BOSTON, June 12 — President Obama campaigned in Roxbury today for liberal Ed Markey, candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The campaign rally was held in Boston’s main black neighborhood in order to take advantage of Obama’s appeal among black workers. Of the many thousands who lined up to hear Obama speak, more than half were black, Latino and/or immigrant. In a silent vigil, a small group of environmentalists held up signs protesting the Keystone oil pipeline, but it was left to a small but bold group of PL’ ers and friends to directly attack Obama as the manager of racist U.S. capitalism.
We held a banner and passed out a leaflet that exposed Obama for maintaining racist unemployment and mass incarceration of black workers and youth; increasing the deportation of immigrants; killing and terrorizing civilians with unmanned drones in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan; continuing to kill for oil and bailing out the bankers while working-class families lose their homes.
Although the people who had come to hear him were not a representative cross-section of the population, there were large numbers willing to read our leaflet and consider the merits of our politics. Most of them, however, continued to defend Obama as having well-meaning intentions. Several dozen reacted with hostility, crumpling the leaflet or returning it to us. One woman was personally offended when we called Obama a “tool of the U.S. ruling class,” a puppet rather than a free agent. Her black nationalism and racial pride prevented her from seeing that Obama is no different from any other president, except that he has a slicker cover. An old friend waiting on the line said that when Obama was elected, she was able to feel proud of being an American for the first time in her life. This revealed the ruling class’s real purpose for backing Obama — to win more people (especially black and young people, two of the most potentially revolutionary groups) to actively or passively support U.S. imperialism abroad and vicious anti-working-class attacks at home. The broad acceptance of the fascist lockdown after the Boston Marathon bombing shows that to a large degree the ruling- class’s strategy has been successful.
What we did today took courage, especially for the two young black women students among us who had voted for Obama. Armed with a class analysis, our multi-racial group was able to penetrate the patriotism and nationalism that fuels the hero worship of a dangerous enemy of the international working class. We introduced many people to the truth about Obama and U.S. capitalism, thereby loosening the grip that the ruling class has over working people. We communists need to seize every opportunity to do this until we can directly challenge the bosses’ rule in a working-class revolution.
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Liberal Rulers Sharpen Racist Attacks; PL Summer Project Hits Back
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- 04 July 2013 533 hits
NEW YORK CITY, June 28 — The working class in this city has endured 11 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s racist, anti-student education reform. These policies have accompanied a massive escalation of brutal police tactics against black and Latino youth, anotably stop-and-frisk, and a wholesale assault on the mainly black and Latino unionized city work force. (For the first time in history, every municipal union is without a contract.)
Bloomberg’s Wall Street buddies weathered a brief period of scrutiny at the height of Occupy Wall Street. Since then, they have resumed drawing huge bonuses, free from criticism. Meanwhile, the mayor brags that his greatest legacy is his denial of years of raises to city workers — and that the main problem with stop-and-frisk is that it fails to harass more black and Latino workers and youth. Racism is getting worse, not only in New York City but nationwide. That is the context of education reform.
The Progressive Labor Party is responding with a two-pronged Summer Project. In New York, we are continuing the struggle for justice for Shantel Davis, the 23-year-old woman who was executed by a cop in Brooklyn last year. In Atlanta, we will take the struggle against racism to the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA). Like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the NEA leadership refuses to confront the intensifying racism in our schools. To do so would expose the limits of capitalism. Instead, union leaders are tripping over themselves to cooperate in the latest education reform schemes.
AFT President Randi Weingarten issues joint-authored articles with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in American Teacher, the AFT’s own publication. The NEA plans to honor Jerry Brown, the rabidly anti-union governor of California, at their convention. Our union leaders are too tied to capitalism to imagine, organize, or demand meaningful change.
With the cooperation of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s affiliate of the AFT, Bloomberg has implemented familiar features of the education reform playbook: performance pay for teachers, elimination of tenure, more high-stakes testing. As tests have been made harder, then easier and now harder again with the Common Core curriculum, college readiness scores remain dismal. The on-time graduation gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts remained unchanged in 2012, ranging from 20 to 22 percentage points. These numbers have been stuck at these levels for five years.
