontracting regime stays put with a few insignificant face-saving changes in language.
Company-Union Gang-Up Dampens Class Struggle
To win acceptance of this latest contract offer, both the company and the union want to isolate us strikers and wear us down. Both fear any sign we might put our faith in the might of a united working class.
Significantly, the IAM leadership sabotaged any attempt to hold a support rally at Corporate Headquarters in Chicago (see letter page 6). We exposed this treachery to dozens of workers we’ve visited. Every one responded, "That figures!"
What Is Success?
Given all this, one crucial measure of success is how many strikers and supporters are won to seeing the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party as the indispensable organization of the working class. There are two new Party-led study groups and other CHALLENGE readers who’ve agreed to attend Party club meetings.
This is a product of having organized numbers of rank-and-filers to build unity with subcontractor workers, to request and receive support letters and to speak at meetings of workers and students for the first time. One worker at a check distribution point, upon hearing about the need for this unity, exclaimed, "So it’s not us against them, it’s all of us against the company!"
"I’m new to all this," said a striking CHALLENGE reader who traveled to Los Angeles to personally give the "thank you" letter he wrote (and helped gather signatures for) to Boeing union and non-union subcontractor workers who the Party has organized to support our strike. "But it seems to me," he continued, "that you can advance your revolutionary [communist] cause by first educating workers and students like those here about the history and ideas of your movement and through action.
"I can’t speak for all the 27,000 Boeing strikers, but I was impressed by the letters of support from subcontractor workers and was inspired by the response of Los Angeles high school students. I’ve heard how these workers that supported us slave under horrible conditions. The most important thing you can do is advance that struggle here. Pick a factory, any factory! You have enough to fight here to keep you busy for a lifetime!"
Between the two LA meetings involving 85 union and non-union workers and students, black, Latino and white, and a similar support dinner in Chicago, we collected more than enough to pay for our tickets to the LA solidarity event and the continued distribution of over 1,000 CHALLENGES per issue and tens of thousands of communist flyers. Overall, in the strike in Seattle and among the Boeing subcontractors in LA, we’ve distributed over 40,000 PLP flyers and 17,000 CHALLENGEs since the beginning of our industrial summer projects in July.
Local college students, inspired by the emerging anti-racist, international unity between strikers and subcontractor workers, wrote their own leaflets about this outstanding development. They’ve organized through their campus groups to bring students to the picket lines. Internationally, we’ve received more than a dozen support letters (often with donations). Hundreds of rank-and-filers organized by PL’ers have taken the initiative to support us, by-passing the union misleaders.
Our weekly CHALLENGE readers’ luncheon group wrote another "thank you" note to these hundreds who’ve supported us internationally, stressing the need to mobilize the might of a united working class. It advocates mass pickets to shut down the bosses, organizing huge solidarity rallies based on anti-racist unity locally, nationally and worldwide. When we brought this letter to the picket lines for signatures, the overwhelming majority of workers who talked to us signed. We’ve also sent a support letter to the Bronx, NY Stella D’Oro strikers linking their struggle to the anti-racist, international unity we aim to build between subcontractor workers and ourselves.
The Revolutionary Communist PLP: Indispensable Organization Of The Working Class
Boeing CEO McNerney says decent wages, benefits and job guarantees are "unsustainable" in this period of intensified inter-imperialist rivalry exacerbated by "global financial turmoil." The pro-capitalist union hacks agree by running to support the bosses’ global subcontracting regime. They only want a few "ancillary jobs" to remain unionized (which the new contract offer may not include) so they can stay in business.
Most workers have learned from their own experience not to trust the pro-boss union mis-leadership, condemning them in language we can’t print here. Given the worldwide capitalist economic crisis, some are even questioning the viability of trade union reform, particularly around job security. No organization that is dedicated to preserving capitalism can provide viable answers for our class.
We will need many more Boeing CHALLENGE sellers to maintain the mass character of our paper now evident among strikers. As the economic crisis opens the door, we have to rush in with CHALLENGE and our revolutionary alternative to the bosses’ plans for war, racism and rapidly accelerating attacks on our livelihoods.
A CHALLENGE reader who is joining our study group declared, "You have to know what’s going on in the world and how the world works just to survive these days." He knows that our Party — through his reading and selling CHALLENGE, through the discussions and organizing at the CHALLENGE readers’ lunch, and through the anti-racist, international solidarity and class struggle we are attempting to build — gives him the tools to survive. As they say, revolution is the only solution. Now that’s worth a lifetime of struggle.
Building Solidarity Between Boeing Workers in Seattle and Long Beach, Cal. In Spite of Union Sellouts
PLP members took picket signs, leaflets and CHALLENGES to a Boeing plant of UAW members in Long Beach, California. Some said that while they support the Seattle strikers, the IAM leadership "steals jobs from us!"
We told them that all Boeing workers have the same enemy and the same interests. "We aren’t supporting the leadership of the IAM or the UAW. They’re trying to divide you. We’re communists. We’re building unity between Boeing workers in Seattle, Boeing workers in Long Beach, Vought workers, and the subcontractor workers who also work for Boeing." Most workers were then more than willing to get CHALLENGE and our leaflet which stated "Workers Power is our only Security." Our signs supported the Boeing strikers and also said "Warmaker Boeing—stop super-exploiting subcontractor workers!" As the Seattle striker said, Long Beach workers, under the same attacks as workers in Seattle, should strike too!
We also held solidarity dinners with Boeing strikers, raising over $700. Subcontractor and other workers, students and teachers vowed to increase our support for the Boeing workers and fight to increase CHALLENGE sales to build communist class consciousness.
Stella Strikers Face Phony Pols, Cops, Scabs
BRONX, NY, October 18 — Fighting Stella D’Oro strikers were joined by fellow workers from different locals for a rally in support of their strike. PLP students and teachers were also in attendance with revolutionary greetings and anti-scab anger.
