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Somalia bombings: U.S. imperialism shows its weakness
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- 24 March 2019 66 hits
Somalia is seeing an increase in lethal U.S. drone strikes, with 47 attacks killing 326 people over the last third of 2018 (New York Times, 3/10). These terror bombings are an essentially defensive response by a weakening U.S. imperialist state trying to counter the ascendant superpower China in East Africa. While both factions of the U.S. ruling class know they must try to contain China’s influence, the bosses’ main wing, the finance capitalists, should know that bombing with no boots on the ground is not a winning formula.
This U.S. is targeting al-Shabab, a band of small capitalists who use religion to justify their own bombings and murders of Somalians and Kenyans (see box). The U.S. is backing the current Somali regime against the al-Shabab insurgency to keep its imperialist toehold in the country. President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed is a dual Somali and U.S. citizen who until recently worked at the New York State Department of Transportation in Buffalo. He is seen as a willing collaborator with the U.S. (Politico, 2/19/17).
Somalia is a desperately poor country with huge geopolitical importance. It is located in the Horn of Africa, a gateway to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. Besides controlling possibly the longest stretch of coast in Africa, Somalia borders Djibouti, where the Chinese are building a military base for 10,000 troops. Just across the Gulf of Aden lies the devastation of Yemen, where the U.S.-backed Saudis are waging a vicious war on Yemeni workers to maintain control of the Arabian peninsula. Close to five million barrels of crude oil move each day through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea. The narrow strait is a potential chokepoint for goods on the trade route between Asia and Europe, including critical energy supplies (bloomberg.com, 7/26/18). This on the cheap strategy to prop up Mohamed as a U.S. puppet, and bomb Al-Shabab won’t be enough to defeat Chinese imperialism.
Horn of Africa eyed by rival imperialists
The New York Times, U.S. finance capital’s leading mouthpiece, claims that “the intensifying bombing campaign undercuts the Trump administration’s intended pivot to confront threats from great powers like China and Russia, and away from long counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns.” Instead of increased bombing, main-wing analysts like the Atlantic Council’s Bronwyn Bruton are arguing for:
Negotiation with al-Shabab, which is expanding the territory under its control.
Ending support for the Somali government, which has a long history of corruption.
Partnering with Gulf States like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are already training Somalia’s military, and allowing them to negotiate with al-Shabab as well (Michigan Daily, 3/13/19).
This liberal counterstrategy exposes the growing weakness of the U.S. position in East Africa. Gone are the days when the U.S. had unlimited resources to impose its will throughout the world. The Vietnam Syndrome, the U.S. bosses’ inability to mobilize worker’s support for land-based military incursions, is alive and well. The rulers’ choices today? Ineffectual bombing or simply staying out of the way to regroup for an inevitable World War III.
Meanwhile, China has increased its trade with Africa by 226 percent over the past 12 years and tripled its foreign direct investment between 2011 and 2016 (Economist, 3/7). In December 2018, the Chinese bosses made a two-year deal for exclusive fishing rights in Somalia’s rich waters. They have also agreed to lend money to the Somali government to rebuild the Mogadishu seaport (Daily Sabah, 2/19). More and more, the Horn of Africa looms as the site of a potential proxy war between China and the U.S.
Second-tier imperialist powers are also vying to continue to exploit and control Africa. French President Emmanuel Macron recently made his tenth visit to the continent in two years, stopping at the French military base in Djibouti as well as Ethiopia and Kenya. The French bosses are allied with the U.S., at least for now. Macron recognizes that “Beijing is aiming to reshape the global order in its interests” and has “made countering China’s growing economic and military power a priority for this year”(Bloomberg, 3/12).
U.S. strategy looks like a loser
Over the past 15 years, drone strikes have become a favored option for the U.S. to flex its military might while minimizing the need for ground troops. Barack Obama bombed multiple countries with drones, including Somalia, during his eight years in office. Donald Trump is continuing this strategy while hiding it from view. The State Terrorist in Chief recently declared that the CIA would no longer make public the number of drone strikes or related fatalities (BBC, 3/7).