We Need Communism
Public education, like all institutions under capitalism, is designed for most to fail. Those who can afford private schooling get small classes, one-to-one tutoring, and excellent facilities. Under such privileged conditions, the bankrupt lessons of individualism, elitism, and patriotism sink in all the more deeply. Meanwhile, public schools provide these high-cost amenities only for the few students being groomed to help the ruling class manage its capitalist system.
The schools we work in have two purposes: to develop workers for the massive low-wage sector of the 21st-century economy, and to produce the foot soldiers for the bosses’ 21st-century wars.
When students fail in the bosses’ schools, they need communist leadership to learn to hold the system accountable. They need to reject the capitalist ideology that those who don’t succeed aren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough. When teachers face the latest attack upon students in the guise of education reform, we need to redirect the debate toward the racist social conditions that set up most of us to fail. Through our Summer Project and communist school, PLP will equip a new generation of fighters with the practice and theory that are essential for a communist revolution.
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Philly: Bosses Cripple Schools, Murder Workers in Building Collapse
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- 04 July 2013 643 hits
PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 28 — If anyone needs a clearer picture of the murderous attacks by U.S. bosses on workers — and the need for a worker-run communist society — two recent events here highlight them.
This month, school bosses said they’re closing 23 public schools (10 percent of the total) and will fire nearly 4,000 teachers and other workers. This assault on workers and students raises the toll of firings since 2011 to more than one-third of the workforce!
This is disastrous for school workers and their families, causing hunger, homelessness and even death in some cases. It’s racist as well since black students comprise 81% of those affected. However, $400 million of the cuts from the state budget will be used to build a 5,000-inmate prison instead. So the bosses do have a plan for black youth.
There have been frequent protest rallies and marches, and a hunger strike aimed at rolling back the cuts and firings, but the school board and state assembly haven’t budged.
Secondly, to add criminal neglect to their official terrorism, on June 5 city bosses allowed a small downtown building — in the shadows of glittering office towers and hotels — to collapse, killing six workers and shoppers in an adjacent store and injuring 13 others.
A criminal contractor, using untrained and vulnerable workers, was demolishing nearby buildings on the cheap. He had declared bankruptcy only weeks before. After the deadly collapse, a city inspector who had been assigned to oversee the demolition, which he had visited only once, was found dead in his truck, shot in the chest with a suicide note nearby. An “investigation” into his death has been ordered.
The owner of the collapsed building is a small-time criminal who has owned a string of adult businesses here and in New York City. The demolition was to have cost him $10,000 for work that, if done safely, would have cost ten times that.
A vital support was removed from a 4-story wall, causing it to collapse and crush the store and the people inside. The adjacent store should have been closed for safety reasons, but the city had not issued a closure order. It remained open and filled with shoppers, despite warnings of the obvious danger to the store’s workers and patrons. No sidewalk protection was provided either, exposing passers-by to serious injury or death.
Though the April collapse of a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, claimed far more lives (over 1,100 vs. six here), the causes for the Philadelphia deaths are the same: greed for profits at any cost.
Most of the largest U.S. retailers (target, Wal-Mart, Kmart, JC Penney) refuse to force their Asian producers to adopt labor, building safety and health standards. Bosses’ disregard worldwide for workers’ lives is murderous.
The International Business Times carried an article (6/19) comparing Philadelphia and Bangladesh:
Both places are scarred by immense poverty, entrenched political corruption…and decaying infrastructure. A...U.S. census..survey...[for]2009-11 revealed that of the ten largest U.S. cities, Philadelphia ranked first in the number of people living in “deep poverty”; more than one-quarter, or 28 percent, of Philadelphia residents are living below the poverty level — up from about 23 percent in 2000...
...People often go hungry, live without running water or electricity — conditions not too dissimilar to those faced by the masses of Bangladeshis...Across the U.S., more than 20 million people live in deep poverty, largely the victims of the collapse of the manufacturing industry and the continuing impact of the financial/mortgage crisis.
