CHALLENGE, October 15, 2008

SEATTLE, WA, September 28 — "I was impressed," said a veteran Boeing CHALLENGE reader at our multi-racial strike-support BBQ. Referring to the traditional "Rolling Thunder" in which workers bang on metal every hour on the hour as the strike deadline approaches, she said, "At first, I was the only woman hammering, but pretty soon the new hires started hammering too. At first the banging was a few minutes; by the time the strike neared it was fifteen minutes. Those young people moved me right off my tub [metal container]! They got there with their hammers before I could even get started!"

Over 27,000 machinists are on strike. No work, no planes, no profit. But the bosses want a blank check to screw the workers. Carson, the company’s jetliner division boss, said, "It is important that it [the strike] be resolved in a way that allows the company to remain successful and…preserve…the right to manage the business."

The strikers, however, have their own ideas. As one worker told a CHALLENGE seller, "I’m not striking for the money. They could give me $50,000 and I wouldn’t take it. I’m striking for the kids and the grandkids."

We met plenty of other young workers as strikers grabbed 1,800 CHALLENGES and 2,500 four-page CHALLENGE extras (in five hours) and picked up their first $150 strike checks. Some had struck before they received their first check! All vowed to hold the line.

Strikers were impressed with our Party comrades from around the country and locally who came to support the strike with our revolutionary communist politics. "Thank you for coming out here to support us," said more than one. "This is the class struggle we all need!" responded one comrade.

Our organizing and literature stood in sharp contrast to the union misleaders’ narrow trade union view of job security. It’s clear to masses of strikers that our Party’s goal is anti-racist multiracial unity between subcontractor workers and those still in unions (see letter, page 6 ). We stand for revolutionary communist class-consciousness.

The union, on the other hand, is focused on insuring that what few jobs are left in the "heritage" (basic unionized) plants remain union (with new workers paid less than half the wages of veteran workers). The mass presence of our revolutionary ideas has put the union leaders on the spot. We brought our communist politics to life in this strike. It’s infuriated the right-wing. That’s why the hacks called the local security to order us to leave. But we didn’t leave until we sold and distributed every last piece of literature and gathered a dozen contacts!

Strikers See Big Picture

Everyone on the picket lines, at the strike-check distribution and at our BBQ was discussing the Wall Street financial meltdown. (The BBQ, incidentally, raised more than enough to pay for the cost of our CHALLENGE "Extra.") The "Extra" showed the link between the bosses we’re striking against (the Boeing Board) and this crisis and how they benefit from the bailout (see page 8).

One of the more interesting bailout discussions occurred in a Boeing CHALLENGE distributor’s kitchen. He, his wife and another striker nearing retirement joined a veteran Boeing comrade, a worker and a new teacher.

This group of black, Latin and white workers pooled decades of experience and knowledge to cut through the fog being thrown in our faces. Rather than accepting the excuse that Bush caused the meltdown, we traced the long history of U.S. imperialism’s need to rely on financial speculation. All roads now lead to more imperialist war and attacks on the working class.

We knew about one of the key economic attacks from personal experience: re-industrialization through racist super-exploitation. We described how a friend who makes Boeing parts in a subcontractor plant is about to lose his house despite massive overtime. Five out of the six concluded that revolution — as hard as it may be to accomplish — was the only answer. "Pacifist marches won’t do it," said a Vietnam Vet CHALLENGE reader, "This will come down to an armed fight!"

"Yeah, we’re going to have to bring the power of industrial workers like ourselves and soldiers together with
their natural allies if we want to succeed," suggested a comrade. Three older workers who participated in anti-racist, anti-imperialist rebellions during the Vietnam era began reminiscing about how it was done.

Much more was revealed in this hour and a half discussion. Here and in several other such gatherings are the beginnings of Party-led industrial groups who read and sell CHALLENGE and organize to win their co-workers, families and friends to PLP’s revolutionary communist ideas in the middle of class struggle. Our friends must become members and they, in turn, have to expand our paper’s sales and influence.

The union wanted strikers to come into this battle blaming black, Latin and Chinese subcontractor workers. But when one seller held up our CHALLENGE strike Extra and shouted, "Read how L.A. subcontractor workers support Boeing strikers," she was cheered.

Based on this experience, a Boeing CHALLENGE reader wrote a "thank you" note from us strikers to L.A. subcontractor workers who have sent support letters and spoken at some of our BBQs. It was the first political document he’s written. He presented it to our group that meets at a nearby restaurant. He knew the union would stonewall any effort to build multi-racial, international unity between non-union subcontractors and us so he proposed a way to gather many rank-and-file signatures right now. Another shop steward agreed to sell more CHALLENGES after this discussion.

Small, but useful, victories as the strike goes on. Holding the line while struggling to advance PLP’s revolutionary communist line.J

Subcontractor Workers Support Boeing Strikers

Workers in LA subcontractor factories are discussing how the Boeing strike affects them and how to support it. In one shop, workers posted PLP leaflets calling for support for the strike, building unity of all aerospace workers and fighting against racist super exploitation in the subcontractors’ factories. Some workers are being forced to work many hours of overtime. At another factory, workers eagerly took the leaflets and CHALLENGES, encouraging PLP’ers to "keep up the good work" and agreed that unity between union and non-union workers is "what we need." The bosses called the cops to hurry there in the middle of shift change. They told PLP’ers to leave or face arrest. But afterwards, more than a few workers drove their cars over to the sidewalk to get the literature and thank us anyway.

Imperialist War Needs Dictate Fascist Financial System Take-Over

Lenin explained many years ago the stage of capitalism where the big bankers eat up the smaller ones:

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. (Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916)

Facing Worst Crisis Since Great Depression

U.S. capitalists caused the financial crisis they now seek to solve with drastic measures like the stalled $700-billion bank bailout. Over the past 30 years, they drove house prices sky-high and workers’ wages down, creating the conditions for subprime loans. Financiers got rich, for a while, by trading these worthless instruments as if they were pure gold. But that joy ride has ended and left U.S. banks in a deep hole. The staggering consequences include a $1.2 trillion New York Stock Exchange plunge on Sept. 29th amid a spate of bank failures. And U.S. bankers’ woes extend far beyond Wall Street.

The profit system ties a nation’s capacity to exploit foreign labor, markets, and raw materials by armed force to the strength of its financial institutions. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s leading think-tank, is worried. "The issue today is whether Wall Street turmoil will produce similar pressure for the United States to look inward—and indeed whether its capacity to sustain an international role may have been compromised" (CFR website 9/29/08).

