The first George Bush president from 1988–1992, died on November 30, 2018, and has since been lionized by the bosses’ media and politicians. But Bush’s vicious, racist legacy caused decades of death and suffering, for the working class around the world.
The U.S. ruling class wishes its murderous actors would carry out their roles with finesse, rather than bumbling ineptness like Trump. Bush committed mass murder in the name of spreading democracy, as have all U.S. rulers since this country’s inception. It matters not whether we assess liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican presidents – they all kill and oppress the workers of the world in order to preserve power and resources. It is the capitalist/imperialist imperative, a system that must be overthrown with workers’ power.
The career of a killer
As a college student at Yale, Bush belonged to Skull and Bones, one of the secret societies for wealthy white Christian men, from which the CIA did much of its recruiting. After graduating in 1948, Bush went into the oil business in Texas and began his covert association with the CIA, using his business ventures as cover. His Zapata drilling company, ironically named after the Mexican freedom fighter, was involved in the U.S-backed overthrow of the elected left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. It was also implicated in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, where Bush family sugar holdings had been seized by Fidel Castro. (The Nation 12/4)
Bush became a Congressman in 1966 and soon afterwards traveled to Vietnam with a CIA official to examine the Phoenix Program, a massive U.S. terror and death squad operation that tortured and killed 25,000–50,000 insurgents. He also became involved in Operation Condor, a program enabling right wing dictators in Latin America, as in Chile and Argentina, to brutally kill tens of thousands of dissidents. Later, when Bush was running the CIA from 1976-1977, a CIA asset with the Chilean secret police fatally bombed Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, and his aide in Washington, D.C . Bush deliberately misled the FBI investigation away from the killer(The Intercept 12/5).
Another mass murderer in the White House
In 1980, Bush became Ronald Reagan’s vice president. Jimmy Carter had lost his bid for re-election largely because 52 U.S citizens taken hostage in Iran after the overthrow of the U.S.-supported Shah in 1979, had not been freed. Since the hostages were released the day after Reagan’s inauguration, it is strongly suspected that Bush had made a secret deal with the Iranians to insure Reagan’s victory.
Once in office, the Reagan-Bush team began a long sequence of secret and vile actions in Central America. Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua installed by the U.S. in the 1930s, had been overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. Hoping to reverse this revolution, the U.S. trained death squads and torturers, the Contras, at the School of the Americas in Georgia and supplied them with arms.
After Congress passed an amendment in 1984 banning aid to the Contras, Bush, together with his National Security Advisor Donald Gregg from the Phoenix Program and CIA head William Casey, began a secret arms plan to supply them with weapons. It was financed by illegally selling arms to Iran and cocaine in the poor, mostly Black areas of U.S. cities (the Iran-Contra affair).
When running for President in 1987, Bush’s most successful tactic was a viciously racist ad that featured Willie Horto, a Black man convicted of  murder, who was on a weekend furlough from prison when he committed another crime. Bush used this rare event to smear his opponent as soft on crime and, by implication, not sufficiently wary of violent Black men.
But Bush was responsible for far more extensive death and deception when he became President in1988. Soon after, he invaded Panama, ostensibly to arrest the dictator Noreiga for drug trafficking, although Noriega had been a CIA asset for years and had allowed the Contras to ship drugs from Panama. Over 24,000 troops invaded this tiny country and killed at least 3,000 people, mostly civilians.
 This invasion was meant in part to overcome the embarrassment of the American failure in Vietnam, to re-establish U.S. supremacy in the hemisphere and to get rid of Noriega, whose drug-running had become too well publicized. It was, of course, touted as an exercise in “restoring democracy”(Greenleft 12/8).
But this was just a rehearsal for the horror that Bush was to unleash on Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, as well as setting the stage for his son’s wholesale invasion in 2003. The U.S. had soured on its former ally Saddam Hussein, who sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves, was threatening to begin selling it for euros instead of dollars and was a potential threat to Saudi Arabia.
Bush launched the forever war in Iraq
The Bush administration appeared to give Saddam permission to enter Kuwait via its ambassador April Glaspie, and then publicized a completely fake story about babies being murdered in a hospital nursery by Iraqi soldiers in order to justify the invasion. As the Iraqis retreated, Bush told his soldiers to “put some hate in your heart” and attacked the fleeing troops mercilessly on what became the Highway of Death, as well as bombing Baghdad, including targeting 400 people in an air raid shelter.  Yet the hope  for  a breezy overthrow of Saddam did not materialize, nor did the “short war” that was supposed to demonstrate the infallibility of new high-tech weaponry forestall further war (The Intercept 12/5).