In 2017, the U.S. suspended military aid to most Somali units as Trump authorized the first deployment of regular U.S. troops to the country since 1994. There are now approximately 500 U.S. military personnel stationed there (Council on Foreign Relations, 1/31)—nowhere near the number needed to consolidate control of Somalia or challenge the growing Chinese presence in Djibouti. Trump’s minimal troop mobilization, coupled with the dramatic increase in bombings of forcibly recruited teenagers in al-Shabab, is hardly a strategy to win the hearts and minds of Somali workers.
A lose-lose conflict for workers
As Somali workers are bombed by terrorists on both sides, from above by U.S. drones and on the ground by al-Shabab suicide bombers, their only solution is communist revolution. The only way to stop imperialist slaughter is by building a red army to seize state power in all the countries of the world. All power to the international working class!
CHICAGO, March 12-Dozens of protesters, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, blocked City Hall elevators for nine hours to protest the $95 million police training academy to be built on Chicago’s impoverished West Side. This is on top of the $1.5 billion yearly budget for the police (Chicago City Budget) and the $113 million the city spent on police misconduct lawsuits in 2018 (The Chicago Reporter, 3/7).
The Chicago City Council nevertheless approved this expenditure, showing once again that the job of all politicians and cops is to “serve and protect” their billionaire capitalist masters.Workers don’t need “better trained” cops that will control us and stop us from fighting back more effectively. We don’t need politicians bought and controlled by billionaires and their lobbyists and their bribes.We need a system where we run society for the working class and by the working class. That’s communism. But to organize such a society we must fight racism and sexism. We must unite our class into a multi-racial force that can overthrow the capitalists. This is why PLP organizes for communist revolution.
This militant action was led by young Black and Latin organizers in the #NoCopAcademy campaign, which has been fighting for Schools not Cops, Clinics not Cops, Jobs not Cops, and to End Police Murder since the plan to build the Cop Academy was first announced two years ago. Participants were prepared to be arrested, but no one was, in spite of a heavy police presence throughout the day. Evidently Chicago’s lame duck Mayor Rahm Emanuel feared arrests would bring more attention to the phony election campaign.
The day was filled with chanting (No Cop A-ca-demy, 95 mil for commun-ity. Say What?), stopping people from coming on or off elevators, marching, and individual conversations. This gave PLers the opportunity to talk about our upcoming May Day march and dinner and to make connections with those interested in further discussing the necessity of communist revolution. The protest continued the next day at the City Council meeting. The City Council voted to borrow $65 million to pay for the Academy, meaning the working class will end up paying three times that in interest.
Capitalists will always spend money on police to protect themselves from the working class while cutting funds for schools, jobs, housing, and health clinics that the working class needs. The capitalist politicians also make sure they hire their “friends,” regardless of competence. The contract for the Cop Academy is going to AECOM, a company whose history is riddled with scandals including use of deficient materials, fraudulent billing, inflated cost projections, and over-charges. A member of AECOM’s Board gave $50,000 to Emanuel’s re-election campaign (The Chicago Reporter, January 24). Capitalists are happy to give their cronies money extorted from the working class in the form of taxes.
The struggle continues. The reform battle to stop the Academy may be lost, but the courage, the solidarity, and the multi-racial unity that these fighters built and experienced cannot be taken away from them. PLP will continue to participate in the many anti-racist struggles to come and person-by-person, we will win millions to fight for communism.
The Youth Climate Strike on March 15 brought school walkouts to dozens of countries. Millions have been driven to participate out of disgust with capitalism’s wanton destruction of the natural world. Masses of people took to the streets across Europe, Chile, India, Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and dozens more countries.