To maintain their global dominance, U.S. bosses are undertaking an unprecedented restructuring of their troubled financial system. Wealth and power are concentrating more and more into a handful of megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and BankAmerica. The bank bailout, a massive infusion of capital to such firms from a Treasury run by Wall Street stalwart [See box.] Henry Paulson, is part of the plan. The big money boys continue to fight for it despite its Sept. 29th rejection on Capitol Hill. They also call for stricter government regulation of markets.

Through these proposed new regulations and massive consolidation that will give the ruling class more direct control over the financial sytem than ever before, the major U.S. capitalists are advancing economic fascism.

Rulers Want Congress Under Military Discipline

The bailout’s failure in Congress (which may prove temporary) highlights a major obstacle on the finance capitalists’ road to fascism and war. An inefficient political system, especially the House of Representatives, hinders actions they sorely need. With every house seat up for grabs in five weeks, most reps opportunistically pandered to their voting bases rather than support the bankers’ vastly unpopular bill.

U.S. rulers formed the Hart-Rudman (H-R) commission in 1999 to guarantee their world supremacy well into the 21st century. In 2001, it had proposed downgrading Congress’s cumbersome one-member-one vote rule in favor of a five person "leadership team" to "review the totality of Executive-Legislative relations." It was to consist of "the Speaker of the House, the Majority and Minority leaders of the House, and the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate" and consult directly with the "the President, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, and senior cabinet officers." Complaining of self-serving reps, Hart-Rudman said "Only by having the five most powerful members of the Congress directly involved is there any hope of real reform." One "reform" was that "every member of Congress...participate in one or more war games per two-year cycle" at the National Defense University.

Bush dropped the ball after 9/11, implementing only one of H-R’s 50 provisions (Homeland Security). Expect more ruling-class calls to clean up Congress following the bailout debacle.

As for the White House, the rulers hope the presidential race will produce a protector of the U.S. empire far more capable than Bush. The CFR is "looking for signals from both campaigns on how Obama and McCain would restore the economy, and thus maintain the ability to project power abroad" (website, 9/26/08). But the Establishment’s New York Times (9/30/08) laments, "Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama were far from Washington, bit actors at best in helping to resolve a crisis that one of them will inherit."

As this economic tsunami is hitting U.S. bosses harder than any other imperialist, the constant allusions in the media to the 1930s are telling. U.S. rulers long for a Roosevelt-style president who can implement the economic discipline they need before they can mobilize to confront rivals like China and Russia militarily. Over the course of a decade of far-reaching economic programs, FDR was able to raise taxes on the ruling class to pay for the consolidation and militarization of U.S. capitalism in preparation for WW II. So we can expect more drastic finance-capital sourced initiatives, like the bailout, under the next administration.

The ruling class, in the midst of a crisis, looks for opportunities to prepare for future conflict. For workers, the financial mess shows voting is a dead end. Obama and McCain are in fact competing to see who can best serve the most powerful camp of war-hungry bankers. We have to take advantage of every opportunity to expose the failure of capitalism and build confidence in our class and our Party as the future of humanity. Investing time and effort in building the revolutionary, communist Progressive Labor Party represents a far better "growth strategy" for our class. Financial disasters and wars are built into the profit system. It will take a long time to get rid of it. But efforts today will reward generations to come.J

Who Pays? ....We Do, Mostly

A few capitalists and all workers will bear the cost of the bailout and the crisis that necessitated it.

Bosses with shares of subsequently bankrupt firms see their holdings’ value drop to zero, but so do workers’ pension funds and individual retirement plans, which mainly hold stocks.

The $700-billion bailout price tag comes close to the Iraq war’s, which, combined with reduced public revenue due to the economic slowdown, spells sharp federal cuts in services for the working class.

The racist, anti-working class nature of the bailout will lead to African-American and Latin home borrowers losing between $146 billion and $190 billion from bad sub-prime loans, according to a United for a Fair Economy report (Interpress Service 9/25).

At the local level, New York’s mayor Bloomberg slashed $1.5 billion from health, education, sanitation and other necessities on Sept. 24 as a direct result of Wall Streets woes. Bloomie foresees a $5.2-billion deficit (roughly equal to his own personal wealth, which he is not about to part with) for 2011. New York governor David Paterson wants to increase his state’s already projected $1 billion service cuts and predicts a $24-billion budget gap over the next three years.

Taxes are going up. For example, seven percent, says Mayor Mike, on NYC property, which landlords jack up further as rent increases to workers.

The financial sector is already hemorrhaging jobs, some high-rollers but mainly working-class, in New York and other money center cities by the tens of thousands. The new consolidation onslaught hastens the pace.

Finance capitalists also want to bail out Social Security, which will be underfunded by 2017, and help themselves, by forcing workers to pay into "mandatory retirement accounts" managed by their banks. Leading this effort to rob workers in order to fund the war makers is the Concord Coalition headed by Pete Peterson, a major Rockefeller-allied investor who once chaired the Council on Foreign Relations.

Top U.S. Policy-Makers Serve Class Dictatorship Of Financiers

The Washington bigwigs doggedly pushing bailout count the biggest U.S. bankers as their main constituents. Treasury secretary Paulson is not just any Goldman Sachs alum. He headed the Wall Street powerhouse and was its biggest shareholder. Representative Barney Frank’s top donors come from Brown Bothers Harriman, a private bank that holds $2 trillion in custody for the ultra-rich. (Bush’s grandfather, Prescott, was a BBH partner.) Citigroup, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Chase led the bankrollers of Senator Chuck Schumer’s last campaign. Senator Christopher Dodd cashed fat checks from Citigroup and AIG (as well as from war profiteer United Technologies).

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BRONX, NY, SEPTEMBER 27 — "All these factory bosses, big or small, have been trying to eliminate the unions all together," explained one of the 136 striking Stella D’Oro Biscuit workers here, out since August 13. Not one worker has crossed the united picket line. Support has come from other locals, transit workers, truckers and the community said one machinist. Strikers said that although lost wages are starting to hurt, they’re all determined to win this struggle.

The Stella D’oro strikers are in Local 50, within the much larger Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). When asked why the other locals haven’t walked out in solidarity, one worker said, "That would be great but many are afraid to lose what they have." This integrated local has shown the rest of the international that withdrawing their labor power from the bosses is a key way of both turning fear into its opposite and making a real stand for workers’ power.

This strike represents many of the same dynamics attacking workers nation-wide. One worker declared, "We know that this strike is an outcome of the economy. They say there’s no money but they want to squeeze profits out of our wages while they spend $2.3 trillion on the war in Iraq!" This worker is absolutely right!

This particular attack began when Stella D’Oro was sold to Brynwood Partners in January 2006 for about $17 million. The crashing economy has reduced sales and profits. A union official said Stella D’oro bosses want to steal an additional $1.5 million annually from these workers.

