The upcoming presidential election campaign between the U.S. capitalists’ twin stooges, Barack Obama and Mitt Romeny, marks a critical period for the candidates’ imperialist handlers. Facing large rivals (China, Russia) and smaller ones (Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda), the bosses’ solution requires ever-widening wars led by the U.S. in the Middle East and Asia, especially over energy resources. To wage them, they need to win millions of workers to back the U.S. rulers’ policies, now personified by Obama.

It’s a difficult proposition for the bosses, since these policies are directly opposed to workers’ class interests. Romney’s election could make it even more difficult, since he’s a more transparent enemy of workers and youth.

The trillion-dollar funding for war requires savage cuts in wages, pensions, healthcare, schools and other social services. As a result, Obama’s ruling-class publicists must lie to workers about his intent to end wars, while reassuring U.S. capitalists of his resolve to expand them.

On May 20, the New York Times, U.S. imperialism’s leading popular mouthpiece, informed readers of Obama’s “peaceful” Afghan intentions. In 2009, he “had reluctantly (our emphasis, ed.) decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops.” The Times then elaborated on Obama’s fake anti-militarism: “A year later, when the president...began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely....And when Mr. Obama joins the leaders of other NATO nations in Chicago...he will announce what he has already told the leaders in private: All combat operations led by American forces will cease in summer 2013.” 

Just a month earlier, however, the Times headlined a fawning op-ed article, “Warrior in Chief.” It boasted that the “president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” Obama’s use of deadly force — in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia — stood to his everlasting credit, the Times said. 

Bosses’ Think Tanks Pave Way For War Policies

These seemingly contradictory articles, excerpted from books aimed at pushing Obama’s re-election, flow from the same imperialist sector of U.S. capitalism. Peter Bergen, who wrote the Obama-as-warrior piece, directs the New America Foundation (NAF) and is the author of the forthcoming book Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad (the city in Pakistan where Bin Laden was killed).

The Obama-as-pacifist piece was by David Sanger, a top Times Washington correspondent and the author of the soon-to-be-published Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. He belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which — like the NAF — is bankrolled by the dominant Rockefeller wing of U.S. bosses. A large number of Obama’s foreign policy advisers hail from these two think tanks.

Political and economic reality gives the lie to Obama’s Afghan peace charade. The U.S. needs to dominate the vast Turkmenistan gas supplies that flow through Afghanistan, shaky ally Pakistan, and hesitant ally India. This was a primary motive for the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Afghanistan, but it continues to elude Obama & Co. As the Times editorialized on the eve of Obama’s NATO summit, Afghanistan’s Kandahar and Helmand Provinces are still a base for the Taliban and “remain heavily contested” (5/19/12). 

So don’t expect U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan anytime soon. In fact, Obama signed a pact with the corrupt Afghan regime to provide enough military force and finances to fight the Taliban until 2024. But all is not well between the U.S. bosses and their junior partners in Kabul, who now want the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India (TAPI) pipeline all for themselves. Meanwhile, the U.S. invaders’ racism has provoked rank-and-file Afghan soldiers to kill their NATO mentors in a wave of escalating attacks. Neither Sanger nor Bergen mention this development.

Paid Mercenaries Fill In For Troop-Short Army

Even if most uniformed GIs leave Afghanistan someday, what will most likely follow is a bloody, Iraq-style occupation by Pentagon-paid U.S. contractors and mercenaries. These hired guns, brought in to supplement a troop-short U.S. Army, are already guarding Exxon Mobil’s oil wells. They’re being entrusted with the prize that has led a quartet of U.S. presidents to promote mass murder in and around Iraq: George H.W. Bush, with the first Gulf War; Bill Clinton’s murderous bombings and sanctions; George W. Bush’s reinvasion and racist occupation; Obama’s continued slaughter. Meanwhile, a deadly civil war seethes in the beleaguered country.

Imperialist tool Sanger, boosting Obama’s Afghan “pacifism,” suggests a bigger-fish-to-fry scenario for world war. According to a press release for Confront and Conceal, “Sanger describes how Obama’s early idealism about fighting ‘a war of necessity’ in Afghanistan quickly turned to fatigue and frustration...and how an effort to re-establish American power in the Pacific set the stage for a new era of tensions with the world’s great rising power, China.”

