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Imperialist War, Profit-System Poverty Are Worst Forms of Child Abuse
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- 18 November 2011 488 hits
Obama Sheds Fake Tears Over Penn State…
Hypocrisy drenches Barack Obama’s denunciation of “heartbreaking” child sex abuse at Penn State: “Our number-one priority has to be protecting our kids.” This phony concern comes from the commander of a United States war machine that routinely slaughters children and other civilians abroad, and whose system consigns millions of children in the U.S. to lives of poverty, hunger and premature death (see box).
What the U.S. president really seeks to protect is the far-flung sources of profit for his capitalist masters. Even as he calls for national “soul searching” over Penn State, Obama gives the go-ahead to atrocities against children in the oil-rich Middle East. While Yemen, for one example, is running out of oil, it borders Saudi Arabia’s unmatched reserves and harbors anti-U.S. Islamic movements — enough to make its people a target. As Salon.com reported, “Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be ‘militants’” (11/12/11).
…While U.S. Drones Kill Kids
Naturally, capitalist rulers don’t want us to know how many children they murder in their profit-driven wars. “We may never know how many,” the government-owned British Broadcasting Corporation reported last month in reference to civilian casualties in the U.S.-led Libyan oil grab that ousted dictator Qaddaffi. But some damning figures do emerge. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism at London’s City University “has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during [Obama’s] presidency” (8/11/11). And these were in Pakistan, a U.S.-bankrolled “ally.”
Young people face even more horrific conditions in Obama & Co.’s declared war zones. UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, calculates that Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a child. One in five does not live to see a sixth birthday. (The death rate for young children there is 199 per thousand, as compared to 2.5 in Singapore.) Most of those deaths are from curable childhood diseases and malnutrition, compounded by war, which makes proper health care inaccessible.
Children, so dear to Obama, freeze and starve in Afghan gutters while well-fed U.S. contractors survey pipeline routes and mineral sources. UNICEF regional communications chief Sarah Crowe told CNN last January, “It is very hard to put a hard-and-fast figure to the number of children dying from hypothermia alone on Kabul’s streets.
“Extreme poverty, having lost a parent, being trafficked or displaced … may have forced them on to the streets where they would be deprived of their most basic needs (decent food, health, immunization, protection) and exposed to the extreme cold of Afghan winters.” In one incident, airborne U.S. “liberators” didn’t bother to distinguish boys gathering firewood from arms-toting insurgents. They killed nine innocents in a single raid last spring.
Targeting of Children Is Genocide
Obama’s fellow liberal and predecessor, Bill Clinton, followed Bush Sr.’s invasion of oil-rich Iraq with something far more deadly: embargoes on food and medicine. UNICEF estimates that these embargoes “killed 500,000 children under five years of age...from malnutrition, diseases for which cures were available but medicine in Iraq was not and poor health at birth due to prenatal effects on mothers” (John Tirman, The Deaths of Others, Oxford University Press, 2010). Denis Halliday, the UN’s assistant secretary general at the time, accused Clinton of “a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Bush Jr.’s Iraq re-invasion, sustained by Obama, added live fire as a major cause of Iraqi child mortality. And despite Obama’s recent withdrawal claims, U.S. troops are by no means abandoning Iraq, not after Exxon Mobil recently bet the ranch there with a $50-billion investment in the vast West Qurna oil field. In a Pentagon-backed, “just-try-and-stop-us” move, the company is now drilling in Kurdistan without approval from Baghdad. On top of that, Exxon has seized control of the water infrastructure needed to pump out Iraqi crude.
Last month it was revealed that Obama is aiming his indiscriminate, terrorizing drones at strategic Somalia at the Horn of Africa, the command point for major Middle East energy export routes. Somali girls and boys may very well be subsidizing Exxon’s bottom line with their lives. The slaughter will end only with the demise of the capitalist system that perpetuates it — and with the communist revolution that our Party is building.J
Obama’s Racist Profit System Also Murders Youth in U.S.
