The current impasse over the federal debt ceiling (and the resulting government shutdown) reflects a sharp disagreement on how — or whether —to pay the spiraling costs of broader wars. This argument reflects the bosses’ growing insecurity as their top-dog status is challenged by China, Russia, and other imperialist rivals. The coming mobilization for war has also triggered a controversial push for more centralized economic control, a key element of the Obamacare health reform.
But despite their serious differences, all wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties wholeheartedly agree on one thing: escalating their attacks on the working class. While $3.5 million in salaries were shelled out to members of Congress during the first 13 days of the shutdown, the impact on workers was devastating. While the media blathered on about re-opening the Statue of Liberty and the national parks, racist and sexist cuts hit the Women Infants and Children (WIC) food program. These subsidies help sustain life for millions of babies, cared for by predominantly black and Latino mothers. At the same time, cuts in food stamps made it that much harder for tens of millions of working-class families to put food on their tables.
Obama proposed a cut in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totaling into the billions. But as the New York Times noted (10/5/13), “Both sides [Democrats and Republicans] recognize that the United States must confront the rising costs of the benefit programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid but also Social Security. Those are driving projections that the mounting debt will become unsustainable after 2016.” The Times portrayed right-wing Republicans as “embracing several of Mr. Obama’s plans that would trim Medicare and Medicaid expenses by $400 billion.”
Food inspections have been suspended, making millions vulnerable to food poisoning. Cost-of-living increases have been halted. Housing applications for mortgages are curtailed. But the U.S. military, 1.4 million strong, is exempt from the shutdown. So is the National Security Agency, whose main job is to spy on every man, woman, and child within reach of an automated camera or cell phone. Neither party is willing to discuss a substantial source of the multi-trillion-dollar federal debt: the 20-year funding of wars and one thousand U.S. military bases in 120 countries worldwide. Nor do they mention the $2.5 trillion stolen from the Social Security Trust Fund over the last 30 years to feed the federal budget and finance this military machine.
But other problems are not so easily papered over. The capitalists have no credible plan to address the country’s fraying infrastructure, reform its corrupt banking sector, or narrow the gap between the society’s haves and have-nots. Widening income inequality, an inevitable feature of capitalism, undermines the bosses’ ability to enlist working-class support for their war plans.
Bosses Need Fascism
Whenever the capitalists face a crisis that threatens profits, they must heighten their oppression of our class to try to escape their system’s contradictions. At the same time, they must discipline their own class, including the faction that controls the Tea Party, to protect their long-term interests and survival against bosses with a shorter-term outlook. These parallel trends mark a move toward fascism, a period when the rulers strip away the veneer of liberal “democracy” and expose their brutal class dictatorship.
On one side of the capitalists’ internal struggle stand the dominant finance capitalists, rooted in big banks like JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup and the huge firms they control, like ExxonMobil and GE. These bosses foresee a costly and global armed conflict threatening their far-flung interests. At stake is control over gas and oil in the Middle East, the essential commodities for any imperialist super-power.
On the other side, smaller U.S. bosses zero in on tax reduction and “smaller government” as cures for their own declining profits. This faction derives profit mostly from domestic investment, as distinct from imperialist adventures abroad. Its main backer is Koch Industries, among the largest privately held U.S. firms, not openly traded on the stock market. The Cato Foundation think thank, a mouthpiece for these smaller bosses, regularly rails at Obama’s efforts to raise the debt ceiling to pay for the U.S. war machine.
Just as the Washington crisis began, Cato published “America Is Spending Too Much on Defense” (Cato website, 10/3/13). To U.S. imperialists backing Obama, this was heresy: “A cataclysmic conflict like World War II is unlikely to recur. As such, the continued spending for an ever-receding likelihood needs to be seriously assessed....There is no need for the maintenance of a large standing military force.” The piece denied U.S. imperialists’ war justifications: “Europe seems to face no notable military threats, the Taiwan/China issue remains a fairly remote concern, and Israel’s primary problems derive from the actions of substate groups” [Hamas and Hezbollah].