These plans for past, present and future U.S. imperialist wars have killed millions of workers and youth in the Middle East and South Asia, and will inevitably kill millions more. They have sent tens of thousands of U.S. GIs to their graves or to lives damaged by war wounds, physical and mental.

Obama’s Warmongering A Racist Body Blow to U.S. Workers

To pay for the U.S. war machine, Obama’s policies — which a President Mitt Romney would no doubt follow — are heaping misery on the U.S. working class. Social services have been slashed, and Social Security may follow. Wages have been halved at General Motors under Obama’s bailout plan, swelling the company’s profits. Criminal bankers reap bonuses while tens of millions endure joblessness. Undocumented workers are terrorized under threat of deportation. All of these crimes against the working class stem from the rulers’ need for its military machine to dominate its imperialist rivals.

The repercussions of the capitalists’ crisis falls most heavily on black, Latino and immigrant workers. They suffer twice as much unemployment, far lower wages, and even more pathetic social services. Daycare has been wiped out for millions of minimum-wage workers. A rotting educational system is failing millions of youth. These racist cutbacks create hundreds of billions in super-profits for U.S. bosses to maintain their decadent capitalist system.

It is the task of communists in the Progressive Labor Party, in every country and organization where we are present, to win masses to understand how the profit system is the source of all our class’s problems. They are needed to join and build PLP as the one force that can destroy this exploitative system and usher in a communist world. Then workers’ power will run society to serve the needs of the international working class, which produces everything of value.

Join PLP and emancipate our class!

BROOKLYN, May 1 — At noon today, a handful of students exited Brooklyn Technical High School and gathered at a local café. Although their numbers were smaller than they’d hoped, the students decided to go through with their planned course of action. Lined up in two rows, they began marching and chanting around the school. Soon other students from the school joined them. A march of 15 grew into a march of 50.

Chants were led by a few young people who have been in or around Progressive Labor Party. Instead of limiting the protest to racist cutbacks on education, the chants tied together a number of ills that students face under capitalism. 

There was outrage against recent acts of police brutality,  particularly last month’s murder of Tamon Robinson, a popular employee at a local café. 

In addition, the students marched in solidarity with workers all around the city, the country and the world. Chants of “Whose day? Our Day! What day? May Day!” and “Racist Cops Mean, We Got to Fight Back!” rang throughout the block.

Although the march was somewhat small, the participants’ enthusiasm was unmatched. For over two hours, the Tech students yelled at the top of their lungs. Many displayed a newfound passion for protest and broke out in spontaneous chants when a moment of silence fell over the march. For many participants, this was their first rally. They were clearly glad to be part of it.

Their enthusiasm only ballooned after the Tech group made contact with other students from Paul Robeson High School in Fort Greene. A contingent of Robeson and Tech students continued to chant and cheer at the base of the steps at Fort Greene Park, drawing attention from neighborhood workers and residents. At one point a car drove by and the driver violently honked in support of the march. 

Later, the students gathered at a larger rally at the Sailor’s Monument at the top of Ft. Greene. More than 120 students heard speeches and poems and to participate in teach-ins with progressive teachers.

It’s election season at Queens College, a time when all the register-to-vote-ers and the student government hopefuls rally to show us how effective they think elections are, both on campus and on the national scale. On our campus these election campaigns (both student and presidential) are happening in an immediate context of massive tuition hikes, a heightened exploitation of our teachers, fewer and fewer options for us when we graduate, and an intensifying criminalization of black, Latino, and Muslim students. So, we fought back! 

We organized a “Don’t register to vote, register to REVOLT!” campaign to expose the scam of elections. We made signs, gave out flyers and people took CHALLENGE. A lot of us were surprised at the number of students who connected with our message that elections are nothing but a racist battleground for the bosses to duke out disagreements amongst themselves. 

We won many students and workers to “register to REVOLT!” They gave us their contact information and expressed interest in coming to a weekly speak-out we organized on the campus green. At these speak-outs, issues like racist police brutality in our communities, increasing tuition and the inability of working-class students, especially black and Latino, to afford higher education, are at the center of our conversations. These speak-outs have been very well attended and very politically sharp, not only in ideas but also in organizing actions.

