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U.S. Warmakers Hit Roadblock from Germany, Japan
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- 14 November 2013 384 hits
U.S. capitalists have a growing crisis on their hands. As they prepare for a wider global conflict with their imperialist rivals, they’re having trouble forging the coalition they need. This process will have unpredictable twists and turns. What’s clear is that the U.S. is in sharp economic decline and increasingly unable to go it alone in paying for their war machine.
Of the nations Washington counts on as strategic bases of operation, sources of troops and financial backers, two key ones are balking. The German rulers’ public outrage at U.S. phone tapping reflects their reluctance to toe the U.S. bosses’ line, economically or militarily. Some important Japanese capitalists, meanwhile, aren’t ready to abandon the post-World War II pacifist edicts (forced into the Japanese constitution by the U.S.) that helped enrich them. The prohibition of a standing army boosted the profit margin for Japanese corporations.
These edicts could change, however. Capitalism is a dictatorship of the ruling class. Capitalists use the government to maintain their profit system. They use war to resolve their conflicts with other capitalists. The bosses’ sole interest in the working class is to exploit labor for profit — and to use workers’ sons and daughters to fight and die in inter-imperialist wars. The rulers will alter or nullify any laws that limit their ability to pursue their profit goals.
We, the international working class, need to smash this bosses’ dictatorship. We need to establish a workers’ dictatorship that represents our class interests and eliminates the profit system and all its evils: unemployment, racism, sexism, mass poverty and war.
German Bosses Won’t Bow
to U.S. Demands
On November 4, Paul Krugman, a liberal economist at the New York Times, wrote, “German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel’s cell phone. What has them enraged now is...a U.S. Treasury report. [It] argues that Germany’s huge surplus on current account — a broad measure of the trade balance — is harmful, creating ‘a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.’ ” Krugman went on to attack Germany’s relentless impoverishment of Eurozone U.S. allies and NATO members like Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
A day later, the Times further exposed the root of the Obama-Merkel rift. In the eyes of U.S. rulers, Berlin is withholding its military potential from the cause of U.S. imperialism. As Jochen Bittner, editor at the pro-U.S. Die Zeit, complained in an op-ed piece:
Germany is Europe’s unrivaled superpower, its largest economy and its most powerful political force. And yet if its response to recent global crises, and the general attitude of its leaders and citizens, are any indication, there appears to be nothing that will get the German government to consider military intervention.
This attitude was apparent in the German population’s overwhelming opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But U.S. capitalists worry most about Germany’s contribution in future global crises. Germany spends only 1.4 percent of it gross domestic product (GDP) on its military. The U.S. tops the world by devoting 4.8 percent to its war machine. Resurgent rival Russia is close behind at 4.4 percent. China invests 2 percent of its GDP in its armed forces, but that figure underplays the true scope of its war preparations:
“The Chinese military budget, at official exchange rates, is one-seventh that of the United States. But on a more appropriate purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, the Chinese military expenditure is about $500 billion, about three-quarters that of the United States” (Global Security).
U.S. Wants Japan on War Footing
Meanwhile, President Obama is desperately trying to get Japan — the world’s third largest economy — to increase its measly 1 percent military outlay by reversing the pacifist Article 9 of its constitution. It states, “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”
This edict was imposed in 1947 to prevent a repeat of the massive Asian war launched by Japan prior to World War II, which threatened U.S. supremacy in the Pacific. But today the U.S. capitalists have more pressing concerns with a new emerging superpower, namely China. Obama and the bosses he represents are tilting toward Asia to meet this threat. At the same time, Japan is embroiled in a struggle with China over energy resources recently discovered in the seas that lie between them.
Under circumstances like these, the bosses simply change the rules. Ann Wright, former U.S. Army officer and diplomat, writes in Global Research (11/8/13):
On October 3, 2013, the United States and Japan issued a “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee: Toward a More Robust Alliance and Greater Shared Responsibilities.” In the document, the United States “welcomes” the [Japanese Prime Minister] Abe government’s “re-examining the legal basis for its security including the matter of exercising its right of collective self-defense....”
In other words, they are seeking a way to eliminate Article 9 and allow Japan to participate in wars of aggression. As a side benefit for U.S. rulers, Japan would be forced to pay for a portion of U.S. military outlays in Japan and Okinawa.
