DHAKA, BANGLADESH, November 27 — Thousands of garment workers poured into the streets of Ashulia, the industrial belt north of here, protesting the deaths of at least 112 mostly women workers, burnt alive in the Tarzeen Factory, trapped by poor escape routes.

The protesting workers paralyzed much of Ashulia, blocked roads and forced the closing of many of the country’s 4,500 garment factories. They produce $18 billion in profits per year, second in textile exports only to China.

The workers were burned beyond recognition because the capitalists who run these factories won’t spend money on fire escapes or follow safety rules. Most of the workers who died were on the first and second floors and were killed, fire officials said, because there were not enough exits for them to get out.

“The factory had three staircases, and all of them were down through the ground floor,” said Maj. Mohammad Mahbub, the operations director for the fire department, according to The Associated Press. “So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building.”

Garment Workers in Bangladesh Unite with Walmart Workers in the U.S.Since 2006 over 500 workers have died in garment factory fires.  Experts say the fires could easily have been avoided if the factory owners had taken the right precautions. Many factories are in cramped neighborhoods, have too few fire escapes and widely flout safety measures. The industry employs more than three million workers in Bangladesh, mostly women. 

Garment workers’ minimum wage here is about $37 a month while the bosses’ sales total over $35 million a year. Yet these workers had NO fire exits! Another element of the tragedy is that they provided childcare in the factory. It has yet to be known how many children were lost in the fire.

Some of the buyers from this plant are the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger and Walmart who is attacking its striking workforce in the U.S. while it literarily murders them oversees. So U.S. bosses are part of the murder of these workers.

PLP is organizing with the striking Walmart workers in the U.S. and backs the workers in Bangladesh who’ve been fighting the terrible conditions that capitalism has forced upon them. We will continue to support the brave women and men workers who are struggling in Bangladesh and all over the world.

After helping to slaughter millions of Iraqis and Afghans, the fact that ousted CIA chief and former general David Petraeus cheated on his wife should shock nobody. Like their U.S. bosses, military leaders propagate capitalism’s exploitation of women inside and outside the armed forces. What matters is the scandal’s political aspect, and how it points to the main finance capitalists’ push towards wider wars and the military draft that likely will be needed to carry them out.

Barack Obama’s policies faithfully serve finance capital’s outlook for long-term war. But while Obama won his second term in the White House, the Republican Party — despite deep divisions in their ranks over war policy — maintained its majority in the House of Representatives. This is the context that reveals the significance of the Petraeus scandal.

An Arab-baiting FBI agent named Frederick Humphries did Petraeus in. (Humphries helped entrap Muslims into “terrorist” busts, though few stuck.) He learned of Petraeus’s infidelity from a socialite who fraternized with top brass in the Pentagon’s Tampa-based Central Command, which runs all U.S. military operations in the oil-rich Mideast. Humphries informed Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who owes his allegiance to the Tea Party faction of the U.S. ruling class.

Petraeus Follows the Costly ‘Overwhelming Force’ Doctrine

Aside from his mass murder of working-class Iraqis and Afghans, Petraeus earned his ruling-class media fame by devising an expensive “Petraeus Doctrine” for fighting wars. In the spirit of Colin Powell, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (see page 2), it calls for 25 “counterinsurgent” U.S. soldiers for every 1,000 residents of an invaded country (Boston Globe, 11/28/07). That would add up to at least 750,000 troops in Iraq and a similar number in Afghanistan. Pro-Israel neo-conservatives, who advocate “war on the cheap,” tolerated Petraeus for a time because the U.S. domestic economic crisis prevented Obama from implementing the general’s costly policy. 

Two years ago, Petraeus became a more pointed threat to the neo-conservative line. As The Atlantic magazine noted, “Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel’s year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the [2010] Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu’s victory and compounded by continued settlements…is a problem. More than a problem, Israel’s total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of U.S. interests around the world” (3/14/10). 

When Petraeus bungled the Benghazi incident, allowing Islamists to kill the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three CIA goons, the U.S.-Israel bloc pounced, though with a calculated delay that suggests a geopolitical deal at the highest level. Cantor, who had taken $5 million in campaign funds from Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire pal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took Humphries’ damning information to FBI head Robert Mueller. But it was withheld from other Republican leaders, who could have used it to torpedo Obama’s re-election.