Preceding the strike the bosses pushed the workers to the hilt. "They sped up production to sub-human standards," said one worker, adding, "It’s not just the contract that drove us over the edge… it’s the working conditions as well!"

The bosses want to eliminate four holidays, 12 sick days, one week of vacation and viciously attack workers‘ wages. Now they want every worker to pay approximately $400 a month for their health benefits and to contribute a dollar of their hourly wage towards their pensions. However, over a five-year period these combined cuts (plus union dues and other expenses) would slash take-home pay nearly 50%, dropping from $18 to as little as $10 an hour, not counting inflation, by 2013!

This bosses’ attack is also racist. Given the composition of the workforce — Latin, Asian, black and white (European immigrant) — the bosses figure they can get away with super-exploiting these workers, and net super-profits.

Although production has slowed down, it hasn’t been stopped. Scabs have been hired. "Nobody wants to get into trouble" physically stopping scabs, explained one worker. We told another worker that, "Stopping scabs from crossing a picket line has always been an important part of maintaining an effective strike." But this worker said this would need the backing of the entire BCTGM union.

We brought coffee and donuts and gave all 25 afternoon-shift pickets a copy of CHALLENGE. They were impressed with the front-page Boeing strike article. "We’re small and it’s good to see so many workers fighting like this," commented one worker.

The Boeing strikers’ militancy and the role that communist leadership plays should help embolden this small but spirited strike here. We will bring our co-workers and students to discuss such lessons with the workers on future visits. They were also excited to hear we would try to raise strike support at the next teachers union Delegate Assembly. We will also invite some strikers to speak at our October 18 PLP forum on the elections.

"While so many people are talking about the illusion of "change they can believe in" declared one PL’er, "you guys are showing workers and students the real direction of change!"

We have much to learn from the striking Stella D’oro workers because they’ve done what so many of us need to do. Ultimately, it’s the entire capitalist system that needs to be shut down. Only then will workers see the true potential of their power.

Ten Thousand March For Homecare Worker Demands

NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — Some 10,000 homecare and healthcare workers of Local 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) marched in Midtown Manhattan to demand a decent contract. Homecare workers are among the most exploited section of the working class despite many being unionized. The average union wage is $8/hour with limited health benefits and no pension. Still worse, sleep-in homecare workers get no overtime pay and are paid for twelve hours a day when they usually work sixteen. These workers are overwhelmingly immigrant women from the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and some from Russia and China. Less than half of all homecare workers are unionized.

Agencies like BestCare are threatening to eliminate healthcare benefits when the contract expires on Dec. 31. The agencies are funded by NY State and keep half of all funding as "administrative expenses," i.e. profits. A "decent" contract for homecare workers would have to double their subsistence wage and guarantee full healthcare and pension benefits.

But there’s no such thing as a decent contract for workers, because of capitalism’s drive for maximum profits. The union is only asking for a $2/hour wage hike and healthcare, and no pension. They want the state to take over administration of homecare from these agencies, cut the administrative cost and use some of that money to pay for increased pay. This collaboration with the state will not win a decent wage or benefits for these workers — especially in these days of financial crisis and endless wars — and weakens the will of workers to strike and prepare for the larger struggles ahead.

The relatively higher-paid hospital workers in 1199 will also face increasing pressure for future wage and benefit cuts. The racism used to divide hospital workers and the mostly immigrant homecare workers must be smashed. Anti-racist unity, fighting for all health workers, must be organized to win these struggles.

At the rally, Progressive Labor Party members, some in 1199 SEIU, talked with workers as we marched. That same day AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, was being bailed out by the Fed to the tune of $85 billion (see page 2 on the financial crisis). The workers expressed indignation that we’ll be paying to save Wall Street and yet can’t receive a decent standard of living or job security. But that is the nature of capitalism: workers pay and pay for the bosses in boom or crisis times.

We distributed hundreds of PLP fliers and CHALLENGES which pointed out that, to satisfy workers’ needs, the only real solution to the failure of capitalism is building a PLP-led movement to fight for a society where production is based on the well-being of all workers, who produce everything of value. We must continue building our CHALLENGE networks in our workplaces, turn them into PLP study groups and and Party-led on-the-job groups to lead the struggles against the racist bosses’ attacks and recruit more communists.

Anti-Racist Fight vs. Police Murders Continues

LANGLEY PARK, MD, September 24 — "Fight Back!" chanted PLPers at a rally against police brutality today. Over 150 people gathered here, led by CASA de Maryland (an immigrant workers’ rights group) and supported by the People’s Coalition for Police Accountability. Protesters spoke out against the police murder of Manuel Jesus de Espina, the lynching of Ronnie White by prison guards (officially a homicide according to the coroner’s report), and the SWAT attack on the mayor of Berwyn Heights. Dorothy Elliott reminded protestors of the long struggle for justice, which she has been seeking for the murder of her son by police in the 1990s.

PLP members brought a message of militancy and revolution to this gathering, distributing over 40 CHALLENGES to fellow protestors. Many in the crowd appreciated the more militant spirit. A Guatemalan man eagerly took DESAFIO and said, "we need a society where everyone is equal — these police will continue the brutality until we have a new system." He liked PLP’s international organizing and outlook, and planned to show the paper to his friends and family. A worker from El Salvador was visibly angry, declaring "the police are without shame; they come in the community and want our help, then they turn around and kill our friend. On top of that, when we stay on the corner looking to work, they kick us off the corner with threat of arrest, when I am only just trying to feed my family."

With the exception of the poignant personal stories and the revolutionary line of the PLP, this event was only a symbolic rally that had the effect of quelling any sense of fight-back. It is almost as if the organizers were saying: "Come out, light a candle, think about the victims, then go home and continue your lives as wage slaves and you will be lucky if you are not targeted by the police." Many workers were optimistic that the rally might lead to justice. But we need to build a fighting spirit of anti-racist militancy in the spirit of John Brown and Harriet Tubman and swell the ranks of the PLP to advance this struggle beyond symbolism.

The reality of the situation is that under capitalism, police protect the bosses and their property and use racist terror against workers. The long history of police brutality will not be ended by rallies alone. At a time when the bosses’ financial meltdown will lead to more oppression of workers, the bosses will need to control fight-back with brutality and intimidation. Only the development of a mass militant anti-racist movement, ultimately leading to a revolution against capitalism, can stem the tide of police brutality.

Profit Drive Killed 25 in LA Train Wreck

LOS ANGELES, CA –– The train accident on September 12 in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles, in which 25 people died and over 125 were seriously injured, was totally preventable. The press has blamed the engineer, Robert Sanchez, for text messaging someone just before the accident, but this tragedy was caused by the greed of the bosses, their politicians, and their anti-worker capitalist system!