But major Japanese capitalists oppose Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push for “proactive pacifism,” his euphemism for remilitarization. A November 8 editorial in the Japan Times warns:
Through the exercise of the right to collective self-defense “proactive pacifism” could eventually lead to deployment of the Self-Defense Forces overseas on armed military missions. In short, if implemented Mr. Abe’s policy of “proactive pacifism” will destroy the Constitution’s war-renouncing principle and Japan’s traditional “defense-only defense” posture [where military force can be used only internally or if Japan is attacked]. Thus the prime minister’s push for “proactive pacifism” must be stopped.
Japan Times is wholly owned by Nifco, Inc., the largest supplier of plastic parts for Japan’s worldwide automotive industry. The company’s profits are much larger when not
being taxed to finance a world-class military apparatus.
U.S. Post-WWII Policies Backfire?
Shortly after World War II, the triumphant U.S. rulers conducted highly publicized war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo. Then they restored their fascist former enemies to political and economic power. They re-Nazified Germany to counter the pro-working class Soviet and Chinese movements of the postwar era. But the U.S. refused to restore military power to the vanquished.
U.S. planners like John J. McCloy, chairman of Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations, was installed as High Commissioner of Germany, essentially its lord and master. At that point the U.S. capitalists owned half the world’s manufacturing capacity. They thought they could maintain sole military control of Germany and Japan. And so they did for decades, with hundreds of thousands of GIs stationed in the two countries, even at the height of the Vietnam War.
But with their vital interests now threatened in the Middle East and elsewhere, the U.S. imperialists’ huge military outlays are straining their capacity. They need their longtime protectorates to chip in as armed protectors of their global empire. The chief U.S. rivals are China and Russia, two former workers’ states that are now state capitalist. By using their governments to directly exploit their working classes, these rivals threaten U.S. rulers’ world domination.
Rebellion Good, Communist Revolution Crucial
What all the ruling classes fear is how workers will react to their murderous plans. Masses in the European Union are rebelling against the austerity imposed by German bosses. Suffering the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, demonstrators are taking to the streets in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. They are fighting the French bosses’ pension and job cuts and the rise of the new Nazis in Germany and Greece.
In China, hundreds of rebellions are underway to oppose the removal of hundreds of millions of peasants from the land and into $2-a-day urban sweatshops and other menial labor. Tens of thousands have demonstrated and fought the cops in Brazil, protesting the rulers’ extravagant spending on the World Cup and the Olympics while transportation fares are raised, wages are cut and food prices climb. Who can predict when U.S. workers will say they’ve had enough of mass racist unemployment? When they’ll fight back against their impoverishment? When they’ll refuse to provide the cannon fodder for the U.S. bosses’ war machine?
Spontaneous rebellion is a positive expression of workers’ anger. But it can never end the exploitation of capitalism. We need a working class led by a mass communist party to smash the state power of the world’s capitalist classes—and to replace it with a workers’ dictatorship.
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Anti-Fascist Fighters Defy College Bosses’ Attack
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- 14 November 2013 385 hits
NEW YORK CITY, November 8 — Thirty people gathered in the frigid cold morning to protest the disciplinary hearing for Taffy and Khalil, two students suspended for rallying against the closing of the Morales/Shakur Center at City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). After the students refused to be bought out by the administration, their hearing was postponed to 9 a.m. Friday, November 15. A rally will be held in front of the City College North Academic Center.
This struggle began October 21, when students and faculty demonstrated against the City College administration for shutting down the student center with no notice. In fact, the shutdown was aimed at the growing fightbacks that began earlier this semester. These protests targeted the CUNY presence of racist General David Petraeus and the Reserve Officer Training Corps [see CHALLENGE 11/13].
Our fight is anti-racist because Petraeus represents the U.S. bosses’ imperialist war on workers in the Middle East and South Asia. City College sits in Harlem, one of the most oppressed communities in the country. It’s also a place where Petraeus and ROTC hope to recruit more black officers for their war machine. Unity with Harlem’s workers would strengthen our anti-racist fight.
Taffy and Khalil are now barred from setting foot on campus, but they are neither silenced nor intimidated. Taffy thanked the cops and administration for their help in growing the movement. He was referring to the collective anger that results when one of our students is attacked. Instead of scaring us, the attack has emboldened us.
What Fascism Looks Like
Militancy was evident both inside and outside the hearing. Although fifteen people at a time were supposed to be allowed in, the cops barred the door. They shunted the crowd behind the NAC building, which effectively hid the protesters from the main entrances. One PL’er yelled at the cops, “This is what fascism looks like!”
Inside the hearing, Taffy and Khalil were offered a deal. They would be readmitted to campus if they renounced political activity and consented to be monitored by the cops. What rubbish! Instead of giving in, they demanded that their comrades be let in for the hearing. These student militants are committed to winning back the student center. Their hearing will now take place in a larger room to accommodate the protesters.
