Obama, Clinton, Bushes Killed Millions More
We join the grief felt by the parents of the 20 children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, and by the families of the six school workers. It’s unfortunate, however, that grief under capitalism is selectively expressed. Far less sympathy can be found for the families of children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, who are fatally shot routinely by the rulers’ cops in cities across the United States.
Capitalist influences led to Adam Lanza’s rampage. His “me-against-the-world” outlook was an extreme but revealing reflection of the profit system’s inherent individualism and cutthroat competition. Capitalism is based on reaping profits at the expense of rival capitalists and on the backs of the losers’ laid-off workers. When workers are confronted by the lethal problems caused by this system, the rulers tell them, “You have to look out for yourself.” The bosses’ greatest fear is that workers will discover the real solution: Uniting with our class sisters and brothers to collectively fight our oppressors.
When we, the working class, run society, collectivity will stamp out much of the anti-social pathology that periodically explodes in individuals like Adam Lanza. When communist ideas were prevalent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, collectivity was taught almost from birth. Babies were given blocks too big and heavy for one of them to move or manipulate by themselves; block-stacking required a group of babies to work together. In school, marks were given not to individuals but to the class as a whole. As a result, more advanced students were induced to help their classmates improve.
During capitalism’s Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of millions of workers were tossed onto the unemployment rolls because they were no longer useful in creating profits for their exploiters. But during the same period, the Soviet Union maintained full employment. Everyone was needed to help build a society to benefit the entire working class. Communists believe that everyone has the potential to contribute to society. A communist society will treat and overcome anti-social behavior through reeducation and any necessary treatment.
Adam Lanza was a creature of capitalism, from its rotten health care system to the war culture created by U.S. imperialists. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, well-meaning people are clamoring for reforms in mental health services and gun control. But capitalism cannot be pacified or disarmed. It depends on fascist violence for its very existence. (For an explanation of fascist violence, see letter on page 6.)
U.S. Presidents: Murderers-in-Chief
The same system that depicts Lanza as a monster makes heroes out of far deadlier mass murderers, including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each of them is responsible for killing millions of civilians, from the genocidal use of atomic weapons in Japan to the imperialist “surge” in Afghanistan and the “collateral” civilian victims of drone killings in Pakistan. In between, the U.S. rulers have slaughtered millions of innocents through their interventions in Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam (more than two million civilians there alone).
Many more were murdered as a direct result of the U.S. rulers’ installation of the fascist Shah in Iran, the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the U.S. backing of South African apartheid, a fascist system that led to the deaths of fifty percent of the children before they reached the age of five. The U.S. bosses helped murder a million people by supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran, and caused another million deaths in Iraq from two wars and eight years of Clinton sanctions that cut off food and medical supplies.
Within U.S. borders, racist cops execute scores of youth, majority black and Latino, who bear the brunt of this intensifying fascism. In 2010 alone, there were 91 unjustified cop shootings that killed the victim (CATO Institute report in NY Daily News, 12/30).
Where the guilty U.S. rulers and their henchmen are concerned, there are no consequences for their lethal brutality. And it’s no surprise that none of these mass slaughters have drawn any public displays of sympathy from the White House.
Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s, U.S. officials initiated the wholesale elimination of mental health facilities. That’s when U.S. imperialists’ defeat in Vietnam and sharpening foreign economic competition first threatened the top-dog status that they’d enjoyed since World War II. Over the same period, Pentagon spending (in today’s dollars) has doubled. The state psychiatric hospital in Lanza’s Newtown, which once served up to 4,000 patients, was closed in 1995 as the imperialists tightened the workers’ belts.
Lanza was diagnosed with autism, a disorder affecting the brain’s development of social and communicative skills. The great majority of autistic people never hurt anyone. But Lanza’s case showed that even the children of affluent families are denied adequate mental health care in a society whose rulers have other priorities.
Factional Fight Over Militarizing the U.S.
Different factions of U.S. capitalists have pounced on the murders in Newtown to push their competing views for militarizing the nation. Politicians and TV pundits, careful not to offend their ruling-class patrons, never denounce the alienating, dehumanizing, death-dealing profit system. Instead, they attack the scheme of one capitalist gang or another to mobilize the U.S. populace for war. The conservative, mainly Republican, National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted the liberal, mainly Democratic media for distributing the shoot-’em-up video games played by Lanza. The NRA then called for uniformed armed guards at the door of every school in the land, along with concealed guns for teachers and principals.