In this case a MetroLink commuter train collided head on with a Union Pacific freight train sharing the same track.

Yes, sharing the same track. Imagine driving on a one lane highway in which cars, trucks, and buses traveled at freeway speeds in both directions, but had to share that one lane. Furthermore, the only way a driver would ever know that an 18-wheeler was heading towards him or her was a stoplight. If it is red, drivers must get their car off the road. If it is green, just drive ahead on that one-lane highway.

This lunacy is the deliberate policy of the MetroLink Authority –– mostly appointees of local Southern California Democratic politicians –– which runs the Los Angeles area commuter train system. Their patchwork commuter system is woefully under-funded and run with callous disregard for the safety of passengers and MetroLink workers. And, to save a few bucks, MetroLink contracted with a French company to operate the system, including hiring workers.

Since these totally avoidable deaths, many people have pointed out the obvious fixes to avoid future accidents. First, the train system needs to be double-tracked; trains traveling in opposite directions would no longer share the same track. Second, all trains should be equipped with Positive Train Control. This is an electronic system widely used throughout the world which detects trains headed for a collision and automatically stops them.

New radios should be installed on local freight and commuter trains. Because MetroLink shares train tracks with freight trains and because passenger trains and freight trains use different radio frequencies, engineers are unable to communicate between the two systems.

Split shifts could be eliminated. The MetroLink engineer, who died in the accident, worked a 13- hour day. He worked the morning rush hour, then had the mid-day off, but had to report to work again for the afternoon rush hour. In addition to having such an unsafe work schedule all week, engineers have no back-up. MetroLink operates their trains with only one engineer, not two. If an engineer is sick, distracted, or misses one of those red lights, that’s it. No one else, and no safety feature, is there to back him up or catch his mistakes.

So far, after an enormous public outcry, the local and national politicians –– who are responsible –– have moved into inaction. Locally, California Public Utilities Commission directed rail companies to ban train employees from using cell phones while on duty.

Nationally, proposed legislation would reduce the number of hours railroad employees can work from 400 per month to 276. Workers can now work 90-hour weeks, but the new legislation would reduce their work-week to about 60 hours — still unsafe. In contrast, the FAA limits airline pilots to 100 hours of flight time per month, a 22-hour work- week.

As for Positive Train Control, current proposed legislation would not require these electronic safety systems until the year 2015. The bosses’ foot-dragging will lead to more people dying unnecessarily in the next decade because of this total disregard for the workers.

At a time when the Federal Government is spending about $1 trillion to bail out the banks and finance companies, spends more than $1.1 trillion per year on its military and spy agencies, and the lion’s share of local government budgets is devoted to cops and jails, the "no-money" argument of the politicians reveals that capitalism serves only the interests of the capitalists — at the expense of workers’ lives.

Workers and passengers are cogs in a giant capitalist machine devoted to squeezing every last ounce of profit out of the commuter train system. The bosses are sacrificing the safety and lives of the workers riding the trains (and transit workers) to bail out the banks, pay for imperialist war and line their pockets.

Only when workers take power will our safety and lives be more important than the dollar-bill flag of the bosses. A system that cannot provide safe transit is one more reason to join the fight for communist revolution!

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GRAND ISLAND, NEBRASKA, September 19 — About 150 Muslim workers were fired today at the JBS Swift meatpacking plant in a struggle over prayer time during the 30-day period of Ramadan. Of 2,500 workers, about 500 are Muslim, mostly from Somalia and Sudan.

While we don’t believe in prayer and religion, we must unite with Muslim workers and oppose racist anti-Muslim attacks. As the economic crisis deepens and the imperialist oil war expands, the rulers are building a mass fascist movement by getting workers to blame each other for boss-crated problems. The recent immigration raid in Mississippi — where more than 650 workers were rounded up — was called in by the AFL-CIO, and federal agents were cheered on by union workers as immigrants were handcuffed and led away. We cannot allow repetition of this chilling scene.

Last Monday, hundreds of Muslim workers walked off the job, protesting lack of prayer time, especially concerned for evening prayer, which ends the daily fast. Swift supervisors accused Muslim workers of taking too long on their prayer breaks. Some workers complained of being kicked by a supervisor while they prayed. A woman worker protested being followed into the bathroom by a male supervisor as she attempted to pray. They held a similar protest on Tuesday and marched to City Hall.

Break times were changed on the second shift to accommodate the sunset prayer, which forced all workers to work Saturday to get their 40 hours. That sparked a protest by about 400 black, Latin, Asian and white non-Muslim workers, who walked off the job Wednesday and Thursday in what was basically a racist protest against the Muslim workers. The bosses and union leaders of the United Food and Commercial Workers no doubt encouraged it.

About 80 Muslim workers were thrown out of the plant after a confrontation with protesters. When they tried to return for their shift Friday, they were fired, along with 70 others. No non-Muslim workers were fired. Also, the bosses reversed themselves on the new break schedules.

One worker said that the Somali workers "have changed everything," and that "Swift management has given in to the minority." Another said, "Nobody should have special privileges." How often have we heard white workers make these same racist comments about black and Latino workers? This is exactly the type of "unity" that Bush-Obama-McCain and the racist rulers are counting on to expand their war on terror to Pakistan, Iran and beyond.

One precondition for communist revolution is the highest unity of the international working class. "Globalization" and mass immigration worldwide, with more internationalized work-forces on the job, make this possible. But it doesn’t just happen. We must set the example of building anti-racist, international friendships, and a revolutionary communist movement that reflects the same. Like the Mississippi raid, we should see this Swift struggle as a sign of things to come, alert our co-workers and build the revolutionary communist PLP, the only antidote to the bosses’ fascist poison.

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September 29 — Union bus drivers are discovering the hard way what was buried away in the contract arbitration "award" forced on us last year. After a fear campaign of "doomsday scenarios" and sending the contract to arbitration to avoid a rank-and-file vote, our paychecks are shrinking and our jobs are less secure. All this is happening as more workers ride buses and before the current economic crisis.

The contract and the state legislators are funding a new Health Care Trust fund that most drivers will never use, by collecting 3% of every paycheck. In addition, they increased pension funding to 6%, more than wiping out the measly 3% wage "increase" we were "awarded." So far this has cost every worker about $2,000.

Even more dangerous, full-time senior drivers lost our 8-hour guarantee, and about 50 part-timers are being hired every month. Right now about 950 part-timers comprise almost 25% of the 4,000 drivers. They pay the same union dues as full-timers and get little more than the right to file a useless grievance. Part-timers cannot afford to feed their families on what used to be a job many young black workers sought. It’s so bad that union Local 241’s sellouts tried to get part-timers to support a 6-day schedule rather than split shifts, so they would have more time each day to work a second job to support their families!

