The recent upsurge in militant class struggle, as seen in Greece, Egypt, Spain, England, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and the United States, is a heartening development. Over the last two months, the trade union movement in New York City has moved thousands of its members to participate in its Labor Day march and at various rallies connected to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This display of the potential power of the working class has encouraged still more organized workers.

Black, Latino, Asian and white workers from scores of unions, in both the public and private sectors, have made what appears to be a statement of solidarity and unity. Once you get past surface appearances, however, the essence of this activity is something very different. Progressive Labor Party was present at the Labor Day march and lifted the struggle level by raising questions like:

What was the focus of the unions’ Labor Day march? Did it aim to stop the racist threat of public hospital closings at Brookdale in Brooklyn or Peninsula General in Queens? Such a fight would do much to stop the erosion of desperately needed medical care in the predominately black and Latino communities that these hospitals serve — and the layoffs that these closings would require. PL’ers have supported these struggles by joining picket lines and demonstrations at the hospitals, along with our coworkers and friends. Our solidarity efforts, communist ideas and CHALLENGE were warmly received by rank-and-file hospital workers, many of whom have become our friends.

It would have been great if the Labor Day march had taken a stand against the racist crisis of unemployment that grips every segment of the working class at an “actual” rate (including underemployed and “marginally attached” workers) of more than 21 percent (shadowstats.com). We say that unemployment is racist because black, Latino and immigrant youth are victimized by joblessness by a multiple of three times the overall rate. But the union “leaders” have no plan to fight either health care cuts or massive, racist unemployment.

What if workers organized to force the New York City Central Labor Council (NYCLC) to call for a citywide general strike to stop the layoffs of some 800 public school support workers? The struggle led by PL earlier this year at the John Jay High School campus in Brooklyn showed how students, teachers and parents could be won to unite and militantly confront the racist Department of Education.

What if such a general strike had demanded an end to the imperialist oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? If the NYCLC organized such a strike, we would begin to see real working-class power in action. Instead, we saw calls for patriotism and support for U. S. imperialism via signs “remembering” those who died on 9/11.

If the Labor Day march had been intended to build real working-class unity, it wouldn’t have stopped at East 66th street. It would have continued into Central Park and joined striking restaurant workers at the Central Park Boathouse as the PL did. Plers built support for this strike in the weeks before Labor Day and leafleted that march to guarantee that many marchers, including those we brought, would indeed show their solidarity with the strikers. The valiant, mainly women immigrant restaurant workers were able to win union recognition and a contract. Still, a massive outpouring of marchers into the park would have helped build unity and fought racism, sexism and anti-immigrant sentiments. From this New York restaurant to a Chicago library to a California grocery chain, PL has sought to build solidarity campaigns to fan the embers of working-class struggle. In the process, we have met wonderful people who are excited by our revolutionary communist ideas.

What if workers demanded that instead of marching up 5th Avenue, past the luxury buildings housing the richest 1% of New York, we had marched in the working-class areas of Brooklyn where the 99% live? What if we had rallied in front of the Flatbush Gardens housing complex where unionized workers have been locked out since last November? Or if we had joined the picket lines at Long Island University, where teachers were on strike and in opposition to tying any raise to tuition increases? Then we could have been built worker-student unity!

What if Verizon workers in the Communication Workers of America, who had joined the OWS activities by rallying in front of Verizon Corporate headquarters on October 21, had instead renewed their strike against Verizon? Then they would have harnessed the anger stoked by OWS against a corporation that amassed $22.5 billion in profits and paid its top five executives $258 million in the last four years — while moving to slash worker benefits, sick leave and raising health insurance costs and eliminating job security. What if the 110,000 members of the American Federation Of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, whose contract expired a year and a half ago, went out on strike for a new contract and to restore cuts and laid-off workers? Then these workers would be taking on the fascist Taylor Law. The spark of OWS would have led to sharper class struggle.

The reason these things haven’t happened is because the unions’ role is to maintain capitalism! The leaders mimic the bosses by demanding obscene salaries. A case in point: Gerald McIntee, International President of AFSCME, was paid $479,328 in 2009. AFSCME’s District Council (DC) 37 head, Lillian Roberts, earned $343,467, or about 10 times the average wage of DC 37 members.

