OAKLAND, November 16 — The Occupy movement continues to explode here.  After, the November 2 General Strike briefly closed the Port of Oakland, protests continue and are focused more sharply on the devastation that capitalism brings to the working class. Front and center are the issues of economic inequality, institutional racism, and the need for international unity to link our struggles with those of workers around the world.

The intensification of Occupy Oakland was sparked by the general strike, which was a great step forward from earlier events.  It aimed, if still symbolically, at shutting down the whole capitalist economy. A march that started under a “Death to Capitalism” banner temporarily closed several downtown Oakland banks. Teachers, the most visible group of unionized workers at the strike, brought students to the protest. Some schools also shut down, and hundreds of students marched at Laney Community College to challenge racist inequalities and corporate control of education.

Medical workers, particularly in the California Nurses Association, had already mobilized to support the first-aid needs of the encampment in what is now called Oscar Grant Plaza. The multiracial participants were young and old, students and workers, marching together in social groups of families or friends.  Conspicuously absent from the general strike were contingents organized by unions or mainstream churches and community groups. While the rank and file of these groups turned out, participation by the Alameda Central Labor Council was limited to serving food.

The general strike ended in a march of 15,000 to shut down the Port of Oakland, with the sympathy of many in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), a union with militant communist roots, and the trucker sub-contractors who haul the cargo. The ILWU has led job actions against apartheid, and in April it marched in solidarity with state workers in Wisconsin to protest union-busting there. Three years ago, the mostly immigrant and non-unionized truckers helped shut down all California ports on May Day over the issue of immigrant rights. (One trucker took our poster and CHALLENGE during the general strike, and asked why we had not come at 6 a.m. to really shut the Port down.) This collective history was a big reason that Occupy Oakland focused on Oakland’s economic center, the Port.

A Step Toward Waking the Sleeping Giant

PL’ers spent the weeks before and after the General Strike bringing the Occupy movement to our jobs, especially at transit.  Alameda-Contra Costa Transit (AC) and MUNI workers joined us at the noontime activities on the day of the general strike.  The absentee rate doubled at one garage in Oakland.  During the rally, we talked with coworkers about the strategic importance of mass transit workers.  As one worker put it, “Transit workers move the Bay Area economy just like the ILWU in the Port.”  Several spoke on an open mike.  One ended his speech: “When I say workers, you say power!” The chant of “workers’ power” echoed throughout the crowd. 

As we marched to the Port, we had a long discussion about communist economic and social relations. One Municipal Transportation Agency (MUNI) coworker asked us, “what do you mean, abolish wages? How can we live without money to buy things?” Wages represent our enslavement by the capitalists; they distort our relationships with other workers and the working class as a whole. Under communism, we won’t need money to fulfill our needs. We will produce and share according to need and commitment.

At a monthly Union meeting of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), PLP members made a motion to donate money to Occupy Oakland.  We argued that workers have the Occupy movement to thank for refocusing anger away from public worker pensions and toward the 1%, the finance capitalists who are attacking all of us.  The motion failed because the union is broke from paying lawyers (instead of organizing workers’ action) to fight the financial capitalists.  We did, however, raise $340 from individual workers.  It was an example of the class-conscious platform we are advancing in the union elections.

We Teach and We Learn

On the day of the General Strike, PLP members and friends marched as a contingent with flags, posters and chants.  We distributed hundreds of CHALLENGEs.

The call for communism leads to talk about what it takes to make a revolution, and what we need to do next.  A typical response came from one young black man: “You can’t get more upfront than that.”  He took the CHALLENGE and gave us contact information.  Another said, “That’s right, capitalism has to be overthrown, we need a different society.”  Similar responses followed from many younger workers and students.

We also learned from others.  For example, we modified one of our chants to make it more international and militant:

‘Black, Latino, Arab, Asian & White, 
United for Equality We Must Fight!’

Even more so than the budget cuts, Occupy Oakland has opened doors for political struggle at a local high school.  One teacher helped a younger teacher conduct a teach-in on unemployment and distribution of wealth.  After the General Strike and arch, a student told others at the school that she liked the poster her teacher was carrying.  As a result, another teacher asked about the poster (see front page).

As this struggle advances, we will continue to bring lessons and experiences from the Occupy movement to jobs and community organizations.J

Recent California Developments:

• Racist police terror remains in the spotlight, with marches for justice for Oscar Grant, the unarmed young black man who was executed two years ago by a transit cop, and to protest the military operations planned for shutting down the camps of demonstrators.  Mayor Jean Quan and the Oakland City Council manipulated last week’s fatal shooting of a young man near the downtown Oakland encampment in an attempt to justify their cops’ clearing the Occupation from Oscar Grant Park (with dozens of arrests) early on Monday, November 14. But other encampments fed marches back to the Plaza, where new General Assemblies were held.

• On Veterans Day, vets marched to the police station to protest the attacks on two Iraq War veterans: Scott Olson, whose skull was fractured by a projectile shot by the police, and Kayvan Sabehgi, who suffered a lacerated spleen after the cops beat him while he was walking alone in central Oakland. The vets linked this brutality to racist unemployment and the long history of racist and criminal police actions against black, Latino and immigrant youth in Oakland. As one vet who spoke at the demonstration put it, “I did not serve and protect you, the 99%. I protected corporate America’s profits around the world.”

• The general strike inspired and escalated existing battles on California campuses to protest the banks, budget cuts, and racist inequality. Police attacked protesters at the University of California-Berkeley, brutally dismantling a tent camp there. In response, Berkeley faculty and students called a campus-wide strike on November 15, with a march (joined by Occupy Oakland) of 2,000 through the city and a rally at Berkeley High School. In solidarity, students at several Cal State campuses have staged walkouts. Cal State faculty voted to strike two campuses that serve the black and Latino communities in the East Bay and Los Angeles. The UC regents canceled their November 16 meeting for fear of being confronted by the Occupy movement.

• A march on Wells Fargo Bank protested profiteering by private-sector immigrant detention centers around the country. Bilingual chants emphasized the racist attacks on immigrant and black workers.

• Other marches have focused on the devastation of public services. These actions dovetail with a confrontation between the Okland Board of Education and a group of parents, teachers and students who oppose the closing of five public schools.

• Workers and community groups are continuing to organize to challenge evictions and prevent bank foreclosures. In Stockton, California, the Occupy movement has shut down several banks.

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.

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.