Then there is the "Second Chance" program: workers on probation or sentenced to community service are cleaning buses and garages. Mayor Daley and the bankers want to run mass transit on poverty wages and prison labor. All this in a city and state run by the Democratic Party machine that created Barak Obama.

But workers are fighting back. Transit Workers United, a rank-and-file group of full- and part-timers, is circulating a petition demanding the union fight to make everyone full-time, and force the city to fill almost 200 vacant full-time slots. More than 200 part-timers attended the September union meeting.

This is good as far as it goes, but transit workers need to understand that this is not just our problem. We’re being assaulted by the same racist profit system that closed half the Cook County health clinics for uninsured workers in 2007, eliminating 2,000 jobs, and is eliminating the second shift at the Chicago Ford Assembly Plant this November.

These racist attacks hit black and Latino workers first and hardest. There are more than 20 million unemployed in the U.S., nearly a million in Illinois. The unemployment rate for black workers is twice the national average, and for black youth, ages 18-25, four times higher. With the unfolding Wall Street calamity, foreclosures on the South Side of Chicago have tripled; Detroit is the nation’s highest.

No matter who wins the White House, the racist rulers will continue their assault on the workers because they need trillions more to expand their oil wars and rescue Wall Street. As the rulers face increasing challenges to their empire from other imperialists, the threat of world war grows. A struggle against racist unemployment that unites transit, Cook County and Ford workers with immigrant workers and unemployed youth can be fertile grounds for expanding the revolutionary communist PLP and creating a more mass distribution of CHALLENGE. Fighting racist unemployment and for jobs, guided by communist politics, can open the door to revolution!

Italy: Black Workers Rebel vs. Racist Mafia Massacres

ITALY, Sept. 25 — Racism has grown all over Europe as the bosses need to superexploit immigrant and non-white workers to obtain massive profits and blame them for the crisis of capitalism. The racism built into the capitalist society breeds racist killers. The area of Castelvolturno was the scene of the first racist killing in post-war Italy when in 1989 Jerry Eslan, a black man, was killed by racists in the nearby Villa Literno. Today, racist violence is even more common.

More recently in Castelvolturno, a racist massacre was carried out by the Camorra, the local mafia. It was the biggest mafia killing in recent years. Some local gangsters randomly fired against a group of black workers and youth, killing six of them. The bosses’ media reacted to this atrocity by blaming the victims, who were condemned as criminals and drug dealers. In spite of these stereotypes, 99% of black workers work under semi-slave conditions in the tomato fields. But the mobsters shot at random to "teach blacks a lesson." Six were killed just for being black, just as neo-Nazis burn immigrant workers’ refugee centers to "teach them a lesson," and just as Roma people (often called by the racist term Gypsies) have been victims of a recent pogrom at the hand of racist mobs and the right-wing Berlusconi government. According to these racist killers, all immigrant and black workers should be killed.

This time black Italians protested the killings with a mini-rebellion, burning garbage cans and damaging some cars in the Caserta zone of Castelvolturno. A similar small rebellion took place in the bigger city of Milan.

These workers and youth are tired not only of being exploited on their jobs, but of being charged higher rents and of discrimination in general. They are tired of being treated as second-rate citizens.

In Milan, an Afro-Italian teenager was beaten to death with iron bars by two store owners. The killers said he stole some cookies, as if that was a crime punishable by death. This slander was repeated by the media without any real investigation of what happened, even though no cookies were found. Racism was the real cause of this horrendous crime.

The bosses, their media and some people influenced by racist ideas are labeling all blacks and immigrants as criminals, while treating the big criminals of the Mafia and their politician and cop protectors with kids’ gloves.

Racist brutality is a universal aspect of capitalism, from Milan to Paris to Brooklyn (like the recent killing of a mentally-impaired Latin worker with a taser) to Maryland (see article p. 3). Any worker who falls for this bosses’ racism is cutting his/her own throat, particularly today when the rulers need more racism to divide workers so they can exploit ALL workers even more to pay for their economic crisis and wars (Italy has a military contingent fighting with NATO in Afghanistan). Our slogan must be: same enemy, same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and white, unite to smash capitalism and to fight for communism!

a name="Colombia: Uribe Gov’t Murdering Student Protestors">">"olombia: Uribe Gov’t Murdering Student Protestors

Colombia’s bloodthirsty ruling class has murdered thousands of people who oppose its policies of hunger, war and oppression. It’s even killed many who foolishly tried to change the system through elections. It has also forced over four million rural workers and their families, many indigenous and union activists, to flee their homes, losing everything.

According to a report of 400 human rights organizations presented to the UN High Commissioner in Colombia, over 13,600 people have been "murdered, executed or disappeared in the six years of the President Uribe administration" ("Página12", 9/24). Meanwhile, bodies of 45 youth have been found in Bogotá’s southern suburbs and in the poor coffee region of Central Colombia. The cops and army executed the youth, including a minor with mental problems, under the guise that they were all "common criminals."

Also, "Página12" (9/26) reported that death-squad chief Salvatore Mancuso, extradited to the U.S. in May, testified via video in a trial of two Senators of Uribe’s Party that the AUC (the death-squad organization) influenced the local 2002 Presidential elections.

Uribe, a Bush lapdog in South America, was one of the "world leaders" Sarah Palin spoke to briefly at the U.N. in mid-September. (The others included the U.S. puppet President of Afghanistan and war criminal Henry Kissinger.)

But now, to avoid more national and international outcries, instead of the past mass massacres, people are killed daily in ones and twos. Militant students are some of the victims of this "new" style of repression, ones like Johnny Silva, Nicolas Neira, Oscar Salas and many more who’ve been murdered. They’ve been part of the militant fight against plans to privatize public universities. For this the government and the bosses’ media have branded them "subversive guerrillas."

So in addition to the usual brutal repression of young protestors during the annual mass May Day marches in Bogota, the rulers have now put a price on the heads of the more militant H.S. and college youth to try to quell the growing protest movement against the Uribe government.

As part of the struggle to give political leadership to angry workers and youth, two PLP comrades in Ciudad Bolívar are trying to bring communist ideas to some of the million people in this poorest section of Bogotá. Many of these residents are refugees from the murderous war waged by the rich landowners’ death squads and the army in rural Colombia.

The refugees face a lot of contradictions coming to Ciudad Bolívar. Instead of a countryside of trees and rivers, they now live in a boss-created urban jungle filled with unemployment, racist and sexist discrimination, alcoholism, police persecution and rejection by the bourgeois society. Their hard lives are made even more oppressive.