Big Capital Begs to Differ
JPMorgan and Exxon and their Washington stooges, however, differ on every count. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel toiled most recently for the Atlantic Council, a “nonpartisan” think tank funded by JPMorgan and Exxon. This group ceaselessly warns of Russia’s menace to Europe: “Russia, in turn, cannot be certain of NATO and U.S. intentions in Central and Eastern Europe and thus feels compelled to modernize its defenses to protect the deterrent value of its strategic nuclear forces” (Atlantic Council website, 5/21/13).
As for China, U.S. imperialists’ big worry is that the inevitable clash may come sooner than expected. As Foreign Affairs, another Exxon-JPMorgan organ, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, noted: “There is a real danger that Beijing and Washington will find themselves in a crisis that could quickly escalate to military conflict....The danger of a crisis involving the two nuclear-armed countries is a tangible, near-term concern” (September/October 2013).
This tension was evident at the recent meeting of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 40 Asian countries, which Obama had to miss because of the U.S. domestic crisis. China took advantage of his absence as it steadily expands its Asian sphere of influence.
Israel, which Cato dismisses as a minor worry, is part of the oil-rich Middle East, cornerstone of the U.S. global empire. By discounting Israel, Cato ignores Iranian and al-Qaeda threats to U.S. energy interests in Iraq, Kuwait and, above all, Saudi Arabia.
On October 4, the Atlantic Council (10/4/13) quoted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s attack on the radical Republicans and their threat to U.S. imperialism: “I’ve never seen anything like this. From my view, I think this — on top of sequestration...seriously damages our ability to protect the security and safety of this nation and its citizens.... This is not just a beltway [inside Washington] issue. This affects our global capability.” The same piece, “National Security and the Shutdown,” urges Obama to secure war funds. Until there is certainty in the defense budget, the Council argues, “credibility and readiness will decline.”
Finance capitalists within the Republican Party are also alarmed. The New York Times reported (10/13/13): “One top [Republican] party fundraiser said the Wall Street financiers and corporate executives he counts on for support are ‘having fits’ over the [Republicans’] brinkmanship strategy, especially related to a potential default if Congress does not agree to raise the debt ceiling later this month. ‘The donors I raise money from understand the vital importance of credit markets and are upset that the U.S. credit system is being put at risk’” (Washington Post, 10/5/13).
Only One Side — The Workers’ Side
As these two gangs of bosses vie for power and profits, the working class has no stake in either side. Both spell death for our class. Both exert state power on behalf of the capitalists and against the workers. It is our job to expose them and organize direct opposition to their attacks. We must fight back against racist police terror, mass imprisonment and unemployment. We must attack the special oppression of women in the workplace and the degenerate depiction of women in the bosses’ media.
Only a movement of millions led by a mass revolutionary communist party, the PLP, can destroy the profit system and the misery it creates. Only a communist organization can establish a workers’ state run by and for our class.
Shutdown, yes! Shut down capitalism completely, once and for all! Join PLP!
Washington, DC, October 8 — Today PLP rallied at a major subway station to denounce the police murders in this area over the past few days. PL’ers and friends distributed over 400 leaflets and CHALLENGEs to outraged workers and students. Several workers asked for bunches of flyers to share with their friends, and others expressed the need to take action against the kkkops. A resolution calling for the indictment of the cops has been introduced at the Association for Humanist Sociologists meeting in Arlington, and others are joining this effort against police brutality and racism.
The Case of Miriam Carey
In a gross display of brutal overkill, the Secret Service and the Capitol Police shot 17 times and killed Miriam Carey, an unarmed young black woman. She apparently tried to first crash her car into the White House and then tried to crash it into the Capitol. The cops put out the word that there was “an active shooter incident” to get the public behind them, but the only shooters were the trigger-happy cops. In fact, Cathy Lanier, Chief of Police, boasted that the bollard barriers to both the White House and Capitol, put in place after 9/11, worked perfectly. If that was the case, there was absolutely no reason to gun down the driver. But it you’re black, the cops shoot first and ask questions later.