To realize the potential power of the working class to unite and fight for a better world, we will have to free ourselves from the ruling class’ leadership of the climate movement. The environmental movement is being led and promoted by the main wing U.S. bosses and their allies in Europe who are moving towards fascism to hold onto control of their increasingly threatened liberal world order.
These murderers who sit atop the capitalist world, who have plundered the earth while destroying the lives of billions of workers in the process will always and forever sacrifice the environment of the working class to preserve themselves and their power. Only communist workers power can build a society that serves the needs of the working class.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), in service to Nancy Pelosi and her big capitalist backers, seeks to leverage environmentalism to broaden out the base of support for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class while bringing reluctant politicians into line with the needs of these big fascist U.S. bosses. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND) is a bid, in the words of its own organizers, to reorganize U.S. society on the basis of permanent wartime mobilization - “The Green New Deal is premised on the realization that America now faces ‘the moral equivalent of war’ in the twin crises of climate change and worsening income inequality.” (newconsensus.org)
This same ruling class that irradiated Japan with nuclear bombs, doused Vietnam with napalm and Agent Orange, and poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium is now asking us to swallow ‘war-time mobilization’ in the name of environmental protection and social justice. They created cancer clusters in Gary, Indiana and offered lead-laced water to the children of Flint. The only class interest the U.S. capitalists have ever pursued are their own.
We have seen this language from Washington liberals before, and it led to decades of war. In reaction to the Arab Oil Embargo that shook U.S. imperialism in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter announced in 1979 that “We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing…[it is] the moral equivalent of war.” Soon thereafter he announced a “Carter Doctrine” which set a policy of exclusive U.S. control of Middle East oil which launched an era of indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim workers from which we have yet to emerge.
The climate politics we see taking shape will be used to discipline politicians who show signs of being out of touch with the bosses urgent need to fundamentally reorganize society in preparation for conflict with rival imperialists. In a cell phone video that went viral on the internet, long-serving and arch-imperialist California senator Diane Feinstein was positively roasted by a gaggle of children and teenagers who visited her office to expose her refusal to sign onto the Green New Deal.
The ‘Sunrise Movement’ that organized the Feinstein flaying, names the Koch Brothers on its main website as a fossil fuel company that has to be targeted for dismantling. Some of the most strident voices in the push for a GND have called for the nationalization of energy firms that refuse to sign on to the program, and have even called for top executives of these firms to be tried for crimes against humanity (thedig, podcast, 12/27/18).
The more domestically oriented/’Fortress America’/small fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class, typified but not totally led by the Koch brothers, has more leverage in today’s Trump White House than in any other before. The more internationally oriented main wing of the U.S. ruling class must build a political movement to smash their rivals, and environmentalism is shaping up to be a major strategy of these liberal imperialists to do so. Agreements such as the Paris Accords align with the interests of giant gas energy firms whose holdings allow them to isolate equally filthy smaller energy bosses more closely tied to coal interests and other legacy energy production methods:
For ConocoPhillips and Exxon—as well the non-U.S. oil and gas heavyweights; BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Eni, Total, and Statoil—backing the Paris Agreement is not just riding the trend of increasingly environmentally-conscious businesses. Those companies with operations all over the world stand to benefit from the Paris Agreement because the nations’ efforts to cut carbon emissions will lead to transitioning from coal-fired plants to gas-fired plants. And natural gas is quite a substantial portion of all those majors’ businesses, investments and profits. (oilprice.com ).
If ‘green tech’ pioneer Tesla is any indication, AOC’s promises of a social-justice oriented and environmentally friendly U.S. capitalism are a pipe dream and the Green New Deal will amount to new corporate welfare schemes benefitting a new ‘green’ ruling class. Enjoying the boost of an estimated $5bn in federal subsidies Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now valued at $20bn (and projected to be worth $55bn) while his firm has recently carried out 7 percent layoffs, amounting to some 3,000 workers (wired.com,1/18) and firings of union organizers in the name of keeping profits high (cnn.com 10/26/17).