Since elections are approaching, several Bronx politicians showed up at the rally. They spoke one after another and made promises to support the strikers. But in reality they have done virtually nothing.
A PL’er exposed the role of scabs, cops and politicians. No matter how badly you need a job, scabbing is never justifiable. When you scab, you are a traitor to your class — the working class. Scabs must be stopped. The politicians have allowed the bakery to remain open even though no quality-control inspector (legally required) is there. The politicians have allowed the cops to remove the shelter and chairs used by the strikers.
The politicians and the cops are on the side of the bosses, whether the Stella D’Oro bosses, the Boeing bosses or any others. The politicians depend on big business for the money to win elections. Their job is to protect the rich rulers of New York City and the country as a whole. As long as the rich run the system, things will always get worse for workers.
Since the rally, the cops have again demonstrated that they are the servants of the bosses. This week, in an attempt to break the strike, the Stella D’Oro bosses and NYC police orchestrated the arrest of one of the strike’s key organizers. One of the bosses falsely claimed to have received a phone threat from this organizer. The organizer was pointed out by the general manager, arrested and held for two days at Bronx central booking on $20,000 bail. Though charged with only two misdemeanors, this was clearly not only an attempt to remove the organizer from the struggle, but also to deplete the union’s strike fund.
As a result of this and other attacks, the strike fund is rapidly running out. Any contributions will be well-used and greatly appreciated. Since the arrest, PLP comrades have met with the strike leadership to push for immediate demonstrations to call for the dropping of these trumped-up charges against this strike leader.
The only way we will have decent lives is through working-class revolution. Many workers responded enthusiastically to the Party’s ideas. Counter to our message, the union president pushed the line of following the law, doing whatever the cops say and counting on the politicians. This is a losing strategy. We must count on our fellow workers and ourselves. We must build a united fight-back that takes on the bosses, their politicians, their cops and their scabs.
Howard U. Students Demand Halt to Racist Execution
WASHINGTON, DC, October 24 — During two days of rallying, members of Howard University’s Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC), were joined by members of Malcolm X Grassroots and the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the wrongful execution of Troy Davis.
PEAC speakers declared that Davis’ execution, scheduled for October 27, is one more example of the entrenched racism of the U.S. system. Davis, a black man, has been in prison almost 20 years for supposedly killing 27-year-old Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in 1989.
The District Attorney and police intimidated and coerced witnesses to get a conviction of then 19-year-old Davis. Now decades later, seven of the nine key witnesses have recanted, and other witnesses have identified a person they believe to be the actual killer — but innocence is not a defense, according to the U.S. Supreme Court and the State of Georgia!
Campus police were sent to stop the PEAC rally, and a leader was detained when he refused to stop speaking on a bullhorn. Students continued their bullhorn rally despite the attack. The University administration’s effort to harass and suppress student activism — using the pretense that the students were "disrupting classes" — stands in stark contrast to the University’s endorsement of ear-splitting concerts and fraternity celebrations on the main campus at the same time of day.
This confrontation demonstrated that the so-called "legacy" of Howard University in civil rights struggle and progressive action is in reality a legacy of student and worker movements in opposition to the University. The University is a corporation dominated by big businessmen and the bosses’ politicians. We have no unity with the University administration which parades behind a fig leaf of liberalism while trying to blunt the revolutionary spirit of its students!
On the second day of the rally, Davis’s lawyer announced he had received a 30-day stay of execution, but this is only a temporary respite while the government figures out how to move forward with the execution of an innocent black man.
The racist (in)justice system is critical to the U.S. ruling class’s strategy of intimidating superexploited black workers and dividing them from other workers. But repression breeds resistance, and racism must give rise to anti-racist revolutionary unity.
Today’s financial crises and wars will give rise to ever-greater racist offensives against the working class as the rulers become increasingly desperate to build their profits and power. It is urgent that struggles like the Troy Davis case be linked to the battles of workers throughout the world. We must turn these into a fight for communist revolution to destroy the capitalist roots of racist oppression.
a name="PL’ers Foil Mis-Leaders, Win UFT Backing for Stella D’Oro Strikers"></">PL"ers Foil Mis-Leaders, Win UFT Backing for Stella D’Oro Strikers
NEW YORK CITY, October 15 — Four Stella D’Oro strikers brought by PLP members to the teachers union Delegate Assembly (DA) here won a rousing standing ovation from the approximately 1,000 delegates as well as a solidarity endorsement and a "sizeable contribution" to their strike fund. The PLP’ers’ effort overcame the union leadership’s attempt to stop the strikers from speaking, worried that the workers’ militant actions would expose the misleaders’ pacifist response to the growing economic crisis and $700 billion bailout to the banks. The latter was the reason for the emergency meeting.
The UFT (United Federation of Teachers) leadership showed more allegiance to the interests of the bosses than to the workers they allegedly represent.
In the debate on the resolutions, the leadership’s position on escalating cutbacks and mass racist unemployment was to react with our "head and not our hearts." This in a school system with 85% black, Latino and Asian students whose budget has been cut by $500 million and that sets them up for either poverty-wage jobs or as cannon fodder in the U.S. bosses’ imperialist wars. Although members and friends of PLP could not defeat resolutions supporting pacifism and the bosses’ elections, we did mobilize a different message.
Along with bringing the four strikers, over 200 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed as well as hundreds of leaflets entitled, "Support the Boeing, Morelos and Stella D’Oro strikers; Bosses’ Bailout only Bails Out Bosses: Workers’ Revolution Will THROW Them Out!" The well-received leaflet contained a resolution calling on the UFT to endorse all three strikes and provide financial aid for the Stella D’Oro strikers.