In addition to the millions of lives destroyed by Bush’s drug fueled Iran–Contra secret war, Bush also left a legacy of death and discrimination against workers in the U.S. suffering from AIDS. The HIV epidemic was in full flower in the 90s, and 70,000 mostly gay men died during his presidency. Funding for AIDS research was cut, while Bush repeatedly urged people to change their behavior and criticized Act Up, the main organization advocating for AIDS victims, for using “excessive free speech” (The New Yorker 12/7).
The legacy of that great “statesman” Bush is a massive war in Iraq that is still unresolved that has caused over a million deaths, the rise of Islamic extremism, millions of workers dead or disabled by disease, drugs, or incarceration, and an increase in war and racism. Let us build Progressive Labor Party internationally to drive capitalism from the face of the earth and assure that no more “great politicians” are able to ruin our lives.

The sit-down strike and occupation of the General Motors’(GM) Fisher Body plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, for 44 days and nights —  from December 30, 1936 to February 11, 1937 — demonstrated the power of workers in the basic industries, a central outlook of the three-year-old Progressive Labor Movement, that later inspired the Progressive Labor Party.
 A sit-down strike occupies the means of production, preventing the bosses’ use of scabs to resume operations and is harder to attack than an outside picket line. Any company frontal assault would endanger millions of dollars’ worth of machinery. While not a revolutionary act, Flint sit-down was completely controlled by the rank-and-file, although the press and GM labeled it as “Soviet-style tyranny.” GM CEO Alfred Sloan called it “revolutionary in its dangers and implications,” possibly because communists played a central role in its organization and leadership.
The city of Flint was company-controlled — the mayor, city manager, police chief, and judges were GM stockholders, company officials or both. To combat union organizers, GM hired the infamous Pinkertons (a private police force bosses used to infiltrate unions, keep strikers out of plants,that  recruit goons, and protect scabs).They also had ties to the U.S. Justice Department and Navy Intelligence. It organized the Black Legion, a terrorist group that beat, tarred, feathered and murdered active unionists — all this to protect Flint, the nerve center of GM’s world auto empire.
 Three-fourths of GM’s cars were dependent on the chassis produced in Flint. 80 percent of the city’s population was directly dependent on GM for a living. The workers suffered the most intense speed-up on GM’s assembly lines, often unable to climb the stairs when they got home. The workers were determined to slow down the line and smash the open shop. During the Great Depression, with millions unemployed, the company using the threat of layoffs to enforce its speed-up. Flint became a driving force to establish an industrial union called the United Auto Workers (UAW) that included thousands of unskilled and skilled workers, a rarity in unions at that time.
What did the strike demonstrate?
 It was against this backdrop that workers  bravely fought for union recognition, a 30-hour work-week, time and one-half for overtime, abolition of piece work and slowing down the line. They organized the most effective strike apparatus ever seen, completely controlled by the rank-and-file. A mass meeting elected a stewards committee and a strike strategy committee of seven, six of whom were communists.
The strike not only demonstrated the ablity of workers to halt and seize production, it exhibited many instances of working class leadership militancy through organizing, that included:

The creation of rank-and-file committees that governed food distribution, security, information, sanitation and health, a “kangaroo court,” entertainment, education and athletics.
Two mass meetings of 1,200 — the supreme body — were held daily. Every worker served six hours duty — on three, off nine in every 24 hours.
A Special Patrol of 65  workers that formed part of a security committee carried out 35-minute inspection everyday and every hour, to check on any problems, “rumors,” and disruptions.
  Daily cleanup’s occurred as dozens of workers moved through the plant in waves, leaving it spic and span.
Strikers’ children were hoisted through the windows to visit their fathers.
     Labor history and writing classes were organized.
     Charlie Chaplin donated his film “Modern Times” for workers’ viewing.
     A “Living Newspaper” was established for workers to act out the events of the day.
     Women workers and strikers’ wives constituted Brigades armed with 2x4clubs to guard the plant from the outside against police attacks and potential assault by the National Guard.       