In Prince George’s County
The day before, in Prince George’s County, the cops chased a man through the woods and shot and killed him as he supposedly reached into a bag. The seven-year veteran cop claimed he feared for his life. But no weapon was found at the scene — other than the cop’s gun.
Behind Police Brutality
The “War on Drugs” by the government and cops intensified their targeting of black and Latino workers and led directly to the mass incarceration that jams the jails and prisons throughout the country. The “War on Terror” similarly unleashed military-style attacks against any “threat to the homeland.” The working class is enduring ever greater fascist terror, in addition to massive cutbacks in social programs, wages, and benefits. More devastation lies ahead unless the working class mobilizes to fight back to limit such attacks.
Ongoing Struggle
In a related action, workers and students in the Peoples Coalition in Prince George’s County recently rallied to demand the indictment of the county cops who killed Archie Elliott 3rd as he sat handcuffed in the front seat of a police cruiser in 1993. This case, like the murder of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader, and the murder of four black Birmingham girls in a church bombing, cries out to be re-opened and the killer cops brought to justice. After protest and mass petitioning by the Coalition, the states attorney finally met with Archie’s mother and her supporters. But the response? There was no way the state of Alabama would re-open the 20-year-old case, even as the states attorney acknowledged that the cops were out of control in the 1990s.
Now there are two more bodies that the killer cops have given us, in D.C. and in Prince George’s County, and more throughout the nation. The cops will continue to play their role of terrorizing the working class with brutal racist repression. Justice cannot be won in a racist capitalist system. But the working class can stop them cold with communist revolution.
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Drive Out Death-Squad Petraeus, Build Anti-Imperialist Movement
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- 18 October 2013 414 hits
NEW YORK CITY, October 15 — More than 90 people filled the room to “Defend the CUNY Six--Drop the Charges Now!” Others were barred from entering by campus security. As reported in the last issue of CHALLENGE, students demonstrating against General David “Death Squad” Petraeus teaching at the City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by the NYPD on September 17. A panel composed of two students, two professors, and an Iraq war veteran addressed students and their supporters. They denounced the militarization of the community and explained how U.S. Imperialism must be defeated. While the audience responded well to the speeches, little practical plans were put forward.
An anti-war veteran of the 1960’s struggles gave the most concrete remarks. He stated, “The best defense is a good offense!” Because of the week-by-week demonstrations, Petraeus has been forced to teach his
Monday seminars in a bunker-like environment with underground garages. PLP and friends must resume these demonstrations wherever he hides, wherever he goes. More importantly, we must build a large citywide anti-imperialist movement on every one of the CUNY campuses because most CUNY students do not yet know about Petraeus, and the foul deeds of the U.S. military and the CIA.
More than that, Progressive Labor Party must be at the forefront of this struggle, calling for communism — a system without wages, imperialist wars, racism, and sexism — as the only solution to the terror capitalists rage against workers and students, domestically and internationally. PLP should use this momentum to build for their International College Conference to Smash Imperialism on November 8 and 9, as it will provide a real alternative to building illusions of a safer capitalism. The conference will engage friends in critical questions, such as what is the relationship between imperialism and fascism; how do we build an antiracist and antisexist movement on campus; why is a communist party, PLP, necessary to building, sustaining, and advancing a communist world.
The veteran suggested that we concentrate our forces next week on a particular campus. For example, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) center is at City College. Despite strong faculty opposition voiced at a Town Hall meeting at the College of Staten Island, the Provost continues to connive to bring in ROTC (see CHALLENGE 10/16). Progressive forces from CSI must be brought together with folks from the three campuses where ROTC has already been instituted: City College, Medgar Evers, and York.
At any rate the students are determined to fight on. They have received letters of support from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY). Money has been raised to replace broken glasses and to pay for legal expenses. The workers in PSC will raise more money if needed. But the students alone cannot sustain the struggle by themselves. They need to build strong relationships with faculty and other campus workers, and with soldiers and sailors as well. History shows us that during the course of the struggle against the murderous Vietnam War, both soldiers and students alike rebelled against imperialism. And the majority of the U.S. working class was won to see that slaughtering workers in other countries was not in their interest.