Capitalism’s domestic war on children means:
• The U.S. infant mortality rate ranks 34th in the world in infant mortality, behind Cuba, Croatia, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the Czech Republic (2011 UN World Population Prospects Report);
• Black children are twice as likely to be born premature, and more likely to die in infancy (UCLA Prof. of Obstetrics and Public Health Michael Liu);
• In 2010, 22% of U.S. children, more than 16 million, lived in poverty (U.S. Agriculture Dept.);
• In 2009, 33% of black children lived below the poverty line, as compared to 11.9% of white children;
• Fourteen million children face hunger or the risk of hunger;
• Three million children experience hunger on a regular basis, forced to skip meals and go without food for entire days;
• Clinton’s racist welfare “reform” makes black women three to four times as likely to die in childbirth as white women;
• The profit-induced, racist “true” unemployment rate of 22% (and far higher than that for black and Latino workers) has tens of millions of children living in jobless families, many of them ousted from homes with unpaid mortgages.
Obama’s “number-one priority” doesn’t seem to be protecting these kids.
From Hitler’s Nuremburg to Penn State Rallies,
Bosses Pervert Sports for Fascist Ends
Hitler publicist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl must be smiling in his grave at the most visible reactions to the rape of working-class boys by a Penn State football coach. A former Harvard football cheerleader, Putzi returned to his native Germany and helped the Nazis to use sports’ crowd-steering potential as a deadly political weapon. Fresh from the Harvard gridiron, Hanfstaengl helped Hitler orchestrate the 1930’s Nuremburg rallies that brainwashed masses of German workers.
As Putzi’s Boston cousin John Sedgwick wrote, “When Putzi played some of the rousing football marches from his Harvard days, he had Hitler fairly shouting with enthusiasm. ‘That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,’ and he pranced up and down the room like a drum majorette” (Boston Magazine, 2005). Putzi wrote fresh marches for Hitler and credited triumphal Harvard football fight songs for inspiring his invention of the Nazi “Sieg Heil” chant. It translates to “Hail Victory,” not far from “Ten thousand men of Harvard gained victory today.”
More recently, Putzi’s beloved “team spirit” motivated Hitlerite Penn State student demonstrations in support of pedophile protector and on-field Fuhrer Joe Paterno, who essentially ignored the rape of a 10-year-old. Penn State has been billed as a “super college,” an institution that produces exceptionally educated students. But from recent evidence, it is turning out people with blind loyalty to a football program that amasses $50 million a year with a win-at-all-costs philosophy—and which sheltered a predator of children since the late 1990s. For many students, the chief concern was that Penn State not be labeled a “child-molester” school, a stigma that might damage the value of their degrees after graduation.
At the same time, the capitalist rulers used sport-oriented school loyalty to organize a football game-day stadium prayer fest on November 12, when Penn State lost to Nebraska. Authorities seized the opportunity to preach a pro-government, “call-the-cops-and-trust-the-courts” mentality. But the capitalist U.S. government is not in the business of saving children. It kills them ceaselessly, in vast numbers.
We have a better response to Paterno-gate—one that supports our real team, the working class. Our touchdowns will come in exposing and attacking the service of universities like Penn State to U.S. imperialism through ROTC and war research, two agents of child abuse on a global scale.
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Public Health Workers Turn Up Heat vs. Bosses’ Racist ‘Care’
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- 18 November 2011 482 hits
WASHINGTON,D.C., October 31 — Almost 200 public health workers, Occupy D.C. activists, and District of Columbia workers rallied and marched, attacking capitalism and racism and demanding jobs and health care for everyone now. After leaving the American Public Health Association (APHA) meeting of more than 12,000 public health members, these workers surged onto the streets of Washington chanting, “Out of our silos, into the streets! Public health workers turn up the heat!”