Many different groups are out to influence these refugees, some with pro-government ideas, others opposed to the government. We’re involved in some of them that are trying to bring the few available but limited resources available in this area. But we’re also struggling to fight for unity in action as the best way to fight for improvements for the residents of the area. We want to win some of the movement’s most active leaders into a political school, no easy task amid mass terror carried out by the bosses’ paramilitary goons, aimed at preventing us from organizing ourselves.

Our goal is not building a better reform movement begging for more crumbs from the government, but winning masses of workers and youth to PLP to fight for the only real solution to this capitalist hell: communism. DESAFIO is a key ideological weapon in accomplishing this long but vital process for our class.

AFL-CIO Labor Fakers Always Bail Out Bosses

NEW YORK CITY, September 28 — More than 1,000 workers and others demonstrated three days ago near the NY Stock Exchange against giving Wall Street a blank check in the financial bailout. This swindle is so unpopular — seen by many as "corporate welfare" — that the NYC Central Labor Council was forced to react and organize one of many similar protests held nationwide to demand a "fairer bailout" which helps working-class people. Big shot union sellouts like AFL-CIO President George Sweeney and teachers union chief Randi Weingarten attended the rally.

One of the AFL-CIO’s top demands is for the bailout to be governed by an "independent board." (Of course, the bosses pick these "independent" boards.) The labor honchos are banking on an Obama and Democratic Party victory so that some of the allotted $700 billion will finance Obama’s plan for infrastructure repair, which they hope could create many unionized jobs.

But as far as workers are concerned, the union mis-leaders are part of the problem. In every bosses’ bailout — from the NYC fiscal crisis to the one for Chrysler in the 1970s to all others for any company — the union sellouts have been on the bosses’ side, giving them huge concessions on jobs and benefits.

Lack of regulations, greedy bankers and speculators are all part of the problem but not the root cause. The first major post-World War II crisis occurred in 1973; then came the "Black Monday" Wall Street crash of 1987 followed by others in 1990-93, 1998 and 2001-2. As each crisis ended, we were told the problem was "fixed" — but then a new one occurred, slashing workers’ standard of living even more — and because of racism affecting black and Latin workers still more. On top of that, racist politicians and media pundits are blaming the victims of the subprime lenders for the crisis.

Company profit rates have actually not returned to their pre-1973 level. More than a century ago Karl Marx described this as the falling rate of profit. To compete with each other, the bosses invest in new technology, replacing workers. But machines by themselves don’t produce profits. Real profits come from workers’ labor, with the bosses pocketing most of the value that labor creates. While the volume of profit might increase, the higher investment in machinery and technology forces the rate of profit down.

As their crises worsen, bosses try to compensate by exploiting workers even more, by taking out or swallowing the competition and fighting with rival imperialists for new markets through wars. PLP has a different answer: workers of the world unite to smash a system based on war and economic crisis!

LETTERS

Anti-Racism Leads the Way in Boeing Strike

The Party’s work in aerospace subcontracting facilities (as well as other industries) has left us able to expose the racist super-exploitation present in these plants and tie it to the increased attacks on primarily white union workers in the basic heritage plants.

Subcontractors employ mostly Latin, immigrant and black workers. The fact that our Party has built a small concentration in the subcontractor plants over the last few years has given us a "leg up" on raising the absolute necessity for anti-racist, multi-racial class unity.

After more than a dozen visits to strike picket sites at Boeing plants all over King County it is clear that workers appreciate the Party’s revolutionary message. Almost every worker takes a CHALLENGE .

These visits to the picket lines have allowed the Party to expose how capitalism uses racism to attack all workers. Boeing strikers have shown great appreciation for the statements of solidarity coming out of subcontracting plants. The significant minority of black, women and now Latino workers in the Boeing union plants has been particularly receptive to this show of class unity.

Strikers delved into "how capitalism uses racism to attack all workers" at two recent lunches at a restaurant near the plant. A dozen strikers and a guest from England examined the condition of the working class from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, to the slave-like conditions of India immigrant workers in Mississippi shipyards, to the ruin anti-black, anti-immigrant racism has wrought in the new "southern aerospace corridor" and the L.A. subcontractors. "It’s the same damn thing in England," said our British friend. "First they imported the Poles and when they started to organize the bosses switched to eastern Europeans — never allowing the Poles to become "legal."

No wonder many strikers believe the union can’t win on job security. The pro-capitalist union leaders’ narrow trade union outlook can’t deal with the racist and nationalist divisions that immobilize us. It’s impossible to save a few decent-paying jobs in the heritage plants while the bosses are hell-bent on attacking all industrial workers through racist super-exploitation in subcontractors.

A friend took a small step towards building anti-racist class conciousness. He volunteered to write a thank you note to L.A. subcontractor workers that have supported our strike. We are going to circulate it on the picket lines, and at our lunches and visits with strikers.

Even on my job, a construction site rather than an aerospace plant, the situation at the subcontracting plants has helped to illuminate the constant presence of racism on our site. After discussing the low wages and dangerous conditions present at these subcontractor plants one worker spoke up, "the immigrant workers on site are the subcontracted workers of construction." This is the first step to leading anti-racist fight-back on the job.

The key to defeating the boss’ divide and conquer tactics is to bring anti-racist struggle onto the shop floor. The sell-out contracts "won" by the UAW leadership and the current contract pushed by the pro-boss IAM leadership increasingly show how the fates of those in the heritage plants are tied to those in subcontracting plants. Ultimately this strike will be sold out as well. The only way to end this racist exploitation is to show workers that racism is inherent to capitalism and will intensify as the bosses scramble to shore up their shaky empire, and that only communist revolution can unite all workers by ending capitalism.

Red Worker

Summer Project Unites Workers Across Borders

The L.A. Summer Project showed that the working class must be internationalist. The comrades in the project shared experiences and learned from each other and lived in a comradely way, spreading PLP politics without being limited by borders and language barriers imposed by the bosses. We had a BBQ during the project where most of the participants spoke only English and a few of us spoke Spanish. But our communications, though limited by gestures and expressions, showed a lot of joy and curiosity in meeting people with the same goals: fighting for communist revolution. I was able to speak at the BBQ with a young worker living in L.A. who migrated from Mexico and told me about the difficulties of being a low-paid undocumented worker, living check-by-check and sometimes not being able to satisfy the basic needs of life. On top of that, he lives with the fear of being deported or fired from the job and so has a very limited social life because of these conditions. It is very difficult for him being away from his immediate family in Mexico to fight for the "American Dream" that is more and more a nightmare. But now that he knows the PLP, he is very happy with his friendship with the comrade who invited him to the BBQ and with other comrades he is meeting. He never imagined himself being part of a communist Summer Project.

I heard similar comments from a young Mexican immigrant couple who met our Party and politics for the first time, and now want to join a PLP study group.

