WASHINGTON, DC, June 28 — Over 60 protestors including bus drivers, transit riders, workers from other unions, and Occupy activists rallied and picketed outside the board meeting of the DC Metro transit system. The rally demanded cancellation of the planned fare hike for riders and the racist pay freeze and benefit cuts for the predominantly black workforce. Chanting, “lower fares, higher wages, make the bosses pay”, demonstrators condemned the bosses for putting the cost of the system on the backs of the working class.

The transit system makes billions of dollars for the businesses (like the Verizon Center, the Nationals’ baseball stadium, and dozens more law firms and big office buildings) located near subway stops. It makes economic activity possible in the city as a whole. So why shouldn’t the real estate developers, big businessmen, and banks pay for something that makes profits for them?  Because they run the government and will do everything they can to maximize their profits at our expense.

Metro is trying to play off riders against the union, blaming the wages, pensions and benefits of workers for the fare hikes, and then turning around and telling Metro workers that they should support the fare increase so they can be paid. But even under capitalism, most transit systems don’t rely on the farebox for their operating costs. In D.C., 70% of the operating costs of the system come from fares, a national record!

At the rally today, several Metro workers took their first step in getting involved in conscious class struggle. All of the Metro workers as well as most of the other demonstrators received copies of CHALLENGE, learning more about the long-term struggle for revolution that will take from the bosses everything that the bosses have stolen from the labor of our class. All of the demonstrators were pleased to see the unity in life shown by the rally, and pledged to continue the struggle together.

PAKISTAN, June 28 — Prolonged daily power outages in almost every big city and small town have provoked widespread violent protests and strikes by angry workers. They have set fire to government-owned buildings, property, vehicles and offices belonging to the Water and Power Development Authority.

Almost every day the protestors are besieging grid stations, blocking trains, closing roads, pelting the police with stones and fearlessly facing attacks from cops wielding batons and hurling tear gas. They have destroyed traffic signals and attacked shops which do not close down. 

When angry workers burned a few homes of ministers and ruling-class-elected representatives, the latter’s personal guards and police shot four demonstrators to death and injured dozens of others. 

Workers staged a sit-down outside the Guddu Thermal Power House in Sindh province, chanting against the bosses for their negligence, lousy working conditions, lack of necessary tools and corruption, all of which caused the death of a co-worker. The security commander — a politically influential person affiliated with the ruling party — demanded the workers end their protest and chanting. After trading hot words with the workers, he left for his office. Later, his brother, accompanied by some gunmen, arrived and killed five workers on the spot, severely injuring 14 others.

Responding to this brutal act, workers shut down the plant and organized a huge march, demanding the arrest of all the culprits, including the security commander and the managing director of the power house. Workers are fuming and are organizing a city-wide strike in Guddu and its surroundings.

The energy crisis, caused by the bosses’ corruption, incompetence and lack of planning, is forcing layoffs, as well as riding roughshod over workers’ daily lives. Workers are angry over the poverty, unemployment, exploitation and oppression. Recognizing their enemies, they believe these bosses are responsible for all their miseries; and want to get rid of the bosses. But they do not yet have the leadership which can organize their anger and militancy towards an international communist revolution.

Comrades and friends of PLP are trying to expose the bosses and explaining that voting for one bosses’ party or another won’t change their lives but will continue their misery. 

At the Guddu Power House demonstration, our comrade and some friends delivered revolutionary speeches and asked the workers to organize against the viciousness of the capitalist system and the brutal bosses, and for a communist revolution. They condemned the puppet union leadership, explaining that PLP is the true party of the working class, fighting for a society run by our class, for a world without exploitation, poverty, inequality, injustice and torture — a communist world!

The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the core provisions of President Barack Obama’s health care reform is no victory for the working class. The mandate forcing people to buy insurance on a for-profit basis is a bonanza for the insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). These companies will now have tens of millions of new customers from whom to reap enormous profits. The same is true for the pharmaceutical and hospital industries that will continue to rob the general population with over-priced drugs and tests, many of them unnecessary. The more money they rake in, the less workers will have for basic needs.

The money to pay for health reform will, in effect, come from a tax on the entire working class. This was the basis for the rulers’ new hero, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the deciding vote in declaring Obamacare constitutional. Congress has the power to tax, he said, and tax it will. Not everyone will be covered by the reformed health care system, of course. Twelve million undocumented workers and their children will remain unprotected, facing Obama’s policy of mass deportations, upwards of 1.4 million and counting.