Today the task of building an anti-war movement is more difficult than in the 1960’s because we live in a period of developing fascism.
Police terror against black and brown youth has increased. The union movement has been decimated. Thousands of people remain in detention even though they haven’t been charged let alone convicted. More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama’s reign than in any other point in history. Every day new reports come out of increased government spying on civilians at home. Why is all of this happening now? U.S. capitalists are on a collision course with capitalists from China, Russia and other countries. (Russia has a naval base in Syria). To prepare for future conflicts the U.S. government plans a stronger military with more black and Latino officers being trained in ROTC on NYC campuses. The ruling class also plans to develop more and more patriotism among workers and students. Well, we are not going to go along with this program! With communist ideas and practice, fight back!
As the bosses’ economy continues to tank, one news report after the next warns that young people are entering the worst job market ever. This “new normal” of high unemployment and relentless attacks on salaries, benefits, and unions has teachers running scared as well. In hot pursuit is the main wing of the U.S ruling class. As these capitalists find themselves losing ground to their imperialist rivals, they are pushing for greater, more centralized control over what is being taught.
Most recently that push has taken the form of the Common Core — our common enemy.
The Common Core is a set of learning goals the bosses have established that require even more high-stakes testing. It is a part of President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” a competition where the losers — students and teachers alike — are trained to blame themselves, not the racist, exploitive capitalist system. Education workers, parents and students must not be fooled by the bosses’ stated goal to use the Common Core to ramp up “critical thinking.” Real critical thinking would uncover the truth that capitalism can never work for the vast majority.
Budget Cuts Tied to Imperialist Wars
The budget pressure facing schools across the U.S. is directly tied to the multi-trillion-dollar expenses from the failed imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the need to fund future wars in the Middle East and eventually Asia. The budget cuts are frontal attacks on teachers and their unions. But their primary targets are working-class students. Today these young people spend their days in degraded learning conditions. Tomorrow they may be battlefield casualties in the bosses’ next imperialist war.
United, teachers, parents, and students could effectively fight back against these anti-worker education reforms. That’s why the bosses design these reforms to drive a wedge between education workers and the families they serve.
Common Core is the latest development in a long-standing ruling-class effort to produce workers to serve its industrial and military machines and to control school curricula. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed heavily to the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the agency that spawned the College Board and its racist and hated SAT. Starting before World War II, the Carnegie Foundation, a leading force in the racist eugenics movement (breed only genetically “superior” people), spent millions to develop standardized tests. In 1965, it initiated the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is still used today as a national standard to measure the fitness of the working class for industrial and military competition with the U.S. bosses’ overseas rivals. With an estimated 30 percent of high school graduates now lacking the tools for military service, the crisis of capitalist education is acute.
The same U.S. ruling class forces are now positioning themselves in a desperate fight to maintain supremacy, a struggle that will inevitably lead to bigger and broader wars. Every education reform pronouncement of Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is framed by a thinly veiled rhetoric of war. The priority, they tell us, is to make sure U.S. capitalism is not “surpassed,” by its rivals, and that its workers are prepared to compete in the global economy. As surely as trade wars lead to shooting wars, education workers, students and parents must harbor no illusions about the true purpose of education reform: war preparation.
The Liberal Myth of Opportunity
The broad shift in the U.S. economy away from manufacturing and toward the so-called “service sector” has placed new pressure on the rulers to dress up their schools as places where any young person can unlock their opportunity to a better future, if only they try. Racism makes a mockery of this promise. Liberal commentators like Diane Ravitch take this hypocrisy seriously — reforms like the Common Core undermine U.S. democracy, as she says repeatedly. In Ravitch’s world, we ought not to expect proficiency from all students. She believes we ought to be honest in saying that schools must do a better job in more fairly sorting out young people for various rungs on the job market ladder. And as the job market trends toward a status quo where a small number of highly educated (and debt-ridden) college graduates claw their way into a “knowledge economy,” while most remain locked into a lifetime of sporadic employment and low earnings, the myth that every worker had a chance at success becomes ever more important. To make workers continue to blame ourselves for the failures of the capitalists’ system, the mirage of a high-quality education available to all becomes ever more crucial. Enter the Common Core.
