Workers at Wal-mart have spread their strikes and protests against the world’s largest private-sector employer — 1.4 million workers — to at least 28 stores in 12 states and counting, over the issues of poverty wages, exorbitant hours, wage theft, uncertain schedules, arbitrary firings, physical threats, unhealthy working conditions and lack of healthcare coverage.

The workers are planning a massive strike and protest for the biggest shopping day of the year, “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.

Immigrant workers have led the way, sparking the nationwide actions when they began a strike last June in the small town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, against C.J.’s Seafood, a Wal-mart supplier. They were “guest workers” from Mexico who were paid much less than the minimum wage, forced to work shifts up to 24 hours with no overtime pay, and threatened with beatings if their breaks lasted more than five minutes. Twice they were locked inside their workplace to force them to work from 2:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. without overtime compensation. And if they challenged any of these horrors, they were threatened with deportation. C.J.’s Seafood brings in an annual revenue of up to $50 million and sells 85 percent of its production to Wal-mart.

Soon the strikes spread to Wal-mart stores and warehouses throughout California. In early September, 30 workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma, Ca., walked out for 15 days to protest unsafe working conditions, reporting temperatures up to 120 degrees, no access to clean water or regular breaks and faulty work equipment. Another 60 walked out in L.A. on October 4, and 250 in Pecora, followed by workers striking or protesting in San Diego, Sacramento and Pico Rivera.

Workers vs. the SWAT Team

Meanwhile, workers at a Wal-mart contractor warehouse in Elmwood, Illinois, the company’s largest distribution center struck in mid-September seventy percent of all imported products Wal-mart sells in the U.S. move through that facility. When a mass protest of 600 blocked the warehouse, a Chicago SWAT team was called in and arrested 17 demonstrators. Those workers had sued for non-payment for all hours worked and for overtime and for being paid less than the minimum wage. They cited work-days varying from two hours to 16 hours, inhaling dust and chemical residue, enduring extreme temperatures, forced to lift 250-pound boxes with no help, and discrimination against women workers.

Workers have walked off the job since then in Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Hallandale Beach, Florida, Orlando and Washington D.C., and in Minnesota, Maryland and Kentucky. In Massachusetts, 300 protesters picketed 30 stores, demanding a $25,000 annual minimum wage plus healthcare coverage. The demonstrators were equally divided among union members, students and churchgoers. Two hundred Wal-mart workers descended on a company investor meeting at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, advancing their demands.

While Wal-mart has been claiming these workers’ charges were false and were a “publicity stunt,” saying that it involves just a tiny group of disgruntled employees, they are actually taking the movement very seriously, having distributed a secret memo to all managers on how to handle the strikes and protest. (Huffington Post, 10/14)

Wal-mart’s Reaps Super-profits From Workers’ Labor

Wal-mart’s profits are based on all this super-exploitation. It had an “operating income of $10.2 billion through July 3 of this year” and “expects to generate $9 billion in on-line sales alone in 2013. The heirs to founder Sam Walton rank among the richest people in the U.S. with a combined wealth reportedly matching 42 percent of the country’s population.” (Home Media Magazine, 10/12)

While many of the strikes and protests have been led by the rank and file, organizations such as the National Guestworker Alliance, “Our Walmart,” the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, “Making Change at Walmart” and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union all have been involved.

However, none of these groups have pointed out the real source of the workers’ oppression: capitalism. They are all trying to reform the profit system, an impossibility. Wal-mart is driven by the same force that drives all bosses — maximum profit. That’s why Wal-mart exploits workers in China and other low-wage countries, and uses the same methods in the U.S. Profits are the name of the game, and it’s an international operation. There are no borders when it comes to accumulating profit.

The Bosses’ Government is NOT Neutral

Moreover, governments are there to enforce this system, whether in Beijing or Washington, D.C. They are not neutral. That Chicago SWAT team was not called in to force Wal-mart to accede to the workers’ demands; they were ordered in to arrest them.

While workers may be urged to resort to help from the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce so-called labor laws, that agency’s Wage and Hour Division employs a meager staff of 1,038 investigators to cover more than 135 million workers in over 7.3 million companies, leaving each inspector responsible for one and a quarter million workers! Most of these workers will have died before an inspector reaches their workplace. Neither Obama nor Romney will change that since their job is to enforce the profit system.

PLP calls on all workers to support the Wal-mart strikers and protesters in their efforts to achieve their demands and to join their picket lines, to raise this need for support in all their unions, mass organization, communities where Wal-mart exists, churches, schools and on college campuses. But we should have no illusions — as long as capitalism exists, Wal-mart and all their profit-making competitors will refuse to give up their drive for maximum profits. That is the essence of capitalism.