They marched to the Verizon Center sports arena, where a Verizon worker attacked the company’s attempts to strip retiree health benefits from the contract and lay off thousands of workers as their CEO enjoyed record-breaking pay. Stopping at the Clark construction site for the new City Center luxury development, a community activist blasted Clark for denying jobs to D.C. workers and called for unity among all workers to oppose capitalism.
This march attracted people out of a bold and growing anger at capitalism among public health workers. Speakers at today’s rally exposed the system’s racism, calling for a health care system that provided quality care for everyone regardless of immigration status. (Undocumented immigrants are not even allowed to buy health insurance from the new health insurance exchanges.) Speakers attacked capitalism and racism, decrying both Obama and the Republican Party sideshow. A Progressive Labor Party doctor called for the overthrow of capitalism and urged people to make revolution possible, saying, “You know you want it!” PLPers distributed over 50 Challenge-Desafios.
The rally was organized by the Health Disparities Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA), with more than a dozen people planning its messages, speakers, and chants. The committee called on public health workers to return to their roots of building a social movement to ensure healthy conditions for all. It urged them to “reject capitalists and their politicians, who use cutbacks and racism to strengthen their profitability and competitive edge. Build a worker-student-professional movement for change.”
PLers have been active in this group for seven years, battling local government around the HIV/AIDS epidemic and organizing for jobs, housing, and health care for the most oppressed groups in the city. The march represented a significant effort to increase our militancy and connect with workers’ struggles around jobs and health.
Several people new to the revolutionary movement joined others the next day at the annual “Troublemakers’ Breakfast.” We discussed APHA policies and PL’s Haiti and Israel/Palestine summer projects, and planned for ongoing public health struggles within APHA and against capitalism around the country.
Inspired by international rebellions and the Occupy movements, there was more discussion at this year’s meeting about fighting back. After a session on the uprisings in Egypt and Wisconsin and by the Occupy movements, 60 people left the session and marched to the Occupy D.C. site with a message of solidarity and $300 for its first-aid work. These activities inspired many to continue organizing within APHA to raise anti-racist policies and communist ideas that could lead to a real revolution — one that brings the working class to state power.
PL Organizing Efforts at APHA
PL members also organized within APHA to pass anti-racist policies. We initiated a resolution condemning the Secure Communities policy, which the Obama administration mandated for all states. Secure Communities requires local police departments to turn over the records of everyone arrested for anything to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which then processes undocumented immigrants for deportation. MWPHA activists took the lead in preserving references to racism in the interim resolution, which passed with overwhelming support. At one meeting on immigrant healthcare, a PL speaker was applauded when she said that she approached anti-racism from a communist perspective.
APHA members also presented resolutions to support the Occupy Wall Street movements and to condemn the closing of health centers performing abortions.
PL members attended two sessions on Palestine where the main speakers were doctors from Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. we had met on our trips to the area. It was wonderful to renew these warm friendships and to arrange to see them again on our upcoming visit. After the talks, we were able to raise our advocacy of a single communist state in the region, pointing out the need for workers from Palestine and Israel to unite and overcome nationalism. In another session, we heard a speaker from Egypt point out that Mubarak’s downfall did nothing to change who holds power there.
While APHA sponsors inspiring and thought-provoking sessions, its leadership doesn’t fight for its principles. Its an organization that talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. Its president gave a stirring speech at the opening session, calling for everyone to attend our rally, but never showed up or sent anyone from APHA’s leadership. Like most professional organizations, APHA is tied closely to the political system, especially the Democratic Party, and has no intention of rocking the capitalist boat in any way.
It’s up to us to organize a revolutionary movement among its members.
GARY, INDIANA, October 29 — Today a multi-racial group of nearly 30 demonstrators gathered in downtown Gary, Indiana for the second week in a row to show solidarity with the growing Occupy movements that have been developing all over the world. In a city like Gary, that has suffered racist capitalist oppression and neglect for decades, such a turnout is definitely a step in the right direction.