‘We have only one life’  
   To capture Chevy Plant No. 4 (which assembled 1,000,000 Chevrolets a year), workers planned brilliant military maneuvers, where they feint attacks on two other Chevy Plant’s (Plant’s No. 9  No. 6), drawing company guards scrambling there, which left Chevy Plant No.4 unprotected, and free to capture by strikers. Soon after the 14,000 workers from the newly seized plant joined the sit-down. After the victorious takeover it was not long before the National Guard surrounded the plants, and waged war on workers attacking  them with tear gas. Amid the chaos and blinding clouds of tear gas one worker, a UAW leader, named Joe Sayen addressed a crowd of equally courageous workers:
We want the whole world to understand what we are fighting for. We are fighting for freedom and life and liberty...What if we should be defeated? What if we should be killed? We have only one life.That’s all we can lose and we might as well die like heroes than like slaves.
The effect on the working class
Nevertheless the workers fightback proved too costly for the bosses. After a decisive battle, GM–fearing destruction of its machinery– surrendered, especially when 40,000 workers from four nearby states marched into Flint and surrounded the struck plants, ready to defend the sit-downers. This inspiring feat which was once deemed “impossible” by the leader of GM’s security thugs (a Hitler-sympathizer), shook the bosses, and their goons to the core.
Despite the bosses railings and weak attempts to undermine worker’s power. The workers won union recognition for the CIO’s United Auto Workers, for the 40-hour work week (which led to weekends off for tens of millions of U.S. workers), overtime pay and a slowing-down of the assembly-line speed-up. In its wake the strike had an electrifying effect on the working class. In less than two weeks, 30,000 workers staged sit-in’s  in a variety of industries. U.S. Steel, the world’s largest steelmaker, and General Electric saw the handwriting on the wall and signed up with CIO unions — without a strike. Women in the million-dollar Woolworth chain were sitting in. Within the next four years, five million industrial workers had joined the CIO. Industrial unions were born.
   The role of communists
Communists in the Communist Party  U.S.A played a fundamental role. As historians noted, “Had it not been for the Communists, there is serious doubt that the forces of industrial unionism would have lived through this period.” However, the CP failed to link this huge reform struggle to the need to win workers to the real solution: revolution. It did not expose the relationship of state power to the ruling class and fostered illusions about government being some “neutral” institution in the battle between classes. It did not explain the class nature of the law. The CP essentially backed Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election, even though it ran its own candidate.
   While trade unions are a defensive weapon for workers. Historically, any reforms workers win are eventually taken away by the rulers’ state power and government control.Capitalism is a worldwide phenomenon. Reform victories like these are undercut by capitalists moving their plants to low-wage areas. Today GM produces more cars in China than in the U.S., not to mention the U.S. auto industry’s presence in South Africa, Vietnam and Eastern Europe.
The only answer to this contradiction is overthrowing capitalism — along with its government — a profit system which always exploits workers wherever it can, pitting one group against another.As one striker remarked as he left the Flint plant, “The first victory is ours. But the war is not over.”

On November 24, in the heart of Paris, the French ruling class used the chemical weapon known as tear gas to terrorize a mass protest against rising taxes, stagnant wages, and widening inequality. It was a dramatic sign of escalating class warfare amid the worldwide crisis of capitalism.
The following day, in Tijuana, Mexico, in an even more blatant act of state terror, desperate Central America refugees were tear-gassed by the U.S. Border Patrol as some tried to run toward asylum in California. Wind wafted the gas more than half a mile from the border fence. One woman collapsed unconscious. Small barefoot children in diapers were overwhelmed by pain and respiratory distress. “I felt that my face was burning, and my baby fainted,” Cindy Milla, a 23-year-old migrant from Honduras, told the Wall Street Journal (11/25). She and her two children had been attacked by a nerve agent so dangerous and uncontrollable that it is “outlawed on the battlefield by nearly every nation on Earth, including the United States” (Washington Post, 11/27).
But as a tool for domestic torture, for policing by poison, tear gas is the capitalists’ go-to weapon. The bosses have used it against working-class rebellion from Syria to Palestine, Turkey to Yemen, Belgium to Venezuela. In the U.S., migrants have been getting tear-gassed at the Mexican border since the Jimmy Carter administration in 1980. Under President Barack Obama, in 2013 alone, there were 151 reported uses of pepper spray at the border, and an additional 27 uses of tear gas (usatoday.com, 11/28).
In August 2014, when hundreds of unarmed workers took over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after the brutal, racist murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown, they were met by a militarized police state. The local kkkops in gas masks countered with assault rifles, concussion grenades, armored vehicles—and chemical warfare.
Within 20 seconds of exposure to the gas neurotoxin, the Ferguson protesters were blinded by stinging tears. They were paralyzed by coughing, choking, and nausea. Some felt a painful tightening of the chest that can simulate a heart attack (yahoo.com, 8/19/14). An eight-year-old boy was overcome. As recounted by Huffington Post (8/17/14):
Cassandra Roberts…went down on her knees and raised her hands in a “don’t shoot” motion, but she quickly realized there was a bigger issue and she was being tear-gassed. “I got so choked up,” said Roberts. “I couldn’t even gather myself….It took one of the McDonald’s employees to pull me up out of the smoke. My eyes were wide open and I couldn’t see a thing.
Chemical weapons are designed to both incapacitate and demoralize their victims. Tear gas “is meant not just to smother, but to confuse, intimidate, and terrify” (huffingtonpost.com, 11/28). But the next night, several hundred protesters came out again to defy the police state and express their working-class solidarity.
Workers always fight back
Tear gas is not a true gas but rather an aerosol of solid or liquid compounds. Its chemical family includes pepper spray, Mace, and CS gas, the variety most widely used by police today. The rulers’ kkkops refer to tear gas as a “nonlethal” or “less-lethal” weapon. After the assault on migrant families in Tijuana, U.S. President Donald Trump, the War- Criminal- in Chief, pronounced it “very safe.”
In fact, tear gas has been linked to long-term respiratory damage, blindness, even death. “In 2013, Egyptian police killed 37 prisoners after firing CS gas into a loaded van, causing the victims to suffocate in excruciating pain.After widespread use of tear gas on protestors in Bahrain in 2012....Physicians for Human Rights reported that several women miscarried after exposure, and one asthmatic man died”(businessinsider.com, 8/19). Throwing tear gas canisters can cause lethal head injuries. And no one knows the long-term impact of the gas on children or the elderly.
Despite these dangers, working-class fighters have refused to surrender to the terrorist bosses. In the historic 1937 Flint,Michigan sit-down strike, auto workers fought back with hinges and bolts against cops and National Guardsman armed with tear gas and machine guns. In 1968, French college students dug up paving stones to hurl at police amid daily waves of CS smoke. In 2016, in a protest against a natural gas pipeline, Native Americans clashed for days against gas-wielding cops in Standing Rock, North Dakota.
Of all the lasting images from the Ferguson rebellion, the most memorable might be one of a young man named Edward Crawford, “clutching a bag of chips in one hand as he cocks his arm back to throw a burning tear gas canister that riot police had fired….” (cnn.com, 5/6/17). Crawford said he was moved to act to protect several children standing nearby.
When workers rise up, the capitalist class will wield its state power to try to smash us. But as history has shown, the workers of the world have tremendous power. We don’t always realize this potential, but when we do, we can often challenge the rulers on the street or on the job, fighting state terror and exploitation. A united, multiracial, international working class can overcome any bosses’ weapon.
A criminal history
French scientists invented tear gas during World WarI, as means of forcing German troops out from behind their barricades and trenches. It was used alongside more deadly chemical weapons, including mustard gas and chlorine. After untold numbers of civilians were killed by gas warfare, these agents were banned in war by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and later by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.
But nothing stopped the bosses from using chemical weapons in anti-labor fights. By 1930, they’d been adopted by police departments in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Chicago. In 1932, National Guard Troops fired tear gas into the Washington, DC camps occupied by the “Bonus Army,” veterans seeking overdue wartime payments. In the ensuing smoke and fire, two men were killed and an infant child asphyxiated (Atlantic, 8/16/14). A leading tear gas manufacturer, the Lake Erie Chemical Company, “followed news headlines of labor disputes and traveled to high-conflict areas, selling their products domestically and to countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Cuba” (Atlantic, 8/16/14)
At the 1965 march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Birmingham, Alabama state troopers shot dozens of tear gas canisters at peaceful civil rights protesters, giving the Klan-in-blue a smokescreen to club any protesters who fell. During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops fired tear gas into Viet Cong tunnels while the National Guards sprayed anti-war demonstrators in Berkeley, California: “Helicopters carrying tear gas showered thousands of peacefully assembled students, as well as bystanders, including nursery-school children” (The Atlantic, 8/16/14).
More recently, as working-class fightback has surged, police forces have deployed tear gas against anti-globalization demonstrators. In 2011, the year of Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, tear gas sales tripled. In By 2022, the “nonlethal” weapons industry could be worth more than $9 billion (pri.org, 11/29).
This is what capitalism has to offer our class: war crimes and brutality, death and terror. Under communism, the international working class will have no racist cops, no bosses’ borders, no “migrant” workers, no imperialist wars. Progressive Labor Party is organizing to smash the profit system and create a better world. Join us!