The Common Core exists in the same world as the one where racist police murder and National Security Agency surveillance go unchecked. The Common Core’s intensified monitoring and computerization provides the rulers new avenues for control over what is said in classrooms and staff meetings. National teacher union leaders have embraced these steps toward fascism. On the local level, union leaders have done little more than question or negotiate the pace of their implementation. Talk of “higher standards” and “critical thinking” is a foil to win well-meaning and anti-racist teachers into the patriotic fold.
True critical thinking would lead to massive strikes and walkouts. We should aspire to this higher standard of learning and action. Yet the important teachers strike in Chicago last fall teaches us that we must aim for even more. A radical, militant, anti-racist alternative is desperately needed in battles against segregation and racist school closures in Chicago, New York, and throughout the U.S. The Progressive Labor Party is establishing a beachhead for bigger battles to come. Education workers, students and parents must fight tooth and nail against the Common Core and war budgets with our eye on the biggest prize. We must organize a movement for a working-class revolution. Our goal is to win the world our children — and theirs — deserve: a communist world.
MEXICO CITY, October 13 — The fascist repression against the striking teachers of the National Coordinating Committee (CNTE) unleashed by the bosses’ government of President Enrique Peña Nieto reveals the criminal and anti-working class nature of the capitalist system. The complicity of Miguel Angel Mancera, the mayor of Mexico City, also illustrates how politicians of all the electoral parties — PRI, PAN, PRD, or PT — are capitalists’ loyal servants bent on turning education into a profit-driven business during their global crisis.
The brutal eviction from the city center carried out on September 13 by thousands of federal cops and Federal District riot police, and the subsequent military occupation of the city center, exemplify the fascism the bosses will use to impose their plans.
CNTE teachers’ courage in resisting fascist repression (see CHALLENGE, 10/2) as well as the attacks from the bosses’ media, has inspired thousands of teachers nation-wide, to go on strike, occupy public squares and fight the cops.
Fascist Dictatorship and Imperialists’ Interests
In two CNTE-sponsored discussions about education reform, columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro presented the paper “The Counter Education Reform,” describing how the ruling class, represented by businessman Claudio Gonzalez, outlined for Peña the content of the reform, and how to pass it into law.
The September 13 fascist repression demonstrates the role of the police and the army as enforcers of their law. That apparatus serves the interests of the class in power, the bosses, as do the executive, legislative and judicial branches, at the federal and state level.
As long as the bosses hold political power, the laws and the might of the state will be used to impose the interests of the ruling class on the working class — a dictatorship of a minority of millionaires oppressing an impoverished majority.
In the U.S. the education market is valued at $1.3 trillion. For the multimillionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, the business of education in the U.S. represents an “opportunity” of $500 billion (La Jornada, 1/3/13).
U.S. bosses are enacting reforms to destroy public education and turn it into a lucrative business. It’s the same plan being implemented in Mexico; Claudio Gonzalez is advisor to private schools and is connected with Televisa, the media conglomerate.
We Need A Revolutionary Party
Labor, education, energy and fiscal reforms are all interconnected, responding to the needs of the imperialists and local capitalists. It means more oppression, fascist control and exploitation for the working class, and more profits and power for the capitalists. Trade union struggles are limited in confronting these interests and their leaders defend the system.
We must fight these attacks, which affect all workers. But we need to be organized as a class to destroy the capitalist system that’s behind these attacks. It’s in the bosses’ interest to separate these reform struggles and separate those involved in each one.
Working-class liberation can only be achieved by seizing political power through a communist revolution, led by a workers’ revolutionary party, not a bosses’ electoral party. Only a revolutionary party can tie these struggles together, not just to fight the bosses’ attacks, but to smash the capitalist dictatorship and build a workers’ dictatorship.
We must unite as a class internationally since similar reforms confronting us affect workers worldwide.
We’re calling on all teachers in struggle, and to the working class as a whole, to join Progressive Labor Party. The best lesson teachers can give their students is to join the struggle for a socially just society: communism! That’s REAL education.