Despite its political limitations, the Occupy movement has been useful because it allows workers to recognize their collective power. The crowd was multi-racial and included people of all ages. During both demonstrations, there were a number of younger activists involved, several of whom were experiencing their first exposure to working-class struggles. It was also encouraging that activists from other cities in Northwest Indiana attended the Gary rally, because racist stereotypes often keep workers away from Gary.
Several PL’ers and friends attended the rally. Our militant signs and chants were well received by the group and observers. After rallying near a major intersection for over an hour, the group held an assembly, discussing a practical political direction for the group and future actions. Several local reform groups were represented, but when the subject was broached the collective decided to remain separate from MoveOn, the national pro-Obama group and continue to host weekly demonstrations.
Although participation is limited so far with the Gary campaign, we can turn a bad thing into a good thing. For example, while the organizers of Occupy movements in big cities like New York and Chicago put forward goals like “Destroy Wall Street,” the workers coming to the Gary demonstration have a more tight-knit connection and can express more specific grievances against capitalism, such as lack of jobs or health care. This gives us the opportunity to struggle with them over the inherent flaws of capitalism on a useful one-to-one basis.
As with the rest of the Occupy movements, there is still much work to be done to pose a serious threat to capitalism, but with Occupy Gary we have the opportunity to build a base among some of the most exploited members of the working class.
ROXBURY, MA, October 19 — The leaders of the Pizza and Politics student club at Roxbury Community College went down to Occupy Boston and were excited to see that people in the U.S. are waking up to the reality of class oppression. One sign at the encampment said so much: “They call it the american dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”.
Too many of us have been asleep for too long. The students decided to make the next topic for the club discussion “Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy the World.” They invited some activists from Occupy Boston to come and speak about the goals of the movement. The activists explained the collective way the encampment is being organized and how it sees itself as building a better world. PL’ers raised the idea that in order for that humane community to flourish and spread all over the world the working class needs to seize state power and make the decisions for the society.
Otherwise OWS will either be smashed by the police or co-opted, like the rebel movement was in Egypt. The discussion moved from communism to consumerism to the role of education. It reflected the refreshing openness of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where big questions are being discussed and communist ideas are welcomed by many. However, everything changes, and the Occupy movement will either be won to the left or to the right. It will either become a tool of the Democratic Party or it will move the masses into class struggle — supporting strikes, confronting the police, and fighting foreclosures and evictions. By distributing our literature and raising our ideas, PL’ers and friends of PL are trying to take full advantage of this opportunity to move OWS to the left.
FAISALABAD, PAKISTAN, November 11 — Workers here are calling for solidarity actions and support for six union leaders who have been sentenced to a total of 490 years in jail. They were arrested in July 2010 during a militant strike of power loom workers, and later charged under anti-terrorist laws. To date 13 union leaders are facing charges of “terrorism.”
The U.S.-backed fascist Pakistani government is increasingly using the threat of “terrorism” to try to silence the working class, hoping to crush the rising workers’ movement. But workers are fighting back, in the factories and fields, in the public and private sector (see CHALLENGE, 9/5).
Power loom workers here struck in 2010 after a break-down in negotiations with the bosses, demanding an increase in the minimum wage already announced in the government’s 2010-2011 budget. When government officials, factory owners, local politicians and the media labeled the strikers “terrorists,” it so angered other workers that they ignored a police ban on public gatherings and joined the picket lines.
Over 100,000 workers marched through the streets here, shutting down Pakistan’s third largest city, despite being fired on by the police and armed thugs hired by the textile bosses.
As we work to build strike actions and the solidarity of other workers, we introduce PLP’s ideas into our struggle. Workers are receptive to our idea that militant reform is not enough, that we cannot eliminate this exploitation without getting rid of all the bosses and their capitalist profit system. We are building an international Party to fight for a communist revolution and a communist society where production will be for the benefit of the working class, not for bosses’ profits.