Progressive Labor Party must bring this dual message to the rank-and-file Wal-mart workers, and win them to join a revolutionary communist party, PLP, which fights for the only real solution to their abominable conditions, a communist society, without bosses and profits, run by and for working class which produces all value.

Additional sources include the New York Times, Salon.com, Nation of Change, ABC News, Boston Business Journal, Florida Sun Sentinel.

PARIS, October 11 — Over 4,000 retirees demonstrated here, and hundreds more in Marseilles, Lyons and other cities nation-wide demanding an immediate across-the-board 300-euro-a-month increase ($387) in pensions, guaranteed access to health care, aid for those unable to live alone and an increase in the minimum monthly pension to 1,425 euros ($1,838). A trade union coalition organized the demonstrations.

“Retirees are neither rich nor privileged!” shouted the crowd in La Roche sur Yon in the conservative Vendée in western France. 

“We won’t be the laughing stock for the suckers!” the protesters in Lyons chanted, mocking the bosses who say they “won’t be suckers” and bear any tax increase.

“Retirees are not privileged, it’s the financiers who should be taxed!” the Paris protesters chanted. Today’s protests were sparked by government plans to tax pensions 0.15 percent next year and double it in 2014. The tax is supposedly to pay for care for old people who can’t live alone but in reality, it’s to help ensure that France pays off its $1.9-trillion sovereign debt (2011 estimate) to the world’s finance capitalists.

Ten million retirees will have to pay the new tax while only the poorest 30% will be exempt. But from experience they know they’re next.

The Paris protesters also chanted, “Hollande, can you hear? the retirees are in the street!” This echoed a chant from 2010, when then-President Nicolas Sarkozy upped the retirement age, triggering massive protests. This has exposed current President Hollande and his “lesser-evil” Socialists as every bit as evil as the right-wing UMP party.

Raising the retirement age has increased the number of people aged 55-64 having to work by 3.8%. But the bosses’ economic crisis has spiked that group’s unemployment rate from 4.6% in 2008 to 6.5% in 2011. 

“I can’t afford meat or fish,” said Josiane Bardot, 82, who lives on a 900-euro-a-month pension ($1,161), while paying 300 euros for rent. Francis, 87, lives on 1,200 euros a month ($1,548), but can eat meat only one day a week after paying 300 euros for rent plus a steep heating bill. “If I had an extra 100 euros a month, I could eat in a restaurant once in a while,” he said sadly.

An estimated 1.5 million retirees live below the poverty line (964 euros a month — $1,243 — in 2010). Some 8.6 million people — 14 percent of the population — live in poverty. Some retirees live alone in the slums on 600 euros a month. 

Victims of Racism and Sexism Suffer Most

In 2010 the Alerte collective said retirees would face increasing impoverishment, especially those who’d experienced periods of unemployment. Because of racist discrimination, black people and those of Arab origin suffer the most unemployment. In old age, they suffer disproportionately from poverty. The same is true of women, who often leave work or work part-time while raising children.

Many retirees no longer have complementary health insurance and are skimping on health costs. Some have to choose between food and health care. More need help to pay their heating bills.

Meanwhile, the Socialist government has just decided to maintain special social security provisions that pump up the profits of private-sector retirement homes. That’s no surprise: Luc Broussy, the Socialist advisor on the issue, headed the private retirement-home lobby for twelve years.

Thus the “lesser-evil” Socialists maintain the system that impoverishes the poor and enriches the rich. Between 2004 and 2007, the income of the richest 0.01 percent rose steadily, by 40%.

What’s needed is overthrow of the capitalist system which exploits workers while they’re young and relegates them to poverty when they’re old. This can only be accomplished through communist revolution — the goal of the Progressive Labor Party.

Washington, DC, September 22 — Today, over 300 anti-racists confronted a dozen Nazi/Klan white supremacists. Only their 500-strong police escort saved them from severe beatings that would have discouraged them from future events. Protesters nevertheless drowned out their racist filth with militant anti-racist chants. 

These racists rode into Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. This apparently deliberate attack on anti-racism echoed the 2006 KKK rally at Harper’s Ferry, the site of John Brown’s raid against slavery. Ironically, they arrived on a bus with a black driver and labeled Haymarket (the location of the 1886 protests that gave rise to May Day, the international working-class holiday). 

PLP members distributed over 100 CHALLENGES and talked to anti-racist marchers about communism, free speech and the role of the police and capitalist state in perpetuating racism. Most agreed with a sign that declared “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” White supremacists use such rallies to recruit members to carry out violent attacks on blacks, Arabs or Latinos, but the militant opposition of multi-racial groups like this crowd make racists think twice about joining such racist gangs and slows their growth.

The crowd drowned out the Nazis’ feeble efforts to speak over their bullhorn. Then mounted park police, supported by regular DC police and motorcycle cops, led the Nazi parade down East Capitol Street. The anti-racist crowd would have none of that, and by consensus formed a human barricade across the street. We stopped the mounted cops, forcing the Nazis to stand in the horse manure behind them. 