Only communist revolution in Philly, the U.S., Bangladesh, and the world will eliminate the bosses and their profit system, the cause of such racist exploitation, hunger, death and hazardous working conditions.
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Detroit’s Bankers, Bosses Got Billions, Workers Get Mass Poverty
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- 04 July 2013 633 hits
DETROIT, MI — On June 22, more than 50,000 workers and youth marched here to begin celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. The speech was written at UAW headquarters and first delivered in June 1963, at a march in Detroit to begin building for the August march. Likewise, today’s march kicked off a mass mobilization for Washington, DC on Saturday, August 24. While thousands of marchers came from outside of Michigan, the vast majority were from the Detroit area, brought by the UAW, NAACP and many churches and community organizations.
But more than celebrating the past, workers and youth were protesting the ever increasing attacks of the racist profit system. Like many cities in Michigan and the Midwest, Detroit was sucked dry by the auto bosses, who left behind mass poverty, over-crowded jails and empty shells of cities. In response to the near economic collapse of 2007, Obama bailed out the bankers and auto bosses. After the bosses got their billions, they continued the assualt on the workers: cutting wages in half, closed plants, traded guaranteed pensions for stock market-driven 401ks, cut healthcare benefits and got five-year no-strike contracts. The racist character of these attacks was evident to the largely black workforce.
In sum, the bankers and bosses got billions, the workers and the cities got nothing! Detroit is facing bankruptcy, massive school closings and cuts in all essential city services. The racist Governor placed Detroit under an Emergency Manager, who has the power to open or break every city contract, sell off any city asset and cut pensions of retired city workers, leaving the elected mayor and city council powerless. Detroit is just the latest as Flint, Pontiac, St. Joseph and every majority black city in Michigan except Jackson, has been placed under an Emergency Manager, basically disenfranchising millions of mostly black workers. This has since been compounded by the recent gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. While these decisions are racist, voting in the bosses electoral system will not end racist oppression.
The preachers, politicians and union leaders will use the racist Supreme Court ruling to mobilize all out for the August 24 March on Washington, with their sights set on the Congressional elections of 2014. Here in Michigan, the UAW & Co. are also aiming at the Governor’s election, in hopes of overturning the state Right to Work law. This poses a great challenge for the revolutionary communist movement. On the one hand, we will have to fight alongside workers and youth who will try to overturn the racist Supreme Court decision. At the same time, we will have to expose the dead-end nature of voting and win people to the need for mass violence and building a mass PLP to overthrow the racist billionaires. It is in struggles like these that we will earn the right to lead the working class to power.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 — Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) workers struck today and shut the rail system tight. They’re demanding a 23 percent wage hike while the bosses want workers to pay more for their healthcare and pensions. Oakland City workers also had a one-day strike, shutting Oakland’s downtown (see photo). Bart carries over 400,000 people daily and mainly serves to bring the workforce from outlying areas to Wall Street West — corporations, banks, government offices, retail stores and education buildings concentrated in downtown San Francisco.
Bart is part of eight major unionized transit systems in the Bay Area. Its workers belong to Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555. AC transit workers’ contract (East Bay bus system, ATU Local 192) expired the same day as Bart. So far the leadership of Local 192 and the ATU International have succeeded in dampening the sentiment of many AC workers to strike in solidarity and for their own issues.
Corporate think tanks let the cat out of the bag when they estimated the strike would cost $73 million a day in lost worker productivity. PLP members point to this as a real example of the potential of workers’ power and the bosses’ need of workers’ labor for their profits.
PLP members are building transit solidarity, particularity at AC Transit and MUNI (San Francisco public transit), where we have a long history of organizing. We’re circulating a solidarity pledge for passengers and workers.
Some workers, have taken matters into their own hands by calling in sick, refusing to do extra service or overtime. In contrast, the union leadership has refused to organize anything, leaving members to their own individual decisions. Some passenger groups and non-profits have come forward to unite with transit workers against fare hikes and service cuts. (More next issue.)