To fight New York State’s Taylor Law or the wave of anti-union laws passed in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, the unions would need to break the bosses’ laws and expose their rigged system. Instead, they channel workers’ anger and frustration into the voting booth.

In 2008, the unions’ political action committees spent more than $80 million on federal elections and elected their “friends” to the White House and Congress. Having “won,” they then failed to get their top issue passed, the “card check” method for organizing new bargaining units. This proves yet again that governing power is not determined by elections but rather serves the interests of the ruling class, regardless of which party wins the latest contest.

When a spark like OWS seems to challenge the hold the bosses have over our lives, the union honchos, ever faithful to their friends in high places, organize through coalitions like “stronger for all” to blunt the energy and anger of OWS protesters and to deliver the union rank and file into the waiting arms of the bosses’ “Demopublican” party operatives. Year after year, we are urged by union leaders to vote for lesser-evil candidates (usually Democrats), who promise us fewer cuts and more crumbs. The reality is seen in the current debate in Washington, which is between catastrophic or merely disastrous cuts in services that workers need. Workers choose only one thing in these elections: who will be their oppressor.

Progressive Labor Party has a different plan. We understand that workers create all wealth. We know that under capitalism, the value they produce is stolen from them every day. We want to use the power and fighting unity of the working class to destroy the capitalist system. While we support the necessary fights that workers wage for better wages and benefits, we understand that under the bosses’ system, every reformist gain that is won can be taken back from us. The process of building Progressive Labor Party in these fights strengthens our class’s ability to fight back today as well as preparing us for the bigger fight to come.

That is the fight for communism, a system where the working class takes power, and where everything produced is for the use and benefit of the working class. A society where racism and sexism are outlawed. A system where there is no immigrant/citizen divide, and no more rich and poor.

Get off the bosses’ treadmill and join us in building a society that can truly serve our needs! Join Progressive Labor Party. Read and distribute CHALLENGE. Build for communist revolution!

HASSI R’MEL, ALGERIA, November 1 — The Arab Spring that overturned three neighboring dictatorships has been meaningless for natural gas workers in Algeria, who still suffer from the capitalists dominating the country. They’ve been fighting for back pay and are demanding a 30% wage hike.

On October 27, about 400 workers sat in at the Sonatrach regional headquarters here, the site of Africa’s biggest natural gas field, and attempted a second one two days later. On October 30, the movement spread to workers in the Amont division, who staged a protest outside company headquarters in Algiers.

Multinational Sonatrach is Africa’s biggest oil-and-gas company and the 12th biggest in the world. It has 22 subsidiaries and employed 48,062 workers in 2010.

Rank-and-file workers say they will radicalize their movement if management does not meet their demands. In particular, they’re threatening to repudiate their newly elected union representatives for failing to back their demands, which also include an end to the job promotions freeze.

The movement began in the summer, after management failed to pay the wage hikes obtained in the April 2011 union contract. In June, the workers upped their demands to a 25% across-the-board wage hike (now 30%) instead of the previous contract’s 8% to 25%, depending on one’s work category.

Since then, the workers have held numerous meetings and general assemblies and have drawn up a 15-point platform of demands.

Currently the company is somewhat on the defensive, scrambling to mail out checks to cover the April increases that were never paid. Obviously, they’re trying to buy off the workers and nip the protest movement in the bud before a majority of the rank and file swing over to demanding a completely new contract.

The bold actions and demands of these Algerian gas workers are a beacon to workers around the world. But as the Sonatrach workers know, the ink is barely dry on a union contract when the bosses — with the help of their junior partners in the union leadership — begin to chip away at everything the workers have won. That’s why the only way our class can make real gains is by destroying capitalism altogether through communist revolution.J

NEW YORK CITY, October 17 — Occupy Wall Street (OWS), spreading across the U.S. and worldwide, holds both promise and danger for the working class. It’s now clear that large numbers are seeking an end to the profit system’s misery and injustice. At the same time, Obama and union misleaders are embracing this protest for their own reasons. For the capitalists, OWS represents yet another ruling class effort to funnel workers’ anger down the dead-end road of reforming capitalism, especially through electoral politics (see page 2). 