One PLP delegate was expecting to get the floor to present our resolution. But in attempting to divert the strikers from speaking, the misleadership claimed we were "acting hastily" and should follow protocol and wait for the workers’ local President to receive a "proper endorsement."
One PLP delegate declared there’s no "protocol" when it comes to a strike. "These workers have been on strike since August 13, just saw the cops remove their picket-line tarp and chairs and traveled all the way from the Bronx to get our support and all you have to talk about is protocol. Put them on stage and let them speak!" Knowing our history of boldly raising revolutionary politics at the DA, the union hacks quickly backtracked, saying they’d allow the strikers to speak.
To guarantee this, another PLP delegate escorted the four strikers on stage amid a roaring, standing ovation. UFT President Randi Weingarten sanctioned a unanimous resolution containing a general endorsement of the strike and a "sizeable contribution" to their strike fund. It encouraged members to attend the October 18th strike rally.
The strikers were congratulated with dozens of handshakes and words of encouragement. PLP members emphasized that they represent a working-class response to this economic crisis, which is why the leadership tried to ignore our resolution.
They did succeed in watering down our original motion. In supporting the Stella D’Oro strikers, Weingarten’s resolution omitted the other two much larger strikes and still hasn’t mentioned either of them — no accident.
We will return to the November DA with an even stronger push. Several delegates are reporting these struggles to their local schools. A few have published reports calling for support for all three strikes and openly criticizing the UFT’s pacifist misleadership during this vicious period of giveaways to the bosses and cutbacks for the working class.
a name="Cops Trample Iraq Vets; Pacifism Won’t Work">">"ops Trample Iraq Vets; Pacifism Won’t Work
Hempstead, NY October 18 — The final presidential debate was hosted here today but the most important message of the day unfolded outside.
Several days before the debate, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) demanded that members be allowed to address questions to the candidates on war resisters and funding for the Veterans Administration (VA). The vets received no response, so an hour before the debate a march was organized in order to enter the debate and ask the candidates the questions.
Over a hundred anti-war protestors followed the vets and chanted, "Let them in!" Several vets were arrested as planned but then mounted riot police charged the crowd, injuring several demonstrators including IVAW member, Nick Morgan, who was knocked to the ground and trampled. Morgan suffered a gashing wound to his face and a displaced cheekbone from the horses’ hooves.
An IVAW member and former army National Guard sergeant, Jabbar Magruder, angrily responded, "How can you treat veterans like that in America?...It is not what I gave eight years of my life [in the military] for. It is not what I served in Iraq for. This is not the America I believe in." Many patriotic vets and protestors shared Magruder’s rage and disbelief; however the attacks showed the real truth about America.
The police attacks are a systemic problem, and not caused by a few bad cops. Civil disobedience is a failure as a tactic to stop the war; and the media and politicians’ silence on the incident equals their consent for the police attacks.
What the police, media, and politicians don’t want is for people to conclude that pacifist strategies don’t work, the candidates don’t care, and police brutality is systemic to capitalism. However, facts prove otherwise. The Winter Soldier hearings, eyewitness accounts of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, paint a brutal picture of what capitalist competition does to both working-class occupied and working-class occupying troops.
The cops treatment of protestors at Hofstra — similar to cops day-to-day racist treatment of black, Latin, and immigrant workers as well as the racism inherent in U.S. troops attacks on the Iraqi’s and Afghans — show that the bosses will widen fascist brutality as they see fit in order to achieve their goals of making U.S. workers accept more war, higher prices, and less government services.
Many in IVAW honestly believe in their power to build a non-violent movement of resisting troops to force the Iraq war to end, full funding for the VA, and reparations for the Iraqi people (some in IVAW are even pushing the organization to formally address Afghanistan). However the root of the problem remains capitalism’s pursuit of maximum profit and no capitalist has ever peacefully stopped profit wars.
Vietnamese fighting and U.S. troops’ rebellions — including physically fighting racists and the killing of higher-ups — led to the withdrawal of US ground forces in the U.S. war on Vietnam. And a generation after the anti-Vietnam war struggle, the international working class faces even longer and deadlier wars and the same attacks by police because the root of the problem remains: Capitalist’s grip on state power. Only the communist-led revolutions in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949 have smashed the bosses grip on state power. Those revolutionaries made many mistakes that led to their demise but the fight for workers’ power remains the important correct lesson that we still must fight for.
a name="East Coast PLP Youth Back Strikers, Expose Bosses’ Elections">">"ast Coast PLP Youth Back Strikers, Expose Bosses’ Elections
New York City, NY, October 18,--About twenty-five black and Latin high school and college students spent today engaged in building a communist alternative to the bosses’ electoral circus. Instead of settling for a choice of which candidate will lead us into a future of more war and more fascism, a new generation of young leaders planned and executed a day of activity that solidified our determination to build the only movement that represents a true choice for workers, the movement for workers power. Our recent experiences at the Summer Project in Los Angeles reminded us all how inspirational and necessary it is for us to bring our forces together, and so we held a day of activity for East Coast comrades and friends.
Due to ongoing and deepening relationships party members have built among striking workers at the Stella D’Oro cookie plant in the Bronx, we were invited to begin our day at a rally outside the factory gates. The time for the rally was pushed back by cops from twelve to ten on Saturday, but our young people understood the importance of strike support and all who committed to show up at twelve made the effort to meet up earlier, including our young out-of-town comrades who had arrived late the night before.
Communist consciousness ("we need to be at the workers’ rally") beat out capitalist individualism ("let me sleep") so our day got off to a splendid start! A young Baltimore comrade moved the crowd when she spoke about the need for unity between students and workers.
At the CUNY Social Forum, young comrades led a workshop on the elections where fake leftists once again revealed themselves to be far more interested in arguing with other leftists than in fighting the bosses. Finally we headed down to Brooklyn for our evening forum at a local church entitled "Elections in the Shadow of Imperialist War."
