CHICAGO, May 23 — Strike was on the minds of some 6,000 teachers and paraprofessionals, joined by nearly 2,000 supporters, who took over several downtown streets here to demand that city students get better schools and to oppose the rulers’ all-out assault on students and teachers. The march followed simultaneous indoor and outdoor rallies, where, in a show of unity and solidarity, virtually every Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) member wore red CTU shirts.
The CTU contract expires June 30 and the Board of Education wants to increase class size, outsource art and music positions, increase work hours 20 percent for 2 percent more pay, introduce “merit pay,” decrease job security, and close more schools.
During the rally, members spontaneously shouted “Strike” and carried signs reading “YES,” foreshadowing a June 6 strike authorization vote (unannounced at the time of the rally).
The ruling class here has been viciously attacking students and education workers for years. Recently, in Chicago and throughout the U.S., the attacks have ramped up as rulers, faced with trillions in war costs, feel the economic squeeze on their profits. Internationally, public education has been under attack for even longer.
Fighting A Racist School System
The ruling class wants to turn teaching into a revolving-door, lower-paid job. In line with their need to maintain racism that produces super-profits, they don’t want to spend money on educating poor, working-class black and Latino students. Defense of their empire is a more important priority. They’ve closed over 100 schools here, replacing them with charter schools. In what is still the country’s most segregated city, predominantly black schools suffer disproportionately from closures.
Whether through charters or regular public schools, the ruling class wants to more finely craft the schools attended by working-class students so they better serve the rulers’ interests. Penny Pritzer, billionaire owner of Hyatt Hotels and others sit on Chicago’s Board of Education.
Education for Profits
As one rally speaker revealed, Pritzer told an interviewer: “Students are entitled to get the skills in reading, math and science so that they can be productive members of today’s workforce.” She was talking about working-class students, not those in schools attended by her children or other children of the wealthy. “Skills to become productive workers,” she means teaching students the skills and ideology they need to become workers who make lots of profits for the corporations or become soldiers who fight to protect those profits.
Chicago education workers may challenge ruling-class plans by striking next fall. The politicians who serve the rulers thought they were preventing this by passing a law in 2011 requiring a 75 percent vote of the entire membership (not of just those voting) to authorize a strike. Now it seems highly likely that threshold will be met.
A strike opens up the potential for teachers’ union members to feel their power, to build multi-racial unity against the capitalists who control Chicago’s Board of Education. It can be a great opportunity for a militant, united, anti-racist fight against the children’s exploiters who run the school system. Anything less, in fact, will only embolden these fascists and encourage them to quicken the pace of their attacks on students and education workers.
However, a strike is not enough to stop these profit-driven attacks. Only communist revolution accomplish that and allow students to flourish in schools designed in their interests, not the bosses’.
New System, Not New Mayor
The CTU is still hampered by its reformist outlook. At the rally and march, for example, sellouts Jesse Jackson (Operation Push) and Randi Weingarten (American Federation of Teachers president) had front-row seats.
Marchers chanted, “The workers, united, will never be defeated” but also “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel has to go.” Replacing the Mayor, electing the school board, or doing anything else short of overturning capitalism only ties workers more to this murderous system. Communist revolution really is the only solution.
PLP’s role in this fight is iadvancing, but still needs improvement. A serious group of teachers who meet regularly with the Party; a PLP flyer and CHALLENGES were distributed at the march; the level of discussion and struggle inside CTU and the numbers reading CHALLENGE have increased, creating the potential for more PLP supporters and members.
If a strike occurs, it will provide an even greater opportunity for PLP to become more deeply involved in this class struggle. We must be in it to win workers to realizing they can and must take power and run society.
The Obama administration’s authorization of drone attacks — initiated by his Bush predecessor — has carried past U.S. murders of innocent workers to a new high. Based on a New York Times analysis (5/29), the Nation of Change (NOC) website reports that the Obama killers “are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17.”
Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, suing the CIA on behalf of drone victims, cites “a program that has existed for eight years, picks its targets in secret, faces zero accountability and has killed almost 3,000 people in Pakistan alone whose identities are not known to their killers,” including “women and children in Waziristan…killed with Hellfire missiles.”