Our Party offers answers to the hard daily lives so many immigrant workers, and workers in general, are suffering in this racist, crisis-ridden, war-making capitalist society. These ties make our Party more internationalist. Since bosses don’t respect their own borders when it comes to exploiting us, workers should put into practice the slogan: workers of the world, unite, workers’ struggles have no border!

A Young Comrade, Mexico

At L.A. Factory Gate: Everyone Reads CHALLENGE

This summer a comrade and I traveled to Los Angeles for our first Summer Project. As a new member and a friend of the Party we learned so much on this trip and gained a better understanding of the Party’s line.

At CHALLENGE sales we talked with many industrial workers and soldiers about their bosses’ exploitative practices and the horrible working conditions they endure on a daily basis. One worker told us she needed time off to care for a sick family member and was told not to come back if she took it. One of the greatest things we saw was the morning we had been at an industrial site and turned to look at the entrance gate and saw so many of the workers sitting outside reading the paper! Distributing papers to day laborers, one man told us how he had left El Salvador because of harsh conditions only to find himself worse off. He said that although the economic hardships were bad here too, the level of racist attacks against him and his family member was something he did not have to endure back home. We spoke with a homeless vet who told us of the deplorable tactics used by the military to deliberately train them to dehumanize civilian "enemies." This demonstrates how the bosses’ pit us one against the other in an attempt to break workers apart.

The Summer Project is a great opportunity to learn from other comrades about work done over their years with the Party as well as from each other. As someone very new to the Party, every discussion and reading helped me learn and inspired me. I was able to speak out more, and speak with others about some of my own questions. I helped lead a discussion of student/worker alliances which brought out the importance of keeping contact with friends we bring around the Party. Without the constant connections and close discussions we could lose those potential future leaders of the Party.

In my mind the LA Summer Project is a great way to be one step closer to the building of a communist revolution and the idea of living in a communist society. I know it has given me confidence to work harder, to ask more questions of my comrades, and want to step up to more roles of leadership. Everyone, no matter what their experience level, should attend every Summer Project they possibly can.

New Red

Talking Revolutionary Politics in Obama Campaign

I helped out at a voter registration drive in my neighborhood that I found out about through BarackObama.com. I never voted before and agreed with PLP’s position that voting can’t and won’t alleviate the suffering of workers under capitalism. I also agreed that the Obama campaign provides an important opportunity to meet workers that want to change society and introduce them to the ideas of the PLP.

I worked with two young women who felt strongly about voting and the "change" Obama promises. It ended up being a very good experience since we actually spent more time chatting then registering people. We talked about our lives and racism in the neighborhood and the media (my two fellow registrars were arguing about whether or not Tyler Perry [an entertainer] degrades black workers). Before I left we exchanged contact infomation. I am planning on attending some more campaign events with them and hope to expose them to some of Obama’s comments that accepted the Sean Bell verdict and discouraged violent protest.

Red Registrar

REDEYE on the News

Crisis shows voting doesn’t help
- GW, 9/26

The fact the credit crisis relegated the elections to the inside pages tells us two things.

First, that real power does not lie with politicians. The crucial decisions were made by traders, bankers and speculators….

Second, that…[the] contest to see who will run the country sheds little light and has little bearing on how it is run.

Pipe-dream of US diplomats
- NYT, 8/14

A bumper sticker that American diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s as the United States was working hard to make friends there summed up Washington’s strategic thinking: "Happiness is multiple pipelines."

People speak: Gov’t does opposite
- NYT, 9/25

Americans’ anger is in full bloom, jumping off the screen in capital letters and exclamation points, in the e-mail in-boxes of elected representatives in the nation’s capital…. in outright opposition to the White House plan…. members of Congress say reaction to the bailout does not appear orchestrated or coordinated, but rather individual expressions that come from the grass roots and run across the philosophical spectrum.

War opponents, for instance, are telling lawmakers that they are tired of an administration…[that] played "the fear card" too many times by leading the nation into war in Iraq to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and curbing civil rights in the name of pursuing terrorists.

US said ‘Don’t bail banks out!’
-NYT, 9/24

Wall Street and the administration’s record of financial oversight came under attack at the United Nations on Tuesday….

For some leaders, the Bush bailout plan seemed hypocritical given the tough course Washington has often advised struggling nations to take….

"They are all remembering the very hard, unforgiving advice that they got from American financial institutions" to "deflate your economy, let your banks go to the wall"…. The outpouring on Tuesday came from some of America’s closest allies and trading partners…

Big Washington meet: Look out!
- NYT, 9/25

In deference to the current emergency, we will refrain from pointing out that when our national leaders came together following Sept. 11, the results were, all and all, worse than if they had stayed home.

Boeing Bosses Part of Rulers Who Oppress All Workers

The Boeing bosses are part of a ruling class oppressing workers worldwide. Their Board of Directors is linked to some of the country’s largest corporations and biggest Wall Street investment houses who are looking to make a killing out of any bailout scheme that the bankers and their politician servants can work out. But they also have their hands full these days, with the strike and the financial crisis.

The top Boeing bosses run not only Boeing but they and their class run the whole country, and both political parties.

For example, Boeing director Edward Liddy is also a director of manufacturing giant 3M and (till recently) financial giant Goldman-Sachs. His 3M, like Boeing, makes profit the old-fashioned way, by exploiting workers who create value from making products. However, his Goldman Sachs has been profiting the deregulated way, by gambling and cheating — speculating in the markets and selling bad debts — because it was temporarily more profitable than investing in production.

But the new way has problems. Said the NY Times, "A significant portion of the financial boom…seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable." So now Liddy and his cronies are getting the government to bail them out.

Their Goldman Sachs is taking advantage of the bankrupting of competitors like Lehman Bros. Had insurance giant AIG failed, it might have taken down Goldman Sachs, but the government bought, and saved, AIG — and Goldman Sachs. Now Liddy is the new CEO of AIG! Boeing director John Biggs is also a director of JP Morgan Chase and former CEO of TIAA-CREF, the national teacher’s pension fund. His successor there, Herbert Allison, is now head of Fannie Mae (currently on government life support).

While a bailout may be advantageous to these bosses, they still have to sell it — to Congress, U.S. workers and to international capitalists. If the world’s bosses don’t go along, it could endanger the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Another Boeing boss, William Daley, is a key Democratic Party power broker and an Obama "senior advisor." His brother Richard is currently Chicago’s mayor, and a big Obama backer. These Democrats are trying to convince workers and youth that "Republican greed" caused the meltdown and that Barack will lead them to the promised land of regulated capitalism. Obama’s main job is to win U.S. youth and workers to sacrifice blood and sweat for these thieves’ continued rule.

