NEWARK, NJ, August 13 — Forty five thousand Verizon “wireline” workers struck their bosses last Sunday.  Like the mass uprising of workers in Wisconsin, the decision by Verizon workers to go on strike is a breath of fresh air in the current climate of joblessness and economic crisis. With 25 million adults looking for full-time work, the decision to strike takes courage! We in the Progressive Labor Party salute this courage.

PLP members here have gone to the strike picket lines all this past week. We have brought fellow workers and students with us. We helped lead militant chants on the line of “Shut it down, shut it tight, the bosses can’t profit when the workers unite”; “The workers united will never be defeated” in English and Spanish, and “Make the bosses take the losses.” Many workers took CHALLENGE and a Party flyer analyzing the big picture. Workers clapped when we came back a second time with others. We had great political conversations with workers, and renewed at least one old friendship (see more next issue).

Along with many other bosses, Verizon chiefs are expanding the limits of recent attacks on the working class. Although Verizon posted $22 billion in profits over the past four years, the bosses are demanding $3,000 per year additional health care contributions per worker, the elimination of pensions for new hires, severe cuts on current pensions, givebacks on sick days, etc. As a further insult, Lowell McAdams, Verizon’s CEO, made $20,650 an hour in total compensation in 2007.

This may be a long strike. Like all U.S. capitalists, Verizon bosses are in a dogfight for the number one position against domestic and “foreign” competition. To maximize their profits, Verizon has been downsizing and firing “wireline” workers, while expanding the lower-paid, non-union wireless division. Because the vast majority of Verizon’s profits come from that division, they have viciously opposed union organizing of those workers. A strike in 2000 challenged these anti-worker policies, but the Communication Workers of America (CWA) leadership caved in on unionization demands. Since then, Verizon has vastly expanded their wireless workforce.

CWA union bosses pose this strike as a defense against Republican “attacks on the middle class.” This idea keeps workers from understanding that it is the whole working class that is being forced to pay for the economic crisis of the whole capitalist system and their imperialist wars to control oil and gas overseas.

CWA leaders support Democratic politicians, who pose as friends of the workers, but are actually squeezing us more for the war-makers than the Republicans. Even beating back some of these attacks would take a united, militant strike that shuts down the company’s wireless division and organized mass community support to surround closed worksites. CWA sellouts will oppose these kinds of tactics every step of the way.

PLP members in the Northeast must go to the picket lines with friends, food and drink, leaflets, and CHALLENGEs. We must raise resolutions of support for the strikers in unions, churches, community organizations and student clubs. The international, class-conscious, anti-racist leadership of communists could have a big political effect on the strikers.

The bosses need us, but we don’t need the bosses. They exist to steal the value we produce, which comes only from our class. Nothing operates without us. Wireline workers, who built, build and maintain the Verizon wireless network, can also shut it down. Such an action would be a school for communism.

When the wage slaves of the world come to see our collective strength, no force on earth can stop us. PLP aims to lead that great power towards the overthrow of capitalism, and the advent of a communist system where all the value we produce will be used solely to meet the needs of our class.J

Verizon Pays No Taxes, Steals $12 Billion from Workers

This year Verizon is raking in $6 billion profits and paid a $10 billion dividend to its parent company last year while PAYING NO TAXES! Now, they’re demanding $1 billion in give-backs from the workers who produced this gigantic profit.

Said Citizens for Tax Justice, “Despite earning over $32.5 billion over the last three years, Verizon not only paid nothing in corporate income taxes, it actually received nearly $1 billion...in tax benefits from the federal government during that time,” the same amount as the concessions they’re demanding.

If Verizon paid the official 35% corporate income tax rate, they would have owed $11 billion. So that amount plus the $1 billion govenment subsidy means they’ve stolen $12 billion from tax-paying workers.

Meanwhile, the company’s top five executives grabbed $257 million over the past four years. CEO Lowell McAdam gets $55,000 per day! Capitalism means stealing.

WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 30 — At a rally and march to the White House today sponsored by Save Our Schools (SOS), some of the 3,000 angry and enthusiastic teachers, parents and education advocates vigorously took up the chant started by a PLP member: “Obama and Duncan, you can’t hide!  We charge you with Education genocide!” Duncan is Obama’s Secy. of Education.

SOS’s reform demands included: 1) Equitable funding of all public schools; 2) An end to high-stakes testing; 3) Local curriculum development; and 4) Teacher/community leadership on policy questions.

Participants were rightfully outraged by ongoing school “deform,” an effort by ruling-class billionaires like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg to replace public schools with charter schools, cut resources for education and maintain the most severe racial segregation since the 1960s. “Deform” would coerce millions of teachers to abandon serious education by threatening bad evaluations and loss of employment unless they “get with the program” and do little more than test preparation, all year, every year.

In just an hour’s time, 50 people took CHALLENGE with serious interest, clearly understanding — after a brief discussion — that it stands for communist politics and the fight against racism.  Some gave contributions.

One of the keynote speakers, Diane Ravitch, who served in the Bush administration — while now opposing No Child Left Behind (which she previously supported) — failed to challenge the central tenet of Obama’s “Race to the Top”: an effort by U.S. imperialism to maintain its lucrative and bloody empire, in part, by out-competing its rivals to train large numbers of top engineers, scientists and mathematicians. This international competition and rivalry is the basic cause of imperialist war and massive human devastation.

Ravitch’s 2010 book, “The Life and Death of the Great American School System,” upholds her earlier essentially anti-communist attacks on those who view public schools, in her words, as institutions “devised by scheming capitalists to impose ‘social control’ on an unwilling proletariat or to reproduce social inequality” — which is precisely what they are. Though capitalists claim their public schools are “the door to equal opportunity,”  they recreate the profit system’s class structure — rich and poor, bosses and workers — in each new generation, while maintaining massive racist segregation.

A vivid example of what they want taught is contained in one state’s 2011 high-stakes test, which must be passed to graduate. The question was asked about the purpose of the International Monetary Fund. The “right answer” was “to help and support people in developing nations.” In reality, the IMF’s basic policy of “structural readjustment” prioritizes profits for the rich, spawning soaring food prices and expanding intensification of hunger. This test question and answer represents a purely capitalist point of view.

Such test questions will be part of a national curriculum, known as the Common Core Standards. In upcoming years, teacher evaluations and jobs will be tied to their students’ scores on tests, based on that kind of curriculum. As the U.S. ruling class prepares for more and bigger wars with their international rivals, beyond Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, they will tighten their ideological control of what gets taught, and intensify their efforts to propagandize for unthinking wartime loyalty to the needs of capitalist rulers.

As we build a multi-racial movement to fight school “deform,” we must strive to defeat the capitalist class and its dead-end ideology and win students to participate and play an active, leading role. This requires the spreading of PLP’s ideas to win masses to see the need for communist revolution and to join our Party. That’s the only way to establish a society in which there are no rich exploiting poor but only a working class free of bosses and profits, sharing collectively the value that our class produces.

Despite its recent absence from the news, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan has been moving from bad to worse. After more than two months of befuddling and dodging, the Japanese government finally  admitted the Fukushima plant suffered meltdowns in three of its reactors, releasing more than double its previous estimate of radiation since the March earthquake. (Moreover, government objection to independent testing around the site means these estimates are unconfirmed and probably understate the real amount — (London Telegraph, 6/10).

On June 4, robots entering Reactor 1 reported the highest levels of radiation since the crisis began: 40,000 tons of irradiated water remains in the plant’s lower levels that might or might not be sealed and an unknown amount has leaked into the ocean and surrounding area. (USA Today, 6/4) And questions remain regarding how much radiation has entered the nearby Tokyo water supply. (NY Times, 3/23) Now the Japanese government has admitted that melted fuel might have broken through the containment vessels in Reactors 1-3 which, if true, represents a significant escalation of the disaster. (Bloomberg News, 6/6)

Hundreds of workers in Japan have accepted virtual death sentences by entering the plant to try to contain the meltdown, and 270 retirees and older workers have volunteered to go to Fukushima to help with the containment. One stated, “I will be dead before the cancer gets me.” (Reuters, 6/6) These workers’ sacrifice represents the finest qualities of the working class.