Liberals fired back with both barrels, ridiculing NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre. The NRA’s plan to put state-sponsored gunmen even in wealthy suburban schools is outrageous to the liberals, even though armed cops and metal detectors already “greet” working-class students each day in liberal-run cities like New York and Chicago. The liberals want their cannon fodder to be willing, not intimidated. This policy split recalls the divergent methods among the Nazis, who used both blunt terror (the Gestapo’s ruthless fascist police) and calculated indoctrination (the Hitler Youth) to consolidate their hold on the German population.
The New York Times heaped hypocrisy on hypocrisy by attacking NRA-boosting gun manufacturers’ ties to video games, where the gun-makers get generous product placement. “These troubling relationships expose the NRA’s disingenuous [deceitful] strategy of blaming the media” (NYT, 12/27/12). But in defending the video media, the Times failed to disclose the industry’s direct link to imperialist war-makers far bigger than Bushmaster or Colt.
‘Call of Duty’ Unites Bosses
Big Oil, the gun and video game industries, and the arms manufacturers are all inter-connected. “Call of Duty,” reportedly Lanza’s favorite interactive video game, comes from French conglomerate Vivendi’s wholly owned U.S. subsidiary Activision. One Vivendi board member, Christophe de Margerie, serves as chairman of oil giant Total, whose billionaire shareholders profit mightily by his partnering with the U.S. killing machine. Total, which originally sided with Saddam Hussein, now controls oil fields throughout Iraq as a payoff for French troop contributions to the U.S.-led Afghan slaughter. Late last month, Vivendi’s CEO, Jean-Bernard Lévy, became chairman of arms maker Thalès, tenth on the Pentagon’s list of death merchant contractors.
The liberal Times speaks for a U.S. faction planning for ultimate all-out global war. It sees violent video games as a means for recruiting “middle-class” youth who aren’t yet reached by today’s economic draft. The latest installment of “Call of Duty,” so beloved by both Lanza and the Times, envisions a World War III against Russia a decade away and features a “USS Obama” aircraft carrier.
It’s not such a big leap from games like “Call of Duty” to the real-life massacres planned by U.S. rulers. GE boasts that its “IPS5100 [weapons/vision system] can be used in armored vehicles to give troops 360° situational awareness with the help of panoramic imagery that can be manipulated by touch screen, joystick and game-style controller” (Business Insider, 3/13/12). The video games’ usefulness in pre-training potential U.S. soldiers underlies the Times’ “don’t-blame-the-games” stance.
Communists + Class Struggle = Revolution Against Capitalism
Overthrowing the intensifying fascism of the capitalists who enabled Newtown will require a supreme collective effort by a communist-led working class. The seeds of this struggle can be seen in the growing class struggles worldwide. Masses of women (and men) are marching against fascist anti-women violence in India. Garment workers are staging militant protests against profiteering murderers in Bangladesh. Anti-austerity demonstrators are on the march in Pakistan, France, Haiti, Spain, Egypt and Portugal. Miners are armed for class war in South Africa. In the U.S., battles continue to rage against racist cop killings in New York City and Los Angeles and union-busting in Wisconsin and Ohio.
As the Progressive Labor Party’s influence and leadership grows in the two dozen countries where communist clubs have been established, our ideas will win masses of workers to understand that this vicious capitalist system can’t be reformed. Destroying it and building a new society — run by and for our class, which produces everything of value — must become the order of the day. Join PLP!
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Rich Bosses’ Racist Cuts Hit Patients’ Health, Workers’ Jobs
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- 02 January 2013 436 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, December 31 — Downstate Medical Center here, whose patients come from an underserved predominantly Caribbean working-class community, is threatened with closing, or privatization or both. Workers at the hospital, which belongs to New York State, are in the fight of their lives. We are living in times when the major imperialists who run this country need to divert money from health care and other human services to spend trillions on their fight with other imperialists over world domination.