The top brass of the DC police began threatening arrests, and just before the arrests began, the protesters dissolved the barricade and re-formed it a block away. A PL’er gave a bold communist speech via the human mike (the crowd signifies agreement by repeating the speech) in the middle of the confrontation. The barricade scenario happened again, but this time, a brave young black man declared that he would not move, that he had lived in this neighborhood since he was three, and that no Nazi would march down his street.  

PL’ers called on the protesters to come back from their next barricade and support this bold fighter, and they did. At this point, the mounted police used their horses as battering rams against the crowd of furious anti-Nazi protestors. The Nazis were able to continue marching, but protesters continued to harass them all the way to the Capitol building, drowning out their message with chants of “Death, death, death to the Nazis; Power, power, power to the workers!” The Nazis rallied briefly behind a phalanx of fully-equipped riot police serving as their personal bodyguards and then scurried off to their bus and left town.

Smash Racists

Stopping the most extreme racists is critical in an atmosphere of intensifying racism and oppression in the U.S. and around the world. Any hint that extreme racism can function openly and boldly will encourage meeker racists to step up and bolster the ranks of the white supremacists. The result of such a process can only be racist murder and intimidation. We must strike first, and hard.

Despite the overall boldness of the rally, we missed the opportunity to stop the march and beat the Nazis senseless. This time we did not have a sufficient plan and were unprepared to attack (and risk arrests.) However, this was a learning experience for many of our newer comrades and our friends from the Occupy movement, who turned out in large numbers. PLP has an impressive history of bold physical confrontations with Nazis and the Klan. In fact, Klan leader Bill Wilkerson publicly declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement. We will study the history of the ruling-class support for these Nazis and PL’s staunch opposition. Next time, we will be ready and the Nazis will be lucky to escape with their lives.

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More War, More Racism

We should recall that the organized white supremacist movement in the U.S. in the 1930s included hundreds of thousands and was supported by the ruling class. When the U.S. ruling class wanted to win workers to fight fascism in the 1940s, they reduced their support for such racist groups to build a façade of anti-racism. Fighting Hitler at that time had become extremely profitable for U.S. bosses. 

However, before World War II, Hitler had received support from U.S. companies such as Ford, GM and IBM in building his tanks, trucks and technologies — a fact omitted from history textbooks. 

Today a veneer of anti-racism is part of the ideas pushed by U.S. bosses. But the deeper they lead us into wars around the world, the more racist terror they unleash both in the U.S. and worldwide. Arab workers locked up without trials after 9/11 and immigrant workers rounded up on the job and deported away from citizen children can attest to that.

As the economic crisis deepens we may see even more blatant racist attacks from both the state and gutter racists like the neo-Nazis, Klan and Minutemen. We must not let them get away with it. We have a world to win.

The imperialist drumbeat to invade Syria is getting louder by the day. The U.S. rulers have found a willing partner for a push to war in the energy-rich slave state of Qatar, which borders Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. This blossoming alliance seeks to use the Arab Spring upheavals and the Iraq War to heighten its profitable influence in the Middle East.

In a September 25 address to the UN General Assembly, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, urged other Arab countries to do their “military duties… to do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria.” 

Two days later, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece, “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now,” by Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution. The column’s rhetoric — in line with President Barack Obama’s pledge “to foresee, prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities” — cynically masks the drive for profits from gas pipeline routes that motivates Qatari and U.S. war plans. It is apparent that yet more death and devastation await workers in the Middle East.

This latest push for a U.S. intervention, including (for starters) a countrywide no-fly zone and a Turkish corridor for military supplies to Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, is part of a sharpening competition between imperialist interests.

In the name of “freedom,” U.S. and allied capitalists aim to remove Syria’s Assad government, which has united with gas-rich Iran and Russia in jockeying for gas export routes. Qatar contains 14 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves, ranking it third behind Russia and Iran.

The majority of Qatar’s natural gas is located in the massive offshore North Field, which spans an area nearly as large as the country itself. The leading foreign investor in Qatar’s North Field is ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil and gas company and the world’s richest corporation by revenue.

According to the Asia Times, “It’s clear what Qatar is aiming at: to kill the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline….Here we see Qatar in direct competition with both Iran (as a producer) and Syria (as a destination), and to a lesser extent, Iraq (as a transit country)” (9/28/2012). With Qatar as a main source, the article adds, the “strategic aim” of U.S. ally Turkey “is to become the top energy crossroads from the Middle East/Central Asia to Europe.” 

U.S. ‘Humanitarianism’
Murders Millions

Since the First Gulf War invasion of Iraq in 1991, Qatar had been home to a major U.S. Air Force base and now serves as a launching pad for strategic U.S.-backed energy and financial ventures (see box). The victims of these ventures mount into the millions: 

     • Reporting on the strife in Egypt, The Economist magazine (9/9/2011), a staunch booster of U.S.-UK imperialism, provided a conservative body count of 846;

     • Libya’s own health ministry estimated at least 30,000 dead in that country (Associated Press, 9/9/2011);

     • According to The Lancet, the authoritative British medical journal (10/12/2006), Iraqi war deaths totaled 654,965 between 2003 and 2006;

     • At least half a million children died from earlier U.S. sanctions that Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, deemed “worth it” (“60 Minutes,” 5/12/1996). 

Racism Kills Worldwide

Furthermore, domestic U.S. racism, as reflected in the recent rash of cop killings of black and Latino youth, has been “exported” to this mass murder of Arab, Muslim and black workers in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Racism has no boundaries. It is fueled and justified by the demonization of peoples as “worthless” or as “terrorists” for imperialist purposes.

ExxonMobil and Qatar Aim to Break Iranian-Russian Gas Dominance

Qatar’s energy sheiks have joined U.S. bosses’ domestic schemes to break the global gas supply dominance of Russia and Iran. As the world’s largest shipper of liquid natural gas (LNG), Qatar has vessels and expertise that could transform the current U.S. gas boom into a geostrategic weapon. “Exxon Mobil Corp. and Qatar Petroleum International are teaming up on a proposal to export LNG from Texas. Exxon is a 30% owner of Golden Pass Products and Qatar holds a 70% stake. The two firms could invest up to $10 billion in the project” (MarketWatch, 8/20/2012).

The CFR and Brookings proponents of a Syria invasion share something in common with Qatar’s ruling clan: the same benefactors, representing the dominant wing of U.S. capitalism. JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil have invested fortunes in these finance-capital think tanks. In accord with Qatar’s rulers, Boot and Doran propose that “American intervention would diminish Iran’s influence in the Arab world.”

The agreement between U.S. and Qatari rulers is not complete, however. Qatar’s sheiks believe that Saudi-led, U.S.-armed Gulf Cooperation Council forces can oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But while U.S. finance capitalists understand that “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Israel would like to see Mr. Assad toppled,” and that “France and Britain could also be counted on to help,” Boot and Doran maintain that only the U.S. Air Force and Navy “have the weaponry needed to dismantle Syria’s Russian-designed air defenses with little risk.” The authors manage to ignore nuclear super-power Russia’s naval base in Syria.

CHALLENGE doesn’t make speculations. But when capitalists are calling all the shots, we know for certain that whatever happens in Syria (or Iran) won’t be good for our class. A U.S. coalition strike will kill many. In the absence of such a strike, imperialist rivals Russia and China will be in a stronger position — another step toward a wider war. 

U.S. Elections Hide War Dangers to the Working Class

The phony choice between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney aims to derail U.S. workers from uniting to rise up against these war-makers.

By painting Obama as a lesser evil to the right-wing Republicans, the U.S. ruling-class media attempts to deceive workers into believing he will protect them from the “extremists.” But while Romney rants about bombing Iran, Obama prepares for it. Tens of thousands of U.S. military troops are stationed throughout the Middle East. Nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, waiting in the Persian Gulf, are not there as peacemakers.

Meanwhile, U.S. workers under Obama suffer from all the pathologies of capitalism: mass racist unemployment and home foreclosures, huge numbers of racist deportations, and the world’s highest racist incarceration rates, with black and Latino workers representing 70 percent of the U.S. prison population. These attacks stem from a profit system enforced by whoever resides in the White House. Clinton or Bush, Obama or Romney — for the working class, it makes little difference.

The only real choice for workers lies in uniting to destroy this exploitative system and its oppressive state apparatus, and to replace it with a communist society without bosses, profits, racism, sexism and capitalist-bred imperialist wars. 

The goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is to win workers and youth in all our workplaces, unions, schools, campuses, communities, churches and mass organizations to the fight for revolution. That’s the answer to the bosses’ election circus. Join us!

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Middle East Bank Scramble Mirrors Global Imperialist Rivalry

As a willing U.S. client state, Qatar hopes to turn a fat profit by taking over banks in lands recently “liberated” with lethal U.S. assistance:

Qatar National Bank (QNB), seeking to boost its regional presence, has hired J.P. Morgan Chase to advise on its planned buy of [French] Societe Generale’s Egyptian arm….It also raised its stake in Iraq’s Mansour Bank and bought a 49 percent stake in Libya’s Bank of Commerce and
Development earlier in April. BNP
Paribas, another French lender, is said to be seeking initial bids for the sale of its Egyptian retail arm, with QNB interested in the business…. However, the lender lost out to Russia’s Sberbank in bids for Turkey’s Denizbank earlier this year (Reuters, 9/2/2012).