All of us should be out in force on Friday, making our presence known to the school with posters, flags, and chants. Within the reform struggles for the student center and against ROTC, we also need to put communism at the center of the fight. Students have won reforms in the past, but the university later breaks its promises and takes them away. The only lasting victory is to recruit more forces into Progressive Labor Party to fight directly for communism.
Greetings from Haiti
At today’s rally, one student read a letter of solidarity from college students in Haiti who also are fighting the militarization of their campuses [see front page]. The crowd cheered. We need to do more to bring an international outlook to our local fights.
Our main weakness is the lack of mass student support on campus. Class consciousness is at a low ebb. While many students took literature and nodded in solidarity, they have yet to see the importance of building an anti-imperialist movement. Universities are sites of struggle. Although the bankers, generals, and politicians may own the school, we can use this space to expose the bosses’ war aims and win students to the fight for a communist revolution.
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Solidarity from Haiti: ‘Comrades, We Are a Single Class’
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- 14 November 2013 330 hits
Comrades,
The capitalist system, aware of its decline, knowing that even the most apathetic are losing confidence in its false promises, is growing fearful behind its façade of humanitarianism. The workers, employed and unemployed, are more and more grasping the fact that it is the bourgeois system responsible for the poverty, the misery, and wars that ravage the world. They understand too that all the wars in the world today are the consequence of the capitalists’ greed.
This growing awareness among international working people of the imperialists’ lies is shaping anti-capitalist organizing. This is true even where capitalism has entrenched its culture of individualism, racism, and all their other means of dividing and alienating us. This is why workers, the unemployed, and peasants, are in the process of organizing themselves against capitalism, or at least against its oppression and exploitation. Capitalism has deceived and disappointed the human race. To stay in command, and to continue their domination, the exploiting bourgeois criminals take up arms. They have used their force to hold down the whole working class, and black workers in particular.
Everywhere War, War Everywhere!
In Haiti, we live daily with the sound of shots from the machine guns of MINUSTAH [troops of the United Nations “peacekeepers” in Haiti] and the gangsters in the Haitian armed forces. We are oppressed and “downpressed,” and we struggle against the pressure! Our rallies, our non-violent marches and our sit-ins are subject to armed attacks. That is the only way these bourgeois cowards know how to respond to our just and well-organized struggles. It’s always tear gas, rubber bullets, and heavy weapons, to try to put down our movements against the inhuman actions of the system.
We here clearly understand what it is that you, CUNY students, are up against in this struggle, our struggle, the class struggle. That is precisely the struggle we must keep on waging. Everywhere, the oppressed must fight with passion against the militarization of society. We fight against war, we fight against imperialism. Resist! Keep going! Victory will be ours.
Right now, we in Haiti are living through tough times, as fascism has our campuses in its cross-hairs. Some penniless students are co-opted and turned into strong-arm agents of the system. We keep our struggle going, nevertheless; there are strikes which create an alliance of teachers and students. When weapons no longer scare us, we will be closer to victory.
We are, in all regions, a single class, in battle against a barbarous
system. Faced with this situation, we must carry on the class struggle; and, as an exploited and oppressed class, we will not stop along the way until we win the final victory. Comrades, you are not alone; if not for the bosses’ borders we too would be on the front lines at CUNY. One day, we will all be together everywhere in our world.Every struggle is a victory and every victory counts: forward march! You are not alone, comrades.
Comrades from Haiti united in struggle,
October 26, 2013.
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Philippines, Bangladesh: Capitalism Is the Disaster
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- 14 November 2013 463 hits
For five days and counting….
Ten thousand workers in the Philippines are expected to be among the dead in just one city, with hundreds of thousands left homeless by a fierce typhoon bringing winds of over 200 miles per hour. NGOs are flooding the affected region, but if this is a repeat of the recent experience in Haiti — after the devastating 2010 earthquake — most of the aid promised by the big imperialist countries will not be delivered, and what is delivered will mostly be spent in the donor countries.
Young soldiers carrying M-16 assault rifles were sent by the government to “restore order,” accusing angry hungry people of “highjacking” relief vehicles. Food and water are slow to be distributed and dead bodies are piling up, endangering public health.
The “super typhoon” was known to be coming, but evacuation was mismanaged because the government was calling it a “storm warning” instead of a “tsunami” — a word which carries much more significance in the area.