The threat to Downstate comes against a background of other hospital closings and forced mergers. Brooklyn’s Interfaith hospital was forced into bankruptcy just last month and will be closed. At Downstate, Gov. Cuomo, who is also planning huge Medicare and Medicaid cuts, hired John Williams as the new President of Downstate. Williams and his allies already have a long history of gutting healthcare and closing or privatizing hospitals.
At George Washington University in D.C.,where Williams made his reputation, he was made Vice President in charge of the medical school and hospital because the Trustees liked the way he had helped sell 80% of the hospital to for-profit Universal Health Services. He did such a good job, he was able to collect salaries from both GWU and Universal — until they found out! To balance the medical center’s budget, which had been losing millions each year, Williams closed five suburban clinics and the HMO. He also sold off the faculty practice plan and laid off 500 staff members and 50 doctors. Now Cuomo wants him to do the same here, and is paying him over $750,000 a year to do the hatchet job.
Many of us have worked at Downstate for years. We have worked through hiring freezes and pay lags when there were cutbacks. We have worked short-staffed, trying our best to meet the needs of our patients. We have fought for adequate staff. Depending on the state of the capitalist economy, things have been bad or worse. It has been no picnic for workers or patients in this state-run hospital.
Williams would redefine our medical center as a “clinical enterprise.” His plans likely include some form of privatization, possibly a closure of Downstate. He threatens the latter if we workers and patients don’t sacrifice. We must demand these cuts be rescinded, and that more government money be available for care of uninsured workers.
The bosses and their henchmen like Williams are trying to take back hard-won benefits from the remaining union workers by spreading the lie that we have it “so good.” It is the height of hypocrisy when people like Williams and his other high-paid six-figure cronies try to paint regular state workers as greedy and lazy!
What kind of system makes the healthcare of the working class (especially the black, Latino and immigrant workers) secondary to profits? For our patients and our co-workers, we reject sacrificing for the capitalist system. Read CHALLENGE to learn of workers’ struggles around the world against imperialism and for communism.
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Fight-Back Thwarts Hospital Frame-up of Militant Retiree
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- 02 January 2013 555 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, January 5 — Four months of struggle to fight false criminal charges against Ira Wechsler, a retired hospital worker active in the continuing struggle to fight cutbacks and the intended closing of Downstate Medical Center, have been rewarded with victory. On Dec. 4, the Brooklyn DA had to drop the charges, which were trumped up to try to split workers’ unity against the cuts.
Ira, recently retired from Woodhull Medical Center, is a long-time District 1199 union member. The charges grew out of collusion between corrupt 1199 union officials and the bosses of the merged SUNY Downstate-Long Island College Hospital medical complex. They want to defeat the rank-and-file rebellion against their plans to destroy health care for predominantly black workers from the West Indies.
A mass rally in June, organized with little assistance from the three unions that represent the bulk of Downstate workers, sparked the rebellion by grounds workers, nurses, and technical workers. A determined rank and file leadership was able to move the workers to act in spite of misleadership from union officials.
The union misleaders called a rally in mid-July to try to take the initiative away from the rank-and-file. Ira spoke against the leadership at a Downstate workers’ meeting. After leaving this rally, hospital police arrested Ira for “trespassing” as he walked to a bus stop. The move was driven solely by their desperate need to intimidate workers from fighting back.
Workers at Downstate collected over 200 signatures demanding the charges against Ira be dropped. At least 50 other signatures were collected at other Brooklyn healthcare facilities. Several hospital workers and friends attended the legal proceeding to make sure the courts knew of the solid support for their brother.
While this was a victory, it was not the end of the struggle. NY Governor Cuomo and his class henchman continue to plan cutbacks in health care for workers and in jobs for healthcare workers. Racism has been the cutting edge of these cutbacks in facilities and programs that serve mainly black and Latino working-class neighborhoods. But Cuomo plans to spread these cuts to the entire working class with Medicaid “redesign” engineered by Wall Street point man Steven Berger.
PLP members have been distributing hundreds of Challenges to Downstate workers every issue. We need to recruit hospital workers involved in this struggle and develop mass consciousness that capitalism, not just some “bad” bosses, is destroying workers’ lives. This will lead to smashing the racist system that measures our lives in dollars and cents. Under communism, healthcare will be available to all. Only a revolution led by PLP can bring these changes.