An aspiring young teacher gave a clear and sharp overview of the current economic crisis, followed by a high school comrade whose presentation on the candidates exposed how this election really is about who the bosses think can best lead the U.S. working class into a future of more fascism and more war. In this light, our line that Obama is the main danger was driven home.
Then comrades from Baltimore put on a powerful show, including a short movie, about their struggle against budget cuts in Maryland and the need for revolution, not reform. The program was rounded out by other young leaders who spoke on how striking workers represent the real leadership we need, not politicians, and a group from a local high school who recounted past class struggles in their school against budget cuts and how more struggle will be needed in the future as the answer to economic crisis and war. The future of the working class is in good hands, with these motivated and dedicated young people learning to lead the way to a revolution. J
a name="Do-Nothing ‘Leaders,’ Scabs Undercut Vought Strikers"></">Do"Nothing ‘Leaders,’ Scabs Undercut Vought Strikers
Nashville, TN –– Nearly 1,000 Machinists (IAM 735) have been on strike since September 27 against Vought Aircraft Industries, a huge aerospace subcontractor. Vought wants to freeze the pension plan for employees with less than 16 years seniority and replace it with a 401(k) plan. Meanwhile, Vought’s net income so far this year is over $108 million, more than double last year.
Since the strike began, the capitalist financial meltdown has made it crystal-clear what the economic impact of the pension freeze would be on the workers. The political impact would be to weaken class solidarity by dividing younger and older workers. A striker commented, "Fortunately the older employees recognize this and are not willing to accept this offer at the expense of their younger union brothers and sisters."
Dallas-based Vought has brought in managers and other scabs to run the Nashville plant, which assembles wing and tail structures for commercial and military aircraft. Strikers are warning these scabs that "You’re being told how they need you [but] in the end they wont care about you, and your fellow employees will despise you. You will end up in your own private hell."
Rumor has it that when one scab told the boss he’d gotten a couple of flat tires, he was told that the company "wasn’t buying tires." Company officials admit that the strike is hurting productivity, but with the plant open, time is on their side. Workers need to shut it down! Instead of organizing mass picketing, IAM 735 leaders are encouraging workers to find temporary jobs elsewhere.
Vought is the largest subcontractor to Boeing on the C-17 program and builds the aft fuselage sections for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The website of IAM 735 in Nashville features video clips from the Boeing strike, but IAM leaders are doing NOTHING to build rank-and-file solidarity among Boeing and Vought strikers, let alone broader support.
Vought facilities producing Boeing commercial airplane products and most impacted by the Boeing IAM strike include Stuart, Fla.; Grand Prairie, Texas; Milledgeville, Ga., and North Charleston, S.C. Vought is trying to use workers from these plants to break the strike in Tennessee. Clearly, aerospace workers across the board need to fight the racism and drive for maximum profit that has slashed wages of workers all over. Workers with communist leadership need to make this part of the long-term fight to destroy the profit system.
"It just seems like we are going backwards rather than forward," commented a Vought striker. And that’s in aerospace, an industry that will continue to grow as the U.S. imperialist ruling class steps up its preparation for wider war. But in this period of capitalist crisis and increasing attacks on the working class we can move forward by taking on the bosses attacks with increased fight-back, spreading the communist ideas of CHALLENGE, and building PLP.
a name="Mass Strikes Hit EU Bosses’ Bailout Attacks on Workers">">"ass Strikes Hit EU Bosses’ Bailout Attacks on Workers
Ever since European bosses formed the European Union (EU) in 1993, workers’ demands for any improvements in their lives and working conditions have been rejected because the EU guidelines "wouldn’t allow it." When working-class voters massively rejected the unified European Constitution in referendums in France and Holland in 2005, the rulers simply had the national parliaments adopt the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, allowing privatizations, cutbacks and other attacks on workers throughout Europe.
But when the current economic tsunami hit Europe’s bosses, their EU guidelines were the first thing to go as each national group of bosses nationalized and bailed out banks and cut each others’ throats. Britain threatened Iceland because the latter’s banking crisis affected billions invested by British bankers there. European "unity" went out the window as each capitalist country’s ruling class tried to save its own bankers and bosses.
But the crisis has also sharpened workers’ militancy, involving mass protests and strikes, including a general strike in Belgium on October 6 (see CHALLENGE, 10/29).
Greece Paralyzed
On October 21, a massive general strike paralyzed Greece, the ninth one against the conservative Karamanlis government since 2004. There were huge protests nationwide, two in Athens organized by different union groups. The strike shut down airlines, heavy industries, transportation, health services and schools. It also opposed the 2009 draft budget, headed for parliamentary debate.
The Greek budget would "reform" the pension system, adversely affecting millions of workers. They are also angry at the recent $37 billion bailout of failed banks, the privatization of companies such as Olympic Airlines, the ports, utilities and education. This would attack even more public-sector workers.
Workers were even more irate because while billions of euros of public money are being used to bail out banks, huge financial scandals are erupting, involving many government cabinet members and the "holy rollers" of a Greek Orthodox Church monastery.
Thousands March In Italy
On October 17, a mass strike took place in Italy against the anti-working-class policies of Prime Minister Berlusconi. A governmental education "reform" threatens 87,000 teaching jobs, huge cuts in health services and allows temporary contracts in many industries, leading to wage cuts.
Workers marched in many cities, including 300,000 in Rome, where the cops had to guard the education ministry to protect it from angry college and H.S. student protestors. In Milan, students and cops clashed when students tried to take over the Polytechnic college.
The attacks against workers and students are occurring amid a huge racist campaign against immigrant workers and youth which has led to murders and pogroms of Roma people and violent attacks against immigrants from Africa and Asia.