One possibility is that the information was held back in return for Obama’s tacit go-ahead for Netanyahu’s Gaza slaughter.

Heading Toward A Military Draft

Petraeus had long enjoyed the backing of journalists like Thomas Ricks, a pro-Obama liberal at the Washington Post’s Foreign Policy (FP) magazine and a fellow of the Center for a New American Security, a finance capital think tank. On a book tour praising Petraeus, Ricks lamented the general’s demise but lauded public support for Obama’s push for increased war taxes and the mass conscription that would logically follow: “Nor is a draft out of the question to these people. To my surprise, the same crowd…that applauded the tax hike also warmly welcomed my suggestion that the country would benefit from having some sort of draft” (FP, 11/19/12).

New York, November 27 — Red Cross reps are surrounded by protesters as they try to answer the complaints of families from Far Rockaway displaced by the storm and placed in three mid-town Holiday Inns. These families have been displaced with prejudice, with no regard for mental, medical or any of their needs. Kids are going without diapers, the ill without medication, people without food.

By the end of the day, the displaced families were being interviewed by scores of social workers, getting health care referrals and more. Red Cross officials promised to meet with all 106 displaced families at the three hotels.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, coverage in the bosses’ media emphasizes the helplessness of humanity in the face of nature’s destructiveness. Under capitalism, we are also constantly bombarded with the idea that people look out for themselves, and can never really work together for a common purpose without a money incentive. 

But workers’ own experiences show that these stories told by mouthpieces for the capitalists are lies. PLP members and friends have volunteered in local relief efforts in the New York/New Jersey area. We have heard about and witnessed both stories of life-saving heroism during the storm and the efforts of thousands of volunteers providing basic necessities to their class brothers and sisters.

 History also shows that workers and peasants in communist-led societies have shown the human desire to work for the collective without material reward in return. The communist-led revolution in China in 1949 brought workers and peasants to power. Production and work was organized based upon national five-year plans.

 These plans were discussed all over the country and decided in advance. In Northern China, near Peking, the capital of China, one area had experienced yearly rains that flooded the farmland because the local mountains were quite dry and had no trees or other vegetation to prevent the water from rushing downhill. To stop this yearly damage to the farmland, the region was scheduled for a “check dam” and reservoir during the Third Five Year Plan in 1963-1967.

The peasants in the local area decided for themselves that there was no need to wait. They put out a call to the communist party and other organizations in Peking in 1957. One hundred and twenty thousand volunteer workers responded. Everyone worked for free. Each factory or office sent no more than 10% of their workers to contribute to the collective labor. The 90% who stayed behind worked a little harder to make up for the labor loss, while the 10% who went continued to have their basic needs met. 

Here are the words of a North American resident who was part of the project:

Of all the factors going in to making the project a success, unquestionably the most vital was the enthusiasm of the volunteers. I did a stint with some people from my office and it was an astonishing experience. Men and women who ordinarily did nothing more vigorous than tickling a typewriter or taking half a turn in a swivel chair were suddenly shoveling earth and toting gravel in baskets slung from shoulder poles, day and night, rain and shine.

Our cuisine consisted of gruel, bits of pickled vegetable, and a coarse corn muffin, but we wolfed them down as if they were epicurean delights. We slept eight in a tent, with only pallets of pine branches between us and the ground, but our slumber was deep and dreamless. I heard many a white collar worker say he never realized manual labor was so difficult and so satisfactory.

In less than five months, the dam was finished. Fifty thousand acres of land, which before were constantly hit by floods, now came under controlled irrigation.

Soldiers also volunteered to help, for no extra compensation. In order to support the workers involved in the project, “Peking’s top-flight opera singers and actors and actresses went out to the site to perform for the workers. The boldness of the plan to build ahead of schedule kindled public imagination” (Peking Review, 1958, Issue 1).

As climate change increasingly affects our fellow workers around the world, it will become more and more important for PLP and its supporters to take inspiration from these historical events. The capitalists have no plan to protect workers from the ravages of their profit-induced destruction of the environment. Our job is to participate in the inevitable expressions of human solidarity, to fight the bosses to meet the needs of those affected, and to convince many of the volunteers as well as the victims of “natural” disasters how only communist revolution can end these scourges. The seeds for this struggle to build a profit-less world that will reestablish harmony with nature are contained in the courageous and selfless actions of workers who today are responding to the destruction of Hurricane Sandy.