PARIS, December 5—Workers battle the police’s tear gas canisters, water cannons, and stun grenades. What began as a 300,000-strong protest against planned hikes in fuel taxes on November 17 have transformed into a mass uprising against president Emmanuel Macron. In France, as is worldwide, capitalism is in crisis.
‘An insurrection’
As CHALLENGE goes to press, France is deploying 65,000 cops in anticipation of more rebellions against the capitalist government this weekend. Macron’s promise to suspend the fuel tax hikes was too little too late.
Workers vandalized a national symbol of France, the Arc de Triomphe. This area has become a battleground. Paris’s 8th district mayor called it an “insurrection.” The protests have been declared the “worst rioting in Paris in decades.”
This “Yellow Vest” (Gilets Jaunes) movement takes its name from the yellow jackets protesters have adopted as a symbol of their class anger.
Protesters are angry over record prices at the pump, with the cost of diesel increasing by about 20 percent in the past year to an average of 1.49 euros ($1.68) per litre. Macron then announced further taxes on fuel, set to take effect on January 1, 2019, in a move he said was necessary combat climate change and protect the environment (Al Jazeera, 12/4).
The protests began with workers in rural France but quickly spread to ambulance workers, high school students shutting down schools, and more. The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) trade union called energy workers to stage a 48-hour walkout on December 13 in solidarity. Truckers and framers are also calling for strikes.
Tale of two Frances
Like other Western countries, the gap between the ruling and working class is deep and wide.
The top 20 percent of the population earns nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent. France’s richest 1 percent represent over 20 percent of the economy’s wealth. Yet the median monthly income is about 1,700 euros, or $1,930, meaning that half of French workers are paid less than that (The New York Times, 12/4).
Clearly, no worker—no matter how rich of a country they are in—is safe from the consequences of capitalism.
France—like Italy, United Kingdom, the United States—and other top imperialist countries (that were came out on top after World War II) is digging itself deeper into crisis. In the face of growing great-power rivalry, the imperialist world order that the U.S. created in its own image is crumbling.
Of course, this crisis has been a long time coming. “Living standards and wages rose in France after World War II during a 30-year growth stretch known as “Les Trente Glorieuses.’”(NY Times, 12/4). Those Glorious Thirty years ended in the 1970s. That marked the beginning of the end of the U.S. liberal world order.
Communists warn that in times of crisis, the bosses’ response to that crisis is called fascism. Workers can fight fascism by refusing to trust and take leadership from any faction of the ruling class. When we choose a side in the bosses’ growing fight, we participate in the building of a fascist society.  
Bosses take some losses
The mass protests show that when workers fight back without illusions of nonviolence holding them back, the whole world stops and takes note. French companies were unable to make their usual profits.
French oil company Total has said 75 of its 2,200 petrol stations have run dry because ‘yellow vests’ were blockading fuel depots. Trucking federations said they had suffered operating losses of 400 million euros ($453m) due to protesters blocking highways and toll stations as well as fuel depots (Al Jazeera, 12/4).
Lack of leadership
Unlike union strikes, there is no centralized leadership of the Yellow Vests. The movement is open for all factions of the ruling class to co-opt and control. Internally, there are various levels of class consciousness inside the Yellow Vests as well.
Different factions…have different demands. While they all want a better standard of living, some are furious at…Macron for…unjust tax policies that help the rich but do nothing for the poor, and they want him out of office. Others are more focused on raising the minimum wage and reducing the amount taken out of employee paychecks to cover social security and related services (NY Times, 12/1).
The whole baguette
In an attempt to bribe, president Macron announced it would suspend the gasoline tax increase. One spokesperson of the Yellow Vests said, “We aren’t satisfied…Our demands are much bigger than this moratorium…We want a better distribution of wealth, salary increases. It’s about the whole baguette, not just the crumbs.” (NY Times, 12/4).
Macron was supposed to be the president to “save the liberal order” (one that can rule internationally in the interest of imperialists and rule domestically with a misled and subdued working class). The level of discontent and anger against the France government is yet another example of how democracy and nonviolence has failed workers. This system is proving to be an impossibility for the wellbeing of the working class.
In truth, there is no panacea for France’s decline. Times like these demonstrate the need for a communist party that can provide leadership to class struggles around the world. If workers want the whole baguette, we must own the means to make and bake the bread.
Solidarité!
It’s unclear how exactly the Yellow Vest movement will play out. We can be certain that workers everywhere have everything to gain by supporting the rebellion in France.
Wherever you are, build solidarity with the working class in France!