Teachers, Parents Protest in France
In France, the teachers’ unions and the main parent organization called a national demonstration in Paris on October 19. It had tepid demands — "to defend the public education service, to demand a halt to the budgetary policy of austerity and that necessary reforms be made in a different manner," according to the leader of the Christian teachers’ union. The "church bazaar" atmosphere only mobilized 40,000 protesters, although the union misleaders are claiming twice that number. Some analysts believe workers in France are "disoriented" by the economic crisis, not surprising since no organization is putting forward revolutionary politics.
The mass strikes in Greece and Italy are good but are not enough. Union leaders and opponents of conservative governments in Italy and Greece are using them as an electoral tool to bring back "pro-worker" bourgeois governments. In Italy, such a government preceded Berlusconi’s return to power last year. It was supported by Refondazione (the remnants of the old "Communist" Party). That government also attacked immigrants and workers, and sent troops to fight in the imperialist war in Afghanistan.
In the current situation of sharpening dogfights among imperialists to save their own skins during the global economic meltdown, any bourgeois government must attack workers more sharply.
A big victory workers and their allies could gain from these struggles is the building of a new revolutionary communist leadership, breaking with all the capitalist collaborators calling themselves "leftists." Only then could the working class construct a truly united society without any bankers or capitalists.
Auto Workers Must Strike Against Racist Unemployment
The current global economic crisis places auto workers at the beginning of a worldwide depression. Ground zero may be on Wall Street, but all workers will feel the effects. There will be no billion-dollar bailouts for us, no matter who wins the bosses’ White House. We need communist revolution.
Already, more than $25 TRILLION has been destroyed, much of it workers’ pensions, 401(k)s and IRAs. But the storm is just starting, and the bosses may have to amputate more of the domestic auto industry than they save. Before the crash, more than 140,000 auto jobs had been wiped out with the collaboration of the UAW International leadership.
Janesville, Wisconsin GM and Minneapolis Ford — where over 80% of the workers are Temporary Part-Timers (TPTs) — which already set to close, will close sooner. The Chicago Ford Assembly plant — almost half the workforce being TPTs — was losing a shift. This workforce also includes workers on parole or recently released from jail in the "Second Chance" program and is overwhelmingly black. That’s why racist Ford can get away with paying them about $7/hr!
Over the last year, GM stock dropped more than 80%, and Ford over 75%. With the crash, GM shares fell to $4.00 and Ford to $2.00. Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian started selling his $1 billion investment in Ford as it shrank to $300 million. Cerberus tried to sell Chysler to GM (after buying it for $7.4 billion a year ago), but no group of panicked bankers will finance the deal. Such a deal would cost over 30,000 jobs.
"Conditions in the industry are so perilous they are scaring away even the most fearless investors," said a partner in a major automotive consulting firm. "It’s reaching a point where we’ll have to decide if we’re willing to let the U.S. auto industry fail," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. (NY Times, 10/22).
There are still more than 200,000 "Big 3" auto workers and more than a million retirees. But the emerging depression could cut these numbers in half. GM and Ford have lost more than $28 billion in the first six months of this year and are burning through more than $1 billion in cash each month. Despite massive cutbacks they can’t stop the bleeding.
This depression is pushing the bosses closer to another world war. They ultimately resolve their crises by destroying the factories, and factory workers, of their competitors. The U.S. is also moving more rapidly to full-blown Nazi-style fascism, with racist terror the cutting edge of the bosses’ attacks. Capitalism doesn’t work. The bosses’ future for us is expanding war, racist unemployment, poverty wages and police terror.
UAW President Gettlefinger and Ford CEO Alan Mulally (formerly of Boeing), can hold hands and go over a cliff but we don’t have to join them. Instead, we should follow the lead of 27,000 striking Boeing workers and strike for jobs.
In Chicago, we should keep our laid-off brothers and sisters active in our local unions and reach out to unemployed workers and youth in the region. Employed and unemployed Ford workers can unite with full and part-time CTA bus operators, working and laid-off hospital and city workers, immigrant workers and unemployed youth, and demand jobs on election night in downtown Chicago, not celebrate the bosses’ election.
Amid this struggle against racist unemployment, we must win workers to fight for communist revolution. More Ford workers are reading CHALLENGE newspaper, and are learning how the world works and how to change it. Our union contracts aren’t worth the paper they are written on in the face of fascism, depression and war. The bosses will survive this and all crises until we destroy them. By patiently building a mass PLP, this current depression can open the door to communist revolution.
a name="Colombia Fascists Can’t Stop Raging Class Struggle">">"olombia Fascists Can’t Stop Raging Class Struggle
Class struggles rage on amid more fascist repression here in Colombia. On August 15, a heavily-armed death squad called Los Rastrojos entered the house of Pablo Bolaños, a poor peasant, in a rural area of the State of Cauca. Several days later his mangled dead body was found with his nails pulled out and his tongue and the soles of his feet cut off.
He was murdered in the Argelia municipality, totally militarized by an Army Infantry Battalion. Cops covered the area. Clearly the death squads operate freely, backed by the Army and police.
In the municipality of Soacha, 20 youth were found buried in a common grave. People there say they saw soldiers and civilians jointly recruiting youth to work in another region with higher wages. The bosses’ media said these young people were all "guerrillas killed in combat." But their relatives and friends labeled this a blatant lie. There have been up to 200 youths murdered recently throughout Colombia under similar circumstances.
Hundreds of youth have been slain to try to crush any kind of organizing against the bosses and their death squads. Some victims were involved in fighting in the neighborhoods and towns. One was a revolutionary-minded worker who was offered a well-paying job as an electrician in another town. He was brutally killed, along with another worker, and their bodies dumped in a town near Bogotá.
Guillermo Rivera, while taking his daughter to school, was one of 42 union activists killed so far this year. A video camera showed Rivera being forced into a police car and taken away. His dead body was found four months later.