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Rebuild Bedouin Homes After Israel’s 42nd Demolition
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- 02 January 2013 472 hits
AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, December 15 — Several local and international working-class activists, including a PL’er, visited the “unrecognized” Bedouin village of al-Arakib and helped rebuild its demolished shacks and sheds. On Tuesday, the racist Israeli authorities demolished the village for the 42nd time since the summer of 2010! Israel likes to showcase itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But this “democracy” demolishes the homes of impoverished Bedouin workers and subsistence peasants because they are in the way of the real-estate capitalists’ steamroller.
In front of this criminal bosses’ state and its terrorist police, the villagers of al-Araqib fight back and stick to their ancestral land. They will not move, as the regime wants, to the nearby mis-planned Bedouin town of Rahat, where there are no jobs. The village’s leader, Sheikh Sayakh, once again thanked the Jewish, Arab and international working-class activists who come to help the villagers in their struggle.
The Zionist movement, the “Jewish” colonial nationalists, and the State of Israel it created 64 years ago try to “bring order” to the Bedouin settlements in the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine). This “order” means robbing the Palestinian-Bedouin worker or peasant of his ancestral land, which is his main source of livelihood, in order to let U.S.-based real-estate tycoons such as Ronald Lauder and Inving Moscowitz grow rich from land-theft. The Bedouins, who are, officially, Israeli citizens, are treated as second-class citizens and face racism. Many Bedouins serve in the Border Patrol with the hope of getting decent jobs afterwards, yet at the end of the day are still treated as nothing by these racists. This is the same way the racist U.S. treats Native American, Latino and black workers.
But we Jewish and Arab workers and activists came to al-Araqib in private cars (as Israel lacks public transit on weekends) and helped re-build five shacks. The message should be brought to all corners of the world: the racist, capitalist Israeli state is at war with Arab workers, including the Bedouins, as well as with Jewish workers. The basis of Zionism is racist land robbery. But we, workers of all ethnicities, “races” and creeds, are determined to stand firm with the villagers of al-Araqib in their just struggle.
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Black, White Workers Blast Conrail, Pols over Toxic Gas Spill
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- 02 January 2013 436 hits
Paulsboro, New Jersey, December 28 — From a garment factory in Bangladesh to a chemical spill here, capitalism’s murderous worldwide reach shows that the working class must put this profit-hungry beast down with communist revolution. Few Paulsboro residents were thinking about the need for communist revolution however on November 30 when a railroad tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed and crashed into the Mantua Creek. It released a cloud of this toxic gas into the community.
The derailment was caused when the bridge failed to close properly. Parts of the bridge date from 1873. A few years ago, Conrail replaced the worker who operated the bridge with an electronic system to save the company about $100,000 a year. The electronic system failed so often that Conrail dispatchers and engineers routinely ignored the system’s red lights and drove trains across the bridge if it “looked okay.”
Many of the working-class residents of Paulsboro were exposed to this gas. The most intense exposure was in an area of the town populated by poor black and white workers. This area was evacuated several hours after the exposure. Seventy people were treated in the Underwood Hospital Emergency Room for respiratory problems, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and headaches.
Approximately 700 workers were evacuated from the neighborhoods closest to the accident. They were sent to motels in the surrounding areas. Conrail set up a family assistance center at a hall in the neighboring town of Gibbstown. Residents who were not evacuated were told to “shelter in place,” meaning stay in their houses and keep windows and doors closed.
Two weeks after this accident, there are still two tankers filled with vinyl chloride and one filled with ethanol sitting in the Mantua Creek and none of the capitalist experts can figure out how to get them out safely.
There have been two public meetings since the accident and they have both been angry affairs. Paulsboro workers have blasted Conrail and the flunkey Paulsboro politicians for their handling of the emergency. In 2009, a coal train derailed on this same bridge and it was not adequately repaired. There was never an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The evacuees complained of shabby treatment by Conrail’s support team.
So maybe most Paulsboro folks were not thinking about the need for communist revolution before November 30. But after the chemical spill, they are now planning to form a committee to fight the deadly negligence of the Conrail bosses. This can prove to be fertile soil for PLP’s communist ideas, a “chemical spill” poisonous to all bosses.