The good news is that many in the movement’s growing ranks reject the patriotic goals of the “one-percenters.” On a subway headed to Wall Street, a rider asked, “Are you going to the protest? I’m with you. Your banner says ‘Fight for communism’? I’m not so sure about that, but it sure is true the current system is failing. Stronger regulation of capitalism won’t work. We need to learn from the mistakes of past communist movements because a revolution is what’s needed. Okay, I’ll read this paper.”

When this kind of political discussion breaks out between strangers on a train, it’s a sign that things are changing. The growth of OWS is driven by a profound frustration with capitalism’s inability to provide a decent future for the broad masses of workers. In the face of repeated police repression, brave demonstrators have taken to the streets of New York. More important, many are open to communist ideas and to having the Progressive Labor Party participate in their movement.

On the October 15-16 weekend, as PL members chanted some slogans — “It’s not just Wall Street, it’s capitalism”; “The 99% needs revolution, not reform”; “The 99% need communism” — they were met with near-universal agreement. More than 500 PL leaflets were distributed among protesters and others who came to Zucotti Park to check things out. Friends of PL have been critical in helping spread the communist message, an important step forward toward real change.

U.S. Flag A Banner for Imperialist War

Previously, a larger group of PL’ers, including several youth, had met with a similarly positive response, but they also encountered the dangerous patriotic ideology — the bosses’ ideology — that has infiltrated the movement. A protester holding high a large U.S. flag took issue with a Party banner that read, “Fight for Communism, Join PLP.” A lively exchange ensued in which we attacked his flag and defended our banner as being more in tune with the future that protesters were demanding and deserved. Others gravitated to the debate, and several political discussions spun off.

Attacking the U.S. flag as the flag of imperialist war, the most hated banner in the world, brought out pointed disagreement. Attacking the U.S. Constitution as a slave-owners’ document provoked other sharp exchanges. But through it all, a friendly tone of struggle won most people, some of them initially hostile, to weigh our message against their assumptions. We will continue participating in even larger numbers.

Opportunistic Democratic politicians and their union boss allies are striving to subvert OWS into re-electing war-maker Obama. “[A] consensus is emerging among Democrats that the ‘Occupy’ movement is worth tapping into, even helping along and joining with in some instances” (ABC News, 10/10/11). “I support the message to the establishment,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on ABC’s “This Week” (10/9/11). “Change has to happen.” Labor hacks from the AFL-CIO to AFSCME to the SEIU are lending huge financial support. SEIU boss Mary Kay Healy found “incredible inspiration” in OWS (“The Hill,” 10/15/11).

But meanwhile, these union sellouts do absolutely nothing to fight the layoffs of 660 NYC school aides and other low-paid workers, the 99 per-center victims of the one per-centers’ crisis. Goldman Sachs’ brokers stole $15 billion in bonuses while billionaire NYC Mayor Bloomberg can’t find the money to keep these  $14-an-hour school staffers on the job. As leaders from the United Federation of Teachers spout their lip-service support for OWS, they make not a peep as workers are thrown out of their classrooms and their jobs. Why this seeming contradiction? These union leaders are in the hip pockets of the one percent.

Rulers’ Shill Jesse Jackson Tells OWS’ers, ‘Don’t Fight’

The liberal phonies are making a special push to corral black workers in OWS — the ones hit hardest by the racist New Depression — away from meaningful, militant action and into futile voting. One-time Democratic White House candidate Jesse Jackson urged them to “maintain your disciplined focus, your peaceful nonviolent approach to protest and demand change. In the end, we will win” (Rainbow/Push website, 10/11/11). The “we” Jackson refers to is the U.S. ruling class, which has called his tune from the start of his public life. Back in 1978, the Rockefeller brothers anointed Jackson as their dutiful servant with their “Public Service” award.

Capitalist Press Clouds Billionaire Soros’s OWS Role

Although U.S. imperialists don’t yet control OWS as they would like, they most certainly helped spark it. The first call to “occupy Wall Street” came this past summer from an online magazine called Adbusters, a beneficiary of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, whose biggest sugar daddy is none other than billionaire U.S. imperialist George Soros.

The ruling-class media’s bizarre treatment of this link suggests just how much they want to conceal it. At 11:09 AM on October 13, mainstream Reuters’ coverage led with, “Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.” By 5:25 PM, Reuters had changed the same article to begin, “George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics….” At 6:45 PM, Reuters had the original opener followed by a disclaimer from Soros & Co. In the face of the money-trail facts, liberal rulers spin the lie that only right-wing lunatics see an OWS-Soros tie.

Bankers Provide ‘People’s Park’ as Protest Site

Zuccotti Park, the demonstrators’ New York base, did not fall from the sky. “People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it,” NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg told a September 16 press conference. He obliged with a private park owned by Brookfield Properties, property agents for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, among others. The mayor’s lady-friend, Diana Taylor, serves on Brookfield’s board. Brookfield head honcho John Zuccotti, the Park’s owner, once ran the big-bank-loving Downtown Lower Manhattan Association founded by David Rockefeller.

The grip on OWS of reforming capitalism is growing stronger. On the Sunday morning TV talk shows, an OWS representative blasted “shared sacrifice,” saying the “working class” had already given enough. When the news anchor pressed for a “political strategy,” his reply was, “We won’t say for whom but we want all the allies of our movement to vote.”

Clearly the liberal rulers have a plan: they want to make OWS the beginning of Obama’s 2012 election campaign. “We are the 99%” is within the scope of Obama’s “tax-the-rich” strategy to more fully fund and popularize imperialist war. Black volunteers from the Democratic Party were canvassing for Obama’s phony jobs bill.

But this movement is also a direct result of frustration with the failures of voting. OWS resonates because elections have flopped. This disdain for ruling-class politics is good. But there’s a long way to go. There was little sense of mass anger at the police. The mix of counter-cultural, religious, absurdist and reformist politics lends the scene something of a carnival atmosphere. Passers-by are looking for answers. The absence of anti-racist politics is evident, but the crowds are not all white, at least not in Manhattan.

Real Grievances Could Drive OWS Beyond Bosses’ Grip

The sheer mass of protesters, and their increasingly working-class background, may nevertheless upset the rulers’ scenario. At first the media focused on frustrated, mostly white, college grads with suffocating tuition loans. But then multi-racial representatives of the more than 30 million unemployed and under-employed workers starting showing up. That’s when Jesse Jackson felt the need to chime in. The calming post-World War II U.S. social contract — a steady job, a house, college for the kids, and a pension — lies in ruins. Black workers gained it only briefly after fierce fights in the 1960s and 1970s and were the first to lose it.

OWS’s originators claim inspiration from Egypt’s Tahrir Square activists. But what did they win, without communist politics or leadership? The new cabal of military rulers Tahrir Square eased into power recently slaughtered dozens of unarmed Christian opponents. And OWS leaders’ supposed savior Obama had his Africa Military Command send troops into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Power of the Working Class Is Crucial

OWS must spread to support strikers on picket lines and into schools and workplaces through anti-racist sit-ins and job actions in solidarity with OWS. The scope of OWS must be enlarged to oppose U.S. rulers’ oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan which will further improve the conditions for the spread of communist revolutionary ideas. It would make the movement overall more difficult for the ruling-class liberals to hijack and turn into yet another tool of imperialism.

What we do now to organize workers — the class that produces all the value that the 1% steals as profit and who more and more recognize capitalism’s failures —will significantly advance revolution for workers’ power. In participating in OWS, Progressive Labor Party can expose the capitalists trying to steer it, and win rank-and-file protestors to the long, hard struggle for communist revolution.J

CHICAGO, October 13 — Students, hospital workers, and patients’ family members gathered in the rain in front of Stroger Hospital of Cook County this morning to denounce the institutionalized murder of ventilator-dependent patients. “Does a system that kills its weak to save money deserve to exist? No, it does not,” one speaker said.

As public hospitals like Oak Forest Hospital (OFH) are being shut down here, the bosses have trained their sights on the last remaining patients — those too sick and dependent to escape on their own — transferring these patients to poorly-staffed, for-profit nursing homes.

In early September, Michael Yanul, a 58-year-old ventilator patient with muscular dystrophy, who had lived at OFH for 17 years, was forced tomove. At a nursing home called Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, Michael only survived three weeks before succumbing to pneumonia.

According to the national ratings Web site nursinghomerating.org, this 143-bed facility has an overall rating of one out of five stars. They have “widespread administrative deficiencies” and show a “pattern of quality-care deficiencies.” Among short-stay residents at that nursing home, 34% have bedsores and fewer than half received flu vaccine.