But these fascist murders have not halted the class struggle. Indigenous people have been blocking highways during several days of mass anti-racist protests in the State of Cauca and other rural areas, demanding an end to the repression, and that land seized by the landlords’ hired death squads be returned. They have not fallen for the government’s slander of being "infiltrated by guerrillas." An Army attack failed to stop their nationwide mass march on October 21.
On October 23, 500,000 workers, mostly state employees and teachers, went out on a 24-hour general strike called by the CUT union federation to protest the state of emergency declared by the government to smash a long strike by judicial system workers. Some 56,000 marched in Bogotá as well as thousands in other cities.
Amid the current global capitalist meltdown, the rulers’ attacks are bound to sharpen since Uribe has tied Colombia’s economy much closer to that of the U.S. Building for the general strike, on October 16 tens of thousands of public school teachers in the State of Sucre demonstrated against recent layoffs and a government plan to downgrade their health plan. It was part of a national day of protest by teachers against government attacks on their jobs.
Some 9,000 sugar cane cutters have been on a month-long strike in Cauca, affecting the ethanol and paper production industries. The strikers are demanding better pay and working conditions.
So it’s clear that the capitalist rulers’ fascist attacks, using their hired killers in and out of uniform, cannot stop the class struggle. The anger and militancy of workers and youth here offer our PLP group great opportunities if we redouble our efforts in bringing them our communist politics, exposing the reformists, union sellouts and others who say Uribe is the problem instead of the entire capitalist system. Using DESAFIO as our revolutionary ideological weapon is crucial for our Party to make serious inroads among workers and youth in the near future.
A Comrade, Colombia
Union Leaders Show How Not To Organize Support for Boeing Strikers
A friend of mine is a local union officer and wanted to organize a picket of various unions at the Boeing World Headquarters in Chicago. He told me the following story:
A local president told him to call Jobs With Justice, an AFL-CIO strike support group. The guy at JWJ told my friend that they couldn’t do anything until they were asked by the striking union, the IAM.
So my friend called the local IAM. The IAM guy said it was a great idea and said they represented Boeing workers in St. Louis. My friend asked him if he could bring a busload of workers from St. Louis to picket the world headquarters. He said, "of course we can do that."
He said he had to "check with the boss," and he’d get back to him after the weekend. He never did, and when my friend called him, the IAM guy said that negotiations had just resumed, and "the boss" didn’t want to do anything to upset the talks. My friend asked, "A few hundred workers picketing the world headquarters will hurt your chances?" The IAM guy said we’ll just have to wait.
Another guy in my friend’s local called the IAM spokesperson in Seattle and asked her to call JWJ so we could have the strike support picket line at Boeing world headquarters. She said, "We don’t want to bypass the local union in your area, you better go through them." "But they’re not the ones on strike," he replied.
Without a mass base for PLP that is constantly challenging the union leaders, we are at their mercy. If we can’t move people into battle, we are left with the demoralizing union hacks, who don’t want to fight or up the ante. Workers have to take control of these battles, and having a mass base for PLP is the only way to do that. From organizing mass picket lines at the Boeing strike to mass demonstrations at the Chicago world headquarters, we have to challenge the union leaders and move workers into battle.
A Reader
CHALLENGE Binds Striker and Red Transit Worker
I work for the NYC transit system and during my lunch break I visited the picket line of the Stella D’Oro factory workers. After speaking to some strikers one gave me a CHALLENGE. One striker told me that some teachers, professors and students had been there in support and they gave the picketers this paper that explained their struggle. We exchanged contact info and I returned to the picket line days later for a strike rally with several comrades and friends.
The rally, and PLP’s participation in it, allowed us to raise good conversations about the Party’s ideas with my friends on the car ride home. A comrade, who is a teacher, plans to return to the picket lines with her students and I’ve raised the strike with my co-workers.
I plan to stay in touch with the worker who gave me CHALLENGE and invite him to participate in PL activities. While he likes the paper and told me the strike is important for all workers — not just the strikers — in this economic crisis, he spent most of the rally talking to local politicians and doesn’t see building a revolutionary communist movement as the most important aspect of the struggle. Hopefully, we’ll make long-term ties with him and transform his superficial agreement on the Party’s support for their strike into active participation in future Party actions.
Red Transit Worker
Retirees Back Boeing Strikers; Hacks Balk
At the September meeting of my union retiree association, the attendees agreed to send a resolution of support to the Boeing strikers. The response from my fellow retirees was so enthusiastic that I brought a similar resolution to the retirees Association of AFSCME’s DC 37. This group represents 50,000 retired city workers. These workers’ response to supporting the Boeing strikers was overwhelming also. Both organizations quickly sent letters of support.
I was asked by a leader of the DC 37 retirees, "Why hadn’t Kourpais called for support of the strike?" George Kourpais, the head of the AFL-CIO retiree nationwide network, was the former President of the International Association of Machinists (the union which represents the striking Boeing workers).
After such favorable responses from retiree organizations, I brought the same resolution to the active members of AFSCME’s 125,000 strong DC 37 at a meeting of its delegate assembly. Although initially ruled out of order when I tried to raise Boeing strike support, I persisted and was able to again bring a resolution to the floor. The President of DC 37 again tried to block the motion, saying that a retiree could not present resolutions to this assembly. Another delegate, however, was willing to move my resolution that passed overwhelmingly. After the vote I asked to receive a copy of the support letter.
A week later I checked, there was no letter. Three weeks later, no letter. I called the secretary of DC 37. He said no letter had been sent yet.
Fighting for these support statements revealed that rank-and-file members are willing to support building solidarity and working-class unity, while at the same time the upper level and national leadership actively try to hold back such efforts.
Brooklyn Retiree
H.S. Students Support Boeing Strikers
Dear Boeing Strikers,
We are a group of students in Los Angeles who read about your strike in CHALLENGE. The following are statements from some of us:
* A strike can make a difference. As the daughter of a working-class family, I know the struggles and hardship the working class goes through on a day to day basis. I know that the strike will be successful due to the fact that workers are the ones who make this world. All the wealth that the bosses have comes from the working class; we create their profits. If the workers go on strike, the bosses aren’t making any money.
* It is important that this article talked about unity. Our class, the working class, is strongest when all of us — union and non-union alike — are lined up together against our common enemies.
* I learned about the important role of workers who make airplanes; especially war planes. It’s good that we have the power to stop making airplanes. If we want to stop the war, you guys are really important.
* Unity among workers — citizens and non citizens, students, and every single person who belongs to the working class — is important. We are all struggling to get what we need, but if we don’t unite, there’s no point. We want to end the bosses’ rule because in one way or another, workers are being exploited. Here in California we have a lot of immigrant workers who get paid less than many others.
* It’s an inspiration to me as a working class comrade to see all of you out there on the front line everyday in unity, side by side, fighting back. I just want to say on behalf of the youth of LA, you have all of our support. Tough times are ahead. I just hope you all can keep your chins up and fists in the air. We all can win this fight and will, sooner or later. Many of the bosses will try to put you down and divide the workers, but if you all keep the unity, you are a strong force. Keep up the struggle.
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Both bosses’ candidates, Obama and McCain, build false consciousness among many U.S. workers. McCain jabbers about Joe the Plumber, a non-union, right-wing plumber who has illusions about owning a plumbing business. Obama babbles on about how the "middle class" is hurting. But the working class, the overwhelming majority, did not benefit from the "boom" years of the ’90s and is now hurting even more from the current capitalist economic tsunami.
For millions of workers, capitalism in the U.S. and worldwide in the last three decades has meant lower wages, union-busting, racist and fascist ethnic cleansing from the Balkans to Iraq to Rwanda to the U.S. (with 2.4 million in jail, mainly black and Latin males). Endless wars, racist-fascist terror and mass unemployment are the main aspects of global capitalism. In fact, the director of the UN’s International Labor Organization estimates that the current capitalist crisis will increase unemployment by 20 million worldwide.
According to the AFL-CIO (and it ought to know), over 45 million U.S. workers earn $10.20 an hour or less. One of four earns $9.60/hour, the official poverty rate for a family of three. And 15 million workers earn the minimum wage, $6.70/hour. Among black workers, one of three earns the poverty wage or less.
Throughout the entire history of the profit system, the only time "full employment" has ever existed is during world war — and then only in the more advanced capitalist countries which are the main antagonists of such wars.
Many compare the present crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s when one-third of the working class in the leading capitalist nations was jobless. It was only when a military draft was enacted and during World War II when countries’ industries became completely devoted to war production that anything approaching "full employment" materialized.
Of course, that presumes that tens of millions in WWII uniforms could be labeled "employed" (at least 14 million in the U.S.). Meanwhile, the main warring capitalists in Germany, Japan, the U.S. and Britain geared total production for the weapons of war. It was only then that capitalism could claim the unemployment problem had been "solved." The German and Japanese fascists used millions of slave laborers for their war production. The war wiped out 100 million people permanently, including tens of millions of workers. A similar capitalist "solution" to the current crisis is not far-fetched.
The only country without any unemployment before WWII was the Soviet Union which had no private profit system; the source of unemployment, racism and war. It lost 25 million people in the war while its Red Army defeated the bulk of the Axis fascist armies.
Capitalism is based on the accumulation of maximum profits. The only source of profit is the value created by workers in the course of production. However, workers’ wages do not equal the full value they create. If that were true, there would be no profit for the boss. So the bosses try to keep workers’ wages at the lowest level possible, turning as much of the value workers create into profits for the bosses.
But each individual capitalist is competing against all his/her rivals for the maximum share of the market, and produces as much as they think they can sell. However, nothing is planned. So overproduction results, exceeding what the market can buy. Those capitalists who can produce at the lowest possible cost push aside many of their rivals. The latter, seeking to reduce costs to stay in business, feel compelled to achieve that by cutting labor costs, leading to either wage-cuts or mass layoffs, or both. Thus, unemployment is intrinsic to capitalism.
Racism is one of the main weapons capitalists use to reduce their costs. Historically, they relegate various sections of the working class to "second-class" status — the lowest wages, the hardest jobs, the last hired and first fired, and the worst-off in other aspects of life: housing, healthcare, education, etc. In the U.S., this super-exploitation has fallen on black workers, going back to slavery, and in the last two centuries also on Latino and Asian workers. (This does not include the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans who suffer the highest rate of joblessness, 90%.)
The capitalist class reaps super-profits from this racism, partly from the difference in family income between white workers and that of black, Latino and Asian, and partly because the bosses use the lower wages of super-exploited workers to drag town the wages of the entire working class. In the U.S., this difference amounted to $250 billion annually a decade ago, and is probably much higher when figuring in capitalist competition using racism on a world scale, not just within each capitalist country.
Since China has become a full-blown capitalist country, the imperialists have used its huge cheap labor to shift production away from relatively higher-paying areas. Others — India, Latin America, Vietnam and the former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe — have been used to "outsource" jobs. This "globalization," in turn, has also been used to lower workers’ wages in the imperialist countries, and even to subcontract key industrial jobs in auto, steel, aerospace, etc., to low-paying non-union areas all across the southern U.S. and California. Racism against immigrant and black workers has been crucial in this process. The pro-capitalist policies of the union leadership have helped the bosses carry out this massive attack.
This competition for profits, and for resources such as oil, gas and minerals needed for modern capitalist production, as well as to equip modern armies, is what leads to military confrontation: war. And not limited to wars between two countries, but to world war. This "solution" to inter-imperialist competition plus the mass unemployment produced by the general competition among bosses in one country and between corporations internationally is part and parcel of capitalism. This is what produces the cycles of "boom" and "bust," of recessions and depressions. This is the history of capitalism.
Obama and McCain constantly prattle about concern for "the middle class." They rarely, if ever, use the term "working class." But classes are defined by their relation to the means of production. U.S. workers who might earn $50,000 a year and manage to hang on to their houses and cars are labeled "middle class" and are even portrayed as "future owners of small businesses."
But auto or aerospace workers (or plumbers) can be laid off tomorrow, victims of the bosses’ drive to cut costs to maintain profits, and their homes and cars go up in smoke. Currently millions of U.S. workers are losing their houses because of the capitalists’ scams to make paper profits from subprime mortgages, because profit rates from these swindles exceed those that can be reaped from industrial production.
Workers and youth who think a President Obama will "create good jobs" will soon be disillusioned. These jobs will either be civilian ones, the "National Service-type," with low wages and no benefits or contain the military "option" to carry on U.S. rulers’ oil wars worldwide.
We must be involved with these working-class youth in their mass organizations and win them to see that, under capitalism, their desire for "decent jobs, healthcare, education and housing" is a mirage. We must be part of their daily fights in order to transform them into intensified class struggle between the two classes and use this opportunity to build the Progressive Labor Party. Our goal must be communist revolution to abolish capitalism, its system of wage slavery and racist super-exploitation.
While capitalist crises in and of themselves will not topple the system, they do open the door to building a movement and Party that can lead to the destruction of that system. This is the working class’s only way out of the insufferable horrors of the profit system.
REDEYE ON THE NEWS
Let’s make up for lost time
GW, 10/17
The markets no longer have any faith that the world financial system they helped create has any future. The model is bust…. This is history’s joke: the crisis of capitalism long predicted by communists…
Bush-speak proves Marx right!
NYT, 10/18
Everybody knows that anything our president says is very likely wrong, and certainly won’t happen….
So hearts sunk throughout the nation when Bush appeared at a Chamber of Commerce gathering to say that the economy would recover.
"America is the most attractive destination for investors around the globe. America is the home of the most talented and enterprising and creative workers in the world," said the president, who also insisted that "democratic capitalism remains the greatest system ever devised."
Which translates into: all the money is going to Asia, nobody will ever get a job again and Karl Marx was right after all.
Quick relief, but not for hungry
GW, 10/24
"Rich countries are directing their attention to… turmoil in the financial sector, but the number of malnourished people in the world rose by 44 million in 2008. Nearly one billion people are now going hungry. When you consider the speed of the world’s response to the credit crisis, the delay in acting is shocking," an Oxfam spokesman said…
Age + foreclosure = catastrophe
NYT, 10/18
Losing a home to foreclosure is a disaster for anyone. It’s a catastrophe for older people….
"I had all these stacks of papers at the closing," she told me, "and they were just passing papers back and forth to me, back and forth, telling me to sign. And I kept saying, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’"
She was assured that nothing untoward was going on.
Ms. Richardson did not have a fixed-rate mortgage. Her monthly payment rose, and rose again, eventually passing $800, which she could not pay….
"You find yourself gradually climbing down the economic ladder, and you start thinking, ‘How am I going to survive, and where am I going to go?... Oh, my god. I’m going to end up sleeping in my car.’"
Seeking Cannon Fodder, Obama Enlists Mass Murderer Powell
War criminal Colin Powell’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama speaks volumes about the Obama camp’s militaristic intentions. Powell has a long military history of serving U.S. rulers, from Vietnam to Gulf Wars I and II (see below). This endorsement means Obama embraces the "Powell Doctrine," which demands rallying wide popular and international support to unleash overwhelming force against any imperialist rivals threatening U.S. bosses’ interests, particularly oil.
As part of this strategy, the Obama-Powell love match aims at reversing the sharp decline — 41% last year — in black enlistment in the armed forces. They especially want to stem the loss — mainly due to the racist nature of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — of black sergeants, who train recruits and thus form the backbone of the Army and Marines. The rulers also count on loyal retired black non commission officers (NCOs) to recruit and spread patriotism in their neighborhoods.
In 1996, Charles Moskos, who later worked on Clinton’s Hart-Rudman Commission reports outlining U.S. imperialism’s goals for the 21st Century, co-wrote a book called "All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way." In it he said, "The beneficial impact of black sergeants extends beyond the Army. Every year 2,000 black NCOs in the Army (4,000 in the military as a whole) retire from service....The impact of this group of men — and now women as well — on the civilian black community will be tangible and positive." Obama hopes having Powell on board will help him get the 91,000 additional soldiers he demands for, among other stated aims, expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan.
With 35 years as a professional soldier, Powell rose to full General. He got his start as a captain and later a major in the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, serving as a South Vietnamese Army advisor and as assistant chief of staff for the Americal 23rd Infantry Division. He was assigned to investigate the My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese women and children, which he whitewashed, saying that "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." (So "excellent" that 3,000,000 Vietnamese were slaughtered).
In 2004, Powell told TV interviewer Larry King, "I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. In war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again."
Adding to his executioner "laurels," Powell — as senior military assistant to Reagan’s Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger — helped carry out the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 1986 air strike on Libya.
Powell drips with the blood of the millions of Iraqis he helped kill in Desert Genocides I and II to benefit Exxon Mobil’s oil empire. Powell personally directed the slaughter in the first war as chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs. He "justified" the second invasion by lying to the UN about Iraq’s weapons programs. Powell currently serves as a director in the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. imperialism’s top think-tank.
An Obama presidency would put into practice Powell’s strategy for mass murder, while attempting to win working-class youth, especially black youth, to become cannon fodder for U.S. rulers in present and future oil wars.