In trying to justify these executions as “limiting civilian death tolls to a minimum,” the Times reported that the CIA simply counts all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants.” Their rationale is that “people in areas of known ‘terrorist activity’…are probably up to no good.” (Shades of racist George Zimmerman’s “self-defense” claim in murdering Trayvon Martin.)
Obama Gives CIA Greater Kill Potential
In addition to hit lists, “Obama has granted the CIA authority to kill with even greater ease using ‘signature strikes’ — strikes based solely on suspicious behavior.” The Times noted the U.S. State Department’s description of the CIA’s criteria: “The joke was that when the CIA sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bomb makers — but might also be farmers.”
Under such a rationale the NOC website said, “China might declare an ethnic Uighur activist living in New York City as an ‘enemy combatant’ and send a missile into Manhattan; Russia could assert that it was legal to launch a drone attack against someone living in London whom they claim is linked to Chechen militants. Or consider the case of Luis Posada Carrilles, a Cuban-American living in Miami who is a known terrorist convicted of masterminding a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people….The Cuban government could claim that it has the right to send a drone into downtown Miami to kill an admitted terrorist and sworn enemy.”
The NOC website says, “The kind of ‘intelligence’ used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of ‘intelligence’ that put people in Guantanamo….Hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the U.S. military by bounty hunters.”
Obama’s Killer List may very well be part of his presidential campaign to portray his “tough leadership,” not being a shrinking violet when it comes to killing. Of course, this drone campaign is only a part of capitalism’s death and destruction through imperialist wars, mass racist unemployment, poverty, periodic Great Recessions, racist cops and other horrors. All the more reason to destroy it with communist revolution that puts the bosses six feet under and the working class in control of our future.
NEW YORK CITY, June 1 — John Laje, a very rich businessman and owner of a dozen car washes in New York City, has never wanted to meet with his workers who have asked him on various occasions for a better contract including a paid vacation, paid sick days, salary raises for a year and protection against unfair layoffs.
The car wash workers face extreme exploitation that is typical of capitalism. They work 72 hours per week making $5.25 to $5.50 per hour. The workers have to put up with extreme temperatures and using dangerous chemical products without proper equipment or protection.
Management has stolen their tips and sent them home without pay when it rains. Exploiter Laje has doled out a measly 25 cents-an-hour raise to pacify workers.
Laje’s move backfired; the workers went into the streets to protest in front of “LMC CARWASH AND LUBE,” one of his car washes in Harlem. They were joined by workers from community organizations and unions.
This protest was led by members of a fighting organization in Brooklyn supporting the car wash workers in Manhattan. The purpose of policies and union leaders is to demand that the laws and “rights” of workers are respected. It is very emotional seeing that group yelling militant PLP chants such as: “This fist is seen, power to the workers”.
In a meeting a few days before the protest, the group of workers who led this protest proposed celebrating a new conference in which the main theme would be racism, a social construct that directly affects our comrade workers. With the introduction of the Secure Communities Law throughout the U.S. — a racist anti-immigrant law that targets and deports thousands workers through mass arrests), we’re going to see more attacks on and terrorization of immigrants. More than 50 of the present members approved of this protest and we are now organizing this conference for the month of September.
This entire struggle shows us the importance of uniting and creating class consciousness. Capitalism is the root of all evil and it must be destroyed with a revolution. By broadening our base and building the Progressive Labor Party, we can build a new society where power is in the hands of the workers: a communist society.
BROOKLYN, NY, June 1 — Workers and patients at Downstate’s three hospital campuses face the fight of our lives as Governor Cuomo’s consultants and our administration make plans to “Right Size” the institution.
These racist plans will likely involve hundreds of layoffs and cuts in services in central Brooklyn. A year ago, as Downstate Medical Center “saved” Long Island College Hospital from closing, we felt secure in what we thought was an economically sound, indeed growing, institution in a sea of troubled Brooklyn hospitals. But the appearance belied the essence of what was going on. How could this happen?
To understand this and how to fight back, we need to take a step back and grasp what is driving the changing capitalist health care system in 2012. Change is caused by the interplay of contradictory or competing forces. What are the forces at play in healthcare?
Some, like insurance companies, medical technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and providers (hospitals) must make profits from health care to survive in the capitalist game. Others, like employers paying for health insurance and governments, are out to limit their costs for health care.
The major capitalists take a broader view. They want to minimize the resources put into health care (as well as other services for the working class) so that resources can be focused on world domination (wars). Cuomo with his presidential aspirations represents the latter — and they are winning.
Where are the patients and healthcare workers in all this? The various bosses try to divide us and/or win us to their side. Cuomo, whose main financial backers are insurance, finance and real estate, tells New Yorkers that State workers are just too privileged and greedy. The beginning of the 2011 State of the State address put blame for budget woes on our pensions ($6 billion out of a $132 billion budget). Now we have a sixth pension tier. Downstate Hospital President LaRosa echoed his words when he whined to the press that our pay and benefits are the source of his money problems. Cuomo pits upstate against the city, implying that the problem is mismanagement of inner-city hospitals. But these hospitals have been set up to fail by years of Medicaid cuts.
Let us become a true force in the development of healthcare by uniting patients and workers to fight against the attacks. Our union leaders blunt our efforts. Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) leaders tell us not to worry because there is no-layoff language in the contract. But that expires in January. The Public Employees Federation’s expires in April. Think you can get all your furlough days in by then?
They divert our anger into writing and calling legislators. They caution us that going to our patients could scare them away and make Downstate more vulnerable. We are the human face of the hospital to our patients. We should not leave them in the dark to be surprised when a service disappears. Rather, we should have confidence that we workers and patients have the same enemy and the same fight. If mass layoff notices come out, we should gather that very day in the lobby to take action!
PLP says that workers’ needs cannot be met under capitalism. We fight for a workers’ revolution for communism. What will be the conflicting forces in the development of health care under communism?
One force will be the organized power of the working class led by its communist party to overcome scarcity, inequality and other obstacles. The opposing force will be the old capitalist ideas of pacifism, individualism and defeatism. There will be no money or profit to get in the way of health care — from each according to commitment, to each according to need.
TEL-AVIV-JAFF, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, May 8 — Thousands of Jewish and Arab workers, many of whom live in public housing apartments, marched today to protest the racist policies of the public housing companies. The marchers demanded housing for all (regardless of ethnicity) and an end to the evictions of Arab workers from their homes by the “Amidar,” “Amigur” and “Halamish” companies. Chants also called for a revolution and for an egalitarian society. A speech by a PL’er linking the racism in housing to the bosses’ financial interests and calling for a workers’ revolution was welcomed by loud applause.
Exploiting Jewish Workers
Israel’s public housing companies, at least partially state-owned, were established in the 1950’s and 1960’s to house the masses of Jewish immigrants brought from all around the world to serve as a labor force for the Zionist regime and its capitalist backers. Construction was shoddy at best, but the apartments were very cheap and affordable for most Jewish workers.
The public housing companies are also responsible for administering the homes confiscated from Palestinians who were deported in the 1948 war. Many of the lands on which Palestinian-Arab workers live today inside the “Green Line” (in the western part of Israel-Palestine) are officially owned by these companies.
Since the “Monetary Reforms” (neo-liberalism) of the 1980’s, the bosses cut the funding for public housing, leaving the apartments to rot and crumble on the heads of their impoverished working-class residents while the public housing company bosses and officials draw fat salaries. Workers who cannot pay the rent to a regular landlord can no longer rely on public housing. Indeed, getting a public apartment is nearly impossible. Some workers were forced to squat in public-owned apartments to have a roof over their heads.
Recently, there’s been a wave of attacks by the public housing companies on residents in general and Arab residents in particular, trying to milk these poor workers for money and to forcefully evict them, typically under racist excuses. For example, one lawyer in the employ of the “Amidar” Public Housing Company said in court that “this land belongs to us [the Jews] and the Arab residents should be grateful to us for allowing them to live there [on their own land] for decades.”
Real Estate Bosses Profit from Evictions
The real reason for these evictions is to sell off the land to real-estate tycoons who will reap profits from its development. Many of the lawyers employed by these tycoons are former public housing officials who have kept information about the residents with them when they switched to the new, well-paying private-sector jobs.
The marchers have shown these racist vultures that, despite all this racist crap, thousands of workers from all nations, ethnicities and creeds can unite and fight against these bosses. The slogans marked the way forward for the struggle - a struggle for an egalitarian society free from racism, exploitation and homelessness. We in the Progressive Labour Party have a name for such a society - communism. And the only way to bring that about is for workers to unite, struggle, have a revolution and smash all bosses!