In a political climate where fascism in the forms of brutal policing, anti-immigrant laws and anti-Muslim racism seems to be intensifying, we saw fit to organize around this on campus, since a lot of the students are affected by these issues. 

It has been documented that the NYPD has sent undercover spies into — and has hacked the computers of  — the Muslim Student Associations (MSA) across CUNY, especially at Queens College. So, in the weeks that followed we successfully organized a mock incident of police brutality. 

We walked into a crowded cafeteria on campus and put on a show. Students dressed up as KKKops by wearing pig masks and harassed other students by pushing them up against the walls, emptying their bags, and frisking them. This skit was very well received by the students sitting around us and more students expressed interest in joining the speak-outs. We’re planning on putting on many more encore performances and leading this momentum in the direction of the only sustainable solution for us working people, a communist revolution. 

In a campus desperately hungry for revolutionary change, we are planting red seeds.

BUFFALO, NY, April 27 — New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) is on a campaign here to win teachers to defend capitalism, a tough sell when teachers are being singled out for especially vicious attacks. Delegate numbers for NYSUT’s state convention, the state affiliate of the two national teacher unions, are sharply down this year. Teacher anger is seething. 

So how do the bosses respond?  With 11,000 teachers laid off statewide, and phony teacher-evaluation grades made public, the NYSUT’s leadership did not fight back with picket lines, mass meetings, job actions, or strikes. It didn’t organize unemployed teachers and the still-employed into a unified fighting force. It didn’t support other workers who are fighting back and to unite with them. 

Instead, NYSUT’s leaders invited a mayor, a state senator, the state comptroller, the state education commissioner, and a New York senator to address the delegates.

This convention was aimed at misleading teachers to support the racist and imperialist ruling-class attacks on the working class here and abroad. It was part of the bosses’ ongoing campaign to win teachers to their side in the class struggle, a very serious danger.

Fortunately, the union’s sellout politics were unable to suppress a lively demonstration by the Lancaster teacher local outside the convention on opening night, protesting the teacher-evaluation scam. Two New York City teacher delegates joined them, chanting together as we faced the police on horseback: “Education is a right: Fight, fight, fight, fight!” 

The next day, the Buffalo local walked out on Commissioner John King over the same issue. They rallied outside and welcomed some delegates from other locals.  These are small signs of what is possible if teachers fight back.

The rogues’ gallery of speakers was presented as “friends of labor” by the president of the National Education Association (NEA). Barack Obama and his racist, imperialist Democratic Party are also “friends,” according to this well-paid stooge.  But we know that many of the 600,000 teachers in New York don’t agree with him. 

With communist leadership from the Progressive Labor Party, they can be won to put aside narrow interests and find solidarity with other workers, including their own students. A communist analysis can also help them understand why the laws of capitalism require the bosses’ state to impose budget and pension cuts, layoffs and forced furloughs, fascist-style public shaming, and threats to collective bargaining rights.  

Win Teachers to Oppose Racism, Sexism, Imperialism, Capitalism

PL’ers and friends in NYSUT, along with other delegates who consistently support us in debate, have an uphill battle to expose the federal and state governments as tools of the dictatorship of the capitalist class.  We must lead rank-and-file teachers to the class consciousness denied by the AFT’s (American Federation of Teachers) “union of professionals” logo denies.  Eadie Shanker, widow of the red-baiting, racist AFT leader Al Shanker, actually told the convention, “We are not just workers, we are professionals.” She boasted of winning the racist 1968 UFT (United Federation of Teachers) “strike” against black and Latino communities in New York. For a moment, the mask came off. The racist elitism of the UFT and AFT leadership emerged without apology.  

In a meeting of the civil and human rights committee, we debated resolutions brought by a progressive local against the war in Afghanistan, the racist stop-and-frisk law in New York City, and the “new Jim Crow” of mass incarceration of black people.  In every case, the spokesperson for the UFT/AFT leadership amended the resolutions to remove any explicit attack on racism and imperialism. But even though the UFT leadership stacked the committee in its favor, a pro-imperialist amendment passed by only 58-49. 

Teacher union leaders in the U.S. are explicitly allying with the capitalist state and opposing any rank-and-file struggle against its racist and imperialist policies. Our task as communists is equally clear: to win our fellow teachers to anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism.