Workers produced every item working-class rebels took from shops in English cities. Workers also produce all the Middle East’s energy supplies. So what constitutes real “looting”? Is it a London youth, who may never find a job, grabbing a pair of sneakers? Or is it racist British capitalists joining racist U.S. bosses to murder millions in seizing Iraqi and Libyan oil and Afghan gas routes?

The recent rebellions take place in a context of declining U.S-U.K. imperialism. For survival, the depleted British Empire became the U.S.’s junior partner during World War II. Now, rising China, resurgent Russia, and regional powerhouse Iran have the U.S. & Co. on the defensive. So both U.S. and U.K. rulers are implementing an agenda of widening wars overseas and police terror to enforce massive economic attacks on workers domestically.

Since racism is fundamental to capitalism and its drive for super-profits, the racist super-exploitation of black and Asian workers has moved these youth — subjected to the system’s mass racist unemployment and poverty — to openly rebel.

Militant anti-cop uprisings in England come as a mainly healthy reaction to fascist policing. London’s working-class Tottenham district erupted after August 4 when cops gunned down Mark Duggan, a black father of four, on “suspicion” that he had a gun. He, in fact, never displayed one. The rebellion quickly spread to other deprived communities across London, and to the northern cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool.

But although the killing was a source of anger, it was not the primary cause behind the rampage of thousands of black, Asian and white youth that lasted four days before the heavily-reinforced police could clear the streets. The torching of police cars, police stations and public buildings expressed the pent-up frustration and rage of an alienated generation with no opportunities, gripped by poverty, discrimination and joblessness. Many are the second and third generation of their family without jobs. For some African-Caribbean youth unemployment is as high as 50%. A 2007 UNICEF report found that British and U.S youth had the worst quality of life of 21 developed nations.

“We’re sticking it to the police” yelled one  woman, “and to the rich” she added. A Tottenham protestor who appeared on a radio show described the events as, “A war against injustice.”

Their fury against the rich echoed the anger most Britons have against the bankers who paid themselves huge bonuses after taking government bailouts and of the blatant looting by politicians of public funds for their private expenses last year. One of the most notorious cases involved the member of parliament who took £80,000 ($130,000) of tax-payer money to subsidize his second home. This year’s scandal of police officials taking bribes from the Murdoch news organization has only added fuel to the fire.

Even the right-wing Telegraph newspaper (8/8/11) had to admit legitimate grievances, “Tottenham’s unemployment is still among the highest in London. Black people are far more likely to be stopped and searched by the Met [Metropolitan Police] than whites.”

Despite the media focus on burning stores, the so-called riots’ main aspect was black, white and Asian working-class youth uniting in fierce battles against the killer cops. The Independent (London, 8/14/11) quoted one terrified cop, “We could hear time after time on our radios, ‘Officer down,’ ‘Officer injured’ and we knew it was bad.”

Actually, that’s pretty good, given London cops’ reputation for racist brutality. The protests’ weakness, however, lies, not in violence (which was unfocused at times) but the lack of a communist movement with the goal of destroying the profit system, the root cause of workers’ ills.

Bosses’ Media Ignore Libya
Massacre for London Blazes

Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, who has never done a day’s work in his life, jetted back from vacationing in Tuscany to decry workers’ “criminality” spreading across his country. But the real criminals are “NATO’s air-strikes [on August 8th] at Majer [in Libya which] killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children” (Counterpunch, 8/14/11).

Seeking access to Libyan oil unfettered by dictator Khadafy, British (along with French and Italian) bosses avail themselves of U.S. weapons and leadership. NATO supreme commander, U.S. admiral Stavridis, runs the Libya operation.

While London Burns, Oil Wars Enrich U.K. Bosses

And in Iraq, British rulers’ staunch military support for U.S.-led genocide pays off big time, though stability may never arrive. (On August 14, 42  coordinated attacks in ten cities killed 96 Iraqis and wounded 315.) “Iraq’s oil auctions were portrayed as a model of transparency and a negotiating victory for the Iraqi government,” said Greg Muttitt, author of “Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq,” quoted in the London Observer (7/31/11): “Now we see the reality was the opposite: a backroom deal that gave BP a stranglehold on the Iraqi economy, and even influence over the decisions of OPEC.”

British forces based in Basra fought mostly near the vast Rumalia oil field, which BP (British Petroleum) had owned from 1927 to 1972. BP, to nobody’s surprise, won the potentially 3-million-barrel-per day Rumalia contract at the “transparent” 2009-2010 auctions. Now it’s revealed that in the 2011 backroom deal Baghdad must pay BP for oil not even extracted from the wells should renewed warfare or OPEC quotas curb production. As for Afghanistan, British troops have concentrated on Helmand province, through which much of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline may run.

PM Cameron Wants Nazi-style  ‘Community Policing’ in Britain;
Summons U.S. Top Cop Bratton

Just as in the U.S., British imperialists’ war efforts cost vast sums of money. And, just as in the U.S., the rulers get that cash by stealing from workers with sharp, racist cuts in pay, jobs, health, education, pensions, etc. In Britain, mostly urban African, Caribbean and Asian workers (along with poor white native British and Irish) bear the brunt.

To enforce this exploitation, the bosses employ more intense fascist measures. However, Britain’s police establishment is in disarray. Its two top Scotland Yard chiefs were forced to resign amid the Murdoch payoff scandal to squash the media mogul’s bribery of cops. So to head off future rebellions, Cameron is calling in Bill Bratton, formerly top cop in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, to establish sweet-sounding but deadly “community policing.” It resembles the Nazis’ Judenrat scheme, which turned local Jewish leaders into a network of snitches that led millions to the gas chambers.

In Boston, Bratton employed black pastors. According to a 2008 report from Harvard’s Kennedy School, “The ministers...helped the Boston Police manage negative publicity by the local media after several potentially explosive events [such as] the accidental death of a 75-year-old retired minister who suffered a fatal heart attack during a botched drug raid.” Cameron wishes he had agents like these in Tottenham.

Fascism on the Rise

Fascism is being institutionalized. Government laws, surveillance through a vast street camera operation along with Cameron’s deep cuts in social services impoverishing the working class have become the order of the day. Alongside this is the increasing influence of racist organizations like the anti-immigrant British Nationalist Party which recently took over nearly 10% of the local council seats in the extremely-segregated city of Bradford and has gained enough legitimacy to be included in nationally-televised political debates.

However, workers are not giving these fascists a clear path. Last year when the fascist English Defense League, which has held demonstrations against Asians nation-wide, rallied in Bradford, they were confronted by thousands of anti-racists and local residents, both white and Asian.

The rebellions in England hold important lessons in class struggle. They prove that a militant, multi-racial force of workers can take on and beat “highly-trained” cops. They also show the need for a revolutionary communist party and the outlook of seizing state power for our class, not just winning concessions which capitalism inevitably reverses. (See Verizon strike, p. 3.) Ultimately only revolution led by such a communist party can smash the creators of the world’s largest looting system — capitalism — that gives us police brutality, poverty, mass racist unemployment and war.

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.