Workers Have No Stake in Elections

The main beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision may be Obama, whose bid to retain the White House in this November’s election gained a needed boost, and the finance capitalists who back him as their imperialist and international assassin of choice. But whether the Democrats or Mitt Romney and the Republicans come out on top, workers have no stake in either of these ruling-class candidates or in capitalism’s electoral process. The bosses’ election circus is designed to enforce the profit system that heaps only mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty and war on the backs of the working class. No doubt the medical industrial complex will use this reform to squeeze workers even more, with mergers swallowing smaller competitors and leading to even more layoffs.

Racist discrimination imposes a special burden on black and Latino workers, who suffer from either a doubly high rate of joblessness and lower wages for those who manage to find work. Racism enables the bosses to reap hundreds of billions of dollars from these wage and job differentials, while dividing and weakening the working class’s efforts in trying to fight these attacks. Capitalists need us only healthy enough to create profits, fight their imperialist wars for them, and bear the children the bosses can exploit in the future. These are the narrow limits of Obama’s concern for the masses’ well-being. 

U.S. Bosses in Dogfight

Obamacare’s troubled progress and narrow 5-4 margin in the Supreme Court reflects sharpening conflict among U.S. bosses. The needs of U.S. imperialists who must deal with sharpening global rivalry are not always aligned with the needs of the drug, insurance and HMO bosses, who make their profits primarily from domestic exploitation rather than imperialist wars. 

At the top of Obama’s imperialist agenda is his need to rein in runaway medical expenditures and thereby fund his masters’ war efforts. Second is the imposition of fascist discipline on all capitalists, great and small. Third is fostering patriotism by making workers dependent upon and loyal to a “benevolent” U.S. government.

This isn’t the first time the liberal imperialist wing has tried to advance health care reform as a political strategy. Ted Kennedy made it the centerpiece of his aborted 1980 White House bid. Bill and Hillary Clinton pushed hard for it in Clinton’s first term but were thwarted by the insurance and drug companies. Today it’s the politicians fronting for the domestically oriented bosses who balk at the more centralized control that Obamacare represents. And despite the Supreme Court ruling, the bosses’ internal fight is far from over.

Obama’s inability to rally broad unity for his mandates is a disappointment to liberal, imperialist Brookings Institute think-tankers, who shed crocodile tears for the uninsured while exposing the fact that Obamacare is not all what it seems:

[B]eneath the surface, the ruling is less liberal than it looks....First, the Medicaid ruling limits the power of the federal government to encourage states to extend medical care. This gives states the authority to resist national efforts to expand health insurance....Second, although Chief Justice Roberts supported the constitutionality of the individual mandate, his opinion limited the ability of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce through tactics other than taxes. This part of the decision will restrict the ability of future Congresses to regulate commerce.... The ultimate result of this decision will be that fewer uninsured will be covered than thought by health care reformers (Brookings website, 6/29/12).

The liberal reformers touting Obamacare may deceive some into thinking the U.S. is on the road to a single-payer healthcare system, a la Canada, which seems to be less costly and more efficient. In reality, however, Canada’s system is paid for by higher taxes on the working class as a whole — not so different from Obamacare, with the difference that U.S. workers have the added burden of paying for the profits of the drug, insurance, and hospital corporations.

Only Communism Can Provide for Workers’ Health

Only a communist system, one that puts workers’ needs first, can provide health care that benefits the whole working class. Without bosses and profits, workers — who produce all value in society — can allocate that value to their class’s collective health. Without a parasitic ruling class, health care will be distributed on a communist basis: from each according to their commitment to the social good, and to each according to their need. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for in organizing for a communist revolution. Join us!

Obama’s recent order, Deferred Action, to delay some deportations of undocumented immigrants (see back page) constitutes a classic capitalist Big Lie. (The Big Lie refers to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic and anti-communist propaganda technique based on the idea that “the great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”)

This is an attack on workers masquerading as a benefit. It comes from the president who has deported more than 1.4 million workers, more than any administration in U.S. history. According to the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece, the New York Times (6/17/12), Obama is bringing “joy and relief” to undocumented Latino workers by delaying deportations for a small minority.

In reality, however, the edict has several anti-working class aims. These include re-electing war-maker Obama, sustaining racist, low-wage exploitation, and fostering “government-as-savior” patriotism, particularly encouraging military service among Latino youth. 

The fact that the new policy targets only 800,000 of the 12 million workers that the bosses label “illegal” exposes Obama’s resolve to keep squeezing super-profits from the masses of undocumented workers. Farm work, the main destination of those without papers, pays workers at less than half the rate of other industries. Obama’s “kindness” relegates these mainly Latino workers to rock-bottom pay and wretched living conditions under the unrelieved threat of deportation.

The Times shamelessly praises Obama’s opportunist immigration ploy to lure Latino workers to the polls as “a play for a key voting bloc in the states that will decide whether he gets another term” (6/16/12). The Times speaks for the dominant, imperialist faction of the U.S. ruling class’s finance capitalists who yearn for four more years of Obama as invader/assassin-in-chief. He has been proven to be willing and ready to spill workers’ blood to confront challenges to U.S. imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Russia and China.