Although these Boeing bosses know they can count on Obama to serve Wall Street, some are backing his rival McCain (elections are unpredictable). Another Boeing boss, Kenneth Duberstein, is a director of Big Oil’s ConocoPhillips and was once Republican Reagan’s chief of staff. He’s a long-time McCain advisor and member of Timmons & Co., a leading lobbyist firm. McCain named its CEO, William Timmons, to lead his transition team.

Duberstein, a champion of unregulated capitalism, was also a Fannie Mae director. From 2002-2006 his firm advised that mortgage broker on regulatory matters — how to keep the scam going!

So, the Boeing Board members know that whoever becomes president, he will be tied to the same jackals that caused the meltdown in the first place.

They may have the election sewn up, but they still must convince the world that the U.S., while possibly going bankrupt, is still the only superpower. They plan strategy in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller/Morgan-sponsored think-tank that ("unofficially") plots U.S. foreign policy. Its members include Boeing bosses Biggs, Daley, and Duberstein!

These bandits know they’re in deep trouble. Basically they didn’t make enough profit the "old-fashioned way" so they deregulated, starting with Reagan and growing under Clinton. Instead of investing in industrial production, they had to resort to scams like subprime mortgages — that the old rules made difficult — to make a fast buck.

Now they want to re-industrialize, but not making washing machines and hair dryers. What money remains will be spent on armaments to control the world’s oil supplies and destroy their rivals’ productive capacity.

They want to bail themselves out. But ultimately it’s workers’ loss of homes, jobs and health care, earning slave wages that would bail them out, in their drive to reindustrialize for war production to fight imperialist wars.

The union wanted strikers to come into this battle blaming black, Latino and Chinese subcontractor workers. But when one seller held up our CHALLENGE strike Extra and shouted, "Read how L.A. subcontractor workers support Boeing strikers," she was cheered.

Small, but useful, victories as the strike goes on. Holding the line while struggling to advance PLP’s revolutionary communist line..

Hospital Workers Back Boeing Strikers

STATEMENT FROM CHALLENGE READERS AT A BROOKLYN HOSPITAL

We the CHALLENGE readers express our solidarity with the Boeing workers.

We support our brothers and sisters in their struggle against the Boeing company.

Boeing recently made $20 billion in profit from super-exploiting Boeing workers yet Boeing refuses to meet the economic demands from the workers.

However, the bosses’ government is spending billions in taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks, mortgage and insurances companies, while millions of U.S. workers’ wages have stagnated and health and pension benefits have grown stingier.

We, the CHALLENGE readers, are contributing $70 towards your struggle.

Keep up the fight against the bosses at Boeing.

U.S.-Russia Sharpening Rivarly Revs Up World War Threat

As the Georgian-Russian war revealed, inter-imperialist rivalry has reached a new level. It demonstrated the Russian bosses’ willingness to commit military power to defend their centuries-old sphere of influence and their control of the energy-rich Caspian Sea-Caucasus region. It also again exposed the U.S. bosses’ growing inability to rely on proxy forces to defend their interests abroad, prompting an eventual clash of U.S. and Russian troops. This, plus the on-going worldwide economic crisis, has accelerated the threat of world war as the only "solution" to this rivalry.

At stake in this Georgian dogfight is not only who will exploit, transport and decide where to market those energy resources, but which imperialist gangs will dominate the world, which, since World War I has been based on controlling the world’s energy resources. Since WWII, U.S. bosses’ world supremacy stems from controlling the oil-rich Middle East and energy resources in Latin America and Africa. This control, however, has been eroding, hammered by unrelenting challenges posed by rival imperialists and local bosses.

All this has intensified the U.S. bosses’ decline. To reverse it, says Foreign Affairs (September/December 2008; "A Daunting Agenda" by Richard Holbrooke), the weakness in "the domestic economy" must be repaired because "in the long run, the rise and fall of great nations is driven primarily by their economic strength…." But in reversing this economic downturn "… a new factor has emerged, unlike any the United States has previously faced"; with the high price of oil "...Americans ….are contributing to the greatest transfer of wealth from one set of nations to another in history" — an astounding $3 trillion yearly to oil-producing countries.

Historically, economic power helped determine military power of past empires. U.S. rivals, like Russia, are using their energy wealth to rebuild their military with state-of-the-art weaponry. The Russian navy has commissioned six new carrier groups to be built starting in 2012. The U.S. has eleven.

To regain its economic clout, U.S. imperialism must reassert control over the world’s energy resources and seize or destroy its main rivals’ industrial base. Energy-wise, so far, it has been waging a losing battle in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Venezuela. It recently suffered a major defeat in the Caspian Sea area as Russia’s Gazprom outfit bought most of the region’s exportable oil and gas resources. This effectively killed the West’s projected NABUCO pipeline to transport oil and gas from this area to Europe, bypassing Russian territory.

Now, because of its Georgian military victory, Russia can shut the only pipeline that bypasses the Russian Federation, the BTC (from Azerbaijan to Georgia to Turkey), or achieve this through clients like the Turkish Kurds. Recently, during repairs fo9llowing a Kurdish attack, the million barrels of oil BTC transports daily to Europe was rerouted through the Russian network. Given this, the deputy vice-president of Azerbaijan’s State Oil Co. said, "his company is considering an offer by Russia to buy all of the firm's natural gas production for both domestic use and export to Europe." (LA Times, 8/18/08)

Thus, U.S. rulers’ dreams of using Central Asia’s energy resources to break Russia’s stranglehold on Europe’s energy supplies — to maintain the NATO alliance for geopolitical reasons and eventual global war against Russia and/or China — have temporarily being dashed. Thus, gaining control of Iran — the world’s third largest oil and second largest natural gas reserve — has therefore become more crucial than ever to an ever more desperate U.S. imperialism fighting to maintain its world hegemony, with very few options left but war. Iran is also the perfect land bridge to transport Caspian Sea’s energy to Europe.

All this will require a war of unpredictable consequences. That’s why Holbrooke states, "The next U.S. president will inherit a more difficult set of international challenges than any predecessor since World War II." A challenge either Obama or McCain will dutifully undertake.

Capitalism/Imperialism breeds war under either nationalized or privatized means of production. Eighty percent of the world’s oil/natural gas resources have been nationalized but it’s only sharpened the inter-imperialist rivalry and moved the world closer to global war. Whether Saudi Arabia’s Princes, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Venezuela’s Chavez or Mexico’s Obrador, nationalization serves the interest of one sector of the local ruling classes and whichever imperialist they are allied with.

Our class should never support any of these butchers or participate in any capitalist electoral circus. Our interests lie in building a mass revolutionary communist PLP to fight for a communist world, where our class will decide how to best use and allocate the world’s natural resources to meet the needs of the world’s workers.

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