Communism is the alternative plan – a planned economy is the only way to get to a sustainable future for all the world’s workers. Only an international dictatorship of the proletariat can eradicate the still-greatest peril: imperialist war.
Only communist workers’ power can bring about the reductions in carbon emissions needed on a globally equitable scale. Imperialism threatens nuclear war and leaves workers left poorer by capitalism trapped in underdevelopment.
U.S. bosses want to use environmentalist politics to impose a WWII-style planned economy where profits flow to a unified and disciplined ruling class equipped to wage the most deadly war in history. The bosses political mobilization in the GND hints at the kind of politics and promises they need to generate in order to wage major war with mass support. Millions may be taken in by the inherent nationalism in the bosses plans, and we should be prepared for growing fascism. The struggle to build the communist movement that will lead to a future for our class cannot wait. The egalitarian, pro-worker and pro-planet impulse that drives these same millions of people can only be betrayed by the drive toward profit and war that capitalism has never for a moment in its history been able to do without.
Only a communist-led international working class can seize the means of production and abolish the frightful and senseless waste, first and foremost of the lives of our class brothers and sisters, but also of our planet’s resources, of capitalism’s current mode of production. We need a red new system, not a green new deal; communism is that system. Join PLP.
Baltimore, MD – Students at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have joined local residents to combat JHU’s push for a state law authorizing it to establish a private police force that will patrol campus areas and neighboring public streets. These “Hop Cops” would report to and serve the interests of the administration and board of JHU. That’s how capitalism works. Workers and students need a system that serves our needs. That’s communism.
These privatized cops would not have even the nominal accountability of Baltimore city police. Hopkins security officers are already known for harassing both Black and Latin students and passersby—but currently they do not carry guns or have full police powers. Adding armed police with the power to stop, arrest, and shoot will intensify the racist oppression in and around the three JHU campuses, with potentially fatal consequences.
The purpose of the move, according to Rep. Elijah Cummings, chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee, who is pressuring state legislators to pass the bill, is to keep the “riff-raff” away from a prominent medical institution that serves wealthy patients like Saudi princes. Cummings is just another racist politician who serves his billionaire, capitalist masters. We need a communist revolution to dump them all in the trash heap of history and put the working class in charge.
JHU mouthpieces have lied to residents and lawmakers alike, misrepresenting crime statistics (crime has actually dropped in areas surrounding Hopkins) and offering sham accountability schemes that would result in a force that is more secretive and more shielded from liability than any municipal police department. Some residents have been talked into supporting the move with the promise of Hopkins creating a model police force that uses “best practices” to make their streets safer. The reality, well understood by community organizers and JHU Students Against Private Police (SAPP), is that the force will be mandated to do what’s best for Hopkins, not its mostly working class neighbors. SAPP and local residents have stepped up to expose the charade at multiple community meetings and public forums, and their organizing is paying off.
Many communities are increasingly voicing solid opposition to the measure, as are JHU students, some 3,000 of whom signed a petition against the private police force. And 75 percent of students who responded to an email survey likewise opposed the move. Faculty and JHU alumni (with the exception of former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Hopkins alum and poster child for racist, aggressive policing) have also responded to a petition drive with a resounding “NO”.
But JHU is the largest employer in Maryland and virtually owns Baltimore. It is tightly connected to corrupt elected officials and capitalist power brokers throughout the city and state. But the impact of the bill will be far-reaching. It will set a dangerous precedent for privatized policing in Maryland, sending the state back to the early 19th century when every capitalist enterprise had its own police force to keep order, suppress speech, and break strikes. As we go to press, the State Senate has approved the measure, and it is now in the hands of the House of Delegates for a hearing and vote. But SAPP and local residents, supported by civil rights groups like Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, will not give up the fight. The stakes are too high. And these local struggles are part of a bigger fight to smash the worldwide rise of racism and fascism with communist revolution.