Another one of the long-term ventilator patients from OFH, David Moreno, 34, is particularly concerned about what happened to his former friend. Michael lived down the hall from David on the OFH vent unit. David suffered paralysis from a spinal cord injury 12 years ago and, like Michael, cannot breathe without a machine.

After OFH closed on September 2, he was moved to the Coronary ICU at Stroger Hospital until a long-term placement could be arranged. His social worker told him that the hospital administration plans to move him to Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, where Michael died last month. “I’m scared of going to that place,” he said in a recent interview.

By attacking the most vulnerable patients first, the bosses expect to desensitize workers and prepare the way for more murderous attacks. The Nazi Holocaust began as coordinated, hospital-based murders of physically and mentally handicapped patients (see box).

We distributed CHALLENGE and passed out flyers to patients and workers arriving for the morning shift, exposing the hospital administration’s plans to kill off the few remaining ventilator-dependent patients through deliberate decisions that result in completely predictable deaths.

Their calculations are straightforward. It costs nearly $3,000 a day to keep a patient on a respirator in the ICU. It costs about $2,000 in a high-quality long-term vent unit. It costs about $500 a day at the death-trap nursing home. In a year the administration can save enough to pay the salary of the new CEO, about $550,000.

Our picket line featured large photographs of three OFH vent patients, Michael, David and one other survivor, Posey Conley. Their large images looking directly at passers-by made a stark contrast to the cold financial calculations that administrators were making to sacrifice their lives for the budget.

Several nurses, technicians and other hospital workers came out for our actions even though they had never been to a protest before. They helped pass out flyers and chanted. They didn’t lose confidence even when the hospital police harassed us and threatened protestors with arrest. Eventually we moved about 40 yards away from the front door and resumed our picket. The husband of a patient joined the picket line. He grabbed the bullhorn in a spirited defense of his wife and every other patient who depends on public medical services, asking “This could happen to anyone — Who’s next?”

We collected names of new contacts and deepened our relationships with friends in this little skirmish. For years we have been talking about the development of fascism in society at large and in medicine in particular. Today it is right in front of us and we confronted it squarely. We made some modest gains; this fight is far from over. All workers’ lives are precious to our class. But none of our lives mean anything to the billionaires unless we can be used to make them richer. Their murderous system must be destroyed if workers are to live.J

Hitler’s ‘Euthanasia’: Medical Murder

The Nazi “Euthanasia” Program, 1939-1944

The gas chambers and other mass killing techniques that the Nazis eventually used to kill millions of Jews and others were developed on Germans living in chronic-care public hospitals.

Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston neurologist and psychiatrist, was called as a special expert witness to testify before the Nuremberg tribunal investigating the actions of German physicians during World War II.  In 1949 he published a summary of his testimony in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). He described how the most advanced medical profession in the world was transformed into an appendage of the militarized state, how it lost touch with its mission to care for the sick and infirm. Embracing the politics of the day with patriotic fervor, doctors and other health professionals actively organized a program that was referred to as euthanasia.

In the opening paragraph of his NEJM article, Dr Alexander describes “a rapid decline in standards of professional ethics. Medical science in Nazi Germany collaborated … in the following enterprises: the mass extermination of the chronically sick in the interest of saving ‘useless’ expenses to the community as a whole; [and] the mass extermination of those considered socially disturbing or racially and ideologically unwanted…”

He goes on to describe the system: “The decision regarding which patients should be killed was made entirely on the basis of [limited] information by expert consultants…. These consultants never saw the patients themselves. …[Q]uestionnaires were collected by a ‘Realm’s Work Committee of Institutions for Cure and Care.’ … The ‘Charitable Transport Company for the Sick’ transported patients to the killing centers, and the ‘Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care’ was in charge of collecting the cost of the killings from the relatives, without, however, informing them what the charges were for; in the death certificates the cause of death was falsified.”

When Cook County arranges transportation of undocumented patients to home countries where we know they will not receive the treatments that are keeping them alive, that policy should be referred to as administrative euthanasia. When patients on ventilators are forced to move to nursing homes with none of the resources or expertise needed to care for them properly and a track record of extremely high mortality, that, too, should be labeled administrative euthanasia.

Dr. Alexander concluded, “Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.”