The capitalist class has performed in its usual cowardly way, pushing workers into the plant while hiding safely in Tokyo trying to cover up the scope of the disaster. In a particularly crass move, the Tepco top brass (operators of Fukushima) has to cut workers’ wages 25% to pay for the disaster. (Bloomberg, 4/26) Futhermore, the government refused to expand the evacuation zone “to avoid compensation payments to still more evacuees.” (NYT, 8/9). Under capitalism, workers pay for disasters with both their wages and their lives.

Nuclear Power A Continuing Disaster under Capitalism

The Fukushima disaster cannot be overstated. The meltdown is currently rated as a level 7 nuclear disaster (the highest possible rating), matching the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, which, by some estimates, may have caused one million deaths. (ENS, 4/26) This is significant since the Chernobyl disaster occurred in a less populated area and was contained far more quickly than the currently unfolding Fukushima disaster.

But nuclear plants don’t have to melt down to become deadly. A 2004 U.S. study found Strontium-90 — a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission — in baby teeth. The concentrations of children with this radioactive byproduct were extremely high in communities located within 40 miles of nuclear power plants. (USA Today, 1/2/04) Furthermore, U.S. nuclear power plants have not received thorough and regular inspections, leading companies to continue operating them despite serious problems in safety equipment, in order to maintain high profits. (USA Today, 11/6/03; Democracy Now, 3/27/09; 3/14/11)

Nuclear Power: A Cover for War

The bosses love nuclear power for a variety of reasons. The heavy subsidizing of the nuclear industry (true in all countries) represents huge profits for private firms. Current promised nuclear subsidies in the U.S. represent the transfer of $36 billion from the working class (who pays almost all taxes) to private industry. (MSNBC, 2/16/10)

But the real reason for the growing emphasis on nuclear power is war. The increasing imperialist competition and war for control of energy-producing regions, most notably Central Asia and the Middle East, has led to increasing domestic development of nuclear power in imperialist countries. U.S., Japanese and European capitalists have all placed a heavy emphasis on developing nuclear power to offset their growing dependence on foreign sources of oil and natural gas.

Furthermore, ruling-class support of nuclear power provides a convenient cover for the ongoing development of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power plants are required to produce the various fuel components for nuclear weapons. As capitalists increase their commitment to imperialist war — while public support for these wars wavers — nuclear weapons are seen as important “force multipliers” on the battlefield. A recent report has confirmed that the various nuclear powers, rather than reducing their arsenals, are in fact updating and improving their nuclear weapons systems. (Agency France Press, 6/6)

Nuclear power has been sold to the working class under the lie that it is environmentally “sound,” but the promise of the atom in the hands of capitalists remains today, as it did in 1945: war, death and terror. As a Party we should show our respect and admiration for the brave workers currently battling the Fukushima disaster by building a movement that can crush the murderous capitalist system that created the disaster in the first place.

Capitalism arose gradually hundreds of years ago, mainly through competition among various trades and businesses. They grew into giants that continue to devour their smaller rivals. As corporations try to beat each other to market to sell their products, some inevitably outdo others, leaving the losers with products they can’t sell. But to maintain profits as much as possible, the smaller rivals cut their costs by laying off workers. Even those able to sell their products continually replace some workers with machinery and then speed up the rest.

Capitalists call this process “productivity” and claim that, despite the inevitable layoffs, it is good for both workers and capitalists. After all, they say, this represents progress.

So the underlying cause of unemployment is instability in profits caused by competition among capitalists, combined with their control over employment. Competition is built into the system. Capitalists cannot do away with it, even if they wanted to.

Competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. We’re taught competition is “natural in human society.” We’re even trained to enjoy competition through such things as sports and contests. We’re taught to focus on winners, rarely being reminded that for every winner there are losers, unless we’re among those losers. This process of competition produces losers, psychologically and often monetarily.

Competition inevitably harms some, and often most, whether participants or fans. It fosters individualistic concentration on one’s own welfare, whether real or imagined, and works to destroy class solidarity. Therefore, competition is not good for workers and certainly isn’t “natural.”

A fundamental aspect of capitalism is its use of racism: both to set up competition between white workers and black, Latino, Asian and others, dividing our class and reaping super-profits for the bosses, as well as dragging down conditions for all workers.

Capitalists must maximize profits and expand their business in order to survive. But as winners eat up losers and grow, eventually monopoly results, and competition in that line of business ends — until foreign capitalists move in. For example, Japanese auto manufacturers began to crowd out GM, Ford and Chrysler in the 1970s. Capitalist competition inherently has a tendency to abolish itself, although prolonged through international rivalry.

Each nation’s capitalist class is forced to grab resources, cheap labor and markets. Often this grab requires war; the capitalists become imperialists. Inter-imperialist rivalry is now the cause of every war on the planet, whether local or a world war.

While imperialists invent excuses to fight, in order to gain the loyalty of “their” workers — such as “weapons of mass destruction”; “humanitarian reasons”; “we were attacked”; and scores of other pretexts — the real reason is always international economic competition, To induce “their” workers to fight for them, imperialist governments are forced to lie — the bigger the lie, the more likely workers may believe it — impelling the illusion that, “if it were untrue, no government could get away with it.”

Inter-imperialist rivalry is why the U.S. ruling class, through its government, is sending working-class men and women (usually not their own sons and daughters) to kill other workers, and to risk death themselves, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s why U.S. rulers fought in Korea, Vietnam and in the first Gulf War. That’s why World Wars I and II developed, first among European and Asian bosses and later involving the U.S., and killed tens of millions of workers and others. Competition, with its inevitable outgrowths, is truly a death sentence for millions.

Additionally capitalist competition causes the waste of natural resources and continual pollution of air and water. Pollution heats the atmosphere with oil, coal, and natural gas-derived global warming and the melting of glaciers that provide water to drink, wash in, and to grow food.

The resulting rise in sea level will eventually force billions to move inland and create dislocations that will have unimaginable consequences for the working class (see the article “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System – Only Communism Can Create a Better Sustainable World,” in the Winter 2010 issue of “The Communist” magazine, also available on the PLP website).

Communism the Answer

The opposite of competition is cooperation. Only cooperation can produce winners with no losers. Only the complete absence of competition can produce general well-being. Why should we settle for a system that always produces losers? Particularly when losing under capitalism often spells death. Capitalism is like a gigantic gladiator sport, in which only some who enter the ring will leave it alive, and even the survivors suffer varying degrees of misery.

Communism will produce cooperation without losers. Sporting events can be for exercise and fun without keeping score. Economic winners under capitalism are always capitalists, while the losers are workers. We must destroy this death-dealing system and replaced it with communism.

Communism is run by the world’s working class under the leadership of its communist party for the benefit of our entire class worldwide. Work will then allow us to contribute to the welfare of our class, not just ourselves and our families. We will be able to distribute our needs without money. We will produce only what we need, instead of billions of unnecessary products whose only purpose is capitalist profits. We will eliminate waste of resources and pollution that sickens and kills millions.

Then we will eliminate wars — wars caused by competition between capitalists, that kill millions of workers while capitalists sit home counting their profits. For our long-term future, capitalism-caused climate change will then be brought under control, though it has already started on a course that will be increasingly difficult to reverse. Global warming already causes, and threatens to accelerate, violent weather events that kill hundreds of thousands, though such deaths will become preventable even in the face of such events.

Join and build the PLP to hasten the day that this noble goal is reached around the world. We and our children and grandchildren deserve no less.