Capitalist greed is solely responsible for this unnatural disaster. Storms are increasing in intensity due to global warning, with an 11 percent upsurge expected by the end of this century, causing sea levels to rise. Capitalists don’t want to eat into their profits by limiting carbon emissions and other protection for the environment. (Full analysis next issue)
DHAKA, BANGLADESH, November 11 — Another one of capitalism’s unnatural disasters — extreme poverty and exploitation — drove 30,000 angry garment workers into the streets here in a mass strike that shut over 100 factories. The workers who produce clothing for billion-dollar corporations like Walmart, the Gap and Sears are demanding a 260 percent increase of the $38 monthly minimum wage to $100. The government offered $67 which the bosses rejected as “too high,” which government official admit hardly meets a basic diet.
The cops used tear gas and rubber bullets against the workers but the latter fought back, stoning the cops, blocking key highways and roads, smashing vehicles and factory windows.
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March vs. Cuts in Jobs, Food Stamps, Legal Services
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- 14 November 2013 328 hits
NEWARK, NJ, November 1 — As capitalism’s economic crisis deepens, sparks of working-class resistance continue to flare up internationally. More workers search for leadership for this fightback. Some see the capitalist system behind the attacks. They’re eager to learn how our class can shape our collective future. PLP needs to be in these struggles, where these fighters will see the truth of our politics.
Legal services workers here are joining in this fight. Today, 50 people, including about 20 legal workers and clients, a vanload of people from a local soup kitchen, community militants, students and other workers marched against the five percent cut in Food Stamps, the continued underfunding of free legal services for the unemployed, and the very low-wage workers, and mass racist unemployment in cities like Newark. The marchers were both united and militant.
Even before the devastating funding cuts of the last five years, inflation has halved the real value of federal government grants to Legal Services. Then the 2007–2008 housing crash killed the main source of funds from property taxes, followed by the slashing of first state and now federal monies.
Hundreds of Legal Services workers statewide have been laid off or forced out. The workloads of those who remain have increased. Wages have been cut. At one office, a four-day week was recently instituted, with total wage and benefit cuts there since 2008 now reaching 40%.
Worse, Legal Services clients have seen their advocates often unable to assist them with legal problems dealing with basic survival — evictions, foreclosures, bankruptcies, unemployment appeals and welfare fair hearings, just to name a few.
The attacks initiated by the Clinton-Republican 1997 welfare reform have not stopped. Neither Obama nor any national politician supported an extension of the tiny 2009 Food Stamp increase. That “raise” followed mass anger against the bankers’ role in the crash of 2007–8, and has now been eliminated.
U.S. rulers need to cut so-called safety-net programs to build a war chest for future wars against their imperialist rivals. Their politicians are sharpening their knives for more cuts to Food Stamps, ranging from $4 billion to $40 billion over the next decade.
A local Legal Services union-formed action committee planned and led today’s march. That committee led an 18-month campaign, gathering nearly 2,000 signatures on a petition demanding restoration of state Legal Services funding. Those petitions were delivered to Governor Christie in June. Before the march, that committee was expanded to include non-union staff and clients. That decision proved to be crucial to the worker-client unity expressed at the march.
Along the way, the marchers stopped at a local Bank of America, Newark City Hall and the state unemployment office. Speakers included a Legal Services worker, a statewide community action group and several soup kitchen clients. The clients’ stories of hunger, homelessness and being turned away by government agencies — supposedly set up to help people — were both heartbreaking and infuriating. At the unemployment office we loudly chanted “Jobs yes, racism no! Food Stamp cuts have got to go!”
During the march, PLP members and friends distributed 175 copies of CHALLENGE. A local union and community militant gave the wrap-up speech at the Federal Building, just as Homeland Security cops were trying to shut down the rally. He pointed to mass racist unemployment as the source of poverty, homelessness, hunger, substance abuse and other social consequences. He targeted the capitalist drive for maximum profits as inevitably leading to the crises being experienced worldwide today.
In contrast to prior speakers, who attacked individual politicians like Christie or Newark Mayor Corey Booker, this speaker made it clear that unemployment and poverty are a product of this economic system.
He asked the crowd what kind of world we would want our children to grow up in. On one side, he posed the dictatorship of the .01 percent, using their vast capital to control the government, grinding down the world’s working class to lower levels of existence; on the other side, an anti-racist world based on equality where workers as a class run our lives for the good of society as a whole.
The speaker declared this march was just the beginning, and challenged the crowd to commit themselves to this last vision of a new society. A number of marchers loudly cheered this call.
The future is bright for those who labor and struggle to make ends meet. PLP’s aim is to lead a revolution for communism to bring about that world, where poverty, unemployment, racism and sexism will be a distant memory.