Obama, Most Militarily Aggressive U.S. President

On April 29, the Times gave space to Peter Bergen, director of the finance-capital-backed New America Foundation, which supplies many foreign policy advisors to Obama’s reelection campaign. Bergen hailed Obama as “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” Republican Mitt Romney, on the other hand, poses potential problems for a ruling class that requires ever-wider wars. His proposed platform of “military build-up amid tax cuts” may prove unworkable.

Obama’s immigration move stands to aid U.S. imperialism’s long-range plans by encouraging enlistment. On June 16, the Times editorialized that Obama has effectively revived the Dream Act, “a bill in Congress to give legal status to young immigrants who go to college or serve in the military....It is well past time to make a more sensible and humane immigration policy the law of the land.” Obama’s new order applies only to under-31-year-olds, and only to those “qualified” at that. It is a backdoor hunt for cannon fodder.

Further, as the Times editorialized (9/20/2010) about Latino youth, “The Defense Department, at least, understands their value.” Laws moving these young people into the military “is one of its official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force.’”

Meanwhile, the rulers’ racist practices, like New York’s stop-and-frisk policy and state anti-immigrant laws that encourage racial profiling, produce arrest records that would disqualify — and deport — the very same Latino youth whose Obama’s edict would supposedly free.

Most dangerous of all is Obama’s attempt to obscure the reality of class antagonism. As worldwide imperialist rivalry intensifies, U.S. rulers need greater all-class unity in support of overseas wars and a domestic police state, both of which run directly against workers’ interests. So Obama & Co. trot out the myth that government can serve and protect our class.

Obama Using Latino Workers As An Election Ploy

The Times hopes that Obama’s latest trick will lead millions of Latino workers to look to him as a compassionate savior: “It sent a clear signal to fast-growing Hispanic populations in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and other states that he understood their frustration at his lack of progress so far in addressing problems with the immigration system and reducing the number of deportations” (6/16/12). Obama seeks their votes in these key battleground states to put him over the top in November’s election.

Gary Hart, a leading pro-Obama strategist for U.S. imperialists, co-authored the revealing Hart-Rudman reports commissioned by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Those reports foresaw the 9/11 attacks in stating that an attack on the U.S. homeland would transform popular post-Vietnam anti-war opposition into support for the rulers’ new imperialist adventures. But the ruling class overestimated 9/11’s potential to “galvanize the nation” into patriotic fervor for drawn-out wars that would create a consolidated, fascist state apparatus.

Hart-Rudman led to the the creation of Homeland  Security which spread fear and anti-Muslim racism. It also helped acceptance of the Big Lie of weapons of mass destruction and of the invasion of Iraq.  

At the time, Hart underestimated workers’ growing disillusionment with capitalist political leaders and wars as the workers became more and more improverished. He hopes Obama can reverse the trend. On the eve of Obama’s immigration announcement, Hart wrote:

For more than four decades most Americans identified the Democratic Party with a social contract and safety net, equality of justice and opportunity, and progressive — yes, even liberal — causes....But beginning dramatically in the 1970s things changed. Things being: globalization and foreign competition; the decline of the manufacturing base; petroleum-producing nations controlling the price of oil; and the unsustainable costs of cold war military engagements and deployments....The Democratic response…cost the party its identity.... A well-motivated Democratic president now struggles to move the nation forward against a conservative tide that emerged in the policy vacuum created by Democratic failure to adapt (NYT, 6/15/12).

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal won him working-class support for World War II. Civil rights laws helped Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson win support for genocidal war in Vietnam, though the war eventually turned workers against U.S. rulers. As November approaches and the capitalists’ profit scramble sharpens into regional (Syria and Iran) and global (Russia and China) wars, watch out for more double-edged “blessings” from Obama.

Don’t Fall for U.S. Rulers’ Big Lies

We must win workers to learn from this history of ruling-class ploys and help them to resist being sucked into imperialist wars that kill our working-class sisters and brothers worldwide. We must lead them to support these workers’ struggles against global capitalist exploitation.

Progressive Labor Party has long championed immigrant workers’ battles against racist super-exploitation, from window manufacturing workers in Chicago to garment workers and aerospace parts workers in Los Angeles to farm workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. We must step up such class struggle and unite immigrant workers with black, Asian, white and all Latino workers in all the mass organizations in which we participate.

Multi-racial unity is essential to organizing a communist revolution that will destroy the bosses and their profit system which sucks the blood of our class. Then we can create a society run by and for the working class, producers of all value, which will be shared according to need. That is PLP’s goal. Join us.