BAY AREA, March 20—Teachers in the Oakland Education Association (OEA) went on strike and settled a new contract. Oakland public schools are a product of the same racism addressed in the recent LA, Denver, West Virginia and Charter school strikes. This strike was a mass school for pro-communist ideas.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP)members participated in picket lines at seven schools, worked with friends and co-workers before the strike to build consciousness and solidarity, participated in the mass actions organized by the OEA, and distributed leaflets and literature. PLP teachers were embedded in the picket lines and the on-site organizing and decision-making at their schools.
For many young workers, this was their first strike. It was an eye opener. Many questions surfaced: from tactical issues of how to run the picket line, and what is the role of school administrators who appear friendly, to the strike, to who runs the OEA and the deeper issues about capitalism.
Now that the contract passed and teachers are back to work the burning question remains: what will teachers do? Will they continue to be active? Some high school campuses have formed on-going committees. Will some teachers make the leap from fighting around immediate conditions to building a long-term revolutionary movement to get rid of capitalism? After this experience, will some conclude that the unity they built can grow and abolish the capitalist ruling class? This would indicate a growth in class-consciousness.
As one PL’er discussed on the picket line: “All across the globe, workers are flexing their power through organizing strikes to demand better learning/working conditions and higher pay. I know there is no true stability for our class under capitalism. This system is designed to commodify all aspects of our lives, and then leave us in the cold when we can’t afford to fund our own survival. This process of turning all things and experiences into items that are bought and sold absolutely includes education; take it from an undergraduate who is $25,000 in debt with student loans. In the Bay Area, we have been witnessing that the contradictions of extreme wealth and extreme poverty grow deeper over the last decade.”
Strike ends, fight begins?
When the strike ended, 42 percent voted against ratification, which is a big no-vote since the leadership was pushing this as a win-win. Nurses told the bargaining team they needed lower workloads to serve the student needs (not cash bonuses). They distributed a flyer urging a no vote.
The OEA demands were built around securing teacher and student needs; zeroing in on the particular racist attack on students in Oakland’s low-income areas (Black, Latin, and immigrant students) where most school closings are scheduled. The wage demand focused on the fact that a 20 percent annual turnover of teachers was due to the inadequate wages,and inability of teachers to live where they teach due to predatory real estate profiteering (gentrification). Turnover and underfunding has caused great instability in the schools. There were student-teacher centered demands for smaller class sizes, more resources for students like nurses, counselors, and special needs services.
Working-class solidarity on display
This strike showed a lot of strength, unity, and multi-racial fight against the institutional racism in education. There was working-class solidarity. Teachers, students and community residents picketed in the morning and afternoon. There were mass demonstrations downtown, an occupation of the state building and a demonstration against a charter school organization.
The Oakland United School District (OUSD) school bosses tried to intimidate the fighters and break the strike. Teachers set up alternative “strike schools.” Teachers in other districts adopted an Oakland school, joined the picket lines, and held a sickout action.
Strike fever spread to colleges
In the duo-lingual program, both the Laney Administrators and the “strike-friendly” Oakland High principle tried to intimidate both teachers and students to have “alternatives” (i.e., to create scab classes off campus). Instead, the strike energy spread to Laney Community College where students and teachers started a campaign to publicize and fight the conditions facing part-time teachers, adjuncts who are 70 percent of the teaching staff in a campus of mainly working class, Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant students.
First day back
Monday, the first day teachers went back to work, the OUSD School Board voted for $22 million in austerity cuts which included staffing cuts, cuts to student services, and decimation of libraries. As communists, we see this struggle as a step in building a revolutionary movement. Organization at schools sites and many mass actions show workers can run things based on collectively figuring out what we need as a working class. These are the seeds of a communist society were life is organized based on the needs of the working class not the profits of the capitalists. Many PLP members and friends commented that this battle deepened friendships with families and teachers